407: It Isn't a Big Grapefruit
03 Dec 2020Marco’s Mini reviews, more on M1 scaling, completely predictable computer waffling, and our problem with Apple News.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: You heard it here first: Marco is really starting to justify a new Mac.
- Follow-up:
- You can restore stuff from iCloud here (via Ryan Fegley)
- Accelerated TensorFlow for macOS probably just uses the GPU
- Neural Engine can be used as well, though. (via
@hishnash)
- Neural Engine can be used as well, though. (via
- Apple did make an ECC RAM controller in the past (via Max Lein)
- Lots of info about scaling the M1 via Jonathan Dietz
- Cerebras, the big-die ML accelerator (via Andrew Bunner)
- Memory bus thoughts from Wade Tregaskis
- Dual M1 Macs
- “Low-effort” Mac Pro
- TMSC Achieves Breakthrough in 2nm Manufacturing
- Alexander Graf virtualizes ARM Windows on Apple Silicon
- Marco’s Mini Monologues
- Smart Speaker Size Comparison (scroll down a bit)
- Panzarino’s observation about Qi chargers
- …and his FU
#askatp- Post-show:
- Yes, John is aware of breadboxes.
- Tesla’s “Mission Accomplished”
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Chapters
- Marco’s Computer Waffling
- Big Sur duping Contacts
- TensorFlow uses the GPU
- Apple’s ECC RAM controller
- Sponsor: Linode
- More on M1 scaling 🖼️
- Windows virtualized on M1
- Sponsor: Bombas
- HomePod Mini review 🖼️
- iPhone 12 Mini review
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- MacBook Air update
- #askatp: Disable M1 fan
- #askatp: Apple News
- #askatp: Discrete obsolete?
- Ending theme
- Post-show
Marco’s Computer Waffling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My iMac fan noise problem is worsening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, so I guess you’re buying a new Mac then, probably a Mac mini?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, he just needs to take it off of his desk, put it into a case and carry it around on the street for a while and then unpack it. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed it last time, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Actually, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the transportation to the beach did, I guess, dislodge enough dust. I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting near the end of my rope here. Like, it’s pretty bad. Like, it’s now audible most of the day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when it’s ostensibly idle, like when there’s nothing in Activity Monitor or iStatMenu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is showing that’s actually using the CPUs, it’s now idling at like 72
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degrees Celsius and like 13 to 1400 RPM fan speed, which is not normal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this isn’t even just Catalina being Catalina because it processed through reboots too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m just, this is the worst time in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly a decade to need a new high performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop Mac. Yeah. I did actually, because I actually looked, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-in value for my iMac Pro is almost $3,000. Wow, that’s not bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually. I know, I was like, that’s actually, I could just trade it in and just buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the highest spec Mac Mini with the new chip, which is like $1,700,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I would only then have two terabytes instead of four, and I would have only 16 gigs of RAM instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of 64. And I’m a little hesitant to go that route. And I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to go get my stupid LG 5K and bring it to the beach. And no way in hell I’m ordering a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second one. But you know, just move that one in here. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be kind of an ordeal. And then what I really want, ideally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a new iMac. Like, I love the iMac, although, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I love the iMac? I mean, I’ve had now two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess, right? Did I only have one 5K before the Pro? No, I thought you
⏹️ ▶️ John two. I had the one with image retention, and I don’t remember if you ever got that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed. I did eventually get it fixed. That one came out in, what was it, 2014, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first 5K came out? Yeah, around that. Something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like that, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iMac Pro came out in the end of 2017, and I had it for three years, so yeah. So I’m pretty sure I just went straight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that iMac 5K, the first gen iMac 5K to the iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in both cases, I loved them for a while, but they didn’t age
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly gracefully because of the all-in-oneness. Like, you know, the first one I had, I had a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. And I, you know, it took a while for me to be able to go get a fix, because I don’t want to send my whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac in for repair for, you know, just the screen. Like, the computer part was fine. If it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a Mac Pro, I could just unplug the monitor, You know, like the all-in-one is there kind of limited its lifespan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in this case, the all-in-one is limiting its lifespan as well. So maybe I should learn from this. I probably won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I ultimately, like, if there was an M1 based iMac, I would have probably already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As we record, and I’ve mentioned this before, I try to work on the show notes and get a pretty solid rough draft ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I had already written, you heard it here first. Marco is really starting to justify a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac. I think I will now change that to, you heard it here first. Marco is really starting to justify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will not buy a Mac Pro. I would buy the 6K HDR display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I would buy the Mac Pro, which is funny because if I did that, what I would plug in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 6K HDR display with its fan to, would be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air that I have, but has no fan. My monitor would have a fan and my computer wouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t hear the monitor fans, don’t worry. I’m telling you, I’m sitting in front of it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was looking up iFixit today, it’s like how do you open an iMac Pro if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I wanted to get in there and actually try to remove like major dust buildup, how do I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in there and how risky is it? And the answer is like, it’s a pain in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butt and moderately. And so I don’t know if I wanna attempt that, especially in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dusty, salty air environment that’s highly corrosive. in a house that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very few tools and no abilities to open iMacs effectively and cleanly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably a bad idea. So I’m probably not gonna wanna attempt that myself. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. The end of the world notwithstanding, would it be cheaper to fly a Stephen Hackett
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you to perform this operation and then fly him home? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just, let’s think a little outside the box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it would probably be more practical to just go take my iMac, put it in the carrying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case, walk it to the ferry, get on the boat, go across the bay, go to the nearest Apple store, drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it off, or I guess I could do mail-in, but that’s a whole other ordeal. And then, yeah, and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple do it. I’d be without it for a while. Then I’d have to take another set of ferry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and car trips and walking trips to go pick it up in a few days whenever it was done. So it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be an ordeal. I’d rather not do it. I mean, really, the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsible thing to do here would just be to just deal with my stupid fan noise for the next,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it’ll be, seven months maybe before there’s gonna be an iMac Pro, or an iMac with the M-series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips in them. But man, this is annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, but I’m quite sure that the moment something that even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vaguely smells like an iMac with Apple Silicon in it is released, I am sure that you will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the very first person in line to replace your poor, struggling iMac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I really am, I have been very tempted to just switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to my Air full-time somehow, even though it only has one terabyte, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could use externals, I guess. I could make that work with some hacks, and then just somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve the monitor situation, which would probably be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my next trip, picking up my 5K and bringing it here. So maybe that’s what I’ll do, but I don’t know. I don’t love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you hate more? Do you hate fan noise more or do you hate that LG 5K? That’s a good question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t love the idea of buying the 6K monitor. To have an unknown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future computer, like what am I gonna plug into that in a year? What if the most compelling computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me in the next year ends up being an iMac again? Then I bought this giant monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all this money for only six months of use. And then that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty big loss and a pretty big waste. I think I would have trouble swallowing that. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I just either had a Mac mini that I could plug in or something like that, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged in my MacBook Air to the LG 5K, I don’t like swallowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something about all of these plans. But I think using all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the hardware I already have, that is like the LG 5K is just sitting in my house, like in Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco B doing nothing, I could just use that. And that’s probably what I should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, even though like I’ll be grumbling the whole time looking at that stupid monitor and it’s terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backlight leakage and it’s giant ugly frame and the big ugly foot and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, would you mind going to apple.com slash shop slash trade hyphen in?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m curious if you enter in John the serial number of your XDR, I doubt it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like magically make it through and please do not share that, obviously, verbally. But if you just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quietly enter in your serial number, I wonder what it would say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, it does have an option for it. Under other devices, it says, what kind of device do you want to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you say displays and it says recycle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. That’s recycling only, which is not what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can recycle your display, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which model do you, I entered my serial number and it says, which model do you have? And now I have to pick other?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I guess. Based on what you’ve told us today, your Mac is ready to recycle.
⏹️ ▶️ John entered a display serial number, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s funny. All right, well, it was worth a shot. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
Big Sur duping Contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, shall we start with some follow-up? We have a whole do we have follow-up today. It’ll be a miracle if we get out of follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. So let’s start. Ryan Fegley writes, I had some duplicate, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same duplicate contacts issue as Marco this week caused by an upgrade to Big Sur, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Deduping the contacts or deduping in contacts didn’t work. So I restored from a pre-upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud backup on the iCloud website in a browser. I had no idea this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible. Ryan writes, it worked like a charm. It’s good to know it’s an option. So you log into iCloud.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you click on your name in the upper right and then go to account settings. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then it says restore blank on the bottom left. Restore files, restore contacts, restore calendars, restore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bookmarks. And apparently that’s a way you can restore stuff, which is news to me. I had
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, I filled in the details of this because I’m like, I remember being on iCloud.com, being able to restore
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, but it was a little bit of a trick to find. Like you wouldn’t think to go to account settings and
⏹️ ▶️ John then these links appear totally on the opposite side of the page, but they do. So you can restore, I think you can restore
⏹️ ▶️ John individual files. So, you know, like it’s nice that this stuff is there. I don’t understand why it’s not on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever. Second bit of followup related to this is that when I was doing this to confirm it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I opened up Contacts and guess what? I had duplicates of all my Contacts too. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wait a second, I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t even upgrade. I didn’t even upgrade to Big Sur. Why the hell do I have duplicates? And I said, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t upgrade to Big Sur, but I just got an M1 Mac that runs Big Sur and I made my account
⏹️ ▶️ John on it and I logged in and connected it to my iCloud. So something having to do with Big Sur is
⏹️ ▶️ John really, really excited about making duplicate contacts. I just used the Dedupe feature
⏹️ ▶️ John in contacts and it fixed my problem. I have no idea why I had duplicates, but that’s what I had.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. Lucky us. I don’t seem to have that problem. Yeah, lucky you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, have you, Casey, have you logged into a Big Sur, an official release
⏹️ ▶️ John Big Sur machine with your actual Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet? Yeah, because my MacBook Pro has been on Big Sur for like a week, maybe two.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, well, you like that. But me and Marco drew the duplicate straw. So sorry.
TensorFlow uses the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so accelerated TensorFlow for Mac OS probably just uses the GPU. If I recall correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were surmising that maybe it uses the neural engine. And apparently, that’s not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a link to machinelearning.apple.com where they write, until now, TensorFlow has only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey utilized the CPU for training on the Mac. The new TensorFlow underscore Mac OS fork of TensorFlow 2.4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leverages ML compute to enable machine learning libraries to take full advantage of not only the CPU, but also the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in both M1 and Intel-powered Macs for dramatically faster training performance. Very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and some people were saying on Twitter, like, oh, it’s because the neural engine can’t be used for training, but his Nash on Twitter says, neural
⏹️ ▶️ John engine can be used for training as well, but it’s limited in the type of operations. So ML compute framework uses
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU and GPU because it’s more generic. So yeah, TensorFlow did get a lot faster and it is
⏹️ ▶️ John seven times faster on the M1 Mac, but it’s not because of the neural engine.
Apple’s ECC RAM controller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max lean writes that Marco said on oh, this is actually this is a very good. Well, actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the kind of well actually I can get behind Marco said in the podcast that Apple has never made memory controllers with support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for ECC RAM Admittedly, it has been a while But the power Mac g5 and X serve g5 both supported ECC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM and the memory controller was made by Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah I should have thought of the power my when he said that I was trying to pull something out of my head of whether they Did it and I remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John power Mac g5 had ECC RAM But I couldn’t remember if Apple made the controller if it was some Motorola or IBM thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll trust max He seems like he knows.
