431: City of Chips
20 May 2021Spatial audio, high-resolution music, lossless compression, the appeal of vinyl, and other completely safe topics that nobody will argue about.
Episode Description:
- ALL of ATP is “maxinated”! The vaccination train keeps a’chuggin’! Toot toot! 🚂💉
- Thank you, ATP Store purchasers!
- Follow-up:
- Third-party menu bar items (via Daniel Jalkut)
NSStatusItemBehaviorRemovalAllowedinNSStatusItem.h
- Spatial Audio from Gui Rambo
- 24” iMac Reviews, including Jason Snell’s
- Matching cords, accessories, desktop backgrounds, stickers, highlight colors, “hello” intro movie
- Highlight colors via Sebastiaan de With
- Gasoline stabilizers
- Third-party menu bar items (via Daniel Jalkut)
- Apple Music adds Spatial Audio & Lossless at No Cost
- MacBook Pro Ransomware Leak
- MacBook Air Rumors
- Gurman’s Report
- Post-show: Casey & John’s Adventures with Eero
- Eero lights explanation
- Eero’s comparison page
- Hint: use code
ATP— it still works!
- Hint: use code
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Chapters
- Casey built this city
- Fully maxinated
- Thanks for buying our stuff
- Menu-bar follow-up
- Spatial Audio corrections
- iMac reviews are out
- Gasoline stabilizers (really)
- Sponsor: AfterShokz
- Spatial Audio for music
- High-res and lossless audio
- Sponsor: Remote (code ATP)
- Laptop rumors
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Chip rumors
- Ending theme
- A tale of two networks
Casey built this city
⏹️ ▶️ John As the cold open to this episode you should just put in a clip of we built this city, you know from
⏹️ ▶️ John the song Probably the very opening one just those just that phrase we built this city. It is very
⏹️ ▶️ John short clip and then just start the show Why? That’s because that song is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a meme and maybe it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John not relevant to you, too Yeah, maybe it’s not relevant to you because you’re a little bit too young for it but if you just threw that in people like
⏹️ ▶️ John People would be like what the hell was that and then eventually we get to city of chips Maybe they’d make a connection. Maybe they wouldn’t I just enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ John crap like that sometimes And it’s like it’s literally like a 1.5 second clip. So it’s not like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we built this city
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, or you can just put Casey doing it. You don’t need the clip anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John right. He’s got it.
Fully maxinated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, are you fully vaccinated now?
⏹️ ▶️ John Despite my continued protests of that term, yes, indeed, it has been two weeks since
⏹️ ▶️ John my second vaccine shot. I am,
⏹️ ▶️ John to these standards, you know, as immune as I’m going to be. I’m not sure if that’s entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John true. I think maybe you continue to get more immune. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I’m feeling good. I’m happy to be over the hump.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good. So all three of us, we can hug it out as soon as one of us travels or two of us travels to the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, I guess, but I am so excited. I’m not being silly at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so excited to give both of you uncomfortably long hugs the next time I see you. I am counting down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the days, or I would be if I knew when it would be, when we’re gonna see each other next. But I am super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey duper excited. So please, if you are living in a place where vaccines are being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distributed, if it’s your turn, if you can get a shot in your arm,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please, please go ahead and get vaccinated. It helps everyone.
Thanks for buying our stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Secondly, for those of you who did go to the ATP store and order things, thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. The ATP store is now closed, I’m sorry. I got a delightfully small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of snarky, is the store closed, hurt? I was very happy that most of you abstained
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from that oh so delightful pastime. So thank you for that too. The sale went very well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we appreciate it. I know that, as we spoke about, shipping, especially overseas, is tough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shipping the glasses is tough and expensive. So for anyone who enrolled in a membership,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for anyone who bought anything at all, we thank you very, very deeply. It really makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it much easier and helps us do the show. And we really thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can, if you want, you can go ahead and cancel your membership. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you know, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to do that. You can just show us. No, you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just be thanking the people who didn’t cancel. Thank you to all the people who signed up to get a discount and then
⏹️ ▶️ John just forgot to cancel. Thank you, because you are the real heroes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You are the real heroes.
⏹️ ▶️ John The people who are not currently being reminded to cancel by this segment, but instead are basking in the glow of our thanks
⏹️ ▶️ John and gratitude, because membership is really the best gift. And you know, if you get one, a glass or a t-shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So I’m really looking forward to it. So my little secret, just between the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us, don’t tell anyone. My little secret is that I normally wait until the last minute to buy merchandise, because I just am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so busy doing other things that I don’t think about it. And I have not yet missed a sale, although this time I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, I think, the very last day when I ordered. So one of these times I’m going to be that idiot saying, oh, is it closed?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, because I’m at the end of the list, I think, because I presume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cotton Bureau goes from earliest orders to latest orders, I typically am one of the last to get these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey orders. And so it is genuinely exciting for me when I see all these people sending pictures of their shirts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot, oftentimes days and occasionally even a week or two before I get mine. So I am really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited to see those. Please never feel like you can’t tweet me with a picture of your merchandise, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wearing your merchandise. It’s one thing just sitting on the bed, but it’s even better if it’s on you. So, uh, I thank you so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to those who bought, uh, merch. We will almost certainly do another sale in the fall. I think I’d mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the past that we have some ideas for some other new stuff that we haven’t done before. A couple of ideas that I’m really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really excited about, just like I was excited about these glasses. So, look forward to that sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the fall time, hopefully in time for the holidays. But thank you, anyone who ordered anything from the store. And thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you especially to the heroes that haven’t yet canceled their membership. And please don’t. Thank you. Thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We have a lot of stuff to go through tonight, so let’s just roll right into follow-up.
Menu-bar follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we had some information from friend of the show, Daniel Jalkit, with regard to third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey menu bar items. John, remind me what the context was here. This was with me dragging stuff off my menu bar, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah, like I was just saying, it was a segment where we were talking about bartender and vanilla and I was saying, and also
⏹️ ▶️ John describing just the general way those menu bar icons work if you didn’t know that you could drag them around by holding down command because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly obvious. And I said, you could drag them off and remove them. And I said, certainly you can remove the Apple ones that
⏹️ ▶️ John way, but I wasn’t sure about third party. and Skype didn’t allow the removal, but Daniel
⏹️ ▶️ John just wanted to tell us that third-party applications can absolutely support removal. It’s the NSStatusItemBehaviorRemovalAllowed
⏹️ ▶️ John value for the NSStatusItemBehavior option in NSStatusItem.h.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re a programmer and wanted to know why does Skype not support it, that’s a silly question, Skype is terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey third-party applications can support
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So just to make that clear.
Spatial Audio corrections
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. All right, we’re going to talk about spatial audio later on this episode, if I’m not mistaken,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we had some feedback from a friend of the show, Guy Rambeau. I believe this was regarding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was us saying, you know, why doesn’t the Apple TV have it, which by the way, mine hasn’t shipped yet. And I’m so jealous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I see people are getting shipment notifications and mine hasn’t. I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, mine hasn’t either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so sad. But anyways, so we were talking about, you know, why doesn’t the Apple TV support spatial audio? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think one of us maybe was John, but I’m not sure who. It was me. Okay, the one time I assumed it was John and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was wrong. Marco had said, hey, if you twist the iPad, it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make the sound sound like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it’s still. Oh, that was John.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re right the first time. I was right. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was saying the things that were wrong and John was saying the things that were right, shocker.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I was also wrong. So here’s the problem. The example I gave was like, hey, if you move the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John from side to side, but in reality, when I did this test, I was moving my head because who moves the iPad? So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John continue with the follow-up here to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey clarify how it actually works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so John was saying, you know, if you twist the iPad to keep your head stationary, then the sound will move, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually not correct. So here’s the feedback from Guy. Spatial audio is not supposed to move the sound based on you moving the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone or iPad. It’s supposed to move the sound depending on the movement of your head, which is detected by the gyro on the AirPods Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or AirPods Max. Says Guy, I still don’t quite get why it can’t be done on the Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has nothing to do with the U1. There’s even an API for headphone motion. We’ll put a link in the show notes. As
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far as Guy knows, It doesn’t use Bluetooth low energy at all to estimate motion. It is all based on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the initial position and the relative movement of the gyro in the earbuds or headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We heard this from a lot of people because, because I was speculating last week that maybe the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is on an Apple TV is that that’s too far of a distance to have precise positioning between the headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Apple TV device itself. And then we, yeah, we heard from a lot of people that basically it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter at all because the way spatial audio works, it doesn’t know or care where the device is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It merely, like, when you hit play, whatever position your head is in, it considers you looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the device. So it just assumes you’re looking forward. And then, when it’s adjusting the position
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the audio as you move your head, it’s only adjusting it based on the zero point from wherever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your head was when you hit play. And then, apparently, if you move your head and then don’t move it back, like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you swivel your whole chair around, it will slowly pan the audio to be back in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco front of you again. So it seems like it’s entirely just based on gyroscope and accelerometer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so therefore it’s entirely within the headphones to detect what position your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head is in, and so therefore it shouldn’t matter what the source device is, as long as it supports the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side of this from the device side, which Apple TV theoretically should.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if maybe the previous Apple TVs weren’t fast enough to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of audio computation in real time, but that probably is not the reason either because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio computation is pretty fast to do on pretty much any hardware from the last decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, I have a quick question with regard to that. So I did some networking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rejiggering, which we’ll talk about probably in the after show. And I was doing a speed test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using the Bespoke Speed Test app on my Apple TV. And let me remind you, my Apple TV was the 1080 Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I, and I never upgraded once the 4K Apple TV existed. So this is like a five-year-old Apple TV or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that at this point. And I was doing a speed test and I topped out at like 95
⏹️ ▶️ Casey megabits a second. And I didn’t spend the time to look into it, but it occurred to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that isn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabit connection on there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s not. It is on the 4K models, but on the HD and earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models of Apple TV, those were 100 megabit ports on the ethernet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel a little bit better because for a minute there I was like, what the crap?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Why is this not working properly? And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after a moment I was like, oh, wait, wait, wait. It’s really weird that it’s topping out at a hundred.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, right. So anyway, thank you for clearing that up. I feel much better.
iMac reviews are out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, as we record this, it was yesterday that the 24-inch iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reviews, the embargo, dropped, so we started getting reviews. There were a lot of good ones, of course. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoy Jason Snell’s, and there were a couple of tidbits in here that were really interesting that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t really know or realize. First of all, and this was discussed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Upgrade as well, in order to set up Touch ID on the Bluetooth keyboards, apparently you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pair the keyboard’s Touch ID with the Mac by double-clicking the iMac’s power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button, which that’s fine. It’s just what a weird thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it’s okay. I’m not saying it’s bad. It just struck me as so peculiar. And then once you set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it up, it’s like a laptop, but to set it up, you have to double click the power button, which I thought was just the funniest thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It makes sense for like just a hardware handshake that someone can’t pair it with your Mac remotely. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re working in an office and some malicious person pairs it with your Mac unbeknownst to you, and now they can authenticate as you or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. You know, that don’t make sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does make sense. It’s just funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another thing that I saw in a lot of the reviews that I thought was neat. So we already talked about when we, when these machines released, all the different
⏹️ ▶️ John matching things, the accessories of course match the color of the, you know, the keyboard, the track
⏹️ ▶️ John pad, the mouse, whatever you get match the color of the thing. The power cord is color matched.
⏹️ ▶️ John The little USB-C to lightning cable that they give you, apparently give you with the Mac is also color matched.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, all those cables are braided, which I’m heavily in favor of, you know, when I was putting together my Mac Pro system, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for black braided cables. People wondering why, why do you care about braided? Is it just a fashion trend? The reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I care about it is because I find the braided cables less likely to sort of get permanent,
⏹️ ▶️ John like permanent bends or kinks in them. You know, if you get like a plastic cable and it comes out of the box and you kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of unwind it to try to make it straight, but the bends that were in it from it being packed in the box are still there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Braided cables don’t retain their bends as much. So if it comes wrapped in a
⏹️ ▶️ John circle wrapped around something when you unwind it, it sort of relaxes and lays flat and I find that
⏹️ ▶️ John a nicer experience. And there is an aesthetic preference one way or the other as well, but mainly
⏹️ ▶️ John I want it because they don’t kink and I just feel like they feel nicer. So anyway, braided stuff comes with this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some things that we didn’t know until people got them, I mean we kind of know from the marketing copy and marketing
⏹️ ▶️ John images that they all come with desktop backgrounds that match the colors. So if you buy a yellow one, you get like a yellow background, you buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John red one, you get a red background. we know those backgrounds are like zoomed in portions of the Hello logo, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s even more to it than that. So you get stickers, and if you get one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs that is not the silver one, you get two stickers, and they’re different
⏹️ ▶️ John colors. One sticker is the color of the back of the Mac, and one sticker is the color of the front. But of course, the silver
⏹️ ▶️ John one is the same color front and back, so if you get a silver one, you just get one sticker, and it’s just silver, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, when you, apparently when you first boot the thing, it has like an intro movie. This is the thing that Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS X used to do after install for a couple of years, a couple of different releases. You would boot Mac OS X for
⏹️ ▶️ John the first time and it would show like this welcome video with the word welcome flying at you in a bunch of languages or some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John shiny Apple logo with a light behind it or a star field. Like they were just quick time movies that they would play, but it was kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of fun. These show a little hello intro movie where it sketches out the script hello from the original Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever with the colors. And then once you’re into the Mac, if you go into system
⏹️ ▶️ John preferences in general, you’ll see that each Mac, depending on what color the Mac is,
⏹️ ▶️ John comes with a configured highlight color that matches the Mac. And the color is
⏹️ ▶️ John called this Mac. So like, what color do you want the selection to be? When you know when you select text
⏹️ ▶️ John and it puts like a colored background behind the text because you were selecting it, that color is color matched
⏹️ ▶️ John to whatever color your Mac is. So you get the color match desktop background, of course the highlight color, You know, the highlight
⏹️ ▶️ John color being, if a button is not silver but is instead a color, is it a blue color, red, that matches
⏹️ ▶️ John your thing as well, and the highlight color matches it. So it’s really, you know, lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of cute niceties to really complete the theming. These are things that, you know, individual
⏹️ ▶️ John users could have always done, but the fact that it comes that way out of the box really just adds to the, you know, the fun
⏹️ ▶️ John experience, right? Now the intro movie, I’m hoping there’s no bug where the intro movie will constantly play because an
⏹️ ▶️ John intro movie like that is delightful, the literal very first time you take the thing out of the box and start it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I probably don’t want to see that movie again. So I’m assuming it shows once and then disappears.
Gasoline stabilizers (really)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, we also have information about gasoline stabilizers, because that’s what you thought you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were getting when you turned into the Axvental Tech
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this is a very important episode. Last time I had to tell people, people who don’t watch tons of movies about the
⏹️ ▶️ John end of the world, who didn’t realize that gas goes bad, that it doesn’t last forever. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John leave gas in a gas tank for a couple years, don’t expect to step into that car and start it. It’s not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. And why? What happens to the gas, right? Well, I say it goes bad, but, you know, there’s some chemical process takes place, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John involving oxidation or something. But a lot of people wrote in to say, well, all you need to do is buy
⏹️ ▶️ John some gasoline stabilizer. In fact, I here in insert remote state
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere in the United States use gasoline stabilizer in my insert, you know, lawn equipment
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So it will still be good the next year. So I had to look up what the expectations
⏹️ ▶️ John are for gas stabilizers. And here’s what I found. Depending on the product, the stabilizer can increase gasoline
⏹️ ▶️ John shelf life to between one and three years. Stabilizers work best when you mix them with new gasoline. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John ineffective at slowing down the degradation of old gas, and they can’t return contaminated gas to working order.” So,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it seems like the apocalypse is happening, hurry up and put the stabilizer in all of the tanks
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the cars that you can reach, because if you wait six months for the apocalypse to have happened,
⏹️ ▶️ John the stabilizer is not going to bring that gas back. And even with stabilizer, five years
⏹️ ▶️ John into the apocalypse, any gas that’s out there’s gonna be no good so I really hope you’ve worked on you know what is it
⏹️ ▶️ John is it barter town gas town I don’t know something from one of the Mad Max movies where you’ve somehow got
⏹️ ▶️ John a refinery working again otherwise no gasoline for you.
Sponsor: AfterShokz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored by Aftershocks and their trick new open comm headset.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine this. Say you’re, I don’t know, working from home a lot these days. But imagine you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to be aware of what’s going on around you. Maybe your kid needs help with virtual school. Maybe your dog is ringing the bell to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let out. Perhaps you’re running outdoors and want to, I don’t know, know if a car is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run you over. Maybe you plain just don’t find the idea of cleaning gunk out of your earbuds once a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a terribly enjoyable pastime. I don’t blame you. Aftershocks can solve all of that for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They use their Straight From The Future bone conduction technology so your ears are completely free.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m here to tell you about the OpenComm, which is Aftershocks’ new headset designed specifically for efficient communication
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey We all know what it’s like to be on all day Zoom calls, and don’t worry, Aftershocks’ OpenComm has you covered.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I took a couple of calls with the OpenComm, and nobody was any the wiser. They all thought I was using my actual phone.
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Spatial Audio for music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So we spoke earlier about spatial audio and this week Apple announced snake oil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get us in
⏹️ ▶️ John so much trouble. Well, no, because snake oil, they sell you, but this you get for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it’s not snake oil. There you go. Thanks, John. Problem solved. I’ll call more of a placebo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, placebo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for music people. Here you go, everyone. No, I have thoughts about this, obviously, but nonetheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s try to stick to some facts. So… You listen to vinyl. Apple Music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is adding spatial audio lossless and lossless recordings at no extra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cost sometime next month. The quick executive summary of this is that spatial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio with Dolby Atmos will be arriving in June. Apparently, it will be the default
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for any headphones or headsets that have have an H1 or W1 chip,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I have a question here and we can get back to it in a second, but does that include the original AirPods?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I didn’t think they were like my AirPods, my non-pro AirPods could do spatial audio. So I must be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confused, but we’ll come back to that in a second. The entire iTunes catalog will eventually go lossless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, I shouldn’t have said that actually, it’s not the iTunes catalog, it’s the Apple Music catalog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So iTunes Match and purchases will not get lossless audio, only Apple music,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all of this is at no additional cost, which is pretty cool. So if you are the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of person who thinks you can detect the difference between lossless and compressed audio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I have a bridge I can sell you, but also you can have some great new stuff to listen to in June.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s really exciting. Tell me, first of all, before we argue about whether or not this really is snake oil, tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how is it that I can listen to these with my second generation, but otherwise old and busted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods? because I can’t do anything else with spatial audio,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you? As we established, all you need for spatial audio is accelerometers in your earphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agreed, but I could swear, and it doesn’t really matter, so I’ll let it go, but I could swear when all the spatial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio stuff came out, that was only AirPods Pro, I thought. Maybe I’m wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if maybe the original AirPods, they have the accelerometers to detect those terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap gestures where you break your ear, but I wonder if they don’t have a gyroscope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first couple iPhones had only accelerometers, and then they added a gyroscope somewhere around the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 3GS or 4, or somewhere around there, and that made the precision of the motion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking significantly better. And so I wonder if they need that precision in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give spatial audio good accuracy, and maybe the gyro is only in the AirPods Pro and the AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s a knowledge-based article that R. Mori found in the chat, and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link in the show notes, and says listen with spatial audio for AirPods Pro and AirPods Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s gotta be a gyro thing, or maybe like a CPU speed kind of thing, who knows. But anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s useful to talk about these two things separately. There is spatial audio with Dolby
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Atmos, whatever that is, you know, spatial audio, and then there’s lossless. Those are two very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. They’re announcing them at the same time, there’s a lot of press about both, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, frankly, I don’t think either of them ever really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to become a meaningful thing. That being said, there is demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them. You know, spatial audio. This is not the first time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the music industry has tried to release some kind of surround sound music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco format. I think this will probably be the most widely used one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the reason why they haven’t really gone anywhere in the past is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not really a lot of of benefit to it most of the time. You know, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about what people expect from their music, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music is mixed in such a way that it would sound kind of like you’re at a concert and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the singer is like panned right in the center, dead center, exactly between left and right. It doesn’t sound like the singer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is off to one side. You might have some instruments that are panned a little bit left or a little bit right, but for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most part you’re hearing stuff mostly right in front of you. And the way audio is mixed, the way music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is mixed, it’s kind of like you are standing in front of a concert,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like listening to the concert in really good seats. Like that’s usually the way it’s positioned in the mix and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way it’s expected to be played. And so what studios and artists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to start doing, if they haven’t already, is to start making surround sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mixes, basically, for their spatial audio versions of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music. The thing is, again, we’ve had this before. We’ve had this about, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly every 10 years for like the last 50 years, something like that. Like, we’ve had things like this before. We’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other music formats that have had multi-channel surround audio capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What usually happens is you play it, you listen to like one or two songs, you know, maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, consume some illegal substances and listen to some songs and you’re like, whoa, this is really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you don’t listen to it anymore because it’s kind of a gimmick. it’s kind of like 3D TV. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a fun gimmick for like two seconds. You listen to the handful of things that are mastered that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you just go back to listening to stereo because that sounds normal to you. I think this is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be more successful, as I said, than the previous attempts at surround formats, in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s not gonna require people to significantly buy into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new hardware. You know, if you don’t already have the headphones that do it, you’re gonna need to get those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a lot of people are buying AirPods Pro and AirPods Max anyway. So many people are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to already have the equipment to do that. I would also suspect that any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future like AirPods nothing revision, which has been rumored to happen at any minute now for like the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year, whatever the next version of the base AirPods will be, will probably also support this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the chances are pretty good on that, I think. So eventually, if not already, there will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a large install base that can kind of try this for free. And so I think it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have way more consumption than previous attempts have, where you might have had to like, you know, buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a DVD audio player or something like that and set up surround sound speakers in a living room. Like no one really did that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this might have some benefit there, but I think it’s gonna prove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly to be a gimmick. And it might be a fun gimmick. I’d start to say they shouldn’t do it. They already had everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in place to do it. So it’ll be a fun gimmick, especially for the, you know, the substance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crowd. but I don’t think it’s going to become a big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in terms of scope, just to put this in contrast of the Lostless, which we’re gonna talk about in a second, they’re doing all 75
⏹️ ▶️ John million of their tracks, whereas with Spatial Audio, they say we’ll start with thousands. So
⏹️ ▶️ John thousands is not nothing, but 75 million versus thousands gives you an idea of
⏹️ ▶️ John how likely will you be to find a Spatial Audio track
⏹️ ▶️ John that is also a song that you actually wanna listen to versus you just playing with the feature. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, whereas lossless, it’s just, you know, it will be an option for you for everything in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Music Library.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’d be shocked if the Stroke 9 song, Not Nothing, was actually part of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, good to know. By the way, real-time follow-up, Steve Trout and Smith points out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that perhaps spatial audio for audio is possible with the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods, but not spatial audio for video. I’m not sure why that delineation would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meaningful, but I think he’s right, because if you look at this press release, it says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Music will automatically play Dolby Atmos tracks on all AirPods and Beats headphones with an H1 or a W1 chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, cool. There you go. I don’t get it, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Either way, it’s gonna be a whole lot of people who can play it, and so that’s good. Sure, sure. And if there’s ever been a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for surround sound mixed audio to take off, this is it. Like, this is a way better chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it’s ever had before, but I’m still not optimistic that it’s gonna become a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s definitely a neat party trick, you know, from time to time. It was, I feel like it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar to surround sound when that was still a unique and novel thing. Like I remember vividly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting in the LaserDisc for Top Gun when I was not terribly old. I don’t know if I would say I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a kid, but I was certainly not an adult. I would put in the LaserDisc for Top Gun on, you know, my family’s home theater,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we would use the little, I don’t know if you guys ever saw this, but like there was a jog wheel on the remote control. I think we’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this on the show. And you would go frame by frame on the LaserDisc, and you know, you would do that, and people thought it was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neatest thing ever. And the other thing you do is, you know, you would have the, you would listen to the planes go over your head and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind you. And when you’ve never heard surround sound in a house before, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind blowing. And, you know, we had some super audio CDs back in the day, and I think HD CDs back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was, it was a very neat party trick that ultimately didn’t amount to anything. I would suspect that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, you’re exactly right, Marco, that this is going to be certainly more adopted than most equivalents that we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried, like you said, every 10 years or so. but I don’t think this is going to be more than just an e-party trick personally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, the LaserDisc, for any of you out there who are not too familiar with the LaserDisc format,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fascinating. Like, it does not work the way you think it does. If you’re thinking of a giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CD that has digital video encoded on it, no, that’s not what it is. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video is encoded in analog, yet read from a laser. Trust me, read into it, it’s pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wasn’t there a technology connections on this? I feel like there was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there was more than one, but yes, that’s a good place to start.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the only way Marco knows about any technology that’s before his time, is technology
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco connections.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew about it before that, but yeah, check out, we’ll link to that in the show notes, check out that video, but it’s, yeah, the way Laserdisc works is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fascinating for like modern nerds to look back on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is pretty cool. I loved Laserdisc at the time though. Well, it was great until you had to either wait for it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change the head to get to the other side of the disc or pop the damn thing out and flip it yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, those were the days. Sorry.
High-res and lossless audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let me, I would like to talk to both of you, particularly Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this lossless audio thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been waiting all week for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. And so let me get out like my quick thoughts and then I promise I’ll shut up and let you go on a tear for half an hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this is one of those scenarios that I’m trying to be more conscious of as I get older, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I’m doing like a reverse that’s fine, or maybe it’s a that’s fine for Casey on a reverse that’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Casey. But basically, I don’t think that I can tell the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lossless audio and compressed audio, and I’ve not done like the proper A-B testing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever. Like I’ll be the first to tell you this is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco unscientific. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pronounced ab testing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ab testing. I haven’t done any ab testing. I’ve done a lot of crunches, but no ab testing. And so anyways, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be that my quote unquote testing methodologies are broken, that I would totally believe that. It could be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t listened to good source material. I totally believe that. It could be the stereo or whatever that I’m listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this stuff on is crap. And I would believe that, but there are people in my life and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including me in certain capacities, but certainly there are people in my life that have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely phenomenal stereos and I’ve heard them and I’ve heard great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compressed music on those stereos and great lossless stuff on those stereos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I really don’t want to get into the vinyl conversation, but generally speaking, I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t tell the difference. And so that’s why I’m snarking about snake oil and all that. And I think that I’m probably being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unfair because I’m probably asserting what is true for me to be true
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for everyone, which isn’t really fair of me. So I, I’m curious to hear you justify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, why this is so important? Because I can hear how God awful compressed like XM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey radio is because that is the pits. Oh, that’s the worst. But, but I can’t hear generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, I can’t really tell the the difference between a well-compressed, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, you know, a 96 kilobit or whatever, you know, like 120, 256 kilobit MP3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t really tell the difference between that and a CD. And I’ve tried, it’s been a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’ve tried and I can’t tell the difference. So Marco, tell me, am I just missing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the boat here? Are my ears too terrible to understand? Or what’s the-
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you just found it. You’re old now, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John go. The hearing is going and going fast, But anyway, go ahead. Sorry, what was that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, so you’re not wrong, largely. So here’s the thing, and I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are familiar with my points of view on this, I’m gonna surprise you on parts of this. So here we go. Okay, so first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the human ear cannot hear the difference for anything that represents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequencies above roughly 20 kilohertz. Even like young kids
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who have perfect hearing, who haven’t had any high frequency loss yet, you can’t hear above 20 kilohertz. That’s just how our ears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were built. There’s also limits on the, oh, and anyway, sampling theory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That means that you can perfectly represent the human hearing range, a frequency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range, within the 44.1 kilohertz range of CD audio. That’s one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they chose a range in that, or a frequency sampling rate in that range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Secondly, the 16-bit side of CD audio refers to how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precise the numbers are that you’re storing to represent the amplitude of the signal, that affects the dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range. What’s like the loudest versus the quietest? What’s the range of that in decibels? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dynamic range you can store in 16-bit, even if you ignore the way dithering works, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you shouldn’t, because it’s complicated and it adds more effective range. Again, we’re gonna link again to this wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video by Monty over at Ziff. This is one of the, I think it’s the place that invented the AugVorbis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco format. There’s a wonderful video and blog post series explaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why you don’t need more than 44.1 kilohertz and 16-bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio to represent the entire like, and that’s CD quality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to represent the entire like human hearing range in practice. There’s lots of reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why you don’t, but for the purposes of this conversation, the reality is anything that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is higher than that sampling rate of 44.1 or more precise than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the 16-bit samples that we’re storing there, that’s beyond the realm of human
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hearing. That being said, things are more complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there are certain areas where the differences in these things matter. So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have all sorts of like crazy ideas about like, they picture the sound wave as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the stair step thing with the samples. And they say, well, if you add more samples, the sound wave will become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smoother, and therefore it will better represent the source audio. In practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for lots of reasons that I mostly don’t understand about electrical engineering and stuff, that’s not how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DACs work. And in practice, you can perfectly represent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that full curvature of those sound waves, and most DACs will approximately output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the perfect sound wave. Like, it will be way more perfect than you think, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with way fewer samples than you think, because of the way DACs work, because of sampling theory and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, this is all very well covered in this, in the Zipf.org video that we will link to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also DAC is digital to analog converter. So if you think about it, these are being stored as bits and bytes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these audio files, but eventually it needs to be vibrating a cone to make a sound. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, the DAC, the digital to analog converter, that’s what gets you to something that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play on a speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also a cone, come on, man, vibrating a film between two sheets of magnets. That’s the way to go now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, yeah. Anyway, so that’s the topic for another day, maybe. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, we don’t need more bits or a faster sampling rate than 44
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kilohertz to represent everything we can hear. But it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more complicated than that in some ways in practice. So there’s a couple of very small differences in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way that the DAC works, where if you have a higher sampling rate than 44.1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain parts of the DAC’s filtering stage can be made simpler. Cheaper components can still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound better because they won’t need as good of a filter or as sophisticated of a filter at that stage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, most of that is way above my head, but I do know that’s a thing roughly based on how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the reality though is that most of this doesn’t really matter. What matters a heck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a lot more than the format that you are encoding the audio in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is how the audio is mastered in the first place. Theoretically, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should, in regular audio that we’ve had all this time, even compressed down to MP3s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and AACs, we should be able to have really amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high quality audio that you can’t tell the difference from super high res lossless in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular 44.1 CD approximating MP3s and AACs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In practice though, sometimes you get some kind of new format or some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of new high resolution release and it does sound noticeably better. But that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the format. That’s because usually in that case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve remastered or taken another recording of the audio and they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made it a better mastering for modern sensibilities and modern equipment. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you might they might have they might have like increased dynamic range compared to like the super compressed loudness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco war of the 90s and 80s you know they might have you know just mastered out on more modern equipment, they might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have gone back to the original recordings and the original like analog tapes and re- you know remastered them and remixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and everything. That happens a lot and if they happen to do that to an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco album and remaster it and re-release it in a high-res format, it will probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound better than the original because they remastered it, but not because it’s in the high-res format.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you take something that sounds really great as that’s a high-res audio format
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you down sample that down to 44.1 kilohertz and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 16-bit and encode it as a 256 K mp3 I bet it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will sound exactly the same to almost anybody because the reason it sounds better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because they did a better recording or a better mixing job to accommodate what people want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days with modern equipment and modern sensibilities and everything else especially people who are going to listen very critically on high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equipment. They master it for that, but if you take those high-resolution files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and resample them down to CD quality, nobody will tell the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m telling you, nobody will tell the difference. But because it does sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better, because of the mastering differences in some cases, there is demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this. The demand is real, and you know there’s entire services like Tidal and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Neil Young’s Pano and you know there’s there’s been inside entire you know things based on this there’s a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world of audio equipment there’s a whole world of high-end DACs high-end headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end little audio players many of these things of which I’ve owned or currently own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s this whole world of all this high-res fancy DAC stuff and a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco group of people who swear on lossless and being required and everything and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing is, even if they are not scientifically getting a benefit from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, there is a massive role of demand here. And Apple Music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty important to Apple. It’s a pretty big part of their services play and they care a lot about music and it’s always been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a, you know, a cornerstone of the company. And this is an area in which other streaming services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are competing with them and have been competing with them. And I don’t think Apple wanted to be left behind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think they wanted to use their power in the industry to say, all right, we’re gonna do this great thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if there is not much scientific benefit to it, and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get to the Bluetooth question in a second, even if there’s not much benefit, the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there is demand. There’s a lot of people out there who buy this stuff, who think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re getting something that sounds amazing, because they are getting something that sounds amazing. Why it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing is not super relevant to them. And this is the thing, like audiophiles,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m talking about the people, not the, you know, blobs of data. Audio files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really do enjoy and hear that quality regardless of why it’s there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it’s there doesn’t matter really at all. They, they hear that quality and part of that quality is the mastering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, that’s a huge part of it. Part of it is that they’re listening. Usually I’m pretty good equipment. That’s the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it. And, and bigger than both of those things though, is that they’re paying attention when they listen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you tell yourself, I’m getting something really special here, I’m downloading this giant file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s going to be the most amazing remastering of American beauty I’ve ever heard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is going to be great. And so you put it on and it’s super lossless and there’s billions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of bits flying at you from all directions and you’re really paying attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re listening attentively and you’re telling yourself, first of all, you’re telling yourself, is going to sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great because I did all these things and bought all this stuff to make it sound great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you are paying attention, you’re making it a ritual, you’re sitting down, you’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to listen to this and I’m going to pay attention. This isn’t just going to be something where I shout at a voice cylinder and it plays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the background while I do something else. I’m going to make this a thing I’m paying attention to. So you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sit there and you’re going to listen really closely and you’re going to say, oh my god, I’ve heard, I’ve never heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the background cymbals there before. a French horn tucked back there somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hearing things I’ve never heard before!” It’s not because you had more bits or a smoother
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waveform, it’s because you’re listening attentively. And that’s great! That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great way to listen to music! And you really can discover new things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you never discovered before because you weren’t really listening attentively and really making it an experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for yourself. But you can get that same quality from a CD, if you can still find one. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s you can this the CD can do the exact same thing. In the digital world, a well encoded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mp3 can do the same thing. There’s nothing wrong with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think it’s not right to look down on people for like, oh you’re only listening at 44.1 well like mine’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound way better than yours. At the same time, people like me who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know scientific skeptics of the higher-end stuff, we shouldn’t tell those people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that their opinion that it sounds great is wrong. They might be wrong about why it sounds great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they are experiencing something great. And so I think, you know, when something like Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big thing happens like this, where they’re gonna do all this lossless stuff, that’s great, you know, good for them. Again, there is demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. If people are demanding this, and Apple provides it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people think they’re getting value out of it, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who am I to say that that’s wrong? If they start making scientific claims about why it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, I’ll argue that for sure, but if they say this sounds great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they think they’re getting their value from it, fine. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re looking to upgrade your setup, if you’re looking to make things sound better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and really get that experience out of music, First of all, you might not need to. Again, if you just sit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down attentively and listen to something and just pay attention to it, you’ll get a lot of value out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just by itself, even in your crappy AirPods. Like that’s, you can listen on anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you’re really paying attention, you really will hear a lot, and it’ll be a nice experience. Oh, and by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, that’s entirely why people like vinyl. That’s, side note that’s gonna get us all the email, that’s why vinyl
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds so good to so many people. It’s because they are, they have to by nature of the format,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by how much work it takes to listen to a record, they have to be attentive. They have to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole thing. They have to make it an experience. And they put it on and it sounds good. Not to mention there’s nostalgia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco involved and everything. But the reason why it sounds good is because it’s an experience and they’re paying attention to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re telling themselves this is gonna sound good. That’s why it sounds so good.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also the vinyl audio profile of not being able to have too much bass. And there’s that background hiss that
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody loves. And the quote unquote warmth. Like there is actually a sound profile to vinyl
⏹️ ▶️ John defined by the limitations of the media that people latch onto is that’s the way I want songs to sound.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, it’s not distortion, it’s warmth. It’s not limited frequency range and incredibly limited dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range. It’s warmth. Yeah, so anyway. And of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, there’s mastering differences and everything. So anyway, this is great for people who want it. If you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want your stuff to sound good, buy a decent pair of headphones. You’ll get way more out of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you will out of like getting a 182 kilohertz DAC or something like that. Like don’t, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at your audio setup, the DAC should be the last thing you upgrade. Like once you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco burned all your money on first, the transducers, whether it’s speakers or headphones, that’s the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important thing. And then a very far distant second of that is the amp that’s powering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, only to the point where you need enough power to power them. Otherwise, differences in amps don’t matter that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then yeah, the DAC should be a very distant third. But the very first thing you should do is go try to find a better recording
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the things that you like. Because that sounds better on every headphone and on every speaker, and including your AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, in the world of Bluetooth, by the way, which has been noted here, when audio is transmitted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your iPhone or whatever to your Bluetooth headphones, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not transmitted in analog. Your Bluetooth headphones have little tiny built-in amps and decks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the way that the audio is transmitted from the device to the headphone is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also not lossless. It’s compressed. Early, early Bluetooth headphones had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a terrible compression scheme called A2DP that was the worst, but Bluetooth headphones back then were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also such garbage that, you know, you couldn’t really hear the difference because the headphones, like the actual speaker drivers in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones were such garbage that it didn’t really matter. As headphone design has gotten better and as higher-end headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have gone Bluetooth thanks to market pressure, we’ve had better codecs. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff over in like the Sony
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Android world, I forget what, oh, the aptX and that whole thing, I forget what the newer ones are called.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Over in iOS land, AAC, the codec, you know, like the MP3 successor kind of thing, AAC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is usually the codec used to transmit audio from your devices to the headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what bitrate they use, it’s probably some kind of, you know, maybe it’s like 256k constant bitrate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably Probably something like that. And that would be fine to be totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transparent to almost anybody, almost any of the time. But when you’re listening over Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re already getting it compressed. It’s already going to be very limited in terms of it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s not going to be past 44 or 48 kilohertz in all likelihood. It’s not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than 16 bit. And the fact is that’s all fine because if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are the kind of human who somehow has superhuman hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who can somehow hear the difference with frequencies that literally aren’t there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they were cut out in the mastering stage. But somehow, if you can somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear the frequencies that aren’t really there, and if you can somehow hear the dynamic range that’s like more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than like 120 decibels of dynamic range or something that you can get from 16 bits, like if you can somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be way beyond that, you’re not gonna hear that difference through your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPods. or probably any headphones or speakers that you own. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you are in a laboratory, an amazing speaker design laboratory, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably wouldn’t even have the equipment that could even represent the additional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differences in this to a point where you would notice them. And that’s even if you had the amazing ridiculous hearing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back off all the lossless stuff. It’s not what you think it is, but well-recorded masters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are. And if this is what it takes to get studios to give us well-recorded masters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, that’s fine. I’ll take it. Otherwise, if you want to enjoy your music, just pay attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. And that does wonders.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I do wonder about the scenario. It’s not clear to me what they would do in this case. So you’ve got your
⏹️ ▶️ John lossless audio, which as you noted, like if depending on the recording may or may not have been remastered. But let’s say
⏹️ ▶️ John it was remastered. Let’s say the original version of this came out in the 90s and is super massively compressed. So everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is the same loudness and that loudness is loud. and they remaster it and they give you one with more dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ John range. So the song actually has quiet parts and loud parts, imagine that. But that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John lossless one, right? And you listen to it with your AirPods, but of course the AirPods, as you noted, the
⏹️ ▶️ John signal going over the air is going to be compressed in AAC. Will they still essentially play
⏹️ ▶️ John the lossless one on your phone and then AAC compress it over the air
⏹️ ▶️ John to your AirPods so that what you will hear is essentially an AAC compressed version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the remastered song with better dynamic range?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. The way I understand it, so whenever people learn that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AAC, the AAC is the codec used to transmit Bluetooth stuff from the iPhone to most of its headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the first questions you ask is things like, where does that conversion happen? Does it pass through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unencoded, or does it transcode it, does it decode it first, and then re-encode it and send it over?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as far as I know, I don’t have this confirmed, but as far as I know, the answer is yes, it does transcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because it’s sending an audio stream of every bit of audio on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The phone might change the audio stream halfway through. It might like duck the music to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ding a notification sound or something or it might have to mix in some other sounds. So I’m pretty sure at all times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s decoding whatever you’re playing and playing it as raw samples through the audio pipeline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it’s encoding it as AAC at the last step on the way to the Bluetooth headphones. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there’s any way to bypass that and send a pure bit stream to the headphones. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that any of this would matter, because you’re not gonna notice those differences ever, if not, certainly not
⏹️ ▶️ John So I mean, the scenario I was getting at was like, because you mentioned like lossless, so
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s the way we get remasters, fine, but lossless has a cost in terms of essentially storage space, because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger, right? There’s a reason we use compression. Oh, they’re massive. Right? And so if all you want, It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I just want the new masters because they’re mastered better because they have more dynamic range because they’re just better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to hear them, but I don’t want to waste the space. It would almost be nice if Apple gave you an option that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know you don’t have headphones that can support this, and we know you don’t even want the storage size. So here is
⏹️ ▶️ John the remastered one in a 256 kilobit AAC. You know what I mean? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John why should you be denied that? Why should you have to flip the switch that says here, please use all my storage
⏹️ ▶️ John space on my phone to get this audio. And by the way, the qualities they give you,
⏹️ ▶️ John the options are for the lossless thing is you get CD quality, which is the first tier of lossless, which is 16 bit, 44 kilohertz,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Then you can also get 24 bit at 48 kilohertz. And then finally, you can get 24 bit at 192 kilohertz, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is the Pano level of stuff. But the 24 bit at 192 kilohertz,
⏹️ ▶️ John not only, you can’t listen to any of these things losslessly on your AirPods or whatever for the reasons we just mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ John but to listen at all, apparently, to the 24 bit, 192 kilohertz, you need a DAC, you need an external DAC?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I guess the phone won’t do that? Yeah, all of Apple’s built-in DACs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top out at 48 kilohertz. And that’s pretty common.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any kind of device that’s not made for audio files, generally the DAC is a 48 kilohertz
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so you do need an external box because then the phone or the Mac or whatever it is that you’re playing it on is just
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna send the digital signal to your DAC and it will be its job to turn it into an analog signal that goes to your headphones. And
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, if you’re thinking, oh, I have AirPods Max, but don’t worry, I won’t use Bluetooth. I’ll just plug it in with the cable and
⏹️ ▶️ John then I’ll get lossless, right? Apparently you won’t. Apple says that no, even when you connect your AirPods Max
⏹️ ▶️ John with a cable, you still don’t get lossless. I guess it’s just sending the same AC
⏹️ ▶️ John compressed message over that wire instead of over Bluetooth in that case. We’ll link to the tweet from it. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is from Apple to Micah Singleton. It says, AirPods Max also won’t support lossless
⏹️ ▶️ John over the lightning cable, the company tells me, the company being Apple. So I wonder if that’s like a software update or a firmware
⏹️ ▶️ John update they can fix or if it’s just a fundamental limitation of the way the AirPods Max are created. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John strange that, I can imagine this being a limitation now, but it seems strange if the hardware is fundamentally
⏹️ ▶️ John incapable of supporting it. The great thing is though, that Apple could just tell everyone that it supports it and no one would know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, because again,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way you could tell is with your magical golden ears or whatever. And speaking of golden ears, we didn’t really touch on this, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we mostly talk about how CD quality is sufficient to, you know, encompass all of human hearing and most of the badness
⏹️ ▶️ John about CDs is bad mastering and so on and so forth. But we all know if we’ve been around for the early days
⏹️ ▶️ John of MP3, it’s not hard, and Casey already said this, it’s not hard to tell the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ John a low bitrate compressed audio file and a lossless CD quality
⏹️ ▶️ John file. Because we know the artifacts that we hear, the sort of crackle and sizzle and weird compression
⏹️ ▶️ John artifacts that we hear when something is heavily, heavily compressed. Back in the Napster days, people were encoding
⏹️ ▶️ John things at very low bitrates because bandwidth was low and disk space was low and things weren’t the way they
⏹️ ▶️ John are now, right? I know I have a bunch of audio files in
⏹️ ▶️ John my iTunes collection, or whatever we’re supposed to call it now, that are not encoded at 256 kilobits.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they’re 128, maybe they’re below 128. And even my old person ears can hear, okay, once you get
⏹️ ▶️ John below 128, especially if it’s MP3, and especially if it was encoded by a bad encoder, I can hear that’s not great,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is one of the reasons why I always like to have things on CD, because
⏹️ ▶️ John then you can always re-rip them in higher quality and that you effectively have the best quality
⏹️ ▶️ John version of that song that was for sale at the time. You know, setting aside remasters, you just want to get the file,
⏹️ ▶️ John uncompressed CD quality audio, 16 bit, 44 kilohertz. And then you have to mangle it a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit to get it onto your little iPod back in the day or whatever, right? And so lossless is not
⏹️ ▶️ John useless to you if what you’re coming from is a 96 kilobit MP3 from, you know, 2002, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John because then that CD quality lossless is a big step up. Now really what you should actually do is just
⏹️ ▶️ John take that CD quality lossless one and recompress it to 256 kilobit, or maybe Apple should do that for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then get the benefit of that. And that’s where I get back to my question of like, what if I want the remaster,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t want the lossless? I wonder if there’ll be a way to, and if these are DRM, no, Apple Music always does DRM.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was so disappointed when I discovered this.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, they’re all DRM.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I was messing with audio files, what was it, probably for the Rectifs episode where we were listening to music. I’m like, great, I’ll just grab
⏹️ ▶️ John this song and I’ll be like, wait a second, what the hell is this song? I thought there’s no more DRM in the iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John store, but there’s DRM on Apple Music, which is so dumb. I don’t understand it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you buy it, you get it without any DRM, but if you subscribe to Apple Music, they put DRM,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same song. So you have to carefully fight with the music app to convince it, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John I purchased this song. Stop giving me the Apple Music version. Oh, here you go, you purchased it? Oh, here
⏹️ ▶️ John is your AAC file with no DRM. I’m assuming it’s literally
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same file as the album music one is just DRM or no DRM? Always pick no DRM. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if these were with no DRM, you could get the loss of the ones locally from album music and then you could just recompress them yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you would have your lossless remastered version of all the songs
⏹️ ▶️ John in a more compact size. I think, you know, what we’re mostly talking about is like who
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell about the lossless one. I think at 256, you know, kilobit,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s probably the limit of adult, of adult or certainly older adult hearing
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re gonna have, you’d really have to know what compression artifacts to look for. Maybe if you have some kind of weird industrial
⏹️ ▶️ John music or something with very unexpected frequency, you know, changes and you knew exactly which artifact
⏹️ ▶️ John to listen to, listen for, you could tell the difference between the uncompressed CD quality and the sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John standard Apple music quality. But I do think that if you’re coming from
⏹️ ▶️ John much, much worse compressed files, there is a benefit to be had to stepping up to this new
⏹️ ▶️ John modern format, which we called the CD. That quality of audio that was available
⏹️ ▶️ John in whatever, 1980 something. We took it, I remember railing against this maybe on Hypercritical,
⏹️ ▶️ John we took a step backwards when we all switched to MP3 for its convenience because we had to smush
⏹️ ▶️ John the files down so small that the compression artifacts were there for anyone to hear.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was a step backwards, and I’m glad we’re sort of stepping forwards from that now. I still think it is a waste
⏹️ ▶️ John of everyone’s bandwidth and disk space or storage space or whatever to actually be storing lossless
⏹️ ▶️ John files, especially if they’re 24 bit 192 kilohertz. But hey, that’s what floats your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s kind of like a good summary of this whole thing. This is not going to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound better for the reasons you think, and it is a massive waste of space and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there is demand for it, and if that’s what you want, great. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t try to tell me why it sounds better, because you’re probably wrong. But if you enjoy it, enjoy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, and speaking of that, there’s nothing in this press release that I’ve seen that particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John makes any promises about remastering. Because they do say, oh, all 75 millions of tracks will be lossless. That
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me think they’re just taking, because surely they have the lossless versions of these before they compress them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So that makes me think, unless otherwise specified, when you just say, please give me the lossless
⏹️ ▶️ John version of this, It is literally the exact same song, not a remaster, nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco changed about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it. It’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ John exact same song, but we didn’t run it through our normal compression thing. Is it various times I think they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John upped the quality of what’s available, you know, to purchase and also through Apple Music. And they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John recompressing their same lossless masters that they had in this song. So I’m not sure how many, if any
⏹️ ▶️ John of these things will actually be remastered or whether that will be distinguished in the increasingly broken
⏹️ ▶️ John interface that is the Apple Music application.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, and this is part of the reason why I mean, look, they’ve been doing remastering of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for years. I mean, there was the old like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John master iTunes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like and they’ve, you know, they still like, I don’t know how much Apple is directly involved, but they still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, you know, there’s lots of stuff all over Apple Music and the iTunes store that is like, you know, remastered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versions of older stuff that, you know, that’s that’s That’s been a thing for a long time now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, that I think, I think this was actually a fairly easy thing for them to deliver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a feature because they already had so much in place. They already had their own lossless codec, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making a lossless audio codec is not hard because it’s a pretty simple math to do it. And there’s extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diminishing returns in space to do anything complicated. So you’re basically doing like, you know, encoding like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the difference from one sample to the next as the smallest number of bits you can. that’s basically every lossless format,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it. Because anything else is a waste of computational resources. And they all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco max out at like roughly 50% average compression ratio. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this for them is not that big of a deal. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other sad part about lossless stuff is that while there is demand for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it from a lot of people, they think they’re gonna really need it and know the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s off by default. And the reason why it’s off by default is because it’s huge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in the reality of the world, people are gonna try it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like, if they know to even go turn it on in settings, they’re gonna try it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re gonna see, oh, that burned a ton of my data or that burned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of my battery and or a ton of my disk space. And then they’re gonna turn it off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of those things that people think they want a lot more than they actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end up wanting or using. Because in practice, it’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more ridiculous. I even, like when I buy my live fish concerts from livefish.net,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was one season that they did, like one tour they did where I pre-ordered it. They offer every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco download in FLAC and in high-res FLAC, and then also just in MP3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And usually I would just buy the MP3s. I think they’re like 256K, I think constant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit rate, but anyway, they’re great MP3s, and I’ve never heard a difference. Anyway, there was one tour where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought, oh, I’m so into this, and this was like, years back before I knew better, and I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna buy this one in FLAC, really treat myself, and I’ll start doing that. And it took up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much disk space. They were so big that I ended up doing what John said earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ended up just recompressing them all as MP3s, and just like burning all the flax to like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Blu-ray disc and putting it in the closet and fretting about it. Because like I really didn’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or want the reality of what that meant in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, speaking of Blu-ray though, this is another, regardless of the
⏹️ ▶️ John merits of this particular feature and the trade-offs of it, this is another decision Apple has made with sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of the march of technology and data formats that is really beneficial to their brand.
⏹️ ▶️ John They did it once before when you when they started rolling out 4k movies and iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John by basically saying, hey, if you purchase this movie five years ago, and you purchase the HD version, guess what, now you
⏹️ ▶️ John got the 4k version, no extra cost, you don’t have to buy it a second time, right? And here they are with music saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want lossless, it doesn’t cost any more. If you want any of the songs that you have, you know, you subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple Music, and you want to listen to them losses, fine, they’re yours free, it’s all part of your subscription, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John brand builds brand equity that makes people have confidence spending
⏹️ ▶️ John their money on media from Apple because it’s basically saying so far twice,
⏹️ ▶️ John when the format has changed, Apple has not seized that as an opportunity to make us rebuy everything compared to
⏹️ ▶️ John cassette, vinyl, CD, super audio CD, DVD, Blu-ray, where in the physical world,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, for obvious reasons, you had to rebuy everything and it was a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John windfall, like part of the huge amount of money The music industry made it was when everyone was replacing music they had already purchased and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John buying it again on CD. But the magic of the digital download era, you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. There is no physical media. You can actually just say, oh, that movie you bought a long, long time
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, there’s a 4K version now and you’ve got it for free because you paid us for it once and so here you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a smart move in airporn, especially from a company that is currently undergoing some
⏹️ ▶️ John some let’s say brand cache a loss with the ongoing trials and everything else. So
⏹️ ▶️ John good, good move for Apple for rolling this out for free. It’s a strong competitive mood and it makes people
⏹️ ▶️ John feel more confident locking themselves into the Apple ecosystem by buying stuff from them.
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Laptop rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about some hardware rumors. This is obviously ramping up in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ever increasing time, or decreasing time I should say, that we have before WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think we spoke about on the show, or if we did it was only obliquely, that there was apparently a ransomware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leak at a supplier of Apple’s. And so a hacker group called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reval, R-E-V-I-L, had apparently blackmailed the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supplier Quanta and they said, hey, if you don’t pay us a whole ton of money, I think via Bitcoin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then we’re going to start leaking some of the stuff we stole from you. And guess what? They started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaking it. And we don’t know if it’s real or not, but it’s looking good. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. How do we want to approach this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, I think we
⏹️ ▶️ John could just, these are the things mostly we’ve talked about, but like, I think you did a good job of framing this as like, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John real, but who knows, hacker groups demanding ransom, like this could all be fake
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the rumors because in the end, the information here is not new, but assuming they’re real or even
⏹️ ▶️ John close to real, or even if they’re just mock-ups, it gives us a good idea of like visualizing the rumors we had
⏹️ ▶️ John before. And so we’ll start with the MacBook Pro. We talked about this in past shows. The rumor is flatter
⏹️ ▶️ John design, SD card slot, HDMI port, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that we wanted, right? MagSafe coming back. And so whether these are real leaks
⏹️ ▶️ John or just renders of, you know, the information I just gave you,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a good visualization. I’ll put a link in the show notes so you can look at these pictures too. What might this
⏹️ ▶️ John product look like? As we talked on past shows, hey, if it’s got flat sides,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you pick it off the table? Well, the two side view mock-ups show, as we noted in the last time we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, very prominent feet. That’s one way you can solve it. Let’s put some big feet on these suckers. So then,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the sides are flat, but the feet are pretty big, and so you can still get your fingernails under it and lift it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it shows, if these things are so super thin, how do you fit HDMI and SD card slots on
⏹️ ▶️ John there? How tight is it? It’s pretty tight. I mean, I look at the HDMI port and I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s pretty much as thin as you can make anything that still has an HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in the side of it. And then also for the screen, the
⏹️ ▶️ John squared off edges, the screen looks very squared off as well in this picture. It looks like, imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John that the, the tie book, the titanium power book, but with the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a quarter the thickness of the titanium, like it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John almost impossibly thin. And, you know, and because it’s flat sided, it’s not tapered or anything like the current one. It
⏹️ ▶️ John looks, it’s, the aesthetic is kind of working for me as a
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of slab sided notebook that is also impossibly thin that has very prominent
⏹️ ▶️ John feet. Unfortunately, the MagSafe bit is mostly just the line drawing thing and we can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John tell. We can see which hole they’re trying to say is MagSafe and it’s this hole that doesn’t look like any of the other
⏹️ ▶️ John ports, but I can’t really tell how the magnet thing is going to go into
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Where are the magnets? How different is it from the MagSafe we knew before? So many questions,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether we’re gonna still be able to charge with USB-C or whether it will just be MagSafe. But
⏹️ ▶️ John either way, I think these mock-ups based on the rumors, this is a plausible, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a plausible version of those rumors. And, you know, as we said before, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is what we all wanted. Fix the keyboard, put the ports back on the thing, give us back MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, I still sometimes have trouble believing they’re actually gonna do this because it is such a reversal from
⏹️ ▶️ John all their past decisions, but we’ll emphasize again, I think this is the right decision. I really do hope they make a machine
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like this, especially with an amazing ARM processor in it, which we’ll get to in a little bit. I think it will
⏹️ ▶️ John be a great product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I really, you know, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. There sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a lot of smoke around like these new port changes. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so looking forward to this. I mean, you know, so the only real downside is that it’s gonna,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this is correct, it’s gonna lose one of the USB-C ports. But I think, so it’s gonna go down to three USB-Cs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one HDMI, one SD, and a headphone jack and a MagSafe. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where this is going. I think having only three USB-C ports is fine if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need to use one for charging anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really embracing the idea that, look, one of those ports is always just gonna be used for power anyway, so now it literally is only used for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power. Right, and if you also have a built-in HDMI port, which they do, built-in SD card,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is gonna remove a lot of the need for dongles for a lot of people. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little detail that I love, it sure looks like the headphone jack has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved back to the left side. Thank God. Finally, am I right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because as I’ve always harped on, that’s the side it used to be on for a reason that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most headphones where the cable only goes into one side usually it’s the left side. Not to mention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact that the majority of people who use mice next to their laptops are usually using them on the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side because most people are right-handed and the headphone cable coming out on the right side always gets in the way of your mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s lots of good reasons to put it over back to the left it was for years. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, I’m so happy to see these kind of changes. This looks like it’s going to be incredible. I also see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like from the leaked, um, like schematic looking drawing, you can clearly see the area where the inverted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T arrows still remain on the keyboard and you can clearly see a row of function keys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are also bigger. Um, similar to the, to the, um, the MacBook air render rumors, things that we’ll get to in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, it looks like the function key row is full height again, as opposed to being like the weird kind of half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco height that it’s been. So, you know, it looks like the keyboard is still as good as it ever is. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man, this, having all the ports back, I hope this is real. And the more that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes out about it, the more it seems like it is real and it’s gonna be spectacular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I have a question for you guys. I can’t remember if we talked about this when we were talking about the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier. If the trade-off is that you can only charge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via MagSafe, which I don’t think they would do, But if the trade-off is you can only charge via MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I would want that because now I, right, because I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much USB-C stuff in my life. And as an example, like today, I went and worked at a local park and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used this backup battery and hub that I really like, and I’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so what I did was I plugged my laptop into this battery, but then put it in hub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode such that I could also plug my phone into the battery and I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tether to my phone via USB rather than Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or anything, which I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like. And so that was one USB connection, USB-C connection from the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the computer and then the battery also connected to the phone. And I don’t know, I feel like with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C chargers just littering my house, I don’t think I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would want a MagSafe-only lifestyle. I definitely would love the option of MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for sure. And I would give up a port, a USB-C port to get it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I would want to live in a MagSafe exclusive world anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m totally with you on that. You know, the solution is obvious here. It’s called a dongle. Of
⏹️ ▶️ John course, of course. If you get a MagSafe dongle, then you can still use USB-C and all
⏹️ ▶️ John your charging infrastructure will work. It’s very easy to adapt. And the trade-off is, okay, so I don’t have to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a dongle for SD. I don’t have to have a dongle for HDMI, but I do have to have a dongle if I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to fit into the USB charging infrastructure. But again, I think there’s, it doesn’t seem like there’s any particular
⏹️ ▶️ John reason for them not to support it, because even in like USB, being able to charge through a USB-C port,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like it’s intrinsic to their ARM architecture, basically because it comes from the iPad Pro, where
⏹️ ▶️ John that was first introduced, you know, where you could charge something through USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John and have it be an ARM processor. Like, it almost seems like it would take work for them to make them,
⏹️ ▶️ John to make that not work, just because the architecture of all their laptops for so many years has been, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a bunch of USB-C ports and you can charge through any of them. So we’ll see what they actually do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, as Marco pointed out, and the reason I was confused by that thing, you really have to zoom in to see that in this mock-up,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the ports is supposed to be MagSafe, but it is, again, this is just a mock-up and it’s literally just
⏹️ ▶️ John the USB-C size and shape hole. I would imagine that the MagSafe port will not be the exact
⏹️ ▶️ John size and shape of a USB-C port for many good reasons. So I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to be a problem. But yeah, you will have to have some kind of dongle if they make that bad decision. But honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John say they do that and say, okay, it’s just MagSafe only. All of the other things they’re doing right down to
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that I forgot, which Marco had pointed out, which is like, hey, guess what? No touch bar either. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John net-net, it would still be such a massive improvement over the current models. And then you only
⏹️ ▶️ John have one thing to fix in the next three years, instead of fixing the keyboard. Hey, people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like it that you can’t charge through USB-C. So for the next revision of this, let people do that. And now you’re done. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John not a perfect laptop, but basically like the top seven demands of your
⏹️ ▶️ John users have been met. Like it’s a, this is, would be such a turnaround for this product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and it makes me wonder, and I know we’ve talked about this before, so I won’t belabor the point, but it makes me wonder like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what happened to make all this suddenly possible? Like who left? And I know there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an obvious potential answer there, but who left or who got demoted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and promoted and so on and so forth, such that all of a sudden, all of our dreams are coming true.
⏹️ ▶️ John We need more lawsuits to happen so we can get these
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey depositions and discoveries so we can find out, because
⏹️ ▶️ John this court case is nothing about that, but I don’t, and now I don’t really care who proposed what App Store rules
⏹️ ▶️ John and made what deals with Netflix. Now I wanna know why did it take so long to fix the keyboard, and
⏹️ ▶️ John how did someone apparently, as far as we can tell from these rumors, finally win the argument and say, could we make our laptops good again?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Easy there, easy there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And so the next
⏹️ ▶️ John one, we gotta go through this. The next one is a MacBook Air rumor, right? So the MacBook Air we have now,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the M1 MacBook Air, it’s great, it’s an amazing machine, but it is in fact the old MacBook Air with all its insides ripped out
⏹️ ▶️ John and replaced with just amazing new insides and removing all the fans, which is great, but given this new design
⏹️ ▶️ John that we just described and also given the design of the new iMacs, the rumors here
⏹️ ▶️ John are essentially the iMacification of the MacBook Air. So square it all off, give it to us in
⏹️ ▶️ John colors, put Touch ID on the keyboard with the, I mean, it’s already there obviously on the current one, but like making
⏹️ ▶️ John it look like the keyboard on the iMacs where it’s the little white full-size key with the circle in it, right? White
⏹️ ▶️ John bezels around the screen, like whole nine yards. If you look at these mock-ups, you’re like, yep, if someone turned an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John into a MacBook Air-sized computer, it would look like that. I still question
⏹️ ▶️ John the brand identity of MacBook Air in a world where it is not wedge-shaped, but things change
⏹️ ▶️ John and colors can cover up for a lot. And it’s not like this thing isn’t gonna be thin enough because if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the mock-ups anyway, It’s like, again, literally as thin as it can possibly be to fit the port on the side.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the difference is in this case, it appears there’s no HDMI port, but it’s just USB-C. Which
⏹️ ▶️ John again, makes sense for the MacBook Air. But basically, make a flat sided laptop whose flat
⏹️ ▶️ John side is just big enough to fit a USB-C port, and then put an impossibly thin screen
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, put an M1 inside it, give it to us in colors, with a full-size keyboard with an inverted T,
⏹️ ▶️ John with real function keys, and a touch ID on it. And yeah, this seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John a great product. My only question about these mock-ups, and I’m assuming this mock-up is based, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is from John Prosser, we got a rumor monger on YouTube. My only question about
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the bottom view. And I think this is based on the rumors. The
⏹️ ▶️ John rumors are that instead of having four feet on the bottom of this thing, there would be two rubber
⏹️ ▶️ John strips that look like skis. And I can’t for the life of me figure out what the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can guess. I mean, part of it is I think they want to, like, if, if the, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a big if like how accurate these, these renders and mockups are. Um, but part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it might be to give it a little bit more elevation off the desk. You want something a little bit thicker and maybe that, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be weird with feet or maybe with standard feet they would like, they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get hit and fall off more easily. And I don’t know, like to what degree the current feet fall off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice. Um, maybe this is also just a way to increase the reliability of them staying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in there, to just make them bigger and have it be like, you know, two large pieces instead of four little pieces.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s more glue surface area. Like the feet do come off. Like I know from people who work at Apple stores that sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John the feet do come off, they’re just glued on and they’ll just glue new ones on. But in my personal experience, I’ve never lost a foot on an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple laptop. You know, it is just glue. And I know a lot of people like their Apple watches delaminate
⏹️ ▶️ John from the glue and that’s a more troubling thing. But yeah, more glue surface area
⏹️ ▶️ John makes some sense. I still question whether an entire ski would be that, because like the
⏹️ ▶️ John four points are more likely to have a pleasing seating effect
⏹️ ▶️ John on a slightly uneven surface than four skis, because the four skis give ample
⏹️ ▶️ John opportunity for imperfections in the surface you’re on to translate through to your laptop, right? Obviously three feet would
⏹️ ▶️ John be the ideal one for not wobbling. That’s why we have tripods, not quadrupods for our
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras, right? But with a laptop where you’re typing on it, a tripod arrangement of feet would not
⏹️ ▶️ John be ideal as you hit the control key in the lower left corner and your thing tips over, right? But I also don’t think two
⏹️ ▶️ John skis is the ideal one. So anyway, it couldn’t just be a fashion thing or a design thing. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see any sort of reflection of this. I think someone has pointed out that if you look at the underside of the feet on the new
⏹️ ▶️ John iBacs that they have strips or something like that. But I don’t know. It’s a minor
⏹️ ▶️ John feature, but I’m still a little bit baffled as to what the thinking is and whether Apple, if they
⏹️ ▶️ John introduced a computer that’s like this, would even mention, oh, and by the way, it’s got the best feet ever. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs would do it because he would, some minor detail like this would only get on the thing if Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John thought it was a good idea. And if he thought it was a good idea, he’d have some rationale. So he would mention it. But in the modern Apple, was he a
⏹️ ▶️ John foot guy? Wow. In the modern Apple, they tend
⏹️ ▶️ John not to mention stuff like this at all on stage. They just say, these are great laptops. And then when you ask them later about the feet, they’ll just be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, I don’t I don’t know, it’s our new design. Anyway, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John my big question about this is wedge or no wedge, or if this is not even a MacBook Air and they just call this a MacBook and keep the Air wedge-shaped,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not quite sure. But I’m totally ready for colors to come. Like the iMacs, you know, the reviews have
⏹️ ▶️ John all shown all the different colors, I think they’re great, they’re fun, they should totally do that with
⏹️ ▶️ John the lower level laptops. I mean, I think it should do with all the laptops, but they’re, thus far, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have kept the colors to the lower end products, even in the iPhone realm, even in the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad realm, and been more subdued in the pros, which, you know, that’s a reasonable distinction. Most people buy
⏹️ ▶️ John the low-end ones anyway, so it means that most people will be getting colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really hope that, so first of all, I love the colors. That sounds great, and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s anything like the iMacs, it’s probably gonna be pretty great. You know, it’s still a little pastel-y for me, but hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll take it. But I really hope that they don’t change two things about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Number one, it better not have a fan because having the fanless computer is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s big number one. And number two, I really hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t make the battery much or any smaller. Dr.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Drang had a good blog post about this last week. Basically, as I’ve been very happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it, so has he, that basically because of the way that they designed this first generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 MacBook Air, where as you mentioned, John, They basically just didn’t change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the externals at all from the previous one and just stuffed a way lower power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage processor in there. Didn’t change the size of the battery, didn’t change the size of the case, didn’t change the weight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like everything else stayed the same. So by sticking a very low power usage processor in there, we got this amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life to the point where I love, like if I go somewhere for a weekend or if I have to go home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a day or something, I don’t usually have to plug in my laptop the entire time I’m gone. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can, if I take like a multi, like a weekend trip somewhere, I can treat my laptop more like I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treat an iPad, where I probably will not need to charge this unless I’m using it heavily. And that’s wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s so great to have it just like, I have it sitting around the house, and sometimes it spends the night
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over on a countertop somewhere where there isn’t a cable, and it’s not plugged in. And the next day I can go use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s fine. Sometimes it spends the night on a charger and that’s fine, but you know, it doesn’t have to. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s wonderful. It’s such a great place to be. it really does dramatically improve the everyday usability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this product. So I hope that this first generation one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not some kind of fluke because they were reusing the old industrial design. I hope that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least, again, if they wanna make the higher end, higher powered ones, you know, a little more aggressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their battery to weight ratio, fine. But I hope something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the lineup, and I think the Air is a good place for it because it’s so like low powered, Something in the lineup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should have the ridiculous battery life that the current MacBook Air with the M1 does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That it’s such a great experience. I really hope that this new MacBook Air doesn’t just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shed the quote excess battery in their terminology and cut the battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in half because, oh, it’s too long now. And we have to get it back down to four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours or whatever. Like, please don’t do that. I really, really hope that whatever they are trying to do to make this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing thinner and lighter as they are always pushing to do, please stop at the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it comes to cutting the battery very much from the current one. I would love for them to keep it the same. I think that’s a little too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much to expect. I can’t imagine they would keep it the same, but at least don’t cut it by much, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that goes back to the wedge though, because the advantage of not having the wedge is, not only is there actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, all of the things being equal, not only is there actually more volume for the battery, but even if you cut down the volume by making
⏹️ ▶️ John the fat end thinner, which it looks like in these mock-ups they’re doing, It’s just much easier to buy batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John that are uniform thickness, right? It’s easier to manufacture that, it’s easy to fill the space, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So even if the overall battery volume is lower, not having to do the weird scallops,
⏹️ ▶️ John multipart battery where you’re sacrificing, you’re sacrificing space by essentially not making a wedge-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John battery by doing the scallop batteries, because they touted that as like, oh, and we have these little scallops, like
⏹️ ▶️ John these little terraces, like we’re farming for rice, right? You know, little terrace type things, because the batteries are essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John flat and you have to get multiple ones and chain them together and you’re just wasting space and all of those little terraces and
⏹️ ▶️ John scallops, right? If it literally is flat, you can fill all the available space with a conventional
⏹️ ▶️ John flat battery. And that gives me some hope that there’s a fighting chance of that this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John will potentially match the M1 MacBook Air’s power efficiency, especially if,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this, I didn’t read into much in the rumors, I don’t know if this is rumored for like next year or something like, especially if
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes out later and it’s like a, you know, TSMC’s three nanometer processor something so you
⏹️ ▶️ John get some power savings and then even though the battery gets smaller you match the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life We’ll see you know it could be it could be that this the M1 MacBook Air that everybody loves
⏹️ ▶️ John does end up being like this Slight aberration in that it was just so over over provisioned on battery
⏹️ ▶️ John the next ones are a little bit lower But I have some hope that if these rumors are true, and this really is the air and it really
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have the wedge anymore that’s good for battery possibilities.
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Chip rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, regarding the timing, and this I think might lead us into the next thing, I expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Air, the next one, to have the M2 processor. And I don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M2 processor to come out until this fall or winter. And maybe even spring. They could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a one and a half year cycle for all we know, but most likely this fall or winter I would expect the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M2, because I would expect it to be based on the A15 cores that will come in this fall’s iPhones. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other stuff that we’re about to talk about, which will presumably be using larger core, larger versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of chips, I would expect those not to have the M2. I would expect those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be effectively, whatever they’re going to call it, I would expect it to be an M1X, which is more M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores onto a larger die. And we’ll get to that in a minute. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard a lot of people speculating on different podcasts and stuff about like, Would it be weird to have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger, higher-end products using something in the M1 series of chips and then have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M2 come out and it’s like the small chip again for the next MacBook Air? And I think, no, that’s not weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact, that’s almost always how big chips are made. If you look at the Intel Xeon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line, the Xeons that have the really high core counts, usually it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current generation core when those come out. It’s like last year’s core or two years ago’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core that they have gotten good enough at manufacturing that they can now start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making larger and larger chips with it before, and they’re doing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big, the big large chips using the slightly older core design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they’re starting to get good at making the new design in smaller sizes. And then eventually that will scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to make the next generation of big chips. So the bigger chips usually are like a half generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least behind the smaller chips. And that’s, again, that’s one of the reasons why like Intel’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco newest core designs tended to come out first in small laptops. And they would slowly bring it up the line with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the bigger chips that have more cores and the bigger integrated GPUs and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I expect to happen here, I don’t expect to see this new MacBook Air until the fall at least,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fall or winter. What I do expect to see before then is the bigger laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and possibly the Mac Pro Mini or the Mac Mini Pro, which sounds like they might be two different products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in addition to the Mac Pro, Mac Pro, which is different. But I expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we’re about to see is the M1X line. And I’m very excited about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure that I would put too much stake into how Intel has done things. Like the realities of silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturing are true, but those are mostly tied to the process and not to the products,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So if we assume, you know, like the first five nanometer chip is not gonna be like your Xeon type
⏹️ ▶️ John scale thing. It’s like you said, it’s gonna be a smaller laptop chip or whatever. So Apple’s first crop of five nanometer
⏹️ ▶️ John chips were in fact the low power M1 that’s put in their low end products, right? If they don’t change the process
⏹️ ▶️ John for the big chips and they say, now that we’ve done this process for a while, that you know, this big
⏹️ ▶️ John honking chip for our Mac Pro, it’s also gonna be a five nanometer chip. But
⏹️ ▶️ John now we just have more experience with the process and this was designed from the beginning to be a five nanometer
⏹️ ▶️ John chip. And you know, like I can see that happening and it not lagging behind in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of the core because if the M2 core is also targeting five nanometers, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no reason that can’t also be the core that is in the big chips. We’ll see,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Intel approach, it’s what we’re all used to, but I think a lot of it also has to do with decisions of
⏹️ ▶️ John how Intel paced its product cycle to its process jumps, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John pacing isn’t necessarily the only way you can possibly do things. And Apple is essentially one step
⏹️ ▶️ John into a potential plan, which is a five nanometer chip, the M1 in the low-end products,
⏹️ ▶️ John our next five nanometer chip is the M2 in our big products because now it’s a more stable process.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we’ll see. But like when you mentioned the M1X, like as we’ll get to in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John X seems insufficient as a modifier to delineate
⏹️ ▶️ John the difference between the M1 chip and the slightly more powerful version. When
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like, oh, the whatever chip and then whatever X chip would be in the iPad, right? It’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone chip, but it’s got a couple more cores. Maybe they need to add a few more Xs.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, then you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into problems and you add multiple Xs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree. I mean, that’s why I had an SE30 and not an SEX. But yeah. M1XYZ.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s problematic too.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the rumors for the higher end products, right? What are they actually doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John More concrete details in the high end. They have a bunch of code names called Jade C-Chop and Jade
⏹️ ▶️ John C-Die. and I don’t really understand these code names. I’m sure they make sense to somebody. Later on, they’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you, it’s right there in the name. We’ll get to it. Read the next sentence. It makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John total sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know where it says 2C-Di and 4C-Di.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, no, no, no, before that, we’ll get to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. What is spec’d? So, for the new, so this is a rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, I think yesterday. So, for the new MacBook Pros,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s planning two different chips, code named Jade C-Chop and Jade C-Di. Both include eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-performance cores, two energy efficient cores for a total of 10 and will be offered in either 16 or 32
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graphics core variations. Right there, there’s your reason they’re binning based on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU failures. But why is it called chop and die? Maybe chop is the one that has half the graphics cores
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not chopped off, they’re still there. Well. And why is one called die?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, well, because it’s a large die, I don’t know, C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John maybe C die is. I don’t know who said the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco codenames. Maybe C is for cent for 10, although that’s more of a hundred prefix, but who knows. regardless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s right there in the name. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, here’s the thing. I don’t think they’re binning 16 versus 32 cores. Binning is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, one or two cores are dead. Binning is not half the cores don’t work. Like, that’s the difference
⏹️ ▶️ John between 16 and 32 cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if they’re making massive chips, like, I bet that’s what it is. I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’re offering the same processor with either 16 or 32 GPU cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet it’s a binning thing. We’ll find out. I mean, when it comes out,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll find out. That I have never in the industry heard of a something
⏹️ ▶️ John where literally half, and it’s not just like ones or twos, like 16 cores, like, oh, well, we can only,
⏹️ ▶️ John half the time when we make this ship, you know, like a point that, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is the type of thing happens frequently, but just the idea that there would be literally 16
⏹️ ▶️ John of your 32 graphics cores, that they would use the die space for it, like for the square millimeters
⏹️ ▶️ John inside the case of the computer, especially a laptop, that say, yeah, we’re gonna disable them because the odds of all 16
⏹️ ▶️ John being bad is very low. Maybe three or four are bad, but like why would they not enable it to be like a 28
⏹️ ▶️ John core GPU or something? I don’t know. Again, these are just rumors and we’ll see. The other important
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor is that part of this is 64 gigabytes of RAM, which is an appropriate amount for a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and I think would satisfy everybody. But let’s just talk about this chip here. Eight high performance
⏹️ ▶️ John cores, two efficiency cores for a total of 10 and 16 or 32 graphic cores and 64 gigs of memory. Assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, again, on the five nanometer process and we know how big the M1 is, you can just take that shirt that you all just
⏹️ ▶️ John ordered and take those little, again, it’s not exactly to scale, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can say, all right, well, we know the counts for all the elements in the M1, scale it
⏹️ ▶️ John up linearly. How much bigger does this chip get? This
⏹️ ▶️ John is a much bigger chip than the M1, right? The GPU alone going from eight cores
⏹️ ▶️ John to 32 in the big one, and then the RAM, We talked about that before about various schemes of trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John layer the RAM on top of each other or whatever. The RAM takes up a huge portion of the M1 because it’s off to
⏹️ ▶️ John the side there. And cranking that up, this is a bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ John a much bigger chip. Amazing, it’ll be amazing for performance because we know how fast the M1 is. Imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had something with eight of the power cores and then the efficiency core is just whatever thrown in there. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this is a perfectly appropriate chip for a laptop. As I noted many times, we’ve discussed this in the past, I see no reason for
⏹️ ▶️ John discrete graphics even on the highest of high-end MacBook Pros, and this rumor seems to be saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what you’re gonna be getting is quote-unquote Apple integrated graphics, but again, we know how fast the
⏹️ ▶️ John eight-core GPU is on the current ones. If you wanna know how fast a 32-core one would be because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John massively parallel nature of GPUs, you can mostly linearly scale it up and say it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John four times faster. So that’s looking good to me as an appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John use of die space and power for a MacBook Pro. I would be perfectly happy with these specs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it feels like, and I’m saying this based on no facts, but it just feels like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M1 chip was really, you know, an iPhone or perhaps iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip that was just used in way, way, way more places. And the way this is described
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, it sounds like this is perhaps a scaling up of the M1 as we know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it today, but it’s the first time we’ve gotten a chip that really was truly designed for a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was designed for so much RAM, was designed to have a really good GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It feels like we’re now starting to see signs of the first honest to goodness computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or traditionally defined computer chip that Apple has made. And I am here for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It sounds great. I have to commend you two. We’ve made it more than five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds into this topic without bringing up what’s supposedly going in the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fairness, that’s next.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s one little in-between thing of a rumor that they’re gonna put one of the higher-end chips in a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Mini, which I think would be a good idea. And by the way, Casey, to your idea of a chip designed for a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s also in many ways, and again, we’ve discussed this at past shows, a chip that’s designed to be cooled by a fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what? When you get into the high end,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe having no fan is not your top priority. Maybe you wanna grind through those renders a little bit faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this chip is gonna be bigger, it’s gonna be hotter, it’s gonna take up more power,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s gonna be more powerful fans cooling it. And that’s what you do on high-end devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m happy to see them sort of like turning the dial up and saying, look, we
⏹️ ▶️ John have cooling capacity. It’s a 16 inch laptop. We can put fans in there. We’ve done it before.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not going to be as hot as the big Intel chips where I would hope, but it’s gonna be way
⏹️ ▶️ John hotter than the M1 in the current 13 inch MacBook Pro because that’s what you do on a pro machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I am here for it. I’m ready for it. that chip looks great. And if you want to put a more powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John one in the mini, there’s plenty of excess cooling capacity in that mini. Like they kept the huge power
⏹️ ▶️ John supply from before, you know, I forget how many Watts over provision that power supply is, but there’s also plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John of room there for more cooling as well. So if they want to charge even more for a Mac mini and put one of
⏹️ ▶️ John these better, you know, Mac Pro chips in there, that’ll be great. And then finally for
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro, now they add more Jade 2C die and Jade 4C
⏹️ ▶️ John die. here’s where things start to get a little bit wacky. Your choices
⏹️ ▶️ John are 20 or 40 computing core variations made up of 16 high performance cores or 32
⏹️ ▶️ John high performance cores, and then also four or eight high efficiency cores. Eight high efficiency cores seems excessive to
⏹️ ▶️ John me. What are you doing in the background that you need eight cores for the, you know, I don’t know, we just
⏹️ ▶️ John had room and we just kept putting efficiency cores until we ran out of room. These are huge core counts. This is a
⏹️ ▶️ John huge chip, but here’s where it gets super interesting. According to this rumor, again, The chip would
⏹️ ▶️ John include either 64 core or 128 core options for graphics. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t say where those would be, but again,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco remember the M1 has… It’s right there
⏹️ ▶️ John in the name! You’re killing me! The M1…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jade 2C die and Jade 4C die versus the other one which is called Jade C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know, I understand. It’s right there in the name,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re multiplying the same chip! I understand,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the thing. We know how big eight GPU cores are.
⏹️ ▶️ John That means we probably also know, again, same process size, assuming similar cores, how big 128 of them would
⏹️ ▶️ John be. Just do, just make the diagram. Just start saying how big this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be and start thinking about, and again, assuming they didn’t really mention anything about the RAM here,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the RAM would also be there. Like if the RAM ceiling is higher than 64 gigs and
⏹️ ▶️ John they use a similar design of like, let’s see if we can wedge this all into one package like the M1.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a huge chip. And what I started to think about was, all right, is this
⏹️ ▶️ John sufficient computing? The cores were fine, because the top-end Xeons are what, 28 cores? And these cores
⏹️ ▶️ John are faster than the Xeon cores. And so if you’re gonna have 40 of them, you’re multi-threaded
⏹️ ▶️ John compute, you’re fine. We know that we’ll be fine. I’d buy it. The GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John has always been the big question, because you can put 400 watts of GPU in the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John plus, not to mention the afterburner card lot of other stuff, right. And so to compete with that, you would
⏹️ ▶️ John want to at least match, let’s say we just want to match the highest end
⏹️ ▶️ John single GPU, forget about where people have four GPUs inside their Mac pros, right? Like because you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get two GPUs per card, and you can put two of those cards in there, you’ve got four GPUs, right? Can we even
⏹️ ▶️ John match a single of the current high end graphics card, and it’s hard to tell because
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU cores are not comparable to each other, you can’t just count cores. And benchmarks are notoriously
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult, especially involving games, which is a lot of what people care about or whatever. But if we just want to go, I just want you to go
⏹️ ▶️ John like back of the envelope, like, is it plausible that the chip in this rumor could
⏹️ ▶️ John be competitive with the best single GPU that’s out there today? So we’ve looked at the Nvidia RTX 3090,
⏹️ ▶️ John which no one can buy because everyone’s buying them for Bitcoin or whatever. But assuming you could get one of these, the
⏹️ ▶️ John theoretical 32 bit floating point teraflops of this is 35.58 teraflops. Again, teraflops
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a way to measure GPU performance. Just think, theoretically, like, ballpark capacity-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the computing potential of this thing? It doesn’t mean you’re going to get that in any real-world application, and again, games
⏹️ ▶️ John are fiendishly complicated, and, you know. But anyway, I just wanted to try to ballpark it. To compare that,
⏹️ ▶️ John the 8-core GPU in the M1 gets about 2.6 teraflops of floating-point 32.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, 2.6 versus 35. That’s the gap between the M1’s GPU and the best
⏹️ ▶️ John single GPU you can buy today. So if you do the math and figure out what would it
⏹️ ▶️ John take, again assuming the GPU cores are exactly the same as they are in the M1, which is not necessarily the case for
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, you know, era this chip is supposed to be coming out in. But if you just say, hey, I’ve got the M1 GPU cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got eight of them, how many do I need to get to 35.58 teraflops?
⏹️ ▶️ John And in theory, if you had a 110 core M1 style GPU, you could hit or exceed 35.58 teraflops, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So a 128 core M1 style GPU could be faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than an NVIDIA RTX 3090, right? Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve ever seen an RTX 3090, the card is huge. It’s not a small thing. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John huge because first of all, the chip is huge. Second of all, it produces a huge amount of heat.
⏹️ ▶️ John And third of all, you’ve got to get that heat away in some way. And it’s just the GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John God, it doesn’t have any it doesn’t have anything else in there. It’s just the GPU and and associated
⏹️ ▶️ John vram. All right, but I start to think about okay You’re going to have and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not I don’t know if it’s five nanometers. But anyway, you’re gonna have 120 gpu
⏹️ ▶️ John cores which according to this back of the envelope math is Plausibly a match to the current
⏹️ ▶️ John fastest single gpu thing and you’re gonna put that that maybe, this doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John say, in the same package, in the same neighborhood as your 40 core
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU, and maybe also in the same neighborhood as your 64, possibly 128 gigs of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John they say this thing is gonna be, you know, half size or smaller than the current Mac Pro, and I can believe that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it seems to me that 90% of the case is gonna be taken up with this gigantic city of chips
⏹️ ▶️ John and its associated cooling solution, because this is not like, again, GPUs are nice because you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John multiply it out. Like it’s embarrassingly parallel, as they say. There’s always more pixels. You can literally scale
⏹️ ▶️ John almost linearly by adding more execution cores. It’s more complicated than that when you get into, you know, more complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D stuff. But just for raw compute power, just like bring on the pixels, I will just scale up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the CPU, it’s like, well, what workload am I gonna get that’s gonna exercise all 40 cores? But we can do it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But just start laying that out. again, you know, use the artwork from the shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John and just start laying out these pieces and how big is your SimCity start to get? And you’re like, okay, now let me just
⏹️ ▶️ John measure the edges of this. Wow. That’s a lot of chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a lot of transistors. That’s a lot of power. That’s a lot of cooling. I’m not saying it’s unplausible
⏹️ ▶️ John because hey, this case sitting next to me is huge. It has the cooling capacity to cool something like this
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is going to be a technical marvel. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is this rumor is of a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John This might not come out until next year. And at that point, what is the fastest single GPU then?
⏹️ ▶️ John And we still haven’t addressed the idea of what about a Mac Pro that has four GPUs in it. But granted, each one
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a 3090, but still four of them, it’s a problem. And then the afterburner card and what they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do with that. And the final thing I’ll throw in here, this is a rumor that was, not a rumor,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a real thing. A real thing about a Mac OS releases. And the Mac OS 11.4 beta
⏹️ ▶️ John now supports the AMD Navi RDNA 2
⏹️ ▶️ John graphics cards, which are basically AMD’s graphics cards that are remotely
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive with the aforementioned RTX 3090. They’re actually pretty good, like the 6800, 6800, actually the 6900 XT.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those AMD cards are competitive with the best from Nvidia, right? So, you know, Nvidia, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is like a leapfrog between the two of them. Nvidia leapt ahead, AMD has more or less caught up.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Nvidia cards are still ahead in a lot of important areas, but these are very competitive cards. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John support for these cards in macOS, which is great and all, but Apple doesn’t sell
⏹️ ▶️ John any of these GPUs. And if these rumors are to be believed, Apple is not going to sell any of these GPUs on their
⏹️ ▶️ John new ARM-based Mac Pro. So what’s the deal with this? And the rumor that comes along with this is
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Mac Pro will in fact be revised between now
⏹️ ▶️ John and when the ARM one comes out and the revision will essentially say, okay, well, we’ve got a new Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe we’ll use a new Xeon and a new socket with a new motherboard. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will start selling these AMD cards because Apple doesn’t add GPU support to
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS for the hell of it. They’re certainly not adding it for the hobbyists who can now buy a 6800 and stick it in their Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. Like Apple doesn’t care about those people at all. So seeing the fact that macOS support,
⏹️ ▶️ John this macOS 11.4 beta supports these cards makes me think that we might
⏹️ ▶️ John be getting a, I don’t know if you wanna call it a speed bump update, but it depends on what they do. A revision
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Intel Mac Pro before the ARM one comes out. And unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John for the ARM one, these are powerful GPUs. If I can put two 6900 XTs in an Intel Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to be faster than 128 core ARM chip, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John the 128 core GPU in the ARM thing was
⏹️ ▶️ John able to keep up with or exceed a single NVIDIA 3090. Two AMD 6900 XTs,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d have to have like a 250 core GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John to compete with that. So I still wonder what Apple’s plan
⏹️ ▶️ John is, especially if Apple themselves bumps the Intel Mac Pro to keep up with the times
⏹️ ▶️ John and to let it support faster GPUs and maybe even giving it a faster CPU. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is still the most, obviously, as Casey knows, the most intriguing aspect of this whole thing for me is
⏹️ ▶️ John how does Apple take a phone chip and just
⏹️ ▶️ John rubber stamp it out until the point where you’ve got something that’s competitive with the current Intel Mac Pro? Granted,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are very few applications that need or can even use this power, but for those applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the whole point of the Mac Pro. It’s for the people who can actually use this type of power and want it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if you take it away from them and say, well now the Mac Pro is half the size, but by the way, if you’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John rendering that 8K footage, now it’s gonna be slightly slower for you. But hey, everything’s smaller now, so isn’t that great?
⏹️ ▶️ John People aren’t gonna like that. So Apple has this work cut out for them. I can’t wait
⏹️ ▶️ John to see what monstrosity they roll out on the stage at some point with
⏹️ ▶️ John these number of cores and when they start benchmarking it. I mean, maybe they could spend the whole time just
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about the CPU performance, which is gonna be phenomenal if the current M1s are any
⏹️ ▶️ John indication. But boy, the GPU stuff, that’s gonna be a hard road for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m pretty sure this one’s not gonna be fanless. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The bad news is, is that the shirts that were just on sale are the last ATP shirts we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever sell. The good news is, is that now we’re gonna be selling ATP blankets, because that’s the only way we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fit the diagram on there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t draw any more rectangles. Oh, the good thing is I can just copy and paste the cores, I suppose.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s actually a marketing problem for Apple. Apple rolls out a chip with 40 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores. Do they bother showing
⏹️ ▶️ John a diagram of that? It would just look like static. Like you can’t. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, in reality, that’s not one chip. Like this- Well, no, but if it’s one package.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, we don’t even know that necessarily. I think- We don’t, we don’t. The beauty of this strategy, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all becoming clear now, and it’s kind of amazing. They’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only be making two chips. Like at any given time, for the most part, they will have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two chips. One of them, what’s currently the M1, will power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Air, the low-end Mac Mini, the low-end iMac, and is that it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The MacBook Pro, did you say that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, and the low-end MacBook Pro, right, okay. And the iPad. Oh yeah, and the iPad, right, of course, and the iPad Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, okay. The other chip they make will be a larger core count version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that, and that will power the high-end MacBook Pros, the high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac mini, if that product ever exists again, the big iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then they’ll put two or four of them into a Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they’re still only making two different versions of these chips. Like there’s the low-core
⏹️ ▶️ Marco efficient one that goes into all the low-end products, and then there’s the big pro one, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just put one of them in most products, and in the Mac Pro, you put two or four. And I think the way this goes is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco straightforward. I think they just keep making those two chips and they keep revising them over time to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the newest cores are or whatever the newest core counts are. And then the main challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is, they have to design all the interconnects and all the different technologies involved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in having a system that has two or four of those for the Mac Pro, but that can be the very last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one they release. And until then, there’s building up from the bottom here, but I think that’s where we’re going here. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it literally is just, you have these two different chips used in different products in different ways. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it. I don’t think the Mac Pro is gonna have one giant die with like all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff on it. I think it’s literally just, there’s gonna be two or four of the MacBook Pro chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John Certain point it can’t be one die just because manufacturing sizes or whatever. So, I mean, the M1 isn’t one die, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously they’re gonna have to break things up, but I don’t think there’ll be like four
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro chips separated by a few inches on a giant motherboard with an interconnect. Cause that’s just not gonna fly
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of the CPU cores alone, let alone the GPU stuff, right? So they have to find some way to package these.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it could be, hey, we have a CPU, a cluster of CPU cores over here, plus the RAM. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then over here, elsewhere, we have the GPU stuff and we have an interconnect for the RAM or whatever. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s gonna be like rubber stamp out four of these and make a magical interconnect. Cause that magical interconnect is a very hand
⏹️ ▶️ John wavy thing. And it’s not like, you can’t really have the GPU cores of four
⏹️ ▶️ John widely separated CPUs cooperating in an efficient way if you actually want to. If the math, the back of the envelope
⏹️ ▶️ John math that I just did, it’s like, well, let’s just assume it scales linearly. Once you add an interconnect like that, you’re not getting a linear
⏹️ ▶️ John scaling anymore because the interconnect overhead is gonna kill you. Right, so I do think that there is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a clustering of like components for efficiency purposes, but I do wonder how they’re going to square this with
⏹️ ▶️ John like, how many dies is this? Where do you put them? Like we mentioned before, whether the GPU could be on a card
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. GPUs can be on cards. Like they’ve been there before. Like we’re just stuck in this mindset
⏹️ ▶️ John that the GPU has to be on the same die as the CPU because that’s how the M1 does it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John again, when you start doing the math, it’s like, well, is that even plausible for a 128 core GPU to be on the same die as anything else, really?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think fancy, cool interconnects are certainly a factor here.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think Apple has a bunch of, do they have a bunch of patents on that? There’s some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John asymmetrical RAM hierarchy interconnect stuff that we talked about on a past show. There was some Apple patent
⏹️ ▶️ John filing that could factor into this, but it really is a packaging problem, like a physically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, where do we put all this stuff? And by the way, how do we cool it, right? Because you can’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John spread it all out and just have like, oh, I’ll just, you know, put a bunch of these little tiny chips five inches apart. It’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John connection machine. It’s like that doesn’t work for, do you remember the connection machine? It’s a cool computer. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it doesn’t work for the applications they’re doing. And part of the massive speed
⏹️ ▶️ John boost of the M1 is the fact that everything is jammed into not just the same package, but a lot of it is on the
⏹️ ▶️ John same die and they get huge wins from that. and we’ve mentioned the unified memory architecture and all that stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re gonna wanna give up a lot of those advantages. I think they wanna retain as much as they can. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John this rumor doesn’t have a lot of details. It just says core counts and it just, you know, it doesn’t tell us where are they and how do they work.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is like, this is getting me excited because anything that
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out that’s remotely like this in any way, no matter how they do it, is
⏹️ ▶️ John like the gap in performance between this rumored thing and the fanless
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 MacBook Air is going to be so massive as compared to in the Intel era where, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the single core performance of the most expensive Mac Pro was destroyed by like
⏹️ ▶️ John a really good 5K iMac, right? Like we’re not used to these gaps opening up like
⏹️ ▶️ John this because, you know, especially for the GPU stuff, like this Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is really, really going to differentiate itself in
⏹️ ▶️ John every possible way of computing from the lower end computers, just because it’s not as, I’m hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not going to be at a deficit using like worse CPU cores, and it’s going to be using so
⏹️ ▶️ John much more of them. And especially because, you know, thus far the GPUs have been pretty weak in the
⏹️ ▶️ John low end ones. This is really gonna, you know, make a huge difference. And so hopefully that
⏹️ ▶️ John will help make the high end platform even more attractive. Like everyone is just falling over themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John about, I was just listening to Cortex recently, they were saying we had to edit some big logic file
⏹️ ▶️ John on the M1 Mac because the iMac Pro was choking on it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that, you know, it’s like I have to use the $990 computer because my $5,000 iMac, Intel iMac Pro couldn’t handle it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Imagine what’s gonna happen when it’s not like the smallest ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John chip Apple has ever put in the Mac. Imagine when it’s something with 40 of those cores and 64
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM and 128 core GPU. That’s gonna make people wanna buy a high-end
⏹️ ▶️ John again. So I’m excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I don’t remember the connection machine because when it came out, I was four.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can watch PBS and they tell you about the history of supercomputers. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my recollection, right? Like if you look at what the motherboard looks like, it’s like literally just like stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp,
⏹️ ▶️ John just the same little thing over and over again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it looks like it’s just like rows and rows and rows of identical looking motherboards.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s a lot of connections. It was an appropriately named computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Remote, and Aftershocks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join at hba.fm slash join. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody, we will 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
⏹️ ▶️ John was accidental 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-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long
A tale of two networks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in part of the house construction on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the screened-in porch, I’ve noticed that it seems to be a Wi-Fi dead zone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For reasons I don’t entirely understand, if I’m honest with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I recently learned through some recent construction that wood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocks Wi-Fi significantly more than I previously thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so given how many layers of stuff there are between the interior of your your house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the exterior of your house, much of which is wood or insulation or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whatever else. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of layers there. And so like, you’d be surprised, like it doesn’t have to be a metal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wall to block wifi. It can like just density in general does a pretty good job of blocking wifi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so getting wifi from in your house to out of your house is surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult. You really generally need to have access points pretty damn close to the door or the wall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or ideally outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I don’t have any of those things. I do have one Ethernet drop in the porch because I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would probably want to work out there and it’s not unusual for me to be slinging big media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey files around. Well, I guess that’s not work, but for other personal stuff. So anyways, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do have an Ethernet drop but I don’t want to have to use it. And I found that like phones, laptops, iPads, nothing would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work on the screened-in porch reliably. And I was using an Eero system and they are a many time past sponsor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I was using a fairly old Eero. I don’t recall exactly which generation it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was. I don’t think it was the original, but it was the one that came after. So this is several years old. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I decided, maybe I’ll just go ahead and upgrade my Eero. And I got the new Eero Pro 6,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I paid for. I don’t think I paid for any of the Eero’s I’d had before, but I did pay for this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got my Eero Pro 6, and I went to replace my Eero that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the router with this new Eero Pro 6. And both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that I was replacing and the new one, you have a USB-C power input
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they both have two ethernet jacks or receptacles or what have you. So I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unplug, well, I do the little dance in the Eero app and it says, okay, you know, I want to replace, you know, such and such Eero. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, okay, unplug the original, remove it, plug in the new one. So I did that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it said it was supposed to flash white. And what I saw was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like kind of beige, But I thought, nah, I’m probably, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably being weird. That’s probably white and I’m overthinking it. And it kept flashing relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quickly, this like beige-ish color. And I plug it in and, and it just sits there for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forever. And the app is like, dude, I don’t know what’s going on. Do you want to try to, you know, cause I think what happens is it like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones home to Eero and says, Hey, I’m serial number, you know, one, two, three, four, five, you know, is somebody looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to set me up? And, and it didn’t work. And so it said, okay, well you can type in the serial number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by hand and we’ll try to set it up that way. And I did that and it was like, nope, I don’t know what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I thought, well, you know, maybe it’s that thing with Verizon Fios. I think you both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have talked about this in the past. Certainly I’ve talked about this in the past where it used to be years ago that if you switched whatever your router
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, you had to call Verizon in order to get them to like do whatever magic on their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end to get the connection to work with this new router. And I had also noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was an issue a couple of months back, which I think I tripped the circuit breaker that the ONT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was on or something like that. And I had gone through the automated online troubleshooting on the web, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it actually did get me to fix my problem, much to my own surprise. So, I go to the web, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do the online troubleshooting, and it does some tests, and it basically does a shrug and says, I don’t know, you’re going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to talk to us. Okay, fine. So, I call, and I’m talking to the very nice gentleman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the phone saying, oh, I just got a new You know, I think I need a new IP address. Can you just, you know, recycle, restart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ONT or do whatever magic you need to do? And he was kind of like, okay, whatever. And he says, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I’m looking at your ONT right now and there’s nothing gets, it’s not connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to any router of any sort. I’m thinking I literally removed the Eero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was there and I plugged the exact same crap into the new Eero.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What could possibly be going wrong right now? Like, how is this my fault?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was my fault. Do you want to guess how? I will start with Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John So start with me. I already have a guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to, I figured you would know because this is a long segue into John doing some things with his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network. So I will let you answer the question, John, but Marco, do you have a guess?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John, do you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John From your little preamble, I think my guess is wrong. I was going to say you didn’t plug the ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no. That is something I would probably do. do it though. Yeah, that would do it. No, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it turns out, it was indeed flashing yellow. I thought it was flashing white
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I was just missing, I was seeing things wrong. No, it was flashing yellow. The reason it was flashing yellow is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the power supply was not appropriate. It was giving like an incorrect voltage or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t swap the power supply? You used the old one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No! It was all USB-C! Why should I bother?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my god. You should know from all the MacBook stuff that just because it’s USB-C doesn’t mean it’s correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John sized for your laptop if you use like your MacBook Air, your iPad adapter, iPad Pro adapter to
⏹️ ▶️ John power your 16-inch MacBook Pro, that’s not going to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I can, it just doesn’t work well. And so here it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’d never swapped the power adapter because I thought, why bother? And as I’m on the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I realized that’s the problem. And so I’d say to the guy, oh, wait, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is my fault. Hold on. I swapped the power supplies and sure enough, it worked no sweat. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was my dummy moment for the day. My bad. But yeah, I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you via my fancy pants new Eero. And it’s all working great so far. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including on the porch from my literally like 20 minutes of testing earlier. So, so far so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But John, you’ve been rejiggering things recently. What are you up to?
⏹️ ▶️ John I just changed my network and got everything working. So of course, that means it’s time to screw stuff up again.
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually had a need this time. Like we’ve been using, We have a finished room in the basement, and we’ve been using that more and more
⏹️ ▶️ John often as another private space where you can be on Wi-Fi, essentially. The problem is the basement
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t actually have any Wi-Fi, and it is the basement. So people would go down there, and you could
⏹️ ▶️ John do stuff. But if you tried to do a Zoom meeting or something, sometimes the signal wouldn’t be that great or whatever. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I can solve this. I’ve got a mesh network. I should just buy another Eero thing. Again, Eero, past
⏹️ ▶️ John sponsor of the show, so on and so forth. