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

414: Promoted Onto the Roof

How much could we possibly say about the rumored 2021 Mac changes?

Episode Description:

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MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. Attic politics
  2. Curved screens
  3. AirPods Max detachable headband 🖼️
  4. Brighter whites 🖼️
  5. Sponsor: Linode
  6. Marco’s Ethernet update 🖼️
  7. Casey’s bug update
  8. Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
  9. 2021 MacBook Pro rumors 🖼️
  10. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  11. 2021 Mac desktop rumors
  12. Ending theme
  13. Accidental Analog(ue)

Attic politics

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ben Packard writes, a question for John. We’ve learned over the years that old Apple products go in the attic and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheese graters belong in the basement. What is your rationale for the items that are promoted to the rarefied air of the attic while

⏹️ ▶️ Casey others must dwell in the damp underworld? Is it a matter of weight? Is it because the Apple products must be closer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to God? So well done. Well done, Ben Packard. And this is a great way

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to open the show and kind of make us all smile. So John, what’s the pecking order here?

⏹️ ▶️ John First of all, I take some offense at the idea that my basement is damp. I do

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not have a

⏹️ ▶️ John damp basement. I control the humidity level of my home. My basement is not damp and

⏹️ ▶️ John has never been damp. In fact, even when my water heater has failed twice,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the dampness

⏹️ ▶️ John has not spread to become pervasive in the basement. I have, you know, maybe it also helps that in New

⏹️ ▶️ John England, the winters are very dry, but I do not have a damp basement.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco In

⏹️ ▶️ John fact, my Synology’s in the basement, still going strong after all these years, no dampness.

⏹️ ▶️ John As for the answer to the question, I mean, the easy one is the attic has way more room in the basement

⏹️ ▶️ John because the attic is much harder to get to and not frequent. I mean, you know, nobody goes there that frequently, so it’s more

⏹️ ▶️ John of a storage space, whereas the basement, there’s actually a lot of kitchen stuff down there. I’ve got like,

⏹️ ▶️ John like the, you know, our big lobster pot is down there and some serving trays and like the thing that’s holds

⏹️ ▶️ John a cake when you travel back when we used to travel. Um, there’s lots of kitchen stuff down there. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John the cheese grater is naturally just went with the kitchen stuff. We have like a bunch of those big shelves against one of the walls.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s why the cheese graters are down there. with the kitchen stuff.

Curved screens

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So starting with some follow-up, Nathaniel Cohen writes, with regard to off-axis viewing of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very large LCD, doesn’t it make you want a curved display? I’m a long-time curved display

⏹️ ▶️ Casey person, and I have been very sad that they have more or less disappeared from the market. Here’s hoping that the XDR2 will be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey curved. I mean, as we’ve said last episode, I have not really properly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey given curved displays a chance, but I just don’t like the look of them, which is a very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey admittedly ignorant thing to say. And perhaps if I tried it, I would like it a lot. And I don’t know Nathaniel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes a good point John. What’s your what’s your argument with regard to this?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think he makes a good point because covered it is the objection Maybe we haven’t articulated this on the show

⏹️ ▶️ John in the past It’s not just I mean some people may have an aesthetic objection to curve displays if they look weird

⏹️ ▶️ John or something But my objection is more practical, right? So first of all, let’s get to the

⏹️ ▶️ John point He was trying to make like off axis viewing means you’re not viewing if there was a line coming out of

⏹️ ▶️ John your eye and intersecting With the screen that’s not perpendicular anymore. It’s at an angle, right? So the wider you make the screen,

⏹️ ▶️ John and if your head is in one place, the more the edges are at an angle. But if you curve it, and if you sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John match that curve to the radius formed by like the tip of your nose, a line going from the tip of your nose to

⏹️ ▶️ John the display, every part of the screen could be more or less equal distance from your eyeball, or

⏹️ ▶️ John at least much closer to being equal distance from your eyeball. Right? And therefore the viewing angle will be

⏹️ ▶️ John more perpendicular at all points in the screen. Problem solved, right? Problem is, at least as far as I’m concerned,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to have my head locked into a single position. And from other positions, the viewing angle is considerably

⏹️ ▶️ John worse on a curved display. If my head is two feet to the left, the left edge of the screen has like the worst

⏹️ ▶️ John imaginable viewing angle because it’s curved in the wrong direction, right? And maybe I’m weird that I move around

⏹️ ▶️ John in front of my monitor, but I want my monitor to be a big flat wall that I can move around and not ever

⏹️ ▶️ John get that worst case scenario of a terrible viewing angle. I don’t wanna have to have my head,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, exactly in the middle to get the good viewing angles and have them be worse at the other positions. Now, if you never

⏹️ ▶️ John move your head and you’re in kind of like locked in like a cockpit type scenario, I can imagine a curve display being

⏹️ ▶️ John useful. But for me, that makes me think of something like a flight simulator or like a driving simulator

⏹️ ▶️ John or someplace where you’re literally locked in a position and you’re trying to get like a wraparound screen or like a Disney ride.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where curve displays make sense to me. But for desktop computing, the way I do it, it’s a no-go,

⏹️ ▶️ John not just because they look weird, but also because I feel like it would be worse in practical ways.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, any thoughts?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never tried a curved display. I don’t think I would like it for most of the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John has said. Like, if display technology was such

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it was impossible to make something with really wide viewing angles look consistent, then fine,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I would tolerate that just as like the reality of the situation. But I would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much rather just have something that has a wide viewing angle and is flat and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks good therefore in a wider range of positions. I think I would also, you know, like John,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I would be concerned that if I shift around very slightly in my position, would half the screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fade out, you know? Like it would be, I don’t think it would be solving the problem in a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful way. It seems like it’s kind of a hack to get around limitations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of viewing angles that are possible to, or inexpensive to make.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s why they’re curved though. Like that’s Nathaniel writing in to say, doesn’t that make you want

⏹️ ▶️ John one? But I think the reason they’re curved is just because it’s a cool thing that you can do, right? Because I don’t think most of them actually

⏹️ ▶️ John do have a curve that makes them equidistant from your eye. I think the curve is not designed to be

⏹️ ▶️ John like that. And if it was, it would dictate a distance from the screen that is not what most people want.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it just distorts the image too. Like the images on the screen are not meant to be curved

⏹️ ▶️ John around you like that. When you have a big curve display, like in a big simulator or Disney ride, the images

⏹️ ▶️ John displayed on those curved screens, if you put them on a flat screen, would look really weird because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John accounting for the curve. But nothing that we play, with the exception maybe of some games,

⏹️ ▶️ John accounts for that. It’s expecting to be on a flat screen. So it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John bad distortion

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all around. Yeah, to me, the elegance of a flat display

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is better. Like I’d rather have a flat display that is uniformly visible across

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire thing that has no noticeable variations between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle and the edge or whatever. It just looks the same across the whole thing and is flat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be elegant and that would be a useful, impressive technical

⏹️ ▶️ Marco achievement. And it’s easier said than done, but that is more valuable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me than a curb would be.

AirPods Max detachable headband

Chapter AirPods Max detachable headband image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ve learned a little bit from the iFixit teardown of the AirPods Max, and apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can detach the entire headband from AirPods Max with just a SIM card removal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tool or a paper clip. You don’t have to open anything up. You just put the little,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, thing in the right spot, and I guess it pops right out. And we’ll put a link to the iFixit teardown in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is pretty cool. I don’t know why we would need this. Maybe one of you can fill us in, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool that that’s how they operate.

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope Quinn never sees this. He did that video where he had where he kind of like broke his

⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods Max trying to disassemble them because he didn’t realize the four little screws are just these little latches, right? You remember

⏹️ ▶️ John that whole thing and then he then there was like the glue that he had to get off I guess he wanted to get inside them. It’s not quite

⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing. It’s just taking the band out. But anyway When we talked about this a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ John shows ago, we were talking about the fat lightning connector That is you know at the end of the

⏹️ ▶️ John headphone band and this feels like part of that same thing. Like, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, last show I said, or whatever it was, that that thing just doesn’t come out on its own, but it sure looks like

⏹️ ▶️ John a pluggable thing. Well, it turns out it does come out. And it’s just a matter of releasing the mechanism

⏹️ ▶️ John that holds it in. So this is that whole weird spring-loaded mechanism with these strange kind of like brushes that make

⏹️ ▶️ John contact with the, I don’t know if they’re brushes, two little things to make contact with the little lightning connector.

⏹️ ▶️ John You should look at the iFixit Teardown and see how it maintains the electrical contacts while

⏹️ ▶️ John allowing the different degrees of freedom and how this little sim tool or paper

⏹️ ▶️ John clip just sort of releases the spring mechanism that allows the entire thing to come right out. Makes sense from

⏹️ ▶️ John a repairability perspective and it lends credence to the idea that in theory,

⏹️ ▶️ John these very expensive headphones could last you a very long time because they’re made of sturdy materials and seem

⏹️ ▶️ John somewhat repairable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you gonna be trying this on TIFFs, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ John Nope. We forgot there was also the rumor that like one of the many many rumors about Apples over

⏹️ ▶️ John your headphones was that they were going to do this mix and match thing with different kinds of bands and stuff Right,

⏹️ ▶️ John and so this could have tied into that if that had turned out to be One of the product features that you could get

⏹️ ▶️ John it with different bands and swap bands out and different bands of different styles Whatever the turned out not to be the case,

⏹️ ▶️ John but all the engineering that went into This somewhat easy to release band

⏹️ ▶️ John lend some credence to that rumor or it could have been the other way around and they just made it easily repairable and people saw

⏹️ ▶️ John the repairability and thought it was it meant that Apple was going to make some match bands. That’s that’s the whole thing with rumors. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of you know, what is it the multiple people feeling around on the elephant? I don’t know. There’s there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John some light, you know, but that one

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I got

⏹️ ▶️ John it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I miss that. Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t know. So I it’s like a parable or whatever of like one person feels the trunk and things is a snake and one

⏹️ ▶️ John person feels the tail and I don’t know. You know, and that none of them has the whole picture of the elephant.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John rumors more of them later.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I I think this is, I don’t think this is anything about user swappability.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s everything about serviceability. Because headphones, like the places that headphones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually break, the way headphones usually die and have to be replaced. Back in the wired days,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was the point at which the wires entered the headphone or the part of the wire that’s right next to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the plug. Because those are the points that the cord would get the most stress and eventually something inside of it would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rip and that’d be it. once you went wireless, that entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco category of problems mostly went away. Wireless headphones now, most often,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these big over-ear kinds, most often die from headband cracks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because they all have these big plastic headbands, and the headband usually cracks down the middle because it’s plastic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that every time you take it on and off, you’re stretching it out a little bit, and then unstretching it, and stretching it out a little bit. Eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that stress usually cracks the headband. This is wonderful because this is an easy way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to service the headband. Another common way headphones die is one driver,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one of the ear cups, might start going bad somehow. Like if maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the speaker surround starts getting bad or something gets in there or moisture rots it out or the electronics

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow go bad. And what this shows is that while I don’t think users

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are gonna be able to do any of these things and get these parts very easily from Apple, it means that Apple can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very quickly and easily repair these things if they want to. And so that creates the possibility, again, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know if they will actually pass along the savings to customers here or the availability, but it creates the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibility of easy repairs. And as John said, that’s very good for extending the lifespan of headphones. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also being able to replace the ear pads really easily that’s something users can do really easily. That is even more, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ear pads wear out first before the headband even cracks. So that’s also very good. So anyway, this all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes towards these being surprisingly well-designed, like mechanically,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones. Except that stupid case. But we actually just got in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Waterfield Designs case for TIFFs, and it is massive, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well-made, and very luxurious, and it is definitely the kind of case that Apple should have shipped

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with them.

Brighter whites

Chapter Brighter whites image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell me about brighter whites.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, this is another segment of the show that Casey can’t participate in. Because he doesn’t do

⏹️ ▶️ John laundry? Because he because he insisted on spending a sensible amount of money on his monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, hold on. I take offense at that. Casey owns a like $6,000 configuration

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an iMac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was more than that, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, probably. Probably a seven or eight thousand. Okay. what’s the total cost of what I’m using right now?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My MacBook Air was like $1,600. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an interesting way of looking at it, actually, and very depressing, I should add.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the MacBook Air was like 1,600-ish, whatever configuration. It’s like the most, except one terabyte instead of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t talking about system costs. It’s a sensible amount of money on a display. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the combined setup I have is about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same cost as the iMac Pro that I replaced it, or that I replaced it with.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like $1,000 more, 2000. Well, again, if you’re getting the same. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more, and the result is a much bigger monitor and in many ways a better computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it doesn’t have all the specs, like it doesn’t have all the RAM and disk space the iMac Pro had, and admittedly that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the cost, but when you think about the total sum cost here, yeah, the monitor is stupidly expensive,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the computer is unusually cheap for this, for like a high-end setup.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaker quality is much worse than Casey’s beloved internal iMac

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Pro speakers. That’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see, I would have to get a whole new stereo, man. That would cost money. Gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, tell me about Brighter Whites. All right, so this, I don’t know how people are going to, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone can try it on their computer. This is a link that shows a web page that does

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of trickery that works mostly with Safari, but also kind of works with Chrome. To kick

⏹️ ▶️ John Safari or whatever browser you’re using into HDR video mode, it does it by playing

⏹️ ▶️ John tiny little HDR videos in the corners of the screen. I bet they could have even made those smaller. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John once it does that, apparently if you use the backdrop filter property

⏹️ ▶️ John in CSS and set the brightness level greater than 100%, you can get HDR style

⏹️ ▶️ John brightness levels. So this is a white web page, in the center of which is the word white,

⏹️ ▶️ John W-H-I-T-E. But the word white is like 10 times whiter

⏹️ ▶️ John than the white web page. To be clear, the white background on this web page is, you know, CSFFFFFFF,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s all just 100% white. But the word white is whiter than white.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did they use OxiClean to achieve this effect?

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t know, but it is very disconcerting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because like what Apple’s been doing with a lot of recent hardware is not actually exposing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the user the full range of brightness possible of the display. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they kind of have some brightness in reserve, basically. And they’re using it, seemingly so far, only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to display HDR video or photo content. And so, what happens is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a pretty modern Apple display, whether it’s in a laptop or a phone, whatever, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco set the brightness to max. And if you go to this page, the white or white

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it might actually be even brighter than that because they have that extra brightness in reserve.

⏹️ ▶️ John And on the XDR, it is insanely brighter. So much so that you think it’s dimming

⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of your screen, but it’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I thought that too. Like when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I saw it earlier. Hold on, hold on,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold on. So I’m supposed to make my screen not 100% bright.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, you can make it any brightness you want. If you have a monitor that’s capable of HDR

⏹️ ▶️ John at all, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, because here’s the thing, when I have it on the, not the last tick mark,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the next last tick mark, but anyone below that, I see exactly what you’re describing. It looks like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this white is just blindingly white, which I’m sure it’s considerably less, fewer nits

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than what you guys are looking at, but it does look like the background of that page is like a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gray-ish and the word white or the outline of the word white is crazy bright.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I do think that I am capable of seeing this, you big jerks. It’s just that it’s probably not nearly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as bright as what you’re looking at.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, no, I’m saying like Apple, like in many of their monitor displays, this will work even displays

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they have not marketed as HDR capable, like, but they’ve been kind of holding back on the brightness that’s controllable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the whole UI for the user in order to have this headroom that they can use for this. Also,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems to bypass true tone. So if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like a room in the evening, like we are right now, it’s gonna be showing like a little bit warmer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco color temperature for the UI, but then you see this thing and it seems to bypass that and show pure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco white, not tinted to a warm tone.

⏹️ ▶️ John as you would expect, because like basically this is tricking it into going into video mode. And if you’re playing full

⏹️ ▶️ John screen video, you wouldn’t want it to apply whatever that thing is, the true tone stuff, I imagine. You’d

⏹️ ▶️ John just want it to show the video as it’s meant to be displayed. A fun thing is if you pull out digital color meter, I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ John I have just, I’m the only person with the old Xcode tools installed, but do you have digital color meter installed?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, looks like I do. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s in applications, utilities.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, anyway, pull out digital color meter and use it on this thing. And the background is 255, 255, 255. And guess what?

⏹️ ▶️ John So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey are the letters.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s, that ain’t right,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey man. That ain’t right at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all.

⏹️ ▶️ John And when you mouse over it with digital color meter, it looks exactly the same. Like the brightness doesn’t change at all in the digital

⏹️ ▶️ John color meter, because it has no idea that this is going on. This is Apple’s, they call it EDR. It basically

⏹️ ▶️ John their technology for being able to run the screen in, you know, to run

⏹️ ▶️ John it in normal mode, where we don’t blow your eyeballs out, but also be able to display HDR

⏹️ ▶️ John content on the same screen, which takes a little bit of trickery, because it has to understand

⏹️ ▶️ John the meaning of the source values for the video or whatever. In this case, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John tricking the CSS subsystem into thinking that it should be in HDR mode because of these tiny

⏹️ ▶️ John HDR videos in the corner.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Linode, my favorite place to run

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Marco’s Ethernet update

Chapter Marco's Ethernet update image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, Mark Jackweath writes, I recently made a Cat6 patch cable for splicing into existing Cat6

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wiring and adding a Ubiquiti switch in my attic. The patch cable I needed was about 6 feet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long. I know there are different wiring standards when making ethernet cables, but I figured I was making my own cable, so as long

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the ends matched, it should be fine, right? I made the cable, and it worked fine, but only at 100 megabits

⏹️ ▶️ Casey per second. I rewired it according to the T-568B standard,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and bam, now I was getting a thousand megabits through the switch. More information

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, and we will link that link in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this is relevant to Marco’s problems getting gigabit speed on his ethernet thing. We’re like, oh, is something wrong with

⏹️ ▶️ John the wire somewhere? Maybe one of the wires in the wall. What could possibly be the problem? This was

⏹️ ▶️ John a big download of information about the various wiring standards

⏹️ ▶️ John you can use with ethernet and the RJ45 connector and all that good stuff. And there’s some stuff in here

⏹️ ▶️ John that if I once knew I had since forgotten that I thought was interesting. So anyone who’s ever used ethernet, oh God, what is the

⏹️ ▶️ John audience for this, what I’m about to say? Anyone who has used ethernet, but also knows what

⏹️ ▶️ John a plain old telephone system phone line looks like, will know that they kind of look like

⏹️ ▶️ John big and small versions of each other. So ethernet, I hope most of our audience knows what it looks like. It’s a connector

⏹️ ▶️ John with these little pins in it and the little thing that you push down with your finger to let it go in and

⏹️ ▶️ John out. So the Ethernet connector, right? For people who don’t know, a phone connector, not

⏹️ ▶️ John a cell phone, but like a wired landline phone connector looks just like an Ethernet connector, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John smaller. Isn’t it a itty bitty Ethernet connector? And time was when everybody knew what a phone

⏹️ ▶️ John line looked like and no one knew what Ethernet looks like. And now, at least in the audience of this podcast, it may be the reverse.

⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s a reason they look so similar. So the little phone connector is RJ11 and the big ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ John one is called RJ45. And when RJ45 was made, it was made by

⏹️ ▶️ John telecom telephone companies, and it was made to have a connector that is essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John backward compatible with RJ11. So RJ11 has, I think, like four conductors

⏹️ ▶️ John in it. It’s like two conductors per phone line. So if you had one phone line in your house, it would just be two wires.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you had two phone lines in your house because you’re fancy, you had four wires, right? But you can stick

⏹️ ▶️ John an RJ11 into an RJ45 jack and it will just make contact with like

⏹️ ▶️ John the middle four or the middle two connectors, right? Because RJ45

⏹️ ▶️ John was made to be like, oh, well, what if you have a fancy phone system for like an office and you need a whole bunch of phone lines

⏹️ ▶️ John because this was before packet switching or digital networks or whatever. You wanted to have multiple phone lines, like in

⏹️ ▶️ John a business, you had multiple pairs of wires because that was the only way to do it because the phone system was analog

⏹️ ▶️ John and yada yada, right? Fast forward to today and you have RJ45 used for ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ John and it made sense to use it for that because it’s a wiring standard that existed for a long time and it was cheap and yada yada.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now, how does this relate to Marco and Mark’s problem

⏹️ ▶️ John getting a gigabit speeds over the wires? As Mark points out,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you have an ethernet cable, the way the wiring is supposed to work is like pin one on one end of the cable

⏹️ ▶️ John is connected to pin one on the other end. If you’re not doing a crossover cable, you’re just doing a patch cable or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John As long as the wires go straight through, like there’s this whole thing about, oh, this is the orange wire and this is the white and orange

⏹️ ▶️ John wire, and this is the green wire, and this is the white and green wire, but it doesn’t matter. Make all the wires

⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same color. As long as pin one connects to pin one, pin two connects to pin two, pin three connects to pin three,

⏹️ ▶️ John it should work fine, right? There’s nothing, there’s no like, oh, I wired it this way, and this one has pin one connected to pin

⏹️ ▶️ John seven. No, they’re just straight through, like not a crossover cable, which is not needed because of the auto-MDI

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that Marco mentioned last show. We should find a link for that because it’s also interesting, but I’m not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John get into it here. So why should it make any difference?

⏹️ ▶️ John What are these wiring standards? What is T568B versus A? Either the wires are connected

⏹️ ▶️ John or they’re not. And if they’re not connected, as some people surmise, maybe one wire is not connected, you only get a hundred megabits or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, but if they’re connected, it should work. Well, there is a difference, and it’s not what pins they’re connected to.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the fact that both of these kinds of wiring are what’s called twisted pair wiring, which is exactly like what it sounds. Pairs

⏹️ ▶️ John of wires are twisted around each other, like a pretzel or like, I don’t know, What’s a good analogy for

⏹️ ▶️ John how wires are

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco twisted? DNA. Yeah, like DNA.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re twisted around each other, and that’s to combat crosstalk and interference.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can learn about electromagnetism. So why would it be better to twist the wires around rather than run them straight? But it is. And

⏹️ ▶️ John as this article gets into, there’s all sorts of science around how many twists should they have per unit length

⏹️ ▶️ John and yada yada. The two wiring standards are about which pairs

⏹️ ▶️ John of wires are in which pins, right? And the pairs are the ones that are

⏹️ ▶️ John twisted. So are one and two twisted together, then three and four twisted together, and five and six?

⏹️ ▶️ John Or is it one and three twisted together and two and four twisted together? Like you can do different ways

⏹️ ▶️ John of twisting them together. And the T568B standard is the

⏹️ ▶️ John one where they’re twisted together to provide better reliability over long distances. The A

⏹️ ▶️ John standard was made to exactly match RJ11. So RJ11

⏹️ ▶️ John has just the two pairs twisted in the way they’re supposed to be. And to make it completely backward compatible, if you

⏹️ ▶️ John had these ethernet cables or anything within the RJ45 connector and you used the A standard, it twisted the exact

⏹️ ▶️ John same pairs together, right? So we’ll try to put some images in the show notes or some links in the show notes so you

⏹️ ▶️ John can read all about this. But like the reason the A standard existed to be backward compatible with telephone systems,

⏹️ ▶️ John which has no relevance to Marco’s problem domain at all. And incidentally, when people do

⏹️ ▶️ John home installations, they tend to still use the A standard, because they’re like, oh, well, what if you want to run phone lines over

⏹️ ▶️ John these ethernet cables? All right, so this is some tidbits from, I think these are from the article, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John To preserve dual use of data or telephone, the majority of mass market home builders choose to use the T568A standard,

⏹️ ▶️ John just because they’re still in the mindset of like, oh, I’m gonna run wire throughout this home, and I’m going to use quote

⏹️ ▶️ John unquote ethernet cable, which is just RJ45, which is just carrying multiple analog phone lines.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just use that. So if you want to run networking over it, you can, But if you want to run analog

⏹️ ▶️ John landline phone lines over it, you can. Sounds hilarious in the modern world, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the world of building takes a longer time to evolve. And the final bit here is, only

⏹️ ▶️ John custom built homes where smart home automation is planned from the beginning typically use

⏹️ ▶️ John 568B to better maximize options for faster speeds and better signal isolation.

⏹️ ▶️ John So my questions coming out of this is, well, part two,

⏹️ ▶️ John has Marco solved his wiring problem? But part one, does Marco know if his home was wired using T568B or T568A?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The answer is no and no. No, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which standard I have yet. And not only did I not solve it, but I actually made it worse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the intervening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, delightful. Tell me more.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I set up everything in this house, I got a switch that was too small. I got a ubiquity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch that didn’t have enough ports on it. And so I had to have a second mini switch, like sitting on top

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it and then running half the things through the mini switch and then half the things through the big switch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the big switch seemed to be getting somewhat flaky and I haven’t quite figured

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out what’s going on in that area yet but I thought you know what let me just get one big switch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can be the only switch so it has enough ports to serve everything, has enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco power of ethernet ports and capacity to power all the wifi broadcast things everywhere and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe that’ll be better. Well, when I installed the new switch, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco port to my computer would only run at 100 megabits again and then I noticed it would only run at 100

⏹️ ▶️ Marco megabits no matter what adapter I used. Even my Thunderbolt adapter would kick back to 100

⏹️ ▶️ Marco megabits now for the first time. So I actually made it worse. At one point I like unplugged the wire and plugged into a different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch port and after that it never worked again. So I So I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cable at the switch end, that connector, I think is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaky. It wouldn’t be the first time this happened in this house. A couple of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco access point wires have also been that way. I requested

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cat 7, and so they ran Cat 7. I thought, might as well run the highest end cable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can because it’ll go out of date at some point and this will buy me more time if I get the highest end cable now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know anything about Cat7. Apparently, ending Cat7 requires these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant, like, boot connector, I don’t know what the connectors are. They’re these tremendous connectors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they do end in an RJ45 plug, but they have this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive, like, metal shield around the whole thing, and it sticks out really far, it’s really wide, and it’s this giant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rubber boot on the end, and the cables themselves are extremely, like, thick, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t bend very easily, and so, And the installer was telling me like there’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, he has a lot of problems with these cables basically. Like just, you know, you bend it the wrong way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the connector breaks or whatever. So the other ones were solved by him replacing the connectors and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably how this one’s gonna be solved too. But you know, it’s hard to get people out here so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be a little while before it is solved. Now tomorrow, my Mac mini arrives.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know, that’s gonna change things up a little bit and I’ll see how that works. but I think I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco killed my office main jack by changing the switch. I think that, I think the connector on the switch end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was flaky. This was its last hurrah. I like just unplugging it from the old switch and plugging

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it back in the new switch was too much for it. So anyway, I appreciate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone’s theories on like maybe the wire was wired wrong and maybe it was. All this is to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say there are other gremlins at work here. And so I’m trying to get those fixed and it’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while. but in the meantime, Wi-Fi is a tenth the speed, but it works.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I like Mark’s theory because it would explain how you could get that thing that you just described where sometimes it works

⏹️ ▶️ John and sometimes it doesn’t because in this scenario, again, with the T568B versus A,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like wires are not connected. It’s not like they’re connected to the wrong pins. Everything is there and everything is connected

⏹️ ▶️ John to the correct pins. It’s just that the B standard has better resistance to interference and better sort of signal

⏹️ ▶️ John propagation. And that’s the type of thing where small differences in the input and output, perhaps

⏹️ ▶️ John dictated by the adapter you’re using, could say, well, you can kind of barely sort of work in this scenario, because your

⏹️ ▶️ John problem is not, oh, something is bent or not connected or shorted out or whatever. Your problem is just,

⏹️ ▶️ John hey, for this long run of wire, you’re on the hairy edge of like interference, messing with

⏹️ ▶️ John it and causing it to drop down to a lower standard. But in light of all your new stuff where you’re like, well, now it’s on your bank,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s everywhere, now I can’t connect to anything. That sounds like a mechanical problem. Again, probably not because

⏹️ ▶️ John the wires are connected to the wrong place, but because maybe a bunch of wires are slowly becoming not connected in those

⏹️ ▶️ John weird giant Cat7 connectors that you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey described.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s sounding more and more like a mechanical problem. I really doubt any of the wires

⏹️ ▶️ John are connected to the wrong place. It’s not the issue of crossover versus patch because that

⏹️ ▶️ John has not been an issue on modern ethernet equipment in forever. It just sounds like it’s mechanical. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m actually interested to find out what the heck this problem is. And maybe if you can get a picture of one of those Cat7

⏹️ ▶️ John things, I’ve never seen what you’re talking about and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah, I’m in the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ John or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Yeah, I’ll try. Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, it’s open up your walls.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. What’s interesting? Do you do you remember? What the very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first like auto switching thing was that most people had?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Xbox

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, the first Xbox. I’m surprised you pulled that out. I’m a gamer Yeah the the very the Xbox

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one not the Xbox one but the Xbox one had Ethernet ports on it and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they and it actually supported like multi console in in the same house kind of multiplayer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really well like if you happen to have two Xboxes and two TVs which was not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that common of a setup back then but you could plug any Ethernet cable crossover

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not from the Ethernet port in one Xbox to the Ethernet port in the other one with no switch or no hub

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything and whether it was crossover or not it would just work it was really cool I I saw it done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly one time ever because almost no one had the original Xbox, let alone two of them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was really

⏹️ ▶️ John cool. I remember manually making myself a quote unquote crossover cable using

⏹️ ▶️ John RJ11 on my Mac because Max used to use AppleTalk. I don’t know if you guys ever

⏹️ ▶️ John used AppleTalk, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco are

⏹️ ▶️ John you familiar with the serial port that used to be on the back of Max? It looked like ADB, but a different number of pins in it,

⏹️ ▶️ John little round.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John vaguely. Looked kind of like an S-video connector. Anyway, that was AppleTalk and AppleTalk cables were expensive

⏹️ ▶️ John and AppleTalk networking stuff was expensive, but then clever third parties came out with, God, I wish I

⏹️ ▶️ John could remember the name of this product. Chat room, tell me the name of this product that I can’t remember. But it was a box that you would

⏹️ ▶️ John connect a short AppleTalk cable from your computer to this box, phone net, thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the back of the box had an RJ11 connector. So basically what you’re doing was converting AppleTalk

⏹️ ▶️ John to work over the RJ11 wire physically And you can get phone wire super cheap

⏹️ ▶️ John from anywhere, right? So if you wanted to say, hook up two computers that are on opposite sides of the house,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t get an AppleTalk network to span that unless you’re going to spend gobs of money and are like an enterprise. But you can get

⏹️ ▶️ John phone net adapters and then get a spool of RJ11 and bring it over there. And I remember having to make

⏹️ ▶️ John an RJ11 crossover cable by taking the conductors and swapping them and re-splicing them back together to get

⏹️ ▶️ John some game to work between two Macs that were sitting next to each other on the same desk at my house.

⏹️ ▶️ John Good times.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, anything else on the networking extravaganza?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank God, no. Not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey now, anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Wait till next week when I have the Mac mini, which, hey, it’s coming early. It actually was delivered today to the boat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s always kind of fun. My packages arrive a day late because of the whole boat situation. And so the day

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I’m going to get something, Apple thinks I’ve already gotten it and starts sending those emails like, welcome to your new Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Take a tour. That hurts.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bye.

Casey’s bug update

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a few quick items with regard to feedback and my bug in particular.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last episode, I wasn’t sure if the Feedback app was pre-installed on all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices and all OSs or just beta OSs. As it turns out, it is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey available on even non-beta OSs. If you open the URL,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey applefeedback:// in Safari, it will actually open up Feedback Assistant, which I guess

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is like hidden by default. And once you’re in in there, you can open a particular bug

⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash feedback. You can click on the ellipsis. You can, you can, or tap, I should say, you can tap on, add more information,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tap on add attachment, and then tap device diagnostics, and it will fire off assist diagnose and attach

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, allegedly. Speaking of my particular problem, I actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t had it reoccur in the last week, which is both delightful and frustrating. Frustrating because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have installed the messaging profile that gives Apple more verbose

⏹️ ▶️ Casey logging, and I think with fewer redactions. And so I’ve had this installed on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey both my phone and Aaron’s. And of course, the issue has not recurred because I’m trying to capture it, and I want it to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey recur. Additionally, on one of the two bugs, which as always, the link will be in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, the feedback numbers will be in the show notes, I got the following message from Apple Feedback on January 14

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 5.55 PM. Hello, we have not closed this issue and are actively still investigating behavior reported.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, we were unable to diagnose the issue based on what was in your previously provided sysdiagnose. We are attempting to isolate this behavior in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices internally, but it would be very helpful to get a freshly sysdiagnosed from your device with the logging profile installed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If possible, please attempt in reinstalling logging profile here, blah, blah, blah. Verified you ever started the device

⏹️ ▶️ Casey after installing the profile and provide a fresh sysdiagnose. Thank you for your patience while we work on this. Please provide colon iOS sysdiagnose.”

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, a little hair frustrating, but at least they freaking said

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something, which is a tremendous, horrendous

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John improvement.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a magical example of how communication helps because essentially they just ask you for a cyst diagnose

⏹️ ▶️ John again, which should have just driven you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mad

⏹️ ▶️ John with anger. But by including some sentences written by a human, explaining

⏹️ ▶️ John the situation and some niceties, you’re like, okay, I’ll do another cyst diagnose, which is how communication works. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John being handled. Good job, Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m being handled. It’s so true. And then additionally, I forget, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have in front of me what the status was that made me blow a gasket last week, but it was something like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey investigation complete or something like that, which is slightly on me that I had assumed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that meant the bug was closed. It did not. It meant the investigation was complete,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which yes, I forget exactly what the words were, but if it said investigation complete, I should have had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the presence of mind to realize what that meant. But it still is a terrible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey piss poor way of saying we can’t do anything more with this right now. Like seeing the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey word complete in there is what drew me up a wall. And again,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a little bit on me, but I’ve heard some reports from the inside that that is probably going to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be wordsmithed in the future to be a little more clear as to what that really means and to indicate that the bug

⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t closed, it’s just in some sort of a holding pattern. Naturally, I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking to anyone I know inside Apple Engineering and yelling at them about this. It’s amazing that any of them

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever talk to me anymore because all I do is whine about these bugs, But I’ve heard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback that this is getting looked at. It’s just like the official feedback has said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they just haven’t been able to reproduce it, which seems bananas to me, but here we are. Additionally,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not only me, because Chris Hayes, who apparently is an anchor on what, MSNBC,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that right? Do I have that right? I think that’s right. He’s a gentleman with 2.3

⏹️ ▶️ Casey million Twitter followers. He had this to say just the other day,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quote, so do iPhones just no longer text groups of people without iPhones? Basically never works.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you can bet your bottom that I put that in both of these feedbacks to let them know, no, it is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not just me. And let me recap for everyone, because I get asked this all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has been reported to me anecdotally from different continents and different carriers. No, I am not switching

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to WhatsApp or Signal or anything else, despite whatever privacy implications there may or may not be, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have clout to switch my entire social circle over to a different app because the king

⏹️ ▶️ Casey says so. And three, please stop trying to explain to me what the problem is and assuming that Apple does nothing wrong because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey clearly this is a bug with Apple stuff. So frustrating.

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2021 MacBook Pro rumors

Chapter 2021 MacBook Pro rumors image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what was it Friday there was a major rumor dump. I mean, she quote decided

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to basically spell out most of 2021 for us. I don’t how do we want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to handle this? Do we want to just go through what we have in our show notes? Is there anything that you guys want to touch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on particularly? I feel like if I let you talk about Mac Pro now, then that’ll be the entire show. So can we avoid

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that at least for a few minutes, please?

⏹️ ▶️ John Just go the order in the notes. It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey machine

⏹️ ▶️ John at a time product line at a time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we start off with a new MacBook Pro that will be 14 or 16 inches.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The touch bar will be gone in favor of physical function keys. Now before everyone celebrates,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am very skeptical about this and I get more skeptical as I keep reading as we will do in a minute.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am kind of ambivalent about the touch bar. I don’t actively like it, but I don’t really actively dislike

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it either and that’s okay if you two or anyone listening disagrees.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t complain if it went away, but I’m not seeking its immediate death.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But man, it seems wild to me that they would just can this thing that they touted

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the second coming. And of course, this is not the first time Apple’s done that sort of thing, but I don’t know. This

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is walking back pretty in a pretty big way, almost a big leap. God help me. It’s walking back,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey walking this back in a pretty big way. And I guess we’ve seen this for recent an example with the keyboards.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this is just the first in a long line of things where they’re basically command zing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last five to 10 years of Apple notebooks. And that’s, I’m okay, I’m here

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it, but man, it seems surprising. Like, do you guys buy this?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, you should keep reading, keep reading the other rumored features because I think we can, they’re all in that theme that you have just outlined.

⏹️ ▶️ John We might as well get to all of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey them before we talk about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. All right, fair point, fair point. So apparently MagSafe is coming back, quoting from Bloomberg,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MagSafe will allow those laptops to charge at a faster rate. The connector will be similar to the elongated pill-shaped design

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the older MagSafe port. Additionally, and Marco, I’m going to need you to try to keep your cool here.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The new MacBooks will have more built-in I.O. ports, which means, quote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unquote, most users will not need to purchase additional dongles, according to Ming-Chi Kuo. Kuo does not specify

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what the I.O. ports will be offered, what the I.O. ports are that will be offered, but nevertheless, supposedly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there will be more. The new chassis design is said to feature squared off sides in both the top and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bottom halves of the machine, joining the flat edge design trend started with the 2018 iPad Pro and adopted in the 2020 iPhone 12

⏹️ ▶️ Casey series. Quote, the new models cancel the curvy design of existing models, top and bottom

⏹️ ▶️ Casey parts, and adopt a flat edged form factor similar to the iPhone 12. It’s a lot,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ John All

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right, well, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna leave the chassis design for last because I think that is separate, but the first group

⏹️ ▶️ John of items you read of physical function keys, MagSafe, more I O ports.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of reminded of the Power Mac G5

⏹️ ▶️ John which I talked about on Jason Snell’s 20 Macs for 2020 podcast series.

⏹️ ▶️ John When the Power Mac G5 came out, all of the specs for it leaked ahead of the keynote.

⏹️ ▶️ John And among Apple nerd circles, they were very big into the leaked rumors

⏹️ ▶️ John back in those days. they were just literally totally made up rumors about everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like made up rumors that were just so prevalent in the community, then the keynote would come

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’d be like, oh, I guess that was all made up, right? So when the Power Mac G5 rumors came out and they showed

⏹️ ▶️ John the specs, everybody knew about them. And most people said, oh, it’s just another one of those made up

⏹️ ▶️ John things, because there’s no way Apple’s gonna produce a computer with these specs, it’s ridiculous. The price,

⏹️ ▶️ John the specs on it, it’s like a made up fantasy of some Apple nerd. Yeah, can you imagine if they had a

⏹️ ▶️ John dual two gigahertz processors and a 1.3 gigahertz front side bus? Ha ha ha, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John right. Anyway, I wonder what they’re gonna announce. And they announced that exact machine and nobody could

⏹️ ▶️ John believe it. They’re like, that was all true because it was beyond all our wildest dreams. Looking at these notebook

⏹️ ▶️ John rumors, I feel the exact same thing is happening again. All this stuff is like things that we

⏹️ ▶️ John on this podcast and certain group of Mac users more broadly have been asking

⏹️ ▶️ John for for years and years. And it’s like, hey, guess what? You’re getting everything. Touch bar is gone.

⏹️ ▶️ John MagSafe is coming back. You’re gonna have more ports. Yeah, yeah, right. Sure, like you said, Casey, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gonna just hit Command Z on the last

⏹️ ▶️ John six years of laptops. Sure, it’s things we all want,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it seems so fantastical. It seems like the exact thing you would make up if you

⏹️ ▶️ John just wanted to troll people and make a rumor that people wanna believe, but of course can’t really happen because

⏹️ ▶️ John why would Apple make products with features that are desired by people who listen to

⏹️ ▶️ John Tech Nerd podcasts or people who host them for that matter, right? So I don’t know what to think.

⏹️ ▶️ John This, we could have all made this up and said, in fact, we did. I remember having a show like six

⏹️ ▶️ John months ago where I was like, Apple, if you just made a laptop that had like, bring

⏹️ ▶️ John back Mad Safe, and had more ports and got rid of the touch bar, everybody would love it. And it would be so

⏹️ ▶️ John easy for you to do because those aren’t hard technical achievements. You’ve done it before, you can do it again. Everyone would love it, just

⏹️ ▶️ John do it. And you know, of course we know that didn’t happen, right? But now the rumor says, oh yeah, no, they’re doing all that stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John now. I don’t know what to think. I can’t, I honestly can’t bring myself to believe.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so if you look at the credibility of these sources, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco majority of this rumor came from Ming-Chi Kuo and then Mark Gurman also filled in a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other details. And Gurman was more about the Mac Pro that we’ll talk about in a little while. But Ming-Chi Kuo

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a pretty strong track record of knowing the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco details of things coming up, especially in regards to displays. He seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be well-sourced in the supply chain, especially the display supply chain. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I think is most likely to be true, if not if all of it isn’t true, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the 14 inch and 16 inch sizes are pretty likely to be true,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because those are display-related, and I think the touch bar going away,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s also a display. So I think those are the most likely parts of this to be true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even if that’s all it is, that, I’m telling you, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know we’ve complained a lot about the laptops in the last four years, and I’m sorry, but they deserved complaining about, because when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 2016 models came out, they were so user hostile

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in so many ways. You know, the keyboards were a complete disaster in so many ways

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for so many years. It’s funny, last week, the only butterfly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard we have in our house died. It was on Tiff’s laptop, and the space bar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally died in the way butterfly keyboards always do.

⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ I’m pressing the space bar ♪ ♪ I’m pressing the space bar ♪

⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ I am pressing the space bar ♪ ♪ I’m pressing the space bar ♪

⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ And nothing is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening ♪ And she was like, yeah, I tried fixing it with compressed air, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t work. I’m like, yep, I know, I could’ve told you that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But wait, did she do it at the exact correct angle?

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. The knowledge of the exact angle has been lost to time. Now kids these days don’t even know it’s supposed to be 75 degrees. ♪ I

⏹️ ▶️ John found your instructions ♪ ♪ They were

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not helpful ♪ ♪ I bought this can of air ♪ ♪ I feel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an idiot ♪ ♪ Cause I’m cussing the space bar ♪ Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in so many ways, that entire era of laptops, which we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t quite left yet, we’re still mostly in, this entire era

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of laptops, especially before they fixed the keyboards, was in so many ways just like gaslighting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the users, like, no, no, no, you want this laptop, trust me, this is what we’re gonna make now, and it’s better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you look at it and you’re like, I’m pretty sure that’s worse in a few pretty big ways. And Apple just kept saying, no, no, no, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is better. And year after year, they kept releasing the same thing with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same problems. And they kept saying, oh, it’s better now. It’s better. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the users kept saying, is it? I don’t know. It still has problems.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It still keeps having these problems. The keyboard still keeps breaking. And we still would love more ports.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we still kind of miss MagSafe. And MagSafe is so good, you can just borrow it to the phone and not the laptops again?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they kept, and then the touch bar. It’s like, oh, yeah, the touch bar is, this is apparently the future. But well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t actually work that well. and it introduces all these other downsides,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s kind of buggy, and then Apple literally never made it better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco since its introduction in 2016. So, okay, it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something is wrong with this product line. Like, why isn’t it getting better? They made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worse and then just kept it exactly the same until they finally fixed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keyboards last year. It seemed for a long time that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple was just so convinced they were right that the things they were wrong about,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just refused to fix. They, and I don’t know, and who knows, this could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have had something to do with the end of the Johnny Ive era, who knows, that’s history now. But,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I think we saw with the keyboards was somewhat disturbing on a number of levels,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but one of the disturbing angles of it was that it took them a pretty long time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fix a pretty big problem in the product. And then it took them, what, four years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fix the keyboards? And that entire time, they’re selling millions of these things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are just liabilities to them now. Like, those users, the few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco users that they kept through this process who had bad keyboards, those were still expenses to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. But really, Apple lost tons of users because of those. those, tons. You know, the damage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that to them was massive. And yet it still took them multiple years, like four

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years to release a product that was different. And I think what that showed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco us is that Apple has amazing stuff they release on a regular basis, but we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know how the pipeline works. We don’t know how long that pipeline is. And while they’re able to release

⏹️ ▶️ Marco updated products, like, you know, once a year or whatever else, If they have to change their mind about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something really big, that seems to take them a long time to do. It seems like whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when something goes wrong, at least what happened, like when something did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go wrong, when multiple things went very wrong with this product line, it seemed like it takes them a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time to turn the ship away from what was their intended direction. And so,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s totally plausible to me. If it took them four years to fix an incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problematic keyboard, that maybe it’s going to take them five to six years to fix the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other parts of this product that nobody liked or that weren’t good enough. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this actually is plausible to me that maybe after all this time they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to actually do things that are kind of, you know, like user fan service because that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually would make these things better and they were made worse in a lot of these ways for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either no apparent reason or not good enough reasons. And if they can make them better in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways that users actually want, why shouldn’t they do that? You know, we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, I think, leaving you know, once, I think this had probably had to do something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Johnny, but we’re leaving the era in which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple told us what we want to some degree, like Apple just,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the 2016 generational Apple, they just yelled at us what we wanted. And we kept saying, wait,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really? That’s better?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know, I think I want something else, actually. I think I like the old ones even better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they just kept yelling and yelling and yelling, no, this is better, this is better, this is better. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe now they’ve finally, I think we’ve seen signs in the other product lines.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they finally realized, no, that the users were right about some of that stuff. Some of that stuff never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco got better. so much about these laptops was not adapting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what people needed, but was trying to force people to adapt to them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The idea that Apple would go back on a lot of this stuff actually does line up with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of things they’ve done recently. They have actually made a lot of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t say regressions, but like, you know, going back to the way things used to be done because they were better or, or making products

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are legitimately better, as opposed to sidesteps or backwards

⏹️ ▶️ Marco steps like these. They’ve been on a pretty good tear recently. The Mac Pro is another great example of the whole trend that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco went through. So they are seemingly on the right path. It just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes them so long, it seems like, to make that turn.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s why it seems suspicious when it finally looks like they are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably going to come out with something, because we’re just so used to them seeming like they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening at all, because they kept releasing the same mediocre laptops for four or five years straight.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the reason I’m so suspicious is because I think the timeline is off. Like, yeah, we don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John what their internal schedules are for things or whatever, but the Mac Pro is a

⏹️ ▶️ John great comparison. They really messed up with the Mac Pro. They made a design that they couldn’t continue to make

⏹️ ▶️ John better, and they essentially decided we’re not gonna make a computer like that

⏹️ ▶️ John anymore, right? There was the whole Mac round table, like, no, actually

⏹️ ▶️ John we are gonna make a Mac Pro and it’s gonna be modular and so on and so forth. And the rumors we heard was that the time they were

⏹️ ▶️ John having that meeting, they had made a decision and maybe they had a team, but they didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John a computer. So they essentially decided to make a computer they previously

⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t going to make, starting from basically zero. And as evidenced by the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro they put out, it shares no parts with any previous tower computer that they have ever made, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John They went from zero to Mac Pro, which is a very narrow

⏹️ ▶️ John interest computer in less time than it took them to figure

⏹️ ▶️ John out that maybe they should change some decisions about the laptops. Like if they had made the decision at the

⏹️ ▶️ John same time, like, oh, we made some mistakes with these laptops, the laptops are their bread and butter

⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac line. That’s what people buy. Presumably there would be way more resources

⏹️ ▶️ John and money and effort to be able to put on that project to get that done. It

⏹️ ▶️ John makes me think that if this actually does happen, this decision to go back on a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John the design features of the laptops happened fairly recently.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because if it had happened at the same time we were all complaining about it, they would have done it by now, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s the suspicious thing. It’s like, well, the keyboard, that’s, I don’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ John what happened there, but they did eventually fix the keyboard, right? And there was some stubbornness there because the

⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard was like, especially in the beginning, debatable. Oh, we fixed it this time. You

⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s not like we’re not addressing the keyboard. Look, we’re revising it. Oh, it didn’t work either, right? Whereas

⏹️ ▶️ John things like, these are the only ports you get are Thunderbolt slash USB-C. It’s the type

⏹️ ▶️ John of decision you can reverse on a generation to generation basis. It does not take six years to say,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you want another port, right? The removal of MagSafe, you can put that back at any time. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that you made. You know how to make MagSafe. You made two versions of it. You can make another MagSafe, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John All this leads me to believe that like, Apple was content with the overall

⏹️ ▶️ John design of their laptops minus the keyboard, which they kept trying to fix and then eventually gave up on and reverted,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? I haven’t seen them trying to fix these features and then eventually giving up and reverting.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is just like, we stick with them all for six years and then say, you know what? We were fundamentally wrong about

⏹️ ▶️ John what makes a good laptop. Reverse all those decisions that we made after 2015 and put it back to the old

⏹️ ▶️ John way. Now, I’m not saying they shouldn’t do it or whatever. and I actually, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John characterized it as fan service before. I think that is slightly the wrong term because fan service is like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s give the biggest fans of this thing, the thing that makes

⏹️ ▶️ John them the happiest, even though it’s just an insubstantial confection, show them their favorite character doing

⏹️ ▶️ John their favorite thing or whatever. Like, that’s fan service. The things we’re talking about here are not

⏹️ ▶️ John like features that are just meant to delight hardcore

⏹️ ▶️ John laptop enthusiasts. their basic functionality. MagSafe was not a feature

⏹️ ▶️ John that only weird tech nerds could understand, enjoy, or benefit from, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And we talked about this when they got rid of MagSafe. MagSafe was not without its problems. So I kind of understand why

⏹️ ▶️ John they might’ve gone away from it because it did have problems. But to me, what that says is you should improve MagSafe, not

⏹️ ▶️ John replace it with USB-C, right? The rumors are that you can have the best of both worlds with

⏹️ ▶️ John these new laptops and that it will have a MagSafe, but it will also be able to charge from USB-C. So if you like the USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ John charging, you can keep doing that. Hey, and now I can charge on both sides of my laptop and I don’t have to get new cables and I can just ignore

⏹️ ▶️ John MagSafe. But if you like MagSafe, you can have that too. Again, it makes me doubt these rumors.

⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn’t sound like a very Apple thing to do, does it? It doesn’t sound like an Apple thing to do at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they do. I would love that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly, but now you’re like, but they wouldn’t do that. And I feel like we’re so, we have such a unhealthy relationship

⏹️ ▶️ John with this line of computers that anything, this rumor has too much going

⏹️ ▶️ John for it. And it’s just, it’s not like they’re throwbacks to bygone things. Like let’s give a

⏹️ ▶️ John touch bar as an example, right? Some people like the touch bar, some people hate it, some people don’t care one way or the other.

⏹️ ▶️ John The thing that makes me believe the touch bar part of this rumor is that Apple, as you

⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out, Margo, has never really taken the next step with the touch bar. If Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John really believed in the touch bar, regardless of what customers think, like it’s clear that Apple really believed in this laptop

⏹️ ▶️ John design, because they stuck with it for years and years. Hey, you get a bunch of little USB-C shaped holes inside and that’s it, and you

⏹️ ▶️ John get a really thin crappy keyboard. They stuck with it for years. Apple totally believed in it. They rolled it out across

⏹️ ▶️ John their entire product line. All their laptops have this design. The Touch Bar is not a laptop-specific

⏹️ ▶️ John technology. All of their computers have keyboards. Even the iPad has a keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ John Why did the Touch Bar never appear anywhere outside the laptops? Where is my desktop keyboard with a Touch

⏹️ ▶️ John Bar that Apple could sell for $600? Where’s my iPad Touch Bar? Oh, that’s dumb. and it has a touch screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like if the touch bar was a benefit and a great feature, hey, keep your fingers near the keyboard, but

⏹️ ▶️ John also have a configurable section of the keyboard that can be anything you want, like an iPhone screen instead of physical buttons, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the pitch. Apple, I feel like they tried it, and for whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John reason, maybe usage data, maybe customer feedback, maybe the champions of the touch bar inside the company

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t get behind it, it just never took the next step. So I think that Apple has lost

⏹️ ▶️ John faith in the touch bar as evidenced by them never, A, never improving it like Margo said, but B,

⏹️ ▶️ John never expanding it to the rest of their product line. It’s an opportunity to sell a really expensive Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard with a touch bar on it, but they never did it, right? So I believe that part of it, and by the way, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John has sold and continues to sell laptop computers without a touch bar. Maybe it’s cost-saving.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, the Air doesn’t have it because it’s the cheap computer, but the Air doesn’t have it, right? And that’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John new computer, right? It’s got the good keyboard with no touch bar, They did backslide on him with the escape key. So they

⏹️ ▶️ John recognize one of the problems with it So I’m slightly willing to believe the lack of a touch bar. I’m willing to believe 14 16

⏹️ ▶️ John inch size. That’s great Mag safe now you really starting to

⏹️ ▶️ John make me doubt because this

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco scenario

⏹️ ▶️ John described in these rumors does not sound Apple like it sounds like You know what? They would either do one or the other they already did

⏹️ ▶️ John mags that now they’re on USB C and honestly of all the features Like that. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John heard people complain about about missing from previous laptops, MagSafe was like 50-50.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like some people miss MagSafe and some people are so glad that it’s gone because their cord kept coming out when they used a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ John on the couch, right? And MagSafe did have problems of crap getting stuck in it and

⏹️ ▶️ John debris going in there and things arcing and sparking or whatever. So if they did do MagSafe, it can hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ John be a newer version. And then finally, more built-in IOPorts. What the hell does that mean? What

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of rumor is it if you can’t say what the ports are? Like, that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John worst rumor ever. How does one come to know this piece of information

⏹️ ▶️ John without knowing what port it is?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It doesn’t make any

⏹️ ▶️ John sense. If you have any inside information, certainly you would know what the ports are. So that makes me suspicious

⏹️ ▶️ John that this is not a thing at all. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and Mengshi quotes, like, historically, the things that his information

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems most reliable on would not probably cover, like, the port selection. You know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s why I think this is significantly less likely to be true than the other parts of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this rumor.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, maybe if you see a case design and you see holes that you don’t identify, but then you can get the shape of the holes. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s kind of messed up. And then this final bit here is the most baffling and also the least important.

⏹️ ▶️ John The new chassis design is said to feature squared off sides, right? Well, you can’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ John square off the sides of a laptop like a phone because the top

⏹️ ▶️ John and bottom halves or laptop are curved for a reason. It’s so you can get your damn fingers under it to pick it off of the table.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not a problem with a phone. You just pinch it from the sides, right? You don’t need curved sides to a phone to pick it

⏹️ ▶️ John up because your thumb can go on one side and your fingers can go there and you can pick it right up off the desk. You can’t do that with

⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop. If you actually made a flat laptop, no one would be able to pick it up off the desk. It has

⏹️ ▶️ John to be curved on the top and probably also on the bottom and also on the top, just in case it’s put somewhere upside

⏹️ ▶️ John down. So that said, maybe it’s less curved. Maybe the flat sides are

⏹️ ▶️ John more emphasized in the styling, but I have to think that this is a, something is missing in

⏹️ ▶️ John translation, which is why I put in the, what I think is the translation of the quote report, you know, cancel

⏹️ ▶️ John the curvy design of existing models, top and bottom parts and adopt a flat edge. Laptops already have

⏹️ ▶️ John flat edges and they already have curves in the top and the bottom for a reason. You can’t get rid

⏹️ ▶️ John of those curves. So what do they even mean? So this rumor is the most weird to me. And I,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if it turns out that they have sides that maybe there’s a stainless steel band

⏹️ ▶️ John or an aluminum band around the outside. I mean, that doesn’t make sense because they’re made of a solid block of aluminum and they carve it out and they’re not changing

⏹️ ▶️ John that, right? So I can’t imagine this is true. Save this clip for

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco six months from now when they come out with a

⏹️ ▶️ John laptop that literally can’t be lifted up off a table and we’ll just cry together.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well it would still have rubber feet on the bottom probably, so you’d have some of a gap there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’d get your fingernails under there, right? Just get your finger, just right under. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s less of a curve, but it has to have some curve. That’s not just a design feature. That is an

⏹️ ▶️ John affordance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. No, I mean, again, that kind of thing, I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a whole lot of faith into that yet, but, you know, God, I hope the new laptops don’t have this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant, heavy, stainless steel fingerprint magnet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John around them. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, they wouldn’t, because they’re made out of a solid block of aluminum. Like, they wouldn’t put an applique on it. It’s not like it wouldn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John body cladding, Like a Camaro, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the whole reason they do it on the phones is because the phones are basically glass sandwiches and they have to have something going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the rim, whereas the laptops are a totally different construction method, so yeah, that makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I mean, I’m just, I’m super excited about this because even if like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only one or two of these points end up being true, that’s still fantastic. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the small difference of, I’m telling you, I know I’ve said this before, I’ll make it quick, but just the small

⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference of going from the touch bar to not the touch bar, but still having touch ID is glorious.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every time I have, like I had to use the 16 inch for a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of things last week, and I hated every time I had to change the screen brightness or the volume.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then coming back to my MacBook Air, it’s just a button, oh God, this is so much better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just, I’m so incredibly happy with this MacBook Air with no touch bar.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think I’ve already decided like no matter what they do with laptops this year

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know save this recording right but no matter what they do with the lap at this year I’m never buying another touch bar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’m so much happier in regular use of the non touch bar model

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will not buy another touch bar and if I have to only ever use MacBook Airs again forever That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably fine because this MacBook Air is fantastic, and I love the small size I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco love the small weight. The power that it offers is good enough for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost everything I do. So I’m very happy with this MacBook Air.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t think I’ll be tempted by the bigger laptops that come out later this year.

⏹️ ▶️ John If the touch bar does go away, I think one of the things that will have contributed to its death is

⏹️ ▶️ John the bean counter mentality. Is the touch bar pulling its own weight? Touch bar costs more than

⏹️ ▶️ John function keys. It’s a little

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John just got, you know, back in the day used to have a little compute attached to it. It’s more expensive than putting plastic function keys in.

⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple puts anything more expensive in its laptop, that feature needs to pull its own weight by

⏹️ ▶️ John making the product that it’s in more desirable and making more people willing to pay to get the touch

⏹️ ▶️ John bar. I’m sure there are some people who are willing to pay more to get a touch bar, but

⏹️ ▶️ John in our little circle of people, I hear much more people saying I’d be willing to pay more not to get the touch

⏹️ ▶️ John bar. It doesn’t mean that the feature has has more detractors than fans, but it does mean that

⏹️ ▶️ John it is not an unequivocal hit. Unlike for instance, bigger screen sizes.

⏹️ ▶️ John People are willing to pay more money to get bigger screen sizes. The 16 inch charges more than the 14 inch.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that is a thing that people are willing to pay more for, right? If you don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ John this bigger screen, don’t get it. But people who want a bigger screen, they’ll plunk down their money in a second.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple never ran the experiment of saying, hey, what if we give you a 16 inch with touch bar and without?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like that experiment would show the touch bar has not been pulling its own weight in terms of adding

⏹️ ▶️ John value that Apple can charge for in its product. So the being counter mentality is why are

⏹️ ▶️ John we bothering putting this expensive part in our computers, cutting into our margins when we can sell the computer for exactly the same price as

⏹️ ▶️ John we were before, which is the Apple way, but replace the touch bar with a bunch of two cent plastic keys.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think, you know, the fact that Apple hasn’t touched the touch bar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in four years or whatever, like they really, as we said, like they haven’t made it better, they haven’t expanded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco its capabilities, like they haven’t done anything to it. I think they might have probably decided a while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, this isn’t working out and we’re gonna abandon it, but like when Apple abandons something,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or rather when they decide this thing is not gonna have a future,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they completely stop touching it. Even if the end of its lifetime

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna be five years away, they completely stop doing any effort

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all on anything they’ve decided is going to be a dead end. But they won’t say anything about that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco until it just quietly goes away someday. So it’s possible Apple decided to abandon the Touch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bar in 2017, but it wasn’t in the cards to totally redesign the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire laptop hardware until after this giant Apple Silicon transition. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they decided, all right, you know what? We’re just gonna keep this thing going on life support, but we’re just not gonna touch it at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that’s what we’ve seen. And so they actually might have made that decision a very long time ago, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they will keep selling the exact same thing for years and years and years and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. But if they’ve decided years ago that it’s a dead end, it will get zero

⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort from the company from that point forward. And that’s what happened here.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The thing, we’ve touched on it a little bit so far, but the thing I just can’t wrap my head around is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how does Apple do such a dramatic about face and do so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so quickly. Like, not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in terms of how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do they, well, what I mean is from all outward appearances, it sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they weren’t even considering this and then suddenly, okay, we’re all in on undoing everything. And, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, maybe that’s what happened, but I don’t know, I can’t help but wonder, or I want to explain,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to have an explanation for why, how or why could that happen. And I think an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey explanation is someone like a Johnny Ive, maybe it isn’t Johnny Ive, just decides

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to railroad through. No, we’re going all in on USBC. This is the way that’s that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then that person either moves to a different role in the company, or perhaps if it is Johnny Ive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaves the company for all intents and purposes. And then suddenly cooler and saner heads prevail.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then they say, okay, now that that chuckle head is gone, let’s, let’s do things properly, like we should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have for the last six years. It’s just so hard for me. part of the reason I have such a hard time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey buying these rumors is because how do you end up doing such a dramatic about face

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so seemingly quickly? Uh, it’s just, it’s almost inexplicable to me unless it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a purely political stunt that finally, for whatever reason has gone away.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think when you mean quickly, you mean, you mean like all at once, like they didn’t do one model without touch Mar and then the

⏹️ ▶️ John next year at mag safe and the next year add more ports,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like doing it all at once

⏹️ ▶️ John is that’s what you’re talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. I’m sorry. That’s absolutely correct.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. that makes more sense. I mean, there has been a lot of change in the Apple staff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around this, you know, as you mentioned, Johnny Ive was, you know, promoted into the sky.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Phil Schiller was, I think, promoted like onto the roof. It’s kind of unclear like how,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of involvement he might still have. But you know, he was super involved in product design as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, you know, some of the under, some of the other staffers have changed. There’s there’s been a lot of change in the marketing staff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in the, like the product marketing staff and the PR side of things. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there actually has been a lot of change in the areas of Apple where,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that heavily influenced product design. So that could be part of it for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or it could just be this weird long pipeline thing, or it could be, I heard a long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time ago, like during a lot of the Mac Pro problems and stuff, the summary of the problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that, quote, Tim Cook was getting bad information, whatever that means.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it also could be related to this transition to Apple Silicon. Like this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably significantly delayed certain parts of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product engineering pipelines in order to get that done. And we’ve heard in various places, like they talked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this on Dithering with Ben Thompson and John Gruber, they talked about how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve heard that Apple so much didn’t want to tip their hand to Intel about how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good the M chips were, that they wanted to change nothing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the previous outgoing models. Because otherwise, like, Word might get back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Intel if they change certain components around or whatever, that, you know, how good the M chips are. So like, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons why the first group of M1-based products is completely unchanged

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what came before it in all other ways, except, you know, the chip. Like, everything else about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their enclosure And most of their parts inside even are all like the same parts. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think all of those factors could have come together here. A combination of, you know, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem was happening with leadership years ago when a lot of this bad stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened. Plus whatever, you know, the worst years of Johnny Ive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when he became super unchecked and seemingly checked out as well. You know, plus,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, who knows? A lot of stuff has happened in the last five years that could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have explained a period of bad products or of delayed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements, and then them all of a sudden arriving in like one, two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco year period.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a big company, and with a lot of politics.

⏹️ ▶️ John All those dysfunctions sound very familiar. It’s just that, you know, even if you work in big companies your whole life, you still

⏹️ ▶️ John tend to think like, yeah, but Apple’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco my

⏹️ ▶️ John company with those

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco dysfunctions,

⏹️ ▶️ John where big personalities at high levels in the org chart can send self-serving information

⏹️ ▶️ John up the pipeline. So Tim Cook, quote unquote, gets banned. That happens in every

⏹️ ▶️ John company everywhere all the time. We just don’t want to believe that. We want to believe that

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like the, I mean, I don’t want to get into politics stuff, but it’s like believing that when you’re a kid, that

⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere there’s competent adults running the world. And as you become an adult, you realize, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not really the case. No one really

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco knows what they’re doing. And you

⏹️ ▶️ John like to think like, okay, well my company has these kind of dysfunctions but Apple doesn’t because Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John is a successful company. In fact, Apple is the most successful company so even though every place

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve ever worked has had this dysfunction, Apple doesn’t. And Apple’s just people too so they can’t they can’t avoid

⏹️ ▶️ John it. They do things very well, maybe better than anyone else, but they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John still human so human rules supply.

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2021 Mac desktop rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I’m just going to sign off and you guys can take it from here. Desktop Mac rumors.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So apparently there’s new iMac models which will slim down the thick black borders around the screen and do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey away with the sizable metal chin area in favor of a design similar to Apple’s Pro Display XDR monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Man, I bet those are nice. You guys should try those out sometime. These iMacs will have a flat back moving away

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the curved rear of the current iMac. Apple is also working on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pair of new Mac Pro desktop computers. One version is a direct update to the current Mac Pro, a Hem-John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and will continue to use the same design as the version launched in 2019. Apple has discussed continuing to use Intel processors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that model, which we should explore in a moment. The second version will use Apple’s own processors and be less than half

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the size of the current Mac Pro. The design will feature a mostly aluminum exterior and could invoke nostalgia for the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Power Mac G4 Cube, a short-lived smaller version of the Power Mac, an earlier iteration of the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has started early development of a lower-priced external monitored cell alongside the ProTip Display XDR. Hey-o!

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I’m talking about. The cheaper monitor would feature a screen geared more for consumer than professional

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use and wouldn’t have the brightness and contrast ratio of the top-tier offering.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, another dump of, hey, everything you’ve ever wanted, kind of, sort of. Let’s start with the iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ John Getting rid of the chin, these are all things we’ve talked about for a long time. No rumors of touchscreen, no rumor

⏹️ ▶️ John of like a drafting table type thing. When they they say a design similar to Pro Display XDR,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming they mean from the front because I can’t imagine them spending the money to drill all those little holes

⏹️ ▶️ John in the back of the thing to make it XDR style. That’s just a large amount of machining

⏹️ ▶️ John and finishing for a computer that is not going to be as expensive or have the margins

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway of the XDR. And having a flat back, hey, guess what?

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have to pick that Mac up off the table in the same way as a laptop. So sure, put a flat back on it.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll be just fine. You don’t have to worry about leaving room for the optical disc. You can have some kind of cooling thing

⏹️ ▶️ John with lots of holes back there. But this iMac rumor, I totally believe, redesign iMacs, we all want them. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John time for a redesign to that computer. And nothing in this rumor makes me think it’s ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the iMac rumor seems like the safest of all. It is desperately in need of a redesign.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so much has changed about the electronics inside the iMac since the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco current enclosure was designed. You know, John mentioned no optical drive, but also no more 3.5 inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drive, I bet. And that’s the whole reason why they have that big bulbous bump

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the back. It’s to accomplish, that’s where the hard drive goes when you have a hard drive model. Anyway, in this case, this makes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfect sense and that’s probably going to be a fantastic computer. And who knows, maybe I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco move back to one in the future, but yeah, that’s probably gonna be fantastic. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco put some Apple Silicon in an iMac display case and make it a little bit fresh and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new and that’ll be great.

⏹️ ▶️ John If it wasn’t for the other rumor, I would have said, and Apple, just make it so when the computer part dies, you can still use it as a monitor,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they don’t have to worry

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco about that because we have the other

⏹️ ▶️ John rumors. So I’ll let it go in order here. The Mac Pro, like my Mac Pro, the big tower Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John saying they’re working on an update to that. I love, this is a classic rumor move.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has discussed continuing to use Intel processors for that model. I’m sure Apple has discussed a lot of things.

⏹️ ▶️ John What kind of rumor is that? I don’t care what Apple discusses. I only care what they’re planning on doing. So make

⏹️ ▶️ John a statement in one direction or the other about the likelihood of what they’re going to do. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine a speed bump or a spec bump to the Intel Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if there’s any new Xeons, maybe they could change the prices around, maybe they could certainly put new

⏹️ ▶️ John video cards because AMD’s got their new line of video cards out. All that could be mixed up in this type of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John All that is to say that I would not be shocked if the configuration

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re able to buy a quote unquote 2019 Mac Pro and changes. That said, I

⏹️ ▶️ John would be very surprised if Apple continued to ship Intel processors

⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac Pro any longer than they needed to. I fully believe that Apple is trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to make a CPU or system on a chip and whatever suitable for the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s gonna take a long time. So in the intervening year or two, yeah, they’ll keep selling the current one and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John give it spec bumps, but I don’t expect them to say, and here we are at WWDC two years from now when the transition

⏹️ ▶️ John is complete. And we have, like we said, two years ago, we’ve transitioned our entire line to Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon, except the Mac Pro, which is still Intel. No, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not gonna happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John The transition will be complete when the Mac Pro is upgraded as well. It’s probably gonna be the last one, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s the biggest unknown or whatever, but I see nothing in Apple’s plan as stated

⏹️ ▶️ John or as I can imagine it being, that they’re gonna keep this Mac Pro and Intel permanently. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be the last one to go.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I’m not sure I agree with that. You know, the second part of this rumor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is important to discuss at the same time. This is that they’re also planning a second version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Mac Pro that will use Apple Silicon and will be less than half the size

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the current Mac Pro. The design, you know, blah, blah, blah, could feature some nostalgia for the Power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac G4 Cube and an earlier iteration of the Power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac and Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John Two beloved successful computers, the G4 Cube and the trash can.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but see, if you take these rumors together.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you’re saying like one replaces the other? Yeah, sure, I buy that too, but.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s how I think this goes. So we’ve talked in the past a lot about like the challenges and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like just ruminating on like how might they do a Mac Pro with Apple Silicon, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still having like giant card slots for external GPUs and stuff. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of, that seems to be what kind of makes the Mac Pro right now. And with the 2019

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro model, Apple really showed a big statement, like we’re going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to card slots. We even made our own special card slot thing, and the Mac Pro is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all about modular stuff, and we designed this thing for the future, it should be modular, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in a world of the M1, with everything moving more and more on-chip, as we discussed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past, it kind of goes against that, and achieving big GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on big card slots in the Apple Silicon world is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated and possibly a lot less necessary, depending on how they do their high-end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offerings in the future. And so what I think we’re seeing here is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Apple might do kind of a test balloon thing here. I think the new small

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro will ship, and I think the big Mac Pro will continue

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a product in their lineup for a little while, but will stay on Intel, will be untouched,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel does not release new Xeons of a given family very often. Usually they go at least 12

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 18 months. So I, it wouldn’t surprise me if the current

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac pro tower actually never gets new CPU options. It might get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new GPU options. I hope for, I hope they support it and continue to make GPUs for it. But I think what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are trying to find out by releasing the small one is, do they still need the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big one? Which is a good question. And I think what you will see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, you will see like, whenever they update a product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most of a product line gets updated, and like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one model doesn’t, and they show a slide in the presentation that shows their family of updated models

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the one that didn’t get updated is just missing. But like, they still sell it, and they might still sell it for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, and they might be playing an update to that later, but they just quietly stop talking about it to stop showing it on slides

⏹️ ▶️ Marco during the presentations. I think that’s going to happen to the big Mac Pro once the small Mac Pro is out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what they are going to probably figure out is do they really need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big one anymore? Or do enough people buy the small one, which by that point will probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be faster at a lot of things, just because of the advances in the Silicon, you know, between now and then, and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Silicon compared to Intel. So like, it’s probably gonna be faster. And a lot of people are gonna wanna move to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just because it will be faster. And then we’ll see, like, do they still need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to then make a big tower with card slots or not? Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even today, they do need that for certain markets, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say they barely need that anymore overall. Like, it’s nice that they conserve that role with the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, but Apple Silicon is so compelling for so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many reasons. And again, I see it being a very hard road to bring the world of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Silicon to the world of the giant tower Mac Pro and what it needs. That the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini Mac Pro, whatever that thing will be called, the Mac Pro Cube, that is probably gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the better way to go for almost everyone who would have otherwise bought the tower. If they can figure out a way to just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a lot of RAM in it and put some really beefy GPU in it somehow, whether it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a card, maybe it has one slot, or whether it’s more likely like, you know, on die or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in package, like some giant GPU as we talked about before, I think that’s probably the future of the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. And I think that the 2019 tower will most likely end up being a one-off,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is not what a lot of Mac Pro owners want to hear. But I think that’s what’s actually going to happen here. And I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why we hear this, we were hearing this like double rumor thing about a big Mac Pro and a little Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s what’s really happening here is there is no more big Mac Pro, but they’re going to keep selling it and possibly keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco issuing GPU updates for it for a few more years. And yes, keep it on Intel, because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a lot easier. And they can even say, our pro customers still need Intel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a little while. You know, like they can say that because that’s actually kind of true. A lot of pro stuff is gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco require Intel for a while longer. They can kind of market this in such a way where it doesn’t sound

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they’re abandoning the Mac Pro so quickly. It sounds like they’re keeping this one model on Intel to achieve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the needs of the customers of that model while they use the rest of the product line to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically make that product irrelevant.

⏹️ ▶️ John But they would be replacing it then. Like, the Mac Pro, Intel Mac Pro wouldn’t continue on forever, years and years.

⏹️ ▶️ John It would just be there, like.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, not forever, but it might get like, you know, 2015 MacBook Air into a very long lifespan.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like you are amply demonstrating exactly why Apple keeps trying to make these small computers

⏹️ ▶️ John and then realizing it’s a mistake. Because it’s so tempting. Do you really need all those slots? Do you really need all

⏹️ ▶️ John that expansion? can’t we just make you a smaller computer? Why do you need this big tower computer? How about a little

⏹️ ▶️ John Power Mac G4 or a trash can Mac Pro? Like it’s so tempting to think that we can fit

⏹️ ▶️ John everything you need into a smaller package. And every time Apple has done that, it has proven to be

⏹️ ▶️ John a mistake. Sometimes it takes Apple a long time to figure out that it’s a mistake, but it has been.

⏹️ ▶️ John The engineering wise, if they make the small one, as you described, you’ve basically done all

⏹️ ▶️ John the engineering work to make the big one. The only difference is you just didn’t put it in a bigger case, because you figured out how to have external

⏹️ ▶️ John cards, because you’ve got a GPU on a card, whether it’s an Apple GPU or an AMD GPU or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? You’ve got your fast processor that you’re gonna need, and you figured out how to

⏹️ ▶️ John have a bunch of RAM. The only thing you’re missing is a big honking case that you can fit a bunch of cards in. And while

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people don’t need that case, some people do. I think of the rack mount Mac Pro, we’re crying out

⏹️ ▶️ John loud, like a video of that guy with the thing. He was filling the card slots with these audio interface

⏹️ ▶️ John cards, right? And the whole point of them is they are physical connection ports for wires

⏹️ ▶️ John that leave his computer. It’s not like there is any, like, oh, I can just put it in a little cube and you could have the

⏹️ ▶️ John same computation power. It’s not computation power he’s looking for. It’s literally IO. It’s like a place in the back

⏹️ ▶️ John of my computer where I can plug in umpteen things. Every single slot was filled with one of those things. And the world outside

⏹️ ▶️ John of that computer, kind of like Casey’s social circle, can’t be changed. Can’t just say, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John well,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we’re not gonna have a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ John of audio wires anymore. Like the job of the computer is to be the terminus for all of those audio wires

⏹️ ▶️ John that are not going away. So no, they can’t use a smaller one. And you could say, well, Apple doesn’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John about that market or whatever. This is exactly the story Apple tells themselves when they say, let’s make the trash can, even though it won’t

⏹️ ▶️ John serve a bunch of markets, it’s fine. It’ll be great for our core customers that we really care about. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that is exactly the opposite direction that they’ve gone in with the big tower computer. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I have to think that they’re gonna do the engineering effort to be able to make an arm-based

⏹️ ▶️ John big tower like this. And even if they float the trial balloon of the smaller one, first of all, I wouldn’t call that a trial

⏹️ ▶️ John balloon because I think there’s a market for a smaller one too. I’d probably buy it. Right, like that is a product with

⏹️ ▶️ John a market. Another product we’ve been talking about for years, whether we call it the X-Maxx or whatever, a smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ John less expensive, less humongous tower for people who don’t need the slots is definitely a product.

⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple right now seems very committed to the idea of

⏹️ ▶️ John serving the market that does need that big stupid box. Which is not me, by the way. If they made a smaller

⏹️ ▶️ John one with a card in it, like I’d so long given up on the idea of an X-Max, which is like a configurable

⏹️ ▶️ John small Mac with a fast CPU and a fast GPU and a lot of RAM. I’ve just,

⏹️ ▶️ John forget it, they’re never gonna make that. Or when they do, it’s gonna be super weird, like the Cube, right? If they make that, I will

⏹️ ▶️ John buy it. I don’t even need this big tower. But Apple of today seems very committed

⏹️ ▶️ John to continuing to serve the customer base that wants that big honking tower. The only thing that would

⏹️ ▶️ John modify my opinion of this is how are the Mac Pros selling? Are they 1% of

⏹️ ▶️ John the sales that Apple thought they would be? Apple never tells us this, and you can’t sort of back solve it from

⏹️ ▶️ John their earnings because they don’t break things out very well. And even the best case scenario, the Mac Pro would be like a

⏹️ ▶️ John blip on a blip,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be able to pull that out. But from all their external talk, they seem

⏹️ ▶️ John very committed to serving the market that actually wants

⏹️ ▶️ John a computer this big. So my hopeful version of this is Apple has also finally

⏹️ ▶️ John realized that, hey, there’s a market for people who want most of that stuff, but way, way, way smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But most of the same stuff, it’s a desktop computer. It’s not a mini it’s got, you know, it’s, it’s a,

⏹️ ▶️ John like a mini tower or whatever you want to call it. That market definitely exists and I wish they would serve

⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I don’t think Apple’s ready to give up on this market. And if they are, the little one will replace

⏹️ ▶️ John the big one and they will once again, abandon that market, which will make that guy with his thousand audio interfaces super

⏹️ ▶️ John sad, right? But hey, I mean, you know, the timelines we’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ John again is I feel like even the small Mac Pro-ish thing, that’s like one

⏹️ ▶️ John of the last ARM-based Macs that they’re gonna come out with, right? At that point, when that comes

⏹️ ▶️ John out, I feel like that’s the point to sort of, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t, if you’re gonna use it as a trial balloon, you can’t commit at that point to canning the old one and you know, just keeping it

⏹️ ▶️ John around to serve old customers for a little while. Cause remember they kept the trash can around a long time after we all knew it was dead anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like they kept selling that cause hey, some people need a trash can. By the way, no, we won’t reduce the price.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because we know you’ve got you over a barrel. If you’re buying this computer now, you have no choice. They sold it for so long,

⏹️ ▶️ John even though we knew Mac Pro was not, even though we knew that other Macs were better than it.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you need one of those things, you need it, right? So I can see a fate like that for the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John It all depends on whether Apple wants to continue to serve the market

⏹️ ▶️ John that needs a computer this darn big. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get a read on that from the inside, but I have some faith that

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing that particular Apple needs to do to continue to serve it because everything that’s in this little Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John is exactly what you need for the big Mac Pro, just add air.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but only if they’re going through the trouble of compatibility with card buses

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and card slots. But they are. They’re going to have to for the small one. Maybe or maybe not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe it’ll just be like there will be a GPU module in it, and maybe they have their own custom bus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it, and it’s like an Apple Silicon GPU.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not going to invest in a custom bus for a computer that’s going to sell that little. It’s a PCI.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll have maybe one or two slots, but there’s no point in them reinventing the

⏹️ ▶️ John slot. It already exists.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but what if they do something with the unified memory that like, it eliminates the need for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs to have this very high speed bus between them and main memory and everything else?

⏹️ ▶️ John You still need the GPU itself though.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, but I’m saying like if they, as we’ve talked about in the past, like if they just scale up the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 architecture to just have massive amounts more silicon devoted to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs, whether it’s on package or like a separate die or a stack die or a separate package

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right next to the first one. You can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to do that ends even before the end of the top end iMac. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John you can only go, as far as you can go with that is like game console level performance. That’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John coming close to what people need to process their four streams of 8K with their

⏹️ ▶️ John four giant GPUs, each of which takes 200 watts. And that’s today’s tech. So

⏹️ ▶️ John again, you can abandon the market for the guy who wants to fill every single one of the 12 slots with audio interfaces.

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t abandon the market of the person who wants to do GPU powered video processing. Cause you can do that today

⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac Pro with a huge amount of fan noise and power. And you know, like, but that’s, they’re not going to abandon it. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John then who’s left, right? What pro market are you serving? Well, we don’t serve audio, we need lots of cards. We don’t serve video, we

⏹️ ▶️ John need lots of GPU power. You’ve just basically made a much faster Mac mini.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I mean, as you argue with the sale thing, like Apple’s sure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco angered a lot of that pro market over the last 10 years. They really pushed them away in massive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amounts. So many of those high-end pros use Windows now, or Linux. Like, it’s so many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. Apple lost so many of them. Maybe it is too small of a market now. Maybe Apple thought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the new Mac Pro would bring them all back, and maybe it didn’t. And so maybe they will have been,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I mean, if you look at all these different possible outcomes here, from where we stand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, these things all seem kind of like stretches. Like, it is kind of a stretch to think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Mac Pro sold so poorly, all of a sudden that Apple had changed her mind. It is also kind of a stretch to see how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current M-based architecture scales up to something the size of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant tower with all the slots. It is also kind of a stretch to think like, you know, what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple just keeps the big one on Intel for much longer than the rest of their product line? Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s also seemingly pretty unlikely. So we’ll see what happens, but at this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, any of those three outcomes wouldn’t surprise me.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, my advice to Apple is, uh, you know, kind of like what my advice would have been to

⏹️ ▶️ John Disney Lucasfilm with the Star Wars movies. If you’re going to make a turn like they did and have the big Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John roundtable and say, we’ve heard you, we’re going to make a pro computer and it’s going to be modular

⏹️ ▶️ John and no, we’re not kidding. And here it is. And it’s everything you dreamed it would be. And it

⏹️ ▶️ John goes over like a lead balloon for the reasons you said, Marco, because, hey, guess what? You just spent the last 10 years totally neglecting these customers

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ve all switched to a different platform. If you’re serious about reentering that market,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t try something and then if it doesn’t immediately work, give up and run away. Because that behavior is

⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what scares people away from you in the pro market. I feel like thus far, what Apple has done

⏹️ ▶️ John in words and indeed has said, we are committed to this market.

⏹️ ▶️ John And commitment means not running away at the first sign of trouble. Commitment means like Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John did with the Xbox, we’re going to enter the game console market. It’s not gonna turn out that great.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re gonna survive by the skin of our teeth. Maybe lose some money Halo is the only thing keeping

⏹️ ▶️ John this project from getting canned but halo does exist and we’re gonna try again Then we’re gonna try again. Then we’re gonna try

⏹️ ▶️ John again We’re not gonna run away because hey, we’re Microsoft not tons of money and we can afford to keep doing this and be

⏹️ ▶️ John No one will take you seriously if you try to have a console Go away, and then three years later come back again

⏹️ ▶️ John and then go away and then four years later come back again You’re either in or you’re not. And thus far, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John seems like it’s in. So I really hope, and my advice to them would be, that if you’re serious about this market, as you said

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve been, and you made this big pro workflow group, and you made this amazing computer, even if it doesn’t sell well,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve just gotta keep sinking money into it. Because the only way you’re ever going to get over the hump and get those people

⏹️ ▶️ John back is to prove to them that you’ve really changed this time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what about the gift that Marco has given everyone by buying his

⏹️ ▶️ Casey absurdly expensive monitor. I guess I should be the first to thank you, Marco, for saving me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey several thousand dollars, I would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hope.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, wait a second. The whole idea was all three of us had to buy it for Apple to release a cheaper monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ John What happened was two of us bought it and all we got was a rumor of a monitor. That’s not the same

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. Oh, so if I buy it, then it magically appears? That’s, oh, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I

⏹️ ▶️ John see. Yeah, I mean, if you don’t buy it, this will just end up being a rumor. But if you do buy it, it will end up being true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, what happened was, John, you and I had to buy the monitor for Apple to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco start development on a new monitor. Casey had to buy two new Intel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs in a year for them to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey kill Intel Macs. Seriously.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so let me remind you, listeners, if you would like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lower-priced Apple-manufactured and created and designed monitor,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey please go to atp.fm. I can buy myself a pro display XDR and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get you what you want. Help me to help you. I know this sounds this sounds excellent. Like again,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve used the the LG briefly. I don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nearly as many qualms and problems with it as Marco, but I’ve also only used it briefly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that being said, I would definitely buy an Apple branded monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that looks like an Apple monitor, quacks like an Apple monitor, walks like an Apple monitor, et cetera,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey assuming it wasn’t $6,000. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been thinking about, you know, it’s certainly sounds like next year I’m going to be buying at least

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, if not two new computers, because I plan to replace the laptop probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as soon as I can find a direct equivalent to what I I have and from the sounds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, I might want to replace this iMac Pro. And I was actually thinking to myself earlier, now, knowing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I know today, what would I do? And I would probably get another iMac, maybe not an iMac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but then I got to my, got thinking to myself, you know, with an Apple monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe with a little bit beefier insides, that Mac mini could be real nice. That might be a real

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice setup. I should look into that and think about that. So I’m really, really excited about the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea of Apple actually coming out with a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more affordable, even if it’s less capable, which it sounds like it would be, monitor for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular people and not YouTube lunatics.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re pairing it with the wrong thing though. You’re not supposed to hook it up to the Mac mini. So like as much as we complain about this hole

⏹️ ▶️ John in the lineup, if you just look at the desktop space, it makes some sense. The Mac mini is the one that’s like, it’s super cheap,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s super small, you probably have your own monitor anyway. It doesn’t even come with a keyboard. Of course we’re not making a monitor for that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the Mac Pro is gigantic and expensive. And guess what? We have a gigantic and expensive monitor to go with it.

⏹️ ▶️ John The only place you would need a reasonable monitor is if you had a reasonable desktop. And currently Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John has none of those. They just have the mini and they’ve got the pro with nothing in between. Enter the

⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote half-size Mac Pro. What kind of monitor would you use with a presumably cheaper, smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ John less capable half-size Mac Pro desktop thing? It’s not bring your own monitor like the Mac mini because

⏹️ ▶️ John presumably this computer will come with a keyboard and it’s not, or does the Mac mini come with a keyboard these days? Marco can tell

⏹️ ▶️ John us. It doesn’t, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know, it won’t fit in the box. And that’s why the Mac Pro won’t come with one either.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right, well, we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the big Mac Pro goes with the big monitor. So once you make the medium one, you need a medium monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now this ignores laptops, which is like, well, what external monitor am I supposed to hook my laptops up to? And maybe Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ John been thinking, you’ll just buy a crappy Dell or something, which is why we’ve been yelling for ages, just make a 5K monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s Apple branded. And anyway, rumors of doing that, this I feel like is a no brainer for all the

⏹️ ▶️ John reasons we’ve talked about before. And also, especially at this point, I have to

⏹️ ▶️ John think that no matter how few of them they sell, they’ll make money on every single one.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like the way Apple prices its monitors and the cost of a reasonable non-HDR

⏹️ ▶️ John 5K retina panel, they’re making plenty of money on those monitors. It’s not like they’re losing money on this product.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, you know, I don’t know, it’s like hard to argue for a product inside Apple if it’s not gonna make you a whole jillion

⏹️ ▶️ John dollars, but just make the monitor. Like, we don’t wanna get into this again, the same reason we talk about them making USB

⏹️ ▶️ John hubs or Wi-Fi things or whatever. Just make it so people who want to give you money

⏹️ ▶️ John and have a big match set up and spend too much on their stuff can do so because those people exist and you can

⏹️ ▶️ John make money from them. That’s good for business.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And this this this will solve such a weird hole in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lineup again. It’s like they’re like they’re writing old wrongs and it takes them a long time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it sometimes. But, you know, they’re writing old wrongs here. This whole lineup is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John big. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John assuming everything we’ve read is going to be true. I know we’re slipping into the easily of saying, these are all the things that we’re talking about. What we

⏹️ ▶️ John just read is a litany of rumors that say everything that we wanted ever to happen, which is why we

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey should be

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so suspicious

⏹️ ▶️ John of it, of saying, are you just telling me what I want to hear? But it is what it is. This

⏹️ ▶️ John is the rumor dump. And if we assume that it’s true, it would be, I would say,

⏹️ ▶️ John an amazing reversal, only matched by the Mac round table thing

⏹️ ▶️ John in the past.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And you kind of downplayed the laptop market for this, but I think that’s the biggest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part. Like I think by far, the biggest market for this kind of monitor is people who buy MacBook Pros

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and who docked them at work. Like that’s-

⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember the Apple’s last monitor they made? Pre-written? It had a little pig tail, rat

⏹️ ▶️ John tail thing that had a MagSafe connector to go into the laptop. It was saying like, the only reason you would ever buy this,

⏹️ ▶️ John I bought, had the monitor at work and I connect it to my tower computer,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ John then I have this stupid MagSafe thing just dangling because the monitor is saying, I’m not supposed to be connected to a desktop.

⏹️ ▶️ John What are you doing? No one buys desktops. I’m a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor. Yeah, so I think that alone, that’s enough of a market that they could easily sell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their $2,000 27-inch 5K monitor, and that would be great. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, if that product existed today, I would have bought that instead of this giant thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, I do like this giant thing a lot after another week of using it. But anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll never be able to go to a smaller monitor. It’s a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, development is like actually doing like iOS development on this is glorious. Oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have so much space. Anyway, but like, I do want to, you know, pour a little bit of water on this room.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco As you said, these are just rumors. This rumor is from Mark Gurman, and he does not have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as strong of a track record as Ming-Chi Kuo when it comes to hardware and display rumors, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently. And so I wouldn’t give this a ton of credibility of it being a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure thing. And also, the way it’s worded, Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco started early development. That to me means if this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing’s gonna come out, it’s not gonna come out for like two years at least. So that, I wouldn’t get your hopes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up of this thing being anytime soon if it’s real at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that’s fair. It just seems like such an obvious thing to do though. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the same way that I’m scoffing about getting rid of the touch bar and I’m scoffing at the return

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of MagSafe, As you guys said, it’s such an obvious hole. Like why wouldn’t they fill

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? You know, we all lament the loss of, you know, the airport base stations, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel like that’s an obvious hole for Apple to fill. This is such

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an obvious thing that there’s money there for the taking. Like why wouldn’t you take it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is so much more obvious to me than freaking Apple TV Plus. Like that seems even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more bananas than just making a monitor for your computers. You know, it wasn’t that long ago that you were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple computer, and it seems that computing-like devices are your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey primary products, why not make a monitor for them that is more affordable than the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey absurdly overpriced XDR? I mean, it’s bananas to me that this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t already exist. And it is a little depressing to think about. If it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to exist, I have the same read as you, Marco, it’s at least a year or two away, maybe even more than that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, if you think about like the engineering teams that would be responsible for developing and releasing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a thing. It always, it seems, I’ve gotten the feeling, I don’t know if this is true or not, but I’ve gotten

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the feeling that there are not that many hardware engineering teams for these big products

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside of Apple. And so they focus on one thing for a while and then go to a different product line, and then go to a different product line.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you think about, what does the Apple display team have on their plate recently? Well, they just did the XDR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty recently. So that was probably a big ordeal, the high-end or desktop display

⏹️ ▶️ Marco engineering team. That’s a big thing, okay. So they got that done, shipped. Now they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also going into all these mini LED screens, allegedly, like over the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next year or two, going into iPads and MacBook Pros and everything else. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna be a whole thing they have to engineer. They have new iMacs coming out, probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the next six months. That was a whole new display with whole new engineering and everything like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, probably.

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the display they would use in this monitor though. Like what we’re always asking for just give me an iMac without the iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ John So if they have to do all that engineering for the iMac, if you just rip out the iMac from the iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got your display, at least the display part of it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. But that would actually probably explain why they would kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of just be starting now or like recently they would have recently been starting on this product because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have probably only recently finished the iMac. And so now they can start on like, all right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco take what we have here, or whatever assets we have here, whatever parts we can share,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and design a standalone monitor that is like that, that uses those parts. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there actually is a significant reason why they might have had to wait until recently to start developing this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then it’s only a question of how long does it take them to develop a monitor. And again, Apple’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast about this kind of stuff. So that’s why I’m thinking like, I wouldn’t get your hopes up for it coming out in the next year.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, the obvious time for it to come out, despite the fact that most people will buy it for use with their laptops, is alongside

⏹️ ▶️ John the rumored half-size Mac Pro, which now we’ve gotten enough rumors for that it sounds like there’s something

⏹️ ▶️ John real about it. So, I mean, put it this way, you can’t introduce the half-size Mac Pro, I feel like, without

⏹️ ▶️ John introducing a monitor, because the whole point of that one is, presumably, less

⏹️ ▶️ John expensive than the giant one. And so you need a less expensive monitor to go with it. Otherwise, what are you gonna tell people? Just

⏹️ ▶️ John use it with your Dell like it’s a Mac mini? Like, I just feel like the messaging of a half-size Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John makes no sense without a monitor to go with it. And so that fits with the rumor, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, a year or two from now, the half-size Mac Pro comes out and you get the smaller

⏹️ ▶️ John monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the half-size Mac Pro will be about price. I think it probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be cheaper than, what is the current one? $6,000 to start? Yeah. I think it will be cheaper

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that, but it might not be a ton cheaper than that. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the reason they would be making a half size Mac Pro is only about price, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason they’re making a half size Mac Pro is that’s the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be a little bit cheaper, it might be a lot cheaper, who knows, but that’s not why they’re doing it. So I think the marketing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco message could be totally consistent in saying, here is the new Mac Pro based on Apple Silicon,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s this cool new smaller size, and you can pair it with our wonderful Pro Display XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ugh. Watch, I bet that’ll happen, I bet this new monitor won’t be ready yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s possible. Honestly, the timelines are so difficult to figure out,

⏹️ ▶️ John because especially, you’re saying it’s like a serial thing where the same team that’s doing the iMac finishes the

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac and then proceeds to the next project. I feel like they have enough teams to, those are two separate groups,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Maybe. I don’t, you know, I honestly don’t know how the hardware org works, but,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this, when you’re, if this is a real product and not just a fantasy room or like any

⏹️ ▶️ John of these things, Timing counts for product introductions. And there are a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ John of obvious timings for a product like this to come out. And if it’s a real at all,

⏹️ ▶️ John pick one of them. Either it’s got to come out with all the revised laptops you can say, and look, you can connect these laptops to this beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ John new Apple display. Again, remember the pigtail thing, that’s the whole big pitch. Or it comes out with the new half-size Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or it doesn’t come out at all, which is the other option. Which is just like, no, we have one giant monitor and that’s it. And

⏹️ ▶️ John dude, you’re getting a Dell. Sorry, these are ancient references.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’re done.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Mack Weldon, and Linode. And we will talk to you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and you can join. You can become a member and make Casey buy the giant monitor. That’s right. At etp.fm slash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. and we’ll talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to So accidental, Accidental Tech

⏹️ ▶️ John Podcasts, so long

Accidental Analog(ue)

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has occurred to me the kind of oddity that I use currently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s smallest phone, their smallest watch, their smallest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop, and the biggest goddamn display they’ve ever made.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they don’t even make a keyboard that’s big enough for you. No! You need an even

⏹️ ▶️ John bigger keyboard. You could fit like, you could you could fold up like six Apple keyboards and put them inside yours.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I gotta say, it’s actually, it’s kinda nice. Like, in many ways, the small products are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. You know, they’re easier to hold, they’re lighter, you know, in many cases, they’re cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In many ways, like, all these small products are really nice. I love my 40 millimeter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch. I love my iPhone 12 mini. This M1 MacBook Air,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am just so in love with this computer. I cannot stop saying enough good things about this computer. I love it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much. It is so good. Honestly, anybody out there, I know I’ve been selling this hard,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t have an M1-based Mac yet and you’re looking at the models and you want one,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go for the Air. They’re all good, but the Air is really special

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that the other two aren’t quite as special. Go for the Air.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You will not regret it. Oh man, it’s such a great computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of that, my kids are complaining now that they’re going into school

⏹️ ▶️ John part-time or soon to be going into school part-time, which is another cluster. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John that if they go into school, they have Chromebooks they can use, they should buy the school, but they hate the Chromebooks

⏹️ ▶️ John and they wanna use the laptops that they use at home. And we’ve got an M1 MacBook Air and

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve got a non-M1 MacBook Air, the previous model, right? And so

⏹️ ▶️ John the prospect of sending my children to school with these still very expensive,

⏹️ ▶️ John not very rugged computers is making me worry. And so I’ve been trying to buy like, trying to find cases I can

⏹️ ▶️ John buy for them to protect them somehow. Because, you know, my son,

⏹️ ▶️ John when he got his Chromebook for the first time, I think in middle school, I think it lasted like

⏹️ ▶️ John less than a week before he shattered the screen because he just put it into his backpack like it was a book and then just

⏹️ ▶️ John treated his backpack like he normally does. And then you just open up the Chromebook and say, huh, how did this giant glass screen shatter?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, a Chromebook is not an actual book and you actually have to be careful with it. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m wary about sending my kids to school with these laptops and I’ve been shopping for cases,

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to find something that will protect them. And you can go in a couple of different directions

⏹️ ▶️ John with this. There’s lots of cases that are kind of like foam filled fabric sleeves,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? That you’d buy for an adult who can take care of things. And then on the other extreme

⏹️ ▶️ John is a Pelican case, which is a giant, hardened, plastic

⏹️ ▶️ John shell thing, which they do make sized more or less for a MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ John sized laptop. And I’m like, well, I should buy a couple different cases and try them out. And

⏹️ ▶️ John immediately, the tiny little devil on my shoulder says, put the M1 MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ John in the Pelican case, and then put the Intel one in the Fabric case.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So they don’t use the M1?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because if the Intel one gets cracked, you’re gonna be mad that your kids crack

⏹️ ▶️ John the screen on a thousand something dollar computer, but you’ll also be happy because now you can buy

⏹️ ▶️ John another M1. And this is what the little devil on my shoulder

⏹️ ▶️ John is saying. The other part of me is saying, you have AppleCare on that. If they crack the screen, you

⏹️ ▶️ John should replace it. Don’t buy a whole other computer. And then the devil says, but M1

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey MacBook Airs are really

⏹️ ▶️ John good.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They really are.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The devil is right. Yep, sometimes the devil’s right. Valuable life lesson.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is not the lesson we should be teaching children who are listening to this show. Ha ha ha ha ha.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not my word. Honestly, it’s so good. The more I use it, the more I love it. It’s so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kinda want one. I don’t want one, but I kinda want one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at it this way, Casey. You were so happy for years on the stupid MacBook 12-inch with all of its

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John problems and shortcomings. It’s just garbage compared to the CPU. Whatever you’re holding out, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco total garbage. Whatever you’re holding out for at like the higher end of the spec range, you were fine without

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for a long time. The MacBook Air is so, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good and is out now and is in some ways better than the high spec ones.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John This is why

⏹️ ▶️ John like- Casey’s holding out for the one with MagSafe and an SD card slot.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s it. Whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ John hell, fantasy computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All of the three of us, I’m the one who wanted the SD card slot the most. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think- And I don’t necessarily know that any of that stuff would come to the Air. You know, that might be MacBook Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John only. Oh, for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco his 13

⏹️ ▶️ John inch MacBook Pro, he wants a… Right, but like, the air is so good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, the MacBook Pro in certain ways is less good. Like, you know, it has the fan, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the teardrop, it’s a little bit bigger, a little bit heavier. Like, you know, it is less pleasing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use in certain ways. It currently has the touch bar, which is way less pleasing. They might be fixing that, you know, I hope, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still, like, the air is so nice to use. It feels so good. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so small and light. Like during, I did use a, as I mentioned,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used my 16 inch again for a few days. It just felt like a giant boat and it didn’t feel as,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I know we’re talking about, you know, one and a half pounds of difference or something like that, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t feel as nimble for me to just like, oh, pick it up and go upstairs with it or something like that. Like it felt more like I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to just leave it where it was and go upstairs. Ever since I’ve gotten the Air, I’ve hardly touched my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. Like it’s just so good, I just keep bringing it with me everywhere and it’s so small and light and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, It’s designed for being carried around and doing stuff all around all day. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, it’s so nice. I love that it’s fanless. I never, not only do I not like fan

⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise, but I don’t even like the big ridge slots

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are under the left and right sides of all the new modern MacBook Pros. They have these big air intake

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slots that are under them, and they’re sharp. And when you pick up the laptop, the way anybody would pick up an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco open laptop, like if the screen’s open, You pick it up by the wrist rest area, basically,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the left and right sides. You pick it up and you feel those slots and they’re sharp on your fingers. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air doesn’t have that design. There’s so many things about the Air that are just nicer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more pleasing. And it used to be that to get that, you would have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this massive trade-off in performance. And right now, I don’t know how long this will be the case, but right now, that trade-off

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gone. It’s just so nice to have a MacBook Air that is amazing as a computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is also amazing as a physical object. And that’s really, it’s really something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So just for grins and giggles, I priced my current MacBook Pro for trade-in with Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going to have to cut this from the release version of the show because I don’t wanna see all the tweets about it. But would you like to guess

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much it’s worth?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna say like 1200 bucks maybe? 830. In the middle, 970.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But interestingly, not considering tax, I could basically trade this in and get myself an M1 MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John saying. That’s the other thing about the MacBook Air that makes it so amazing is everything that Marco said

⏹️ ▶️ John is true of the $999 model. It was just mind boggling.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ideally, you know, like Casey, you shouldn’t get that. You should get the 16 gig, 512, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco model at least.

⏹️ ▶️ John But for just a regular person browsing the web and reading email for $999, you get like this fantastic computer. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so nice and pleasing and delightful to use, I would have paid twice as much.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This could have been a $3,000 computer and I would have been perfectly happy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John with it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this is not a measure of anything useful.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know, that’s fair.

⏹️ ▶️ John Margo would pay more for a better product. Hmm, fascinating.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I would rather use this one than the one that costs way more. Similarly, I’d rather use my iPhone 12

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini than the iPhone 12

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro Max that costs significantly more, but I’m happier with the mini. I’m much happier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the 40 millimeter Apple Watch than I am with the 44 millimeter ones. I’m much happier with this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air than I am with the 16 inch. And it’s not only because of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco arm transition, although that helps, but I’m happier with it in use.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s really, really nice. So anybody out there, if you’re on the fence, Casey, just get the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air, it’s delightful. It is such a great computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John He’s saving up for an XDR. Don’t tell him to get an Air yet. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not taking up the next yard. You know, the thing of it is is that I think I have,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know the right phrasing for this, but I think I have a little bit of like a mental hangup

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about buying a new computer in the sense that I consider that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a very infrequent occurrence. And I know Marco that you do it basically monthly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for me, I know I did buy a couple of computers in the span of 365 days,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think I bought my iMac in 2016,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my previous iMac, my non-pro iMac, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess I bought the adorable in what, when would that have been? Was that 2016, 2017, something like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that maybe? Yeah, it came out in 2015, the first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. You got like the second or third one, right? Yeah, I think it was 2017 that I bought it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, they updated it like every year because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it desperately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco needed any help it could get. That’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know, I, I view it as a once every couple of years thing, right. And the pre and before the adorable,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the prior laptop I had bought was probably two to three or four years before that. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s no, like, there’s no tangible reason I can cling to that says this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is why it must be every several years, but it just feels like a once every several years purchase

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the same way that like people who buy cars regularly or perhaps have short leases, like they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going through cars, you know, every couple of years. And I mean, I’ve owned every car that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had for it, L it certainly as an adult for at least five or six years, I think at the least.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, and so, yeah, it’s just, I have this hangup about just, you know, trading in this computer or, or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to sell it online and getting something new, especially in no small part, because I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really honestly don’t want a MacBook air. And I totally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with everything that both of you guys are saying. And for your average person, I think it’s probably the perfect

⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer. But again, maybe they’re silly hangups, maybe they’re not, but I really don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lose the four ports. And I would prefer, you know, not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to lose on on SSD space, which I don’t even do they only get to be a half terabyte now?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or can you get a full terabyte? And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the area can get two terabytes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, wow. Okay, so then that’s not an issue. And again, I still have hangups about RAM. But I’m getting over that because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not heard a single person complain about RAM on any of of these M1 Macs, but more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than anything else, I really do want to keep four ports. And I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just bought this MacBook Pro in June or maybe it was May of last year.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can wait for May of this year, especially since I’m not fricking going anywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really need a laptop right now. And coincidentally, that’s why I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I just said earlier in the show and I stand by it, that the next computer I plan to buy is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a replacement for this laptop, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if the next computer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should buy is a replacement for the iMac Pro. Be that a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop that serves as my one and only computer, which I was kind of thinking about earlier today,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be that a Mac mini that serves as a new desktop, I don’t know. But as much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I can make a passionate argument that it would be smarter or better for me to unload the MacBook Pro I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey today and get like an Air or a new MacBook Pro or something like that, I just can’t wrap my mind around it. I just can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get over, figuratively speaking, throwing away a six, eight, 10 month

⏹️ ▶️ Casey old, whatever it is, laptop, and getting a brand new one just for funsies. I don’t know, maybe I’m weird.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you’re sensible. You’re just not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Which makes me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird in this crowd, I’d say. What

⏹️ ▶️ John are you talking about? I’m the one that keeps my computer for 10 years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but again, I will point out, like, you’re not throwing it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco away.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah. You’re not taking 100%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco loss on it. No. Like, no matter what you do, it into Apple for a little bit of money,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether you sell it for a lot of money, like it’s still, look at it instead as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an upgrade cost. You basically have an offer right now where like, what, you know, you could get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 900 for it from Apple, and then you could get a MacBook Air that you want for like, you know, 14 or 1600,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on how high you wanna go with it. So instead of thinking about it as like, I’m throwing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco away a one year old computer, instead you can say, all right, I have the option to upgrade my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one year old computer to this brand new thing that is significantly different for $500, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, whatever it is. And that, so it’s, it becomes less of a, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, emotional or like moral judgment of your waste. And, and, you know, you, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco failed cause you bought one at the wrong time. Whatever it’s not, it becomes less about that and more about,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just the price of what it would take to do this. And then you can decide whether it’s worth it or not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I think the other part of the problem is like I was saying, I don’t view it as an upgrade, even though it really would be, and even though

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t use more than two ports on a regular basis. I,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I now now that I’ve been burned by the one port adorable, I feel like I do not I do not ever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to go backwards. Like I want to stick with what I’ve got now. And that’s my own hang up. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair. I don’t know, I really do think whenever we get a an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade to the 13 slash 14 inch that I already have, I really think I will go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ahead and get one pretty much as soon as they’re offered.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that very well might be the right answer for you But I do find it useful to like to think about things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco removing the like emotion and judgment from things that don’t deserve those things So for instance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one of my favorite thing, I think I said on the show before, one of my favorite things I’ve ever Heard from our friend Gray

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey He said like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a year

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey ago I was not prepared. He was like he

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was talking about like, you know, like fines or fees and He’s like instead of thinking about it as like a fine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a fee think about it at just the price So much of society tries to like, you know, shame

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, or there’s baggage, there’s emotional baggage of like, oh, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be wrong, it would be wasteful, it would be, I would be failing in some way to change my mind about this purchase,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to want something else when I just got something. but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just a number at the end of the day. And it’s like, okay, well, is it worth that number or not? You can remove the judgment angle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from it and try to make a more objective decision. Because if it’s something, you know, it’s one thing if it’s only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for pleasure. And by the way, that has value. And you can make that decision also. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the decision gets even more complicated when you say things like, you know, this thing might actually help

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me with my work somehow. So if it’s, you know, a monitor upgrade, well, more space generally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes people more productive. Right? So, or if it, or if it’s something about like, if you had like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some, some problem, like with doing podcasting, that there were some new piece of gear out there that could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make your podcasting part of your life significantly better,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you just got a new microphone or whatever, like last month, there would be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant value to that thing. And so instead of looking at it as like, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way that I think we’re trained as, as members of society and, and,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, of just like, there’s this guilt associated with that kind of stuff. Instead, think of it as a business, because you are a business,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and think of it like, all right, well look, there’s this, you know, I can improve the business in this way for this price.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it worth it or not? And just remove the emotion from that decision. And so, in your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco case, I do think, based on what you’re saying about your priorities, especially about the ports, yeah, you know what, you probably should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait. You know, that makes sense. If you’re not in desperate need, which you’re not, and you wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoy the port situation on the air, then you probably wouldn’t get the value out of it than I do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get tons of value out of it because it’s so delightful as a thing. And I have apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now a pile of Thunderbolt hubs that I’m trying out. But they have largely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco solved my problem. There is a lot of value in removing any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that judgment. Don’t think about like the sunk cost fallacy and everything else. Just like, all right, here’s where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am now. Here’s a thing I’m considering going to and here’s what it would cost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s what it would take to get from here to there. And then judge from there, is that worth it or not?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you’re exactly right. And like I said, this is all just hangups on my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey end that, well, maybe not all, but a lot of it is just hangups on my end that it just seems,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is probably too strong a word, but inappropriate for me to get rid of a computer I just bought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey six months ago. And in reality, you’re right, it doesn’t matter if it’s appropriate or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inappropriate, it’s a business transaction, especially since this was bought by the business. So it’s literally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a business transaction. Um, but yeah, it just, it, it, it, it’s a hangup

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have. And, and I think it’s also a little bit self-defense because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my natural inclination is to love and want all the toys. I love toys.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love things. I want all the things. There are so many things like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tangible things that I want that I have been trying to find a reason to spend money on that. I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a silly example is I really want one of the, um, what is the DJI? What is it? Mavic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mini, one of the drones that’s like just barely, just barely under the FAAs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey regulation for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that. Fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t really, yeah. So you don’t have to like worry about registering it or I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Check me on that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco for the love of God. Check me on this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the, it’s 249 grams. So it’s below 250 grams for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey registration. Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So like, I really, really want one. And now as of like a few months ago, they finally have a 4k camera

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they didn’t in the past, which made it easy to justify. Well, I can’t get that one. It doesn’t have 4k camera. I don’t want to spend,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to spend, you know, $1,500, whatever it is for the real ones. And I don’t want to have to carry it around because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey physically quite large. Um, but now I have no reason not to buy one other than that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to resist. And my natural inclination is to just buy all the things. And I’ve learned over the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey years, especially during a time when I had very, very, very little disposable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey income, I’ve learned to like resist that and not allow myself that indulgence because I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think for me, personally, it’s a very slippery slope and if I buy myself a drone, the next

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing you know, I have like an XDR sitting on my desk. And so I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying, I try very hard to resist doing things that I feel like are at least somewhat indulgent,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though again, I’m not arguing with what you said. You I, one could make an argument

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this is an improvement for my business, which is an improvement on my ability to put food

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the table. It’s a hang-up of mine that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really want to lose. And now we’re getting into analog territory. But I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my natural inclination is to spend like it’s going out of style.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if I resist that, and I resist it effectively enough, could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one nicely or gracefully describe me as frugal? I end up being outwardly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey frugal, even though internally, all I want to do is spend money. Similarly, like I think of myself as a deeply selfish

⏹️ ▶️ Casey jerk, but if I try extremely hard not to actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey act that way, am I a deeply selfish jerk? You know, and this is something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve wrestled with for probably 15 years, you know, because I do think my natural inclination is with most people, but especially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, is to be a selfish jerk. And I try extremely, extremely hard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not to act like that. And then, you know, the question becomes, if it’s, even if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not innate, am I a selfish jerk or not if I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not often expressing selfishness and jerkiness?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and, you know, like so many things, it’s a balance you need to find. Like, either extreme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any of these things is bad, right? And it’s very easy to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall into an unbalanced, you know, state of a lot of these things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in either direction it’s bad. Like if you try so hard to not appear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a jerk that you are constantly like self-deprecating and everything, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John actually is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey super annoying. And so you can actually get like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, or like, you know, if you deny yourself things that would make you very happy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much, then you go through life not being very happy and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John unnecessarily,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco needlessly denying yourself of things that could make your life better, you know? But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the same time, if you overindulge, or if you’re overly jerky, those are also bad. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very hard to find these balances. Many people never do, but it is important to recognize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you need to make sure that you are seeking that balance not just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one extreme or the other, because neither extreme is good for you or the world around you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, we’ve somehow have ended up on the proverbial couch, which wasn’t my intention for the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of this episode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s all right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is your tech purchases podcast, and this is about feelings about tech purchases. Yeah, there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t belong in your feelings podcast, it belongs in your tech purchases podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s it. I don’t know, it’s something I do think about quite a lot, you know, is trying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to offset what I think of as some of the crummier sides of my personality

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to not end up that way, you know, to try to offset

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my innate jerkiness and not end up an actual jerk. But you’re exactly right. And especially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey self-deprecating is like my forte, right? So that is a defense

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanism that I have, and many other people have, so as to not sound exceedingly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey confident to the point of it being aggravating or exceedingly jerky.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s something that I often sway too far in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other direction. And like you said, everything in life really is a balancing act. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John on your tech purchase stuff, you know what it sounds like to me? Oh gosh. You need a budget.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh yeah, there it is. Yab

⏹️ ▶️ John nab. Ding ding ding. Hey, you need a budget, then you don’t have to worry about it because the budget will tell you what

⏹️ ▶️ John you can buy. Yab nab. Yep, yep, that’s what it is. Not a cop.