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More on M1 scaling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, moving on, Jonathan Dietz writes, After listening to the scaling the M1 architecture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to higher-end machines section from episode 406, I figured I’d send along some cheat sheets of relevant info.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Die size is generally constrained by the reticle limit, which is due to current lithography
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steppers having a maximum field size of 26mm by 33mm or 858mm2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s important to keep in mind just how many different chips Apple is integrating into to each M-series system on a chip, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPU, the GPU, the PCH, T2, what’s a PCH?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Platform Controller Hub, I think? It’s like what used to be called the Southbridge, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, right, okay, thank you. T2 functions including storage controller and the Thunderbolt slash USB4 controllers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s also worth noting that decent SSD controllers, like the one in the T2, have their own memory interface
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for DRAM cache. With the M1, the storage controller’s connected directly to the system fabric and shares the unified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory pool, meaning performance is no longer limited by PCIe times four connection to the host processor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or cache size. Eliminating the need for both integrated and discrete GPUs as well as consolidating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two or three different memory subsystems has a lot of upside for Apple. There’s a spreadsheet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’ll link in the show notes. There’s a fancy chart that if we remember, Marco will make the show art for this chapter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to RAM, good old DDR4 DIMMs are the only way to scale capacity. Apple will likely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go with four HBM2E stacks. What in the world does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a couple people who are talking about HBM. Well, we’ll talk more about that in the next bit here,
⏹️ ▶️ John but high bandwidth memory. It’s not a great acronym, because like, what does that even mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John What does high mean? What happens when the next memory interface comes out and it has higher bandwidth than the
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed HBM or whatever? Then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you call it ultra high bandwidth 4K.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, super speed, yeah, we know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so Apple will likely go with four HBM2E stacks for up to 64 gigs of crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast on-package memory with the M1X, but would need to tack on an additional eight channel DDR4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interface for any hope of parity with the Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC. Is that supposed to be epic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey platforms? That’s how I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s also worth noting that regardless of memory type, the highest density DRAM dies currently available are only 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabit or two gigabytes. Increasing capacity means adding and paying for more dies. There’s no way around
⏹️ ▶️ John So I did actually make the image that’s in the, in our show notes here is perfectly square for the purposes
⏹️ ▶️ John of show art. So Marco, please make this graph. Because I spent so long making this stupid graph because I do not know
⏹️ ▶️ John how to use spreadsheets to graph things and they make me so angry. For this one, I
⏹️ ▶️ John always go to numbers because see like Jason Stell makes his graphs in numbers. I’m like, oh, Apple’s nice. Everything’s gonna look nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll use numbers to make it, but I cannot figure out how to do anything in numbers. And so then I go to Excel
⏹️ ▶️ John grudgingly and I also don’t know how to use Excel at all, but somehow I’m able to do it in Excel.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I do what I need to do in Excel And then I import, I save the Excel spreadsheet and then I import
⏹️ ▶️ John the Excel spreadsheet into numbers. And then the graph appears in numbers. Like, ah, and I still can’t even reverse
⏹️ ▶️ John engineer it. I so don’t know how to graph things. And I would say spreadsheets are also terrible at graphing things,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially time series data where spreadsheets have no idea what time is. Like they just think like, oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the first column, this is the second column, the third column. Like no, but they’re time values. They’re separated by time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you graph them over time? And it’s like, nope. You know, I know you probably can. Excel geniuses will tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you how. But anyway, I don’t like them. So this graph, what this graph shows is related to something we discussed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Jonathan sent us this giant spreadsheet filled with all sorts of information about
⏹️ ▶️ John various different silicon things, CPUs, GPUs, so on and so forth. We will put a
⏹️ ▶️ John link to, I put the spreadsheet, I copied most of the spreadsheet and cleaned it up a little bit and put it into Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Sheets. And we will put a link to that in the show notes. It’s publicly viewable, so you can look at it. It’s way more data than we’re gonna go into
⏹️ ▶️ John here. But the one graph I wanted to pull out was related to our previous discussion is how much bigger can Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John make the system on a chips? And we were trying to look up die sizes and we didn’t know them off the top of our head. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so this is why he was replying with all his info. So here, this graph shows, and someone should paste this into
⏹️ ▶️ John the chat room for the chat people. It shows the die sizes of lots of different
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs and GPUs and stuff. Way at the left end of the spectrum here is the A14 and A13. And the A14 is actually smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John than the A13 through the magic of process shrink, even though it’s got more
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in it. And the A14 is 88 millimeters square, right? Way
⏹️ ▶️ John on the right side is like this weird data center
⏹️ ▶️ John machine learning GPU that’s just massive, and it’s 826 millimeters square.
⏹️ ▶️ John But right next to that, the second to biggest bar in the thing, it’s 700. That’s the 28
⏹️ ▶️ John core Xeon in the Mac Pro. So the A14 is 88 millimeters square, and the 28 core Xeon is 700.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s a lot of room for these chips to get bigger. By the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John is around 120, this is an estimate. So from 120 to 700, that’s currently the range
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple’s smallest Mac chip to its biggest one. Or actually there may be an Intel one that’s smaller, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I doubt it, right? So how much bigger can the M1 get?
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially where it’s like, how much cooling capacity can it absorb? well, if you’ve got a 28 core Xeon in your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and it’s able to cool it with that fan, boy, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John make the M1 a lot bigger and a lot hotter before you run into any cooling limits.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is darn near impossible to get an image out of Google Docs. My
⏹️ ▶️ John goodness. Copy the link to the, what do you call it? Because that has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just screenshot it and then paste it into a spreadsheet and then save that into a Word document.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I put the Google Docs thing in. Google Docs has, it has the Google Docs version of the chart, which I also probably wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how to do, but because I imported it again, it figured, I just, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like graphing. Actually, I do like graphing, I just don’t like these programs. The way they think about graphing is not the way I think about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andrew Bunner writes, I work in the computer vision space, and one thing that we think about is how we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make giant ConvNet training jobs faster. What on earth is ConvNet?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming that stands for convolution, but who knows? OK, good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk. Here is Cerebros. And they claim to have made a single die
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ML accelerator that is about 8 and 1 1⁄2 inches square. I have no idea what the yields are or if it is even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. But the chips is an example of how big these things can be. It’s 56 times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the size of the largest GPU. And so the largest GPU is 815 square millimeters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 2.1 billion transistors. 21.1 billion. Thank you. Sorry about that. 21.1 billion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s totally what I said. Serapras is 46,225 square millimeters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 1.2 trillion transistors and 400,000 cores. My word. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to look at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s basically like, you know, the silicon wafers you see where it’s like a big circular thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John then on it, they print a bunch of different chips. This is like, just use the whole wafer for one, quote unquote,
⏹️ ▶️ John one chip. And I mean, obviously it’s not one chip. Obviously it is many of the same things over and over and over again, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hilarious. Can you imagine if this was your target, Like, and every single one of them had to work. The
⏹️ ▶️ John yields must not be good. But if you want to know how big can you make a silicon thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make it as big as the whole wafer if, I guess, money is no object. And obviously, if the cores are
⏹️ ▶️ John simple enough or whatever. But yeah, 46,000 millimeters square. So again, M1 is 120. Big
⏹️ ▶️ John Xeon is 700. This one is 46,000. That is utterly bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, this is a wall of text, John. Do you really want me to read all this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I can take a shot at it by paraphrasing, because I think I understand the major points. This is a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of tests. This is from Wade Tregasas, and he’s got a lot of info about memory bus.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ve talked about memory in the M1 and the unified memory architecture and bandwidth and so on and so forth. So his first
⏹️ ▶️ John bit is, he says, I’ve seen it repeatedly stated the M1 has 60 gigabits per second of memory bandwidth,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that it’s three times that of any MacBook Pro. The M1 does in fact have 60 gigabits of memory bandwidth, but the 16
⏹️ ▶️ John inch MacBook Pro has 40 gigabytes of bandwidth. So it’s about 1.5x, not 3x.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he gives all the math on this other thing and it looks like it makes sense to me. So I think people doing a 3x were maybe just
⏹️ ▶️ John not keeping in mind that a double data rate memory sends on the leading and trailing edge, so you have to double it,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So that’s why it’s not 6x. So it’s not to
⏹️ ▶️ John diminish the M1. Again, they just, in the cheapest MacBook Air you can buy, it has 60 gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John per second memory bandwidth, Which is faster than the 40 in the most expensive Intel MacBook you can buy right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Says what’s novel here is the frequency being on package and not having all the single interchange latency Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been able to increase the DRM bus frequency by 220% versus the 16-inch MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this increased bandwidth is mostly It’s the most tattered consequence of this also reduces memory latency and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more likely the main contributed to performance, right? so talking about more of the benefits of the of the
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM being on package you can clock it faster, it’s closer quote-unquote closer by and you have less latency and so on and
⏹️ ▶️ John so forth. So now some more speculation about what do you do in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro and the iMac Pro when you need more memory. So first
⏹️ ▶️ John on the topic of like wow the on package memory has such amazing bandwidth or whatever, high-end
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs today typically have at least eight channels of DDR4 offering 400 gigabytes per second
⏹️ ▶️ John of bandwidth. So the The big Mac Pro and other big computers have way more memory bandwidth than the on-package
⏹️ ▶️ John memory. On-package doesn’t make it magical. Like, if you throw money and buses at it and huge
⏹️ ▶️ John banks of RAM, you can get large amounts of aggregate bandwidth from doing that, right? And soon DDR5
⏹️ ▶️ John will be out, which will basically double the bandwidth again. I’ll put a link in the show notes to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Wikipedia page for memory interface bandwidth numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wade says, I doubt Apple can push the frequency much higher. likely limited by signal integrity if not thermals so to
⏹️ ▶️ John get into the ballpark they’ll need to increase the number of channels and therefore chips about eightfold but by
⏹️ ▶️ John using regular DDR instead of LPDDR which is what they use in the on package RAM that amounts just eight
⏹️ ▶️ John channels and chips very possible from all angles so we’re saying it’s basically if you put
⏹️ ▶️ John right now we have those two little on package chips in the M1 say you make
⏹️ ▶️ John room for eight of them say you put like I don’t know put them all around the edges of or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not a ridiculous stack. Um, or
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and there’s talked about 3d stacking in a little bit, but yeah, it’s not, it’s not ridiculous. So they
⏹️ ▶️ John can do that. That still leaves the capacity angle. It’s likely impractical to fit terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John of Ram onto the, onto the CPU package for the foreseeable future. But I think there’s a presumption being made that Apple cares
⏹️ ▶️ John about large memory systems. This is the point that marker brought up in a couple of past shows. Apple trumpeted the 1.5 terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John support of the current Mac pro because they could, it came for free from Intel. Well, not free, but you know, you know what he means?
⏹️ ▶️ John How much do you think that capability actually means to their customers? So Wade says is, what I actually suspect
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they’ll simply go with on-package only, placing the capacity limit on something on the order of 128 gigabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the performance will be astounding thanks to the same kind of three times higher clock frequencies, etc., not
⏹️ ▶️ John to mention all their performance advances from the rest of the system. So that’s, like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is what we’re talking about. Is it feasible? How much could you get on package if money is almost no object?
⏹️ ▶️ John 128 gigabytes, probably feasible, but it would be really fast under 28 gigabytes. And here is the here’s Wade
⏹️ ▶️ John is obviously well steeped in the ways of Apple. Here is his justification. I believe that Apple believes
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can get away with this by focusing on the end results under domination over Intel in any and every performance
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmark, which they can trivially achieve from anywhere they are. I mean, they’re already achieving with the freaking MacBook Air,
⏹️ ▶️ John so no problem there. If pushed, they’ll use their typical line of, we
⏹️ ▶️ John just couldn’t find a way to achieve the performance we wanted by doing it the the old fashioned way. I find this
⏹️ ▶️ John plausible and in keeping with Apple’s attitudes. I don’t think it’s a slam
⏹️ ▶️ John dunk just because as the Mac Pros whole role is to have tremendous capacity and limiting
⏹️ ▶️ John that just cuts you out of the as Marco said in the last show just totally cuts you out of certain markets
⏹️ ▶️ John where people just need more RAM. But those rumors of a half size Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John or like an iMac Pro that maxes out at 128 gigs of RAM that has these characteristics,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be fantastic. And that is, you know, it, it extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple-like and a very likely machine that they could make. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the end of Wade’s comment. I have a few of my own to add for, because we’ve got so much feedback about here’s how I think we can make
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger and better and faster Macs based on ARM chips. Lots
⏹️ ▶️ John and lots of people, this is the most popular thing that people suggested is how about you just put two M1 chips in
⏹️ ▶️ John there? Remember Remember when Macs used to have multiple CPUs? I mean, hell, my Power Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John G5 had two of them. My Mac Pro had two of them. Why don’t you just stick a second one in there?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is unlikely for a couple of reasons. I mean, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is related to my next line item, which says low effort Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people think this is low effort. Why don’t worry about all this of making the M1 bigger. Just make like a little bit bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John M1, like an M1X and use that in like your iMac or whatever. And then on the Mac Pro, just put two of them or four of them
⏹️ ▶️ John in or something. Symmetric multiprocessing, where you have multiple CPUs that each
⏹️ ▶️ John have their own caches but share a central pool of RAM, like the setup that had been used on past Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of a pain because as you can imagine, we talked about the cache hierarchy last time, all these CPUs have to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of keep on the same page, so to speak, pun pun, about what
⏹️ ▶️ John the deal is with memory. So if they pull something from memory and it’s in their like L3 or L2 or L1 cache
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, Someone else wants that piece of memory. It’s like they CPUs need
⏹️ ▶️ John to communicate with each other and say oh You know I’m in the middle of changing that or you don’t know that I
⏹️ ▶️ John changed that because it hasn’t been written back yet But I have a change version of that in my cache or if someone changes a piece of memory They have to
⏹️ ▶️ John tell all the other CPUs Hey, if you have this in your cache and validate it because I just changed it and that
⏹️ ▶️ John it you know that process There’s overhead to that process. It’s not particularly efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same over when you have multiple cores, and you keep jamming into the same chip not the same overhead But it’s a similar type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John But the more integrated the thing is the easier it is for you to make a very efficient way to do that That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why within a single CPU It is easier to deal with cache and validation that it is with two entirely different
⏹️ ▶️ John chips on it on separate parts of the board That have to do that same task, but they’re farther apart have more
⏹️ ▶️ John latency and they can’t Optimize the way they do this especially if it’s like You know
⏹️ ▶️ John Two way or four way now you have to handle even more cases. It’s kind of a pain so I I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple do that because I think the performance is worse and I think the complexity is pretty annoying It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John actually that low effort and speaking of low effort. I was thinking of this last show I this is one of the first notes
⏹️ ▶️ John I put in for next week’s show What does a low effort Mac Pro look like? I don’t mean this to be insulting
⏹️ ▶️ John But like what if you needed to make a Mac Pro to serve the same needs as the current Mac Pro? But you just
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t want to spend some ridiculous amount of money to do the cool things that Wade was saying where you make this giant chip that has,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 128 gigs of unpackaged RAM and this amazing performance and it’s just this amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John bespoke beast that just has inside of it little bits from like the A14 but in general is this
⏹️ ▶️ John huge beast. What if you didn’t want to do that because it’s just too much money? How do you make a Mac Pro with
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the parts on hand? Let’s assume you have something that’s like an M1X that
⏹️ ▶️ John is beefy enough to be in an iMac or whatever. Or, you know, you’re willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that level of work. The low effort Mac Pro is rip out the on-package
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM and use an AMD GPU and ship it. Because you’ve got the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote system on a chip. The RAM is in a bunch of DDR DIMMs and the
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU is from AMD, your trusted partner for GPUs and you write drivers to
⏹️ ▶️ John the AMD GPU and you use the RAM in those giant banks that have tremendous bandwidth because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very expensive and there’s 12 slots and there’s huge DIMMs in them and you’re done. Like that’s it,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a low effort Mac Pro. It would have better CPU performance than the current Mac Pro, it would have equal capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, the new AMD GPUs are actually giving Nvidia run for their money lately. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re basically done, like that’s a great Mac Pro. The things that are bad about the current Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is the CPU is slow, right? The GPU is actually as good as whatever you can
⏹️ ▶️ John buy and stick in there, it’s as good as you can make it, right? Apple does not have anything that competes with
⏹️ ▶️ John the top end Nvidia or AMD GPUs. And the integrated GPU, as amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John as it is for an integrated GPU, does not compete with the big external ones. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John low-effort Mac Pro, I just want to throw out there, is still an option. Like, we keep talking about all these fantastical things
⏹️ ▶️ John they can do, but they can also make a low-effort Mac Pro. I don’t think it’s a bad machine. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a machine that has a cooler, faster CPU, but has all of the same capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ John And thanks to the wonder of interchangeable parts and slots, the boring old, I’ve just got a bunch of PCI slots
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly you can put a 6800 XT in there Which is an amazing new GPU from Nvidia?
⏹️ ▶️ John I know Nvidia AMD And Apple likes AMD and they just have drivers for it and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John done I know the whole thing we’ve been talking about is Apple’s never gonna use They’re only gonna have Apple GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John from now on they’re only gonna write their own drivers Big Sur doesn’t even ship an arm version with
⏹️ ▶️ John any drivers for any GPUs other than the Apple integrated one Like the writing is on the wall that you’re never gonna see
⏹️ ▶️ John a third-party GPU in in an Apple Silicon-based Mac. We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know the answers to those questions yet. All I’m saying is the low-effort Mac Pro is right out
⏹️ ▶️ John there as an option. It is entirely technically feasible, and I think it’s actually still a good product,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s a little more boring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the lowest-effort Mac Pro would be just keep it on Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And I know this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not the solution anybody wants, and I’m pretty sure Apple’s not gonna do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no. they said they’re gonna fully transition. The transition will take two years. They didn’t have an asterisk that said, except the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, which will never transition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. So like, if they hadn’t said that, I would possibly think this might be even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco further out. But yeah, they did say that. But truly, like the lowest effort would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just keep shipping Xeon workstations at the high end. But again, that’s not their style and that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re going to do. I do also think that they’re gonna keep having slots and they’re gonna keep having interchangeable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modular architecture. And so the way you do that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not by making some giant monster CPU that also has a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs on it. The way you do that is by retaining some amount of modular expansion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slots, whether it’s RAM or cards or both. Most of the feedback here was actually very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very interesting to me because most of the feedback was way above my head, like way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above my knowledge and expertise from people who really know what they’re doing in this area. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really nice to hear of quite how large these other processors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the industry are that we use, or that people can use. And so we know now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple can make a really giant M-series chip, if they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, that has tons of CPU cores, tons of GPU cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as you can pay for it. I mean, the 28-core Xeon W that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Mac Pro is like a $3,000 or $4,000 CPU. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco granted, those are like Intel’s prices. There’s some profit margin there that Apple would be able to absorb into their total product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price, but still, you’re talking thousands of dollars in manufacturing costs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just for that CPU. But while most M
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers, like most of the M-based Macs, I think are gonna have no expansion possibilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatsoever internally. You’re gonna see similar things to the M1, soldered on RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s on or near the package, only GPUs that are built into the package,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are built into the, actually on the chip. I’m not expecting to see any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other thing than that. Like now that I’ve heard from all these listeners and now that I see how big chips can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get and still be part of like kind of mainstream products, I now no longer think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna kick the GPU off the CPU. I think GPU stays on and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only question is how you physically interact with memory in a short, fast
⏹️ ▶️ John Even on the iMac, you think that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so too. I think even on the iMac, I think we’re gonna have one giant chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think seeing the benchmarks of the M1 in various scenarios because people are just really benchmarking
⏹️ ▶️ John the heck out of it these days. The M1 wins everywhere until
⏹️ ▶️ John a real GPU comes walking along and you’re like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey who cares about that? I don’t care about gaming.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a bunch of video apps that do a lot on the GPU and you’ll take a
⏹️ ▶️ John slower, crappier Intel Mac and put a decent GPU in it and it suddenly becomes twice as fast
⏹️ ▶️ John at like 8K video rendering or whatever, right? So, and you know, it doesn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple won’t make that GPU, but they don’t have anything that competes with that so far.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do wonder if they have the will to do that. And especially given that AMD’s new GPUs, because
⏹️ ▶️ John when it was just Nvidia, like we know that it seems like Apple’s just totally on the outs with them, they’re not gonna do anything. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John new AMD GPUs and their new architecture, It’s the same architecture that the new consoles use as well, but bigger and beefier.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re really good And so in a top-end iMac if
⏹️ ▶️ John someone buys that They’re not gonna want it to be slower than their current iMac and a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John the tasks are GPU bound So I’m pretty well convinced that there has to be a discrete GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John in the top-end iMacs Otherwise the arm based ones will be slower than the current
⏹️ ▶️ John iMacs for these kinds of tasks now again Apple could make that GPU, but we don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John have a hint of them doing that. So I’m leaning pretty heavily towards a discrete in the top end iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, maybe. I didn’t realize there was that big of a performance gap. So yeah, that’s very possible then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But regardless, I think almost every other Mac has everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in or around the package, no separation of anything. And then only at the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high end, I think that’s when you get separation. And it doesn’t make sense. Again, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t make sense for the Mac Pro to exist if there aren’t expansion slots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple really, I think, very strongly communicated that that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco direction they intended to stay now, that they rebooted the Mac Pro, they got it back on track, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro’s like, I think they’re gonna keep expansion slots. So I still think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna stay in that product, but I would be very surprised if any other Mac had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of expansion or nearly any kind of separation between the components at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Final bit of follow-up on the making Macs bigger, faster, stronger.
⏹️ ▶️ John Something to keep in mind with regard to die size, cooling and everything else is
⏹️ ▶️ John that TSMC, who manufactures Apple’s system on chips, TSMC is not Intel. TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ John continues to make process advances. The latest story was about the TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ John achieves major breakthrough in two nanometer manufacturing process. So to recap, the
⏹️ ▶️ John A14 and the M1 are at five nanometer. Two nanometer would make for even
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller, more transistors and even less area, it’d be pretty amazing. And this headline
⏹️ ▶️ John confused me, because someone sent this link and it was like, they achieved major breakthrough in two nanometer manufacturing process,
⏹️ ▶️ John comma, risk production in 2023. And you have to parse, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John are they trying to, like, you know in headlines when you leave out articles or whatever you leave out certain words for compactness
⏹️ ▶️ John for the tradition of trying to fit things on the printed page. Are they saying they risk,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, but risk production in, or are they saying risk production with parentheses around
⏹️ ▶️ John it as a compound noun in 2023? And what is risk production? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked it up and I found a couple of definitions, put a link in the show notes. I think one of the plain English ones from Tuna
⏹️ ▶️ John Fish on Hacker’s News was, risk production means that the foundry says, okay, we think everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is fine now, but we make no guarantees that it will work. Customers then have the option of purchasing super expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John wafer starts. You have to look up what starts means because it’s in a whole other lingo thing. Super expensive wafer
⏹️ ▶️ John starts that might or might not work. You might luck out and have lots of great next gen chips months before your competitors,
⏹️ ▶️ John or alternatively you might get five working chips out of each $10,000 wafer. So that’s what risk production
⏹️ ▶️ John means. So 2023 is the time horizon when conceivably
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanted to bend the bleeding edge, this would not be Apple. although for really low volumes, who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Conceivably at very low volumes at high risk, you could get two nanometer parts at a TSMC,
⏹️ ▶️ John which means that the 2024 Mac Pro, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, all the numbers we gave you about die sizes and everything like that, that’s why in the graph where we pointed out that
⏹️ ▶️ John the A14 is actually smaller than the A13 despite having more stuff in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, that five nanometers shrinking down to two nanometers doesn’t mean they’re gonna be half as big for the same amount of transistors,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that means they’re gonna be smaller. So, you know, we’re back on, we’re not, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re back on the Moore’s Law curve because, you know, Moore’s Law will end, we’ve discussed this before,
⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever curve we were on with Intel, we’re not on that one anymore. So expect
⏹️ ▶️ John every couple of years to have maybe, for the next couple of rounds, to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a process shrink and to have that process shrink ripple across Apple’s products and really sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of give us continuing benefits. That was another one of the questions of a lot of the feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John we got is like, can we expect this level of advancement with the M2,
⏹️ ▶️ John M3, M4? First, the easy answer is no, because you went from Intel that was stagnant
⏹️ ▶️ John to ARM, which is not, but you also shouldn’t expect the M2 to be like 3%
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the M1, right? We’re on a better curve than we had been, but there’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be another leap where the M2 is seven times faster or whatever, right? So things are looking up,
⏹️ ▶️ John but keep your expectations in check. But don’t forget, shrinks will happen, and shrinks are good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think a wafer start is kind of like, you know how, I think, don’t the silicon wafers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start out as like a big log and they get sliced? Do you think a wafer start is like the butt of the bread,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the silicon log?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think it’s more like a sourdough bread starter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, okay, where you have to like grow it for a while, feed it additional silicon every day? It’s neither one of
⏹️ ▶️ John those things. I didn’t put the link in the shout outs for wafer starts, or starts in
⏹️ ▶️ John silicon manufacturing, you can look that up as well. But risk production was a new one for me. That’s why I put it in the link.
Windows virtualized on M1
⏹️ ▶️ John And one final bit about ARM Max, this is not about making them faster, but just to note
⏹️ ▶️ John the Alexander graph, this story has already gone around a lot today, but from earlier in the week, has
⏹️ ▶️ John successfully virtualized ARM Windows on Apple Silicon using QEMU plus a bunch of patches.
⏹️ ▶️ John So as we know, Microsoft does not officially support any of Apple’s ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John Max with Windows, despite the fact that Microsoft itself has a version of Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John that runs on ARM and they have their own hardware that it runs on ARM. But their hardware sucks because it doesn’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon. And so if you run ARM Windows on an
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Mac in this QEMU virtualization environment, it’s about twice as fast as the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John actual native Windows ARM hardware you can buy because Apple Silicon is better. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still, you know, as we said back on the ARM Mac introduction,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the ball is in Microsoft’s court. Technically speaking there is nothing stopping Windows from running natively
⏹️ ▶️ John on our Macs except for Microsoft which has thus far Not decided to support them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like Apple wants Microsoft to support Windows and Macs just because for the same reason Apple put
⏹️ ▶️ John that time and energy into boot camp Because it’s saying some of their customers find valuable and it makes Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John more valuable and more versatile So I hope those two crazy kids work this out because
⏹️ ▶️ John I really do want Windows on RMX.
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HomePod Mini review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, we haven’t had a chance to talk about your new toy and oh, the time, the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We do have to do Ask ATP. That stinks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, there was,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was, I did push one follow up item about multi chip modules down to next week, but I think you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t avoid it any longer, Casey. The public needs to know about the iPhone mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if you’ll notice, what I named this topic was Marco’s mini reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got the Mac mini too, right? I get it. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not yet. We’ll see. They’re currently- Oh, you don’t? The build to order Mac minis are currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying that they’re gonna ship in January, in late January at that. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe that plan is not gonna happen. But no, my mini reviews are for my iPhone 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini and my HomePod minis.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s right. So
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many things. Or as Merlin would say, many, many things. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, poor Merlin. I’m from Ohio too. I get it. part of Ohio. Anyway, the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini is where I’ll start. Everybody seemed a lot more excited about this product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I think is ultimately deserved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not to say that it’s a bad product. It’s a fine product. There are a couple of places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have enjoyed HomePods. Let’s say the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smallest rooms in my house. You know, for the past however long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HomePod’s been out, what, a year and a half or two and a half years, whatever it’s been. Um, I’ve enjoyed the home pod for that purpose, but it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit big, uh, and it’s a bit expensive to, to waste in the smallest rooms of your house. And so the home pod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini is actually really good for that. Like I have swapped it in for that role
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is fantastic for that. And it’s also good in contexts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where what you’re mostly going for is the voice assistant and not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like music listening or where the quality of the the music being played isn’t that important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t think anybody with that list of qualifications is buying HomePods of any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size. The whole reason you buy HomePods is that they sound pretty good. And if you really wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the voice assistant part as the primary role of it, you’re probably gonna want an Alexa
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device instead because they’re generally better at that. Anyway, I had two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod minis as a stereo pair, two HomePod Maxis, I guess, as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stereo pair. and also a new Amazon Echo. And then I also tested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out all of them as, I only had one Echo. I also tested them out as just mono
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single speakers. I just, you know, unplugging one of each thing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco un-configuring the stereo pair and testing it just as mono. The HomePod Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this tiny little ball, about the size of a grapefruit. It’s a hundred bucks. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current, which is actually like a brand new generation of $100 Amazon Echo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the main middle of the road Echo, is also a hundred bucks, also a ball,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but much larger, more like it goes from a grapefruit up to like a, almost a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit bigger than a softball, I think. Grapefruits are bigger than softballs, right? It isn’t a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grapefruit. It’s one of like the smaller ones, maybe a large orange.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the Amazon one like a crystal ball, like a fortune teller?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, it’s almost like the original Magic 8-Ball. So okay, grapefruit grapefruit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and softball were wrong. It’s more like large orange and magic. A ball
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Anyway, the hell’s a bread box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And whereas the home pod like the full size home pod is about two thirds the size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a trash can Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So if only there was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of measurement, we could use to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey express the size of things in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John the listeners can understand. Oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, you say that, but then we would use inches and everyone would complain and moan about how backwards Americans are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s just, it’s a milli HomePod, a kilo HomePod. We’ll do
⏹️ ▶️ John it in plonk lengths, plank, plonk, I don’t even know how to pronounce it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, what you might expect is that the sound quality goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up proportionally with price, and it doesn’t. What you might expect instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the sound quality maybe goes up proportionally with size, because really when you have HomePod Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon Echo ball thing and HomePod Maxi all in a row. It is like kind of like, you know, small,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medium, large. There it’s a nice size ramp. And that is pretty much true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is effectively how the sound ramps up. Because you know, speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing with microphones by the way, you really can’t defeat physics after a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while. You can play some tricks, you can be really clever, But if you’re trying to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a point source emitting sound that is not extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close to your ears, you’re gonna have a hard time making that sound good if the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco source is really small or really far away from you, or a very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco source in a very big room, or some other kind of large difference in the physics between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ratios or the proportions or the distances that you’re trying to go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or it doesn’t move a lot of air, right, is another factor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, you know, sheer displacement here, like, cause it’s, you’re dealing with a physical thing, you know, sound waves are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physical compression waves, you have to, you know, at some point physics is going to win.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have a current gen Echo Dot, but I bet if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Dot, I bet it would fit in right below the Mini in size and sound quality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the Dot costs like less than half, or about half of the Mini’s price, and I bet it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half as much worse. Similarly, the Amazon Echo costs exactly the same as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HomePod Mini. Actually, when it’s as it frequently is on sale, it costs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly less, and the new, you know, the new, you know, whatever, what did I say, Magic 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ball sized Amazon Echo sounds significantly better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HomePod Mini. So it’s the same price, it sounds way better, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the voice assistant is way faster and way more reliable and way better. So ultimately, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking to spend $100 on a voice assistant speaker thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Amazon Echo is a way better choice overall than the HomePod Mini. That being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, the HomePod Mini is a HomePod, and therefore, it uses Siri instead. To many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, that’s a feature, not a bug. To me, it’s kind of a wash. They’re both idiots in different ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like the three of us. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not an amazing home-grown product. And if you compare the sound from the Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the full-size HomePod, it’s clear as day like, oh yeah, the full-size HomePod sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better. Especially where the Mini especially falls down, it’s a massive difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in bass. The Mini basically has no bass whatsoever, and the regular HomePod has surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good bass for its size, which, because the regular HomePod is still, in the world of speakers, is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small. In the world of, you know, smart speakers, it’s maybe medium to large, but like, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world of speaker as a whole, it’s quite small and it competes very well with stereo speakers that are much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger than it, especially when you have two of them. So I think ultimately the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular HomePod sounds like it’s twice as good and it’s about twice the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size. Unfortunately it’s nearly four times the price officially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I think if you can actually have the HomePod, the full-size HomePod, at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its frequent sale price of $200-ish, that’s a fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy and that is totally rational and sensible as twice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as the HomePod mini because it’s about twice as good. As for the HomePod mini itself like where it’s left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of you know the size kind of suggests its quality pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well compared to the other ones. If you have a roll in your house that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to fill with a very small smart speaker that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that expensive and is not that good sounding but where that might not matter or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might not care it’s a good buy I’ll give it that but that’s a lot of ifs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you want something to like you know play music in your kitchen or something the Echo is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be better for that or the full-size HomePod. As with the other HomePod if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can afford two of them it is great and it’s way better than just one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, even in a stereo pair, the HomePod mini is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a real winner with sound. It doesn’t make up for its lack of bass or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of it being kind of okay. Whereas like a stereo pair of the full-size HomePods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really does sound quite good in almost any room. I would strongly suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a role in maybe the smaller rooms in your house where you’re you’re mostly playing podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you don’t care about sound quality. Yeah, go for it. It’s nice, it’s inexpensive. If Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have made the HomePod Mini the size of the current Amazon Echo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead, it wouldn’t have been as small. But people don’t really need these things to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super small. So did they make it super small because Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though nobody was really asking for it to be quite this small, if it’s gonna sound quite this mediocre? Or, do they make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it this small because at $100, their profit margins wouldn’t allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to give it like two drivers? Because like one of the reasons it sounds so bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it doesn’t have a separate woofer and tweeter. It has only one driver. And then it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these quote passive radiators on the sides to kind of enhance bass response. I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know enough about speaker design to know what those do. But every other speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this price category has multiple speakers inside. There’s usually a subwoofer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a tweeter, or a woofer and a tweeter, at least. And so if they prioritized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size here, I think that was the wrong move. If they could have shipped something with better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker drivers, and maybe more of them at this price point, I think they should have. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately, that could have just been a price decision as well. It’s a fine product, but it’s not competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Echos at similar price points.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a couple of things that I wanted to touch back on. First of all, you had made mention that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have an Echo Dot. We have year old Echo Dots, so it would not at all surprise me if these are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now out of date. But I can tell you with a fact, they sound like trash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. Which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. I mean, if we’re gonna put on music on the Echo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dots, it’s because we’re trying to get like multi-room going and we just want seamless music throughout and we only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have these upstairs. So, you know, we just want seamless music throughout the upstairs. We are not listening, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, what is it? The Maxell or whatever it was called that I’ve mentioned before, the advertising with guys with his hair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blown back. We’re not sitting there like listening and really paying attention. We just want some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ambient stuff on. And for that, it’s fine. But they sound like garbage, unequivocally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other thing you said is that the HomePod Mini has no bass. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that alarms me greatly because I am not that much of a, it’s kind of guy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but my understanding of your music preferences is that they are not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly bassy, generally speaking. And so if you’re saying with your comparatively tinny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music preferences that they’re not very bassy, someone who likes something that is less fish and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more, I don’t know, like bassy, that could be quite the deal breaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, again, if you care at all about music sound quality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not a product for you, period. Like, end of story, that’s it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally, in the world of smart speakers, they don’t sound great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because again, part of the physics mentioned earlier is every one of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers and the whole industry of soundbars, which I also hate soundbars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What an amazing branding for such a stupid concept. But anyway, the soundbar problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the same problem that almost every smart speaker has, is that they try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play tricks to defeat physics, to try to make a wider soundscape, basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to simulate having multiple speakers in the room when you’re actually broadcasting sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just from one point. And so you have to do things like try to bounce the sound off the walls or in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corners, whatever. And while that’s a real thing, you can indeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bounce sound that way, in practice, it doesn’t work very well in most rooms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not nearly as good as just having two different speakers that are just one at the left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one at the right. Like, it’s not nearly that good. Similarly, all these speakers try to somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound okay while broadcasting from one single point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a room. Oftentimes that can’t be like the ideal space that you maybe want to put a speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you cared about sound quality. So like, you know, you’re dealing with these compromised physics situations here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so all smart speakers kind of have to be graded on a curve. And so from that point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of view, you could use the HomePod Mini and okay, convenient and fun, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you’re going for convenient and fun, I honestly, I would go for the Echo again. Like unless you really love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri over Alexa for a particular reason that’s very important to you. So it could be privacy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could be maybe some of Apple’s integrations. AirPlay 2 is a big one, and I love AirPlay 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even though the latest release of iOS has made it incredibly buggy, thanks, thanks HomePod Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you don’t have a significant reason to prefer HomePods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically, it’s not a great product. Because even by the grading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a curve that you have to do for smart speakers, and even though the regular HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the full-size HomePod almost eliminated that curve. Like, you don’t have to grade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that on a curve. You can just grade it as a nice speaker and it does pretty well for its price point, especially at the discount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price point. But the HomePod Mini just doesn’t. Like, it doesn’t, it’s not a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product. It’s a cute, small product that is fine, but Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, cut a few too many corners on this one and they should have gone a little bit higher.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even if they had to make it cost, you know, 129 instead of 99, if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have had significantly better drivers in there, and maybe two separate ones, that would have gone a long way towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound quality. And if it made it a little bit bigger, oh well, nobody cares.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to add that while you were talking about this, my wife messaged me to say, quote, Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John sucks. Now here’s the thing. Is she listening to the show
⏹️ ▶️ John live and wanted to chime in about the fact about the fact that Siri is not as good a voice assistant as
⏹️ ▶️ John the Amazon Echo? Or is she just living in my house where Siri exists and
⏹️ ▶️ John occasionally does things that annoy us? There’s no way to tell. Because very often
⏹️ ▶️ John people in our house will have complaints about Siri that are unrelated to listening to a live podcast. So yeah, Siri’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John got some catching up to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Oh, and we’ve fired our Sonos stuff and it’s so good. I’m so happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without the buggy. Sonos makes some good products. The Sonos amp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is awesome. Like I love the Sonos amp. It’s a stereo speaker amp with AirPlay 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with TV inputs and analog inputs. It’s wonderful. I love my Sonos amp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is what drives my TV speakers. The reason I love the Sonos amp is that it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any smart integration. And where the Sonos products really fall down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the ones that integrate the Alexa support and try to make these combo voice-controlled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart products. I don’t know what it is about that integration, but it’s buggy. All the reviews, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were complaining about them, about the Alexa integration being buggy. And I thought, oh, maybe that was just like, you know, beta 1.0
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software issues. And maybe they’ve made it better now, like, you know, multiple years in. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they haven’t. It’s still really buggy. And the Sonos Move, I feel the same way about. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have one of those. I just want to sell it now. Like, I want out of that entire ecosystem. Anything in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any system that has a voice support, I want out of it. So I’m just gonna be unloading those things probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the Sonos amp is wonderful because it keeps it dumb. It lacks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both the buggy Alexa support and any reason to ever use Sonos’ apps for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. So it’s great. Like I just use it as my TV speaker and it’s an AirPlay 2 destination.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s wonderful and that’s it.
iPhone 12 Mini review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that took a lot longer than I expected. So let’s do some Ask ATP. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have to do the iPhone mini. I think I actually might have less to say about the iPhone 12 mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so I got my kind of red iPhone 12 mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The back of it is not even close to red, but that’s okay, I never look at the back. The sides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are red and they are delightful. And every time I see the aluminum sides of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone, it just makes me smile. I love the way this phone looks. In the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand, it feels fantastic. In the pocket, it feels even better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have been using it without a case so far. I have the Apple case. I figure maybe just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I can ever travel again, I’m probably gonna want a case, or maybe I figure I might try it for like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week and see what I like better. The screen size is great on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini. I don’t feel like I’ve lost any screen real estate because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t, like, they did just shrink the 10, 10S, and 11 Pro screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fit this size now. So like, screen real estate-wise, it’s the same. They just made the pixels smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, on the small pixel side, between the 12 Mini, which is shrunking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pixels, and my new MacBook Air, which I’m running at its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco default resolution, whereas compared to my 16-inch I ran at its native resolution, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is larger pixels, I’m looking at everything a little bit smaller now, and I’m starting to feel…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hmm… I’m 38 and a half now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never worn glasses, but I don’t have many years left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of not needing any vision correction and having good uniform vision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can kind of feel it slightly slipping away. And as I am using these two new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices that have more dense screens than what I was using before, I’m noticing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I’m noticing like, hey, this is a little bit harder to read than it might have been a few years ago. Even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’ve just done is go back to the density of all the phones before the 10. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this density is. It’s the same density that the 6 and 7 had.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I am kind of thinking like, this might be a one-year thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I might have issues with just looking at very small things within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next year or two. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can crank up the zoom though, right? Didn’t ask you during setup which size you prefer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I can, but then I lose screen real estate and then I’d be less willing to lose that possibly. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, but you still keep the good hand feel and the good pocket feel, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. I’m kind of hoping that maybe in future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revisions they might reduce the weight of the middle pro line a little bit because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so dense and heavy I feel like that got worse this year. Anyway, um, so otherwise though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it feels wonderful grip wise. I’m still getting used to not having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a leather case. Cause this is the first time I haven’t had a leather case since the five S I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still getting used to like picking it up off, you know, with the edges and having, I kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of still feel like I’m going to drop it all the time. Um, so that, that’s another reason why I might try the case. Another reason is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that in my previous caseless days, the phone would rest flat because there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no camera bump. Now there’s a camera bump and so with no case, the phone does not rest flat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s infuriating. That’s one of the main reasons I use a case these days. I demand that it both lay
⏹️ ▶️ John flat and not make me nervous about scratching it. But laying flat, yeah, that’s why I really was upset by the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple leather Pro Max case, which adds a bump on the bump. So even when you get the
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t lay flat. I was afraid that would be true of all the cases, but apparently not on
⏹️ ▶️ John the non-max size of Apple cases and certainly not on the Senna case that I’m using. Laying flat
⏹️ ▶️ John is a major feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And also just like having a little bit of that tackiness grip when you’re on a surface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I think I’m ultimately probably going to go with a case, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna try cases a little while longer because it just feels so good. And it looks really good. Again, like I love the red
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aluminum edge. I absolutely love it. I like it way better than any of the other colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Performance wise, battery wise, the battery is noticeably lower. Like as everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, yeah, I do get less battery life. It has not been a problem yet. And ultimately, if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to like ever travel with this phone, which honestly, it’s probably not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a whole lot of that, but if I’m gonna ever travel with this phone, I would probably want some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like MagSafe battery. If Apple would make that, that would be awesome. I don’t know, I don’t think anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else has made one yet, but that would be great. Like a little like thing you just stick on the back for charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your pocket sometimes, but not all the time, that would be wonderful. But that doesn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, so we’ll see. I haven’t actually tried MagSafe yet, I’ve just been using my regular Qi charger that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been using for years, like on my nightstand. So I haven’t tried that yet. Cause ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I want for MagSafe is something that is stationary on the nightstand. That like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want their weird little travel wallet they unveiled for way too much money yesterday. Like, I don’t want that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want just like the loose cable, I want like a dock that is basically a magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Qi charging stand like that, or a pad or whatever, that’s what I want. And I don’t know that there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those on the market yet, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s been another issue with the Mini, with dock-like things. If you have a dock that’s made for, quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote, normal phones, the Mini is so small that depending on your luck,
⏹️ ▶️ John it may be that the coils don’t align as well because the Mini is shorter, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John So either it doesn’t charge as fast because it’s misaligned, or in some of them it just won’t charge at all because the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing thinks it’s misaligned and won’t charge it. I don’t think this is a big problem. Panzer posted about it when it first came out, but it is something
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep in mind because the Mini is so different than the average size phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you just have a generic phone charger, or even worse, a charger that is custom made to fit like
⏹️ ▶️ John a Galaxy Note or some other huge thing, be careful and think about it before you buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so otherwise, like, other than like, you know, the battery being a little bit low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, having a dilemma on whether I want to use a case or not, otherwise I’m loving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing. It does feel a little bit like going back in time in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is so much smaller and lighter and you do have less screen physical size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so for things like watching video and stuff, it’s like slightly worse than the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones. But ultimately, you know, we’re talking about, what, a half an inch or something, or like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a one inch screen size difference. That’s a lot proportionally, but you’re still watching video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a tiny screen. And so if you’re trying to decide whether you want to watch video on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny screen or a tinier screen, like it’s, they’re both massive compromises compared to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a TV or even a laptop. So that almost doesn’t matter at all. Camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wise, so far, I have not missed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 2X camera that much. I have taken pictures where I have zoomed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in digitally, but usually not to the full 2X.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the digital zoom has been good enough for my like, you know, 1.4, 1.6 kind of rings. It’s been good enough for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There have been some pictures where, you know, we take pictures like around a dark dinner table. Like we took our Thanksgiving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dinner pictures around our dark table and Tiff had her Max and I had my mini and her pictures did look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. they did have a little bit more detail, but I had to like zoom in and like and really look for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the difference. And so from my point of view, as a much more casual iPhone photographer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like I don’t, I’m not a pro iPhone photographer, I barely post on Instagram. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am, you know, I don’t shoot raw, I don’t use Halide or any of the fancy apps that people who are really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good at this stuff use. I just, you know, shoot with the built-in camera and occasionally tweak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the photos a little bit and occasionally post some of them to Instagram, but even then it’s pretty rare. And so from my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point of view, the 1X camera is great and digital zoom when I need it so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been okay. If there were a 2X option on this size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no question I would pay extra for that. I would definitely take that, but there isn’t. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so ultimately I do like the size a lot, even despite that. Finally, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker seems to be, I’d like some of the reviews tried to say that the speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were kind of comparable between them. They’re not. The speaker on this one is a little bit lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume and a little bit worse than the bigger ones, but it’s not a big difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not a difference that I would consider fatal, and I use the speaker a lot, mostly for podcasts because it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an echo dot for music. So anyway, ultimately I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy with it. I’m a little scared that no one’s buying it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because when I look at my stats in Overcast, there’s not a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of 12 mini compared to the other ones. So I’m a little worried about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might be like a one-off thing and like they might not make another one next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year or ever. If that’s the case, if this is not like a regularly updated product line,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna like hang on to this forever. I don’t love it so much that I would do that. Like if next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year the lineup is similar but without a mini option, I’ll just go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the smallest pro like I have for the last few years. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this is still an option next year, I’ll probably take it because it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels so good. It’s so light, it’s so small, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too small. It doesn’t feel too cramped. I haven’t had problems with the keyboard accuracy or anything like that. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t feel too small. It’s just right on that edge,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s not. So ultimately I’m very happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, we’ll see how the rest of the year goes. We’ll see like what I think about it. If I travel with it, I’m sure the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life will be a hit there. We’ll see, you know, how the lack of the 2X camera plays out over the year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for at least this year, I’m very happy with it. I’m very happy with the almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco red color that I picked. And yeah, I guess I’ll keep you posted on my exit interview, at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what I think then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I survived this. You’re not making me feel that much FOMO, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we all know for me, it’s, but a small breeze that can get me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right into the FOMO side of the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You haven’t felt one yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So far, I’m not feeling terrible, terrible amounts of FOMO. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I consider this a success.
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco CMS I can I’ve done it but most of the time that is not
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MacBook Air update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP like for real this time. Matthew Taylor writes, is it possible to disable the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fan on the new M1 MacBook Pro? Does Big Sur contain a setting for such, or do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know of a third party app that can do so, thus forcibly restricting system-wide performance to a fan-off thermal envelope?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What annoys me about my current 2015 MacBook Pro is fan noise. I’d love to be able to make fan usage an option I control.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand the question, but I have a few problems with this. Like, first of all, anyone I have heard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read, spoken to, who has one of these says that the fans almost never kick on, first of all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Second of all, if you don’t want fan noise, buy a MacBook Air. Like, that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix the problem for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s nearly the same computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right, exactly. Oh, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my God. Just a very quick update on how I am liking my MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love it so much. You know what I love so much about it? Not the color.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The color I think was a mistake. I got the gold, probably a mistake. I could have told you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but it does do one thing though. It makes it look new and different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because while I know the gold has existed for a couple of years in that product, then for even more years before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that on the 12 inch, although that was a different gold anyway, I’ve never had it, so it’s new to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. There’s never been one in the house even, so that is new. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, if you don’t get a weird color on this product, you can’t even tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is. You can’t tell that it’s this radical new cool thing. And for many people, that’s a feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for me, I kind of felt like, you know, I kind of want this radically different, new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome thing to look different, to look new. I’m so tired of space gray.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Space gray is, I’m way, way over it. Silver is what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably should have bought, but I’ve had silver laptops now for how many years? Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, it’s a great color, but it just looks, it made it look and feel older, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m very happy that I got this weird gold, orange, pink, whatever it is color, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks different, even though I actually don’t like it in certain lighting. But in certain lighting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do. You gotta get some skins. No, those are, I’ve tried that. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been down that road. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not for me. Put
⏹️ ▶️ John a paper-like thing on your iPad. Why not put a skin on your MacBook Air?
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t clash with the gold is a problem now, but you do that to yourself. Yeah, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Congratulations,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you played yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But one other thing, it doesn’t have a touch bar. Oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so happy. I love, like, hey, you wanna turn on the volume? Just tap, one tap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not two. You don’t have to wake it up first and then find where the button is and then drag it down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, one tap on a button, boop, volume’s down. You wanna increase the brightness? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John brightness. Don’t make people tell you about the tap-drag gesture because they’re going to.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tap-drag, you still have to tap it to wake
⏹️ ▶️ John it up. I know, I’m just reminding, I know that you know, but people don’t know, I’m saving you. I know. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, don’t write in to tell me what a bread box is. I know, my grandmother had one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, also don’t tell me about a better tuck stool and how much better it makes the tux bar. I’ve tried that too,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey anyway. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, can we explore that just briefly? Can we explore that briefly? Because when I got my MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro six months ago, which was the first touch bar to be in my own home, first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all, I don’t have particularly strong feelings about the touch bar. Like I don’t think it adds anything, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actively piss me off like it does a lot of people I know, including you, Marco. But I thought to myself, well, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I should use better touch tool for doing cool stuff. And I think we spoke about on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, that one of the things I did was put like a little emoji representing whether or not the garage door was open on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the touch bar, not because it needed to be there, but just because I thought it was a neat thing to try. And it worked, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally found BetterTouchTool to be extremely unreliable and very crashy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just did not work well with the touch bar at all. Now, it very well could have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user error. And honestly, if it was, I don’t care because I don’t think I care enough to go digging and figuring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out why this was the case. I know other people have had very good experiences with BetterTouchTool with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Touch Bar, but for me, it just felt like a pile of hacks that just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t really for me. And so those of you who are better Touch Tool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fans, I respect that, but I don’t know how you do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, in all fairness, the Touch Bar is very buggy and crashy and unreliable even stock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, I am so happy with this laptop. Not having a Touch Bar to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me is like not having a fan. It’s wonderful. Here’s this thing that occasionally annoyed me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now it’s just gone. Wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. And I was thinking too, it’s probably going to have a longer lifespan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s no moving parts. I’m having this problem with my iMac being filled with dust after three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. Laptops have that problem too. Many people frequently have problems with their laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the fans spin up like crazy way more than they did when they were new. And some of that’s because of weirdness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe thermal compound degrading, but some of that’s also because stuff’s just really full of dust in there and it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get it out. And so when you eliminate the fan, you eliminate not only the noise and annoyance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that, but so many problems that could occur in the future as you use this machine for years and years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think ultimately the main limiting factor of this is probably going to be the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lifespan, not anything else about it unless it gets damaged because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s just nothing about it to really go wrong. And that’s yet another feature of the air and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again you look at the lineup and
#askatp: Disable M1 fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and going back to this Ask ATP question that I rudely interrupted, sorry Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m with you, if you’re looking into the MacBook Pro, the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, the 13 inch mini MacBook Pro, and you’re worried about the fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise, just get the Air. I mean, even though people have said that it’s really hard to make the fan turn on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if that’s gonna be a main priority for you, just get the Air, because it’s nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think it’s about the fan turning on. Like I don’t recommend getting the Air if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want a MacBook Pro. If you want a MacBook Pro, get one. Like the reports basically say that even
⏹️ ▶️ John though the fan is spinning, it’s spinning so slow that you can’t even hear it. If you have a 2015 MacBook Pro and you’re annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John by fan noise, don’t use that as a way to measure how you’re going to feel
⏹️ ▶️ John about the MacBook Pro with the M1 in it. Just get the MacBook Pro with the M1 in it. All reports have said,
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone just tells you it’s fanless, you won’t even know. because even when people are running benchmarks for 10 minutes, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like Gruber was saying, he literally could not hear it. Put his ear right up to the thing. He, you know, running a benchmark, he couldn’t hear it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The fan is in there and it is spinning, but it’s spinning so slow that it’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be anything like your dust-filled 2015 MacBook Pro. So if that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John want the M1-based MacBook Pro, just buy it. If you’re, if you wanna be sure you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John hear a fan, get the Air, but I don’t wanna steer people away because all the reviews have been unanimous
⏹️ ▶️ John in saying like, yeah, it’s got a fan, but don’t worry, you won’t hear it. It’s not like the fan on your current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also to actually answer the question, before we move on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, you can get software to turn off the fans. In fact, you can, I forget which app I use, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I did it on my Mac Pro. I can stop all the fans on my Mac Pro, which is not advisable. Don’t do it, you can watch the
⏹️ ▶️ John temperatures just go up. But yeah, you can do that, but don’t, please don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I have a question. So the way those programs like CoolBook, like the way those used to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, they would interact somehow with the power management unit of the computer, I don’t know how, I don’t know by what mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could do that, but I would expect, first of all, I would expect all of that to be different on the M1-based Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Possibly not to be available at all for software to modify, or if it is available, it will probably be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while before the apps are updated to support it.
⏹️ ▶️ John they update pretty quickly. Like, remember when we were going through this with the Mac Pro, it took a while for any app to support
⏹️ ▶️ John fan control, but eventually, because it’s the Mac, you’re not limited in the same way you are on iOS devices. So yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is an M1 and it’s new and they’ll have to come up with new stuff, but they will do it. Like there’s nothing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unless they don’t have access to it. Like unless there is no API they can call to modify that on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 architecture, which is possible. Anyway, so I’m curious though, John, because like the way those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to work is they were able to adjust the minimum speed so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could speed the fan up, but they couldn’t slow it down beneath what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the unit wanted to run it at. if temperatures reached a certain level, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system would enforce its minimum speed no matter what you told these apps to do. So all these apps could do would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be to increase the speed so that maybe if you wanted to, the reason why it’s called CoolBook is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could run your laptop cooler by having the fan blow faster. So you’re saying that with your Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was able to actually lower the speed beneath what it would normally be?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I didn’t play the full game of chicken to see,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hey, what happens if I just
⏹️ ▶️ John leave it like this? But you could put it into manual control. I think the app I was using was TG Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can put it into manual control and it basically gave you sliders. And you’d hear what the fan level is at now
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’d move the slider down and it would get quieter. And then you’d watch your temp start going up, right? So clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s whatever I’m doing, I’m making it be below what it would want to go because the temp would start climbing and climbing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I just put it back into automatic because I didn’t want to see what would happen. You know, like, I didn’t want to find out
⏹️ ▶️ John where the limits are on my very expensive computer, but I’m pretty sure that it really was bringing
⏹️ ▶️ John the fans down to below where they wanted to be. You know, it could be that the default mode is above
⏹️ ▶️ John the minimum, to your point, like maybe there’s a minimum and they don’t run at the minimum, they run like in the middle.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it did give me a slider and you could slide it all the way to the end. It did make it quieter and it did make the temperatures
⏹️ ▶️ John go up. But please don’t do this to your computer, especially an M1 MacBook Pro. Just get it and just
⏹️ ▶️ John tell yourself there’s no fan in it and see if you ever hear it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As another quick aside from the Ask ATP that will never end, I recorded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using prior sponsor channels. I recorded a couple of things, a couple of the holiday specials off ABC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I was running them through Final Cut Pro in order to take the commercials out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I rendered them, these are like 45 minute, maybe an hour, 10 minute total
⏹️ ▶️ Casey television programs. And they were 720. The source was 60 frames per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second, which I did not keep. And I’ve cranked it back to 30, I believe. But I was rendering them out of Final Cut Pro. There were no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like fancy transitions. There was no weirdness to them. I did render them as HEVC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my iMac Pro. One of them took literally like six or seven hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea why. Nothing else was going on on my computer that was abnormal. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after that was done, I very nearly bought myself a new Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is preposterous. Now, I know I’m a media pack rat. I know I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have very esoteric and peculiar needs when it comes to media stuff. It is unusual for me to be going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into Final Cut Pro and doing these sorts of things. But I don’t know why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it took so long. People are already unloading in the chat. What about hardware encoding? What about hardware encoding? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has hardware encoding. I know it does. I have no idea why Final Cut Pro, or yes, not Final Cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro 10, it’s just Final Cut Pro now. I don’t know why it took so darn long, but I started it around lunchtime and it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finish until around dinnertime. I have no idea why. but oh my goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was it using the hardware? Because I think the hardware is not infinitely capable and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure under what scenarios Final Cut will choose to use the HEVC encoder
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in the Intel CPU versus not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the big things is that if it has 10-bit video coloring, that it can’t use the T2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that may have been, in fact, I think that might’ve been it now that you say that, but either way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have encoded like, you know, H.264 stuff, I’ve re-encoded as HEVC in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to save storage space on the other end. So if it’s something that I’m, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not critical to me that it’s in the original form factor in which I downloaded or the original codec
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it. You mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ripped? It depends on what we’re talking about. I take your point, but it depends on what we’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, I can do, I can usually on the iMac Pro get anywhere between 1X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like 3X with the CPU doing HEVC encodes, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was like 110th X, and maybe it was the 10-bit thing, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, you’ll know, because if it’s using the T2 acceleration, the CPU will be almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you’ll be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it in iCent menus, like the CPU is doing almost nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I don’t know, whatever. It was just, it was hearing all these people saying, oh, I can render in Final Cut Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so fast. It was quite the sales pitch for me getting a new Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which hand to God, I do not want a new Mac. I don’t want a new MacBook Pro right now, I probably will soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not want a new iMac right now, probably will soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, listeners, you hear it here. So which do you think happens first? Who caves, me or Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, now hold on. Which of us has a different Mac or desktop first?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that’s actually a very interesting question because sitting here now, I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any need or desire, he says with little confidence, to change my iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really do think though, as soon as there’s a 4.13 inch MacBook Pro, it’s quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey likely I’m gonna pull the trigger real soon. And you already did. I mean, you’ve already lost that fight in the laptop department.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I mean, I already won.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, but like, I mean, me buying new laptops is a given. That’s true. But desktops,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s an event. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also true. I don’t know. All right, we should probably get back to AskATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John How long ago did we start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? I don’t know.
#askatp: Apple News
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brian Hoffman writes, can you guys explain what you don’t like about Apple News? Is it just the UI or is there something more? Your comments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last few years brushed it off as almost an obvious to all pile of garbage. But for me, it’s become my go-to news source. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also looking to Apple One and News Plus articles. Yes, the UI could be improved, but so could photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just wondering. You know, I don’t ever touch Apple News unless I end up there by accident because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody posted a link there. I don’t know how to describe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but I know that there are affordances in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey News that are different from the standard way iOS works. Like I think swiping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back actually gets you to a different article, if I recall correctly. So if you do like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left to right swipe, I would expect you to go back to the prior screen, but it’s like, oh no, no, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another article for you. What? Like, I don’t want that. No, no. app on my phone, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey swipe from left to right, it goes backwards. And you’re just sending me to a different article, which I guess is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of backwards, but that’s not what I want at all. Um, additionally, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sharing, uh, to me, if I’m going to share a link with somebody, I want to share the canonical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of that link, which 99% of the time is the web, I don’t want to share fricking Apple news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article. Like if you’re going to share something, share the web version, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And thank you. I don’t know. I just don’t care for it. I don’t like it. Half the time I end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up there, it’s for a paywalled article and I don’t even know it until I land there, which I guess isn’t any different than the web. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t care for it. John, why don’t you tell us what is wrong with Apple News?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the second bit is what you got. The content in Apple News is content from web pages
⏹️ ▶️ John and it should be viewed on the web. The reason everyone has animosity towards Apple News is when we see
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple News link, we’re like, oh, I don’t want to tap that and launch into a dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John app for this special kind of URL that is worse than a web browser, that is more annoying to use than a web browser
⏹️ ▶️ John and makes the article look worse. And you know that article in most cases came from the web to begin with.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like a worse version of the article on the web. Now granted, the web is annoying too. That’s why we run ad blockers
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything on our devices, right? But in general, the open web with URLs that are
⏹️ ▶️ John all interlinked to each other as viewed by a web browser is the proper forum for web data, not
⏹️ ▶️ John a special dedicated reading application. Even things like RSS readers that read a newsfeed from a site,
⏹️ ▶️ John show a web view for the full article or launch a web browser depending on your preference. That’s the right
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do this. If people were sharing links on Twitter and it was like a net newswire,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, NNW colon slash slash, we’d be annoyed by that too because that’s not the right way to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. If it’s a link, if it’s a URL and it’s a webpage, take me to the webpage. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John take me to an Apple News app that embeds a web view that shows a weird version of that webpage. Apple News,
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. Now I understand people who are like, okay, but I like having a dedicated app for this one type of webpage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fine, good. Don’t share those links with the public. Get your own little private place where you go
⏹️ ▶️ John to see things, but don’t send, especially as far as like Twitter, if you want to send it to someone through messages and you know they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John also a diehard Apple News user, fine, go for it. But if you’re writing a tweet out to the world or you’re putting a link
⏹️ ▶️ John on your webpage, do not make an Apple News link. That’s no good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I feel very similarly. You know, the news is almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always designed to be read in web browsers. And you know, for all of its faults,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John was saying, like for all the faults of the web, the web browser is an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco application. And we’ve all developed habits and expectations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on how web browsers work. And you mentioned earlier, Casey, like you don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how you swipe back. And instead of like going logically back in the hierarchy or the history,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it goes to some other article and that’s just, that feels wrong because you’re looking at this content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re, it feels like a web browser, but worse. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re going to read web content, read it in a web browser. Like that’s, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s for. And if you, if you do anything else, if you try to replicate a web browser, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience in an app that is not a web browser, you’re going to get all the details wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re going to have capabilities that are wrong. Like, one of the things I love about web browsers is like, you can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pop open some new tabs, or you can hit Command F and find stuff on the page real fast. And like, there’s all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that are built in that you don’t even think about, because they just have been in web browsers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever, and we use them every day, but you don’t necessarily think like, oh, I need this feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until you’re in something like Apple News, and you want that feature, and it’s not there, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you expect it to behave a certain way, and then it behaves some different way. And it just feels wrong, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has limitations and weird behaviors that just make it feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either limiting or wrong or both. If you’re reading web content, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web browser is the best app to do that in most of the time. And anything that forces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people out of that with some weird automatic behavior like Universal Links do on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stuff, it just feels wrong and it’s frustrating and it’s annoying and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can really disrupt your flow or anger you or both. So, you know, I don’t like things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be in a certain format that are forcing you into their format for business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a reason why if you look back at the sponsors of our show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you look at the sponsors of other podcasts, one of the little rules that we try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to enforce whenever reasonably possible is we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like taking sponsors from services that are subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some kind of product where you pay per month and you get a box full of dog toys or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, well, I don’t really need a subscription to dog toys. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that feels like if you wanna sell me dog toys, why don’t I just order dog toys when I need dog toys? I don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need a subscription to that, right? I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when certain things are like forced into a subscription for business reasons where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t really make sense. And that’s kinda how I see apps like Apple News. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is forced into this app for Apple’s business reasons. Not because it’s better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not because News wants to be in this weird special app that takes over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this certain type of link and that, you know, kinda makes it hard to behave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normally as a web browser would. Like, that’s not, they’re not doing that because it’s better for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, the customer. In some ways it might be, but in most ways it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either just more limited or more annoying. They’re doing that because it’s better for them. It serves their strategic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interests or their business interests, and that’s why that is the way it is. I don’t like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing. If something is better or native to a certain way of doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things or a certain platform or a certain type of app for viewing or consuming it, I want it in that kind of app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to have it in some weirdo special thing. Like, that’s why I don’t listen to podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on YouTube. Like I use a podcast app because that’s what podcasts want to be in and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better and it works the way you expect and that’s it. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that’s why every like major podcast day or every major audio platform is now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding podcasts for reasons and they’re trying to cram it in. Like, oh, use our app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to listen to this particular show that we just bought. Oh, if you have this particular type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of fridge, you can listen to our podcast, this podcast production company we just bought that can only play on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our fridges. It’s like, no, I don’t, nobody wants that. And if you have the option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of not doing that, I generally will want to take that option. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of, I like for things to be in the place, in the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, where they make the most sense, where they are native and where they can be full featured and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow expectations. And Apple News breaks a lot of that, And that’s why I don’t like Apple News.
#askatp: Discrete obsolete?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kevin Duran writes, since M1-based computers have arrived, all tech announcements related to traditional non-system-on-a-chip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computers already sound old and unexciting. It seems that on an infinite timescale, almost all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computers will switch to using ARM-based systems on a chip. This has me wondering, are discrete component
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motherboards the internal combustion engines of computing? How dare you, sir!
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey On an infinite
⏹️ ▶️ John timescale, you know, we’ve got the heat death of the universe. You don’t get at a long-based SCC is unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an interesting question because it, I mean, what Kevin is pointing out is a, just
⏹️ ▶️ John a general trend in this part of the technology sector, which is as
⏹️ ▶️ John we are able to make smaller and smaller transistors, as the process shrinks or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, you need to spend those transistors on something. And it turns out that if you can suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John fit something that used to be an external chip into the CPU or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, For example, putting the memory controller into the CPU, putting a GPU into the CPU, like
⏹️ ▶️ John this process of taking chips that used to be elsewhere on the motherboard and putting them into
⏹️ ▶️ John not an even bigger chip, but a chip that is more or less the same size, but now you can fit more stuff in it, has been
⏹️ ▶️ John going on for decades and will continue to go on. It doesn’t mean, as this process has happened, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean that suddenly you have zero, just a motherboard with one chip on it because you get other chips that are elsewhere, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the cell modem or whatever. Oh, well, you can integrate that. And so this process will continue,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it may eventually get to the point where essentially you have one chip and certain devices and then just analog
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff outside of it, if we’re not already there in some scenarios. But it’s not a new trend.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to give an example of that, we should put this link in the show notes. An acronym from my childhood and that I
⏹️ ▶️ John also found in my schooling at various points is VLSI. Do you know without looking it up what VLSI is?
⏹️ ▶️ John very large scale integration? That’s right. And this is kind of like the
⏹️ ▶️ John high bandwidth memory. If you make up a name like this, like very large scale integration,
⏹️ ▶️ John that sounds impressive. At least they didn’t say ultra or whatever, but they did say very, very large scale integration.
⏹️ ▶️ John A term coined in the 70s, the idea was that you take a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John what used to be discrete components, transistors. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a little black, little
⏹️ ▶️ John pencil eraser thing with three metal leads
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey coming out of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You take a bunch of what used to be a bunch of transistors on a board, and you can combine all those
⏹️ ▶️ John transistors into one thing that we call an integrated circuit. So all those little transistors used to
⏹️ ▶️ John be there, and now they’re in one thing. That’s very large scale integration. They burned
⏹️ ▶️ John that term, and now we can’t use it for just for the idea of an integrated circuit, of not
⏹️ ▶️ John having separate transistors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See also VHF and UHF.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this consolidation trend will continue as long as we are able to make smaller and smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John transistors. Eventually, we won’t be able to make smaller and smaller transistors, and this trend will stop. And who knows,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we’ll use DNA-based computing or something. I don’t know. There’s other avenues we can go on. But transistors will
⏹️ ▶️ John not get smaller forever because physics. But for the foreseeable future,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will continue to spend our transistor budget on putting more stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John into the one main chip, which we now call a system on a chip. But honestly, like when Intel integrated the memory
⏹️ ▶️ John controller. Oh, it’s not a system on a chip, but we’re certainly putting a lot more stuff in this chip. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we cross the threshold. And so now it’s a system on a chip, you know, whatever the arbitrary definition you want to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, when you put this in, then it becomes a system on a chip. But yeah, we’re gonna see more stuff going in. Or the other
⏹️ ▶️ John direction you can go is well, you can just keep making the GPUs bigger, because you can basically make GPUs bigger forever and spend all
⏹️ ▶️ John your transistor and power budget on it. But it is advantageous to have more and more things
⏹️ ▶️ John integrated. This is another question, by the way of like, We’ve been talking for a couple years now about Apple making
⏹️ ▶️ John its own cell modems for its phones Which is a difficult thing to do and they started
⏹️ ▶️ John on it many years ago And they bought Intel’s business for doing that right and we fully expect if not in the next
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone and certainly the one after that That Apple won’t be using chips from Qualcomm for its cell modem.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be using its own could that be integrated into the the system
⏹️ ▶️ John on a chip Maybe but there are analog components to sell modems that may
⏹️ ▶️ John not be easy to fold in So maybe still be good idea to have it outside but those are the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that you can imagine being sucked into that and as for Discrete components being internal combustion
⏹️ ▶️ John engines No because they will always be discrete components because it Doesn’t make sense to put literally
⏹️ ▶️ John every single thing into the system on a chip We just talked about DRAM last time because DRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John is manufactured in a slightly different way it doesn’t make sense to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John do sort of you know the the Manufacturing system to use for the logic and then a separate manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John system to use for the D ram to try to put that on The same die it’s not always going to make sense to do that So there were
⏹️ ▶️ John there will almost always be components Even if it’s just like the stuff that’s like all the capacitors and the analog
⏹️ ▶️ John components for the power supplies that are outside the system on a chip that’s Still gonna be out
⏹️ ▶️ John there Even if it looks like it’s dwindling as we pull more things into the system on a chip But we come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John new ideas to put in that board space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Bombas. Thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You too can join. Not you two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the number two. You also can join at atp.fm. slash join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let
⏹️ ▶️ John him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re listening to this now and you’re just now but you weren’t paying attention earlier But now you’re composing
⏹️ ▶️ John that email to tell me what a breadbox is just stop I Knew it when it was coming out of my mouth Mike I can
⏹️ ▶️ John hear I can hear the tweets going now You don’t know what a breadbox is. You’ve never seen a breadbox. Here’s a photo of the breadbox
⏹️ ▶️ John on my countertop right now Why don’t you have a breadbox? You’re missing the point of the joke.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s silly that the thing we use for 20 questions and charades or whatever to to
⏹️ ▶️ John assess the size of things as a breadbox, which despite you knowing what it is, and despite my grandmother having
⏹️ ▶️ John one, is not the first object that springs to mind about it for size
⏹️ ▶️ John comparisons, for whatever reason. What, breadbox got it, I think, 20 questions, right? Is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John context in which you know bigger than a breadbox?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, is it bigger than a breadbox? Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do we want to talk about? Do we want to talk about Slack? There was a request in the chat room to talk about Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I really, really don’t want to do because I can’t handle the feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. What did Tesla do? Besides the weird tequila thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Full self-driving is real, man. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Full self-driving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s been real like 10 times.
⏹️ ▶️ John They put a big mission to accomplish banner behind it. Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s real, it’s real, and it’s in beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, great. That’s something I want to beta test. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re already beta testing it, Marco. bad news. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, honestly, I haven’t kept up with this. A couple of people have mentioned this and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frankly, the only people have heard about it from our Tesla owners. So this hasn’t even made my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sphere outside of Tesla people being like, Ooh, I’ve got full self driving now or whatever. So I’m not even sure what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different, to be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I haven’t. This is the first I’ve heard of this story, but I’ve, I’ve haven’t been paying attention. I, the last thing I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John about full self driving is a bunch of angry Tesla owners saying that it’s the worst $5,000 or whatever they ever spent
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re super angry about it and that made me happy because they’re learning that the thing they have in their car now
⏹️ ▶️ John will not drive the car for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love that you’re saying that. Meanwhile, TKZ in the chat says, it’s pretty impressive. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a limited beta. So is it good? Is it bad? Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John Drive your own car, people. Until the car drives itself. And don’t trust Elon
⏹️ ▶️ John when he tells you that it does because he’s been saying that for many years now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there’s been so many asterisks on it, and there still are. Every time they make progress,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do something that’s very technically laudable. It’s very impressive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it still isn’t full self-driving, which is what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the feature is called. And every time they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get one step closer to that, they call it full self-driving. I was like, well, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can it actually drive with no interaction from here to there, no matter what I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by here and there, no matter what it encounters in the meantime? No, it can’t. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well then that’s not full self-driving. It might be something else, it might be great. But that’s what full self-driving
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not great because the closer it gets to that without reaching it, it’s the uncanny valley, the more dangerous it becomes. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John the more it lulls the user into thinking that it really is, they really can take a nap. But they can’t, do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing, like, all kidding aside, like what level are we talking about? Because to me, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this isn’t at least level four, which is defined as you can take a nap, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not self-driving. I thought that
⏹️ ▶️ John was level five. I thought level five was you can take a nap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, this isn’t level five. That’s what I thought too. But then I was corrected that this is not level five. So this is very much not full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey self-driving. This is full-ish self-driving.
⏹️ ▶️ John you were saying four is you can take a nap, right? But that’s not four, is it? I don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We went over this many- I’m looking at it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Level four is quote unquote mind off as level three, but no driver attention is required for safety. E.g.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the driver may safely go to sleep or leave the driver’s seat. All right, so what’s the difference between four and five? Steering wheel is steering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wheel optional on level five.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am, but that’s that, see, that doesn’t make sense to me. I guess we should have looked into these SAE levels
⏹️ ▶️ John earlier because like. If you don’t need to pay attention, then why does that need to have a steering wheel? I mean, I suppose you could
⏹️ ▶️ John say, well, if you remove, if you can manually drive it, it’s only level four.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, here we go, here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading, I should just keep reading. That’s the trick, you guys. However, self-driving is supported only in limited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spatial areas, like being geofenced, or under special circumstances. So that’s like, it only works on the highway.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s the thing. If it says that no attention is required, that’s not true. Because if you fall asleep and it ends up
⏹️ ▶️ John running, it gets off at a highway exit, and then comes to a dead stop in the highway exit, and you’re asleep in the car,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve exited the area where I know how to drive, so it’s time for you to drive, driver, and you’re snoring,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not good. And it’s dangerous for the car. Even if all the Tesla’s pull over
⏹️ ▶️ John after the exit and say, well, all our drivers are asleep, but we can’t drive any farther.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like level four. Level five are bust. And so far it’s all been bust.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And I don’t know. It didn’t like somebody in the chat is saying, oh, well, it means
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it level four means you have a few minutes before you have to take over. So it could like wake you up or
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like the worst version of like, don’t worry, you’ll be needed soon,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not now, but you don’t have to pay attention, but you do have to be wakeable, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey oh, it’s like how many, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to get kids up for school. It’s like, look, either you’re gonna drive me there by
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself or I have to be involved in the process.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems so preposterous to me. And I, oh my God, please don’t email me. Please don’t email any of us. I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John A reminder to
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone listening that if you think that the car can drive for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John but at any moment you will be called upon to take over,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t do that. No one can do it. No human can do that. It is against human nature. It is against the functioning
⏹️ ▶️ John of your brain. It is an incredibly dangerous situation. Drive your car until it can drive for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no way you can maintain that level of vigilance over a long car trip. Your attention
⏹️ ▶️ John will wander. You will not be ready to take over in time and you will die. Don’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on hands on the wheel. Agreed a thousand percent. And please, for the love of God, please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t email us. Please, please. I don’t care. I I’m telling you, I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know this sounds rude. I realize that this sounds rude. I am genuinely so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thankful when we get feedback because it means that you’re listening. It means that you care enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to correct us or to give us new information, except the Tesla people who are all the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t care. Don’t email me. Thank you, I love you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you including Marco in that? He’s one of those Tesla people. Not that he drives anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anymore. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I have to acknowledge, I think of all the customer, I don’t know, communities or groups
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m in by the things I buy or like, I think being a Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customer is the worst one of those things. Because the rest of the community is so bad. How about fish?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know lots of people who own Teslas who are not part of the fan base.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re like me, they own it and they like their car, but they don’t participate in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco community or fan base aspects of it. I mean, frankly, that’s pretty much how I am with fish too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I don’t go to the shows. I’m not super into like any of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco communities around it. I don’t know anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John about them. You don’t smoke the pot. I do, yeah, I don’t do any of the drugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just listen to the music and that’s it. And I love the music and that’s where my interaction ends. And with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla, like, I love driving the car. It’s a great car. That’s where my interaction ends. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, I do not want to talk about Tesla on Twitter with people. I don’t want to follow what Elon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Musk is doing in his side projects. Like I don’t want to do any of the experimental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features. I’ve never used summon even, because like here’s another thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s another way I could destroy my car and it achieves a benefit I don’t need. So no thanks, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t drive that, thanks. Like I just, I don’t care. I just don’t care. It’s a great car. I love driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. That’s the extent of the involvement that I want with this brand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s, the relationship I have with the brand of scissors that I buy. When I need scissors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what I do? I buy some scissors. And I don’t know a damn thing about the brand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just know I like these scissors, and I buy them. And that’s it. That’s how I am about my car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like this car. It’s a great car. Don’t care at all about the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t wanna argue about it. don’t want to talk about all their weird side projects they’re doing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their beta features that almost kind of sort of fully work. Like, nope, don’t care about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just like the car. It’s a great car. I like driving it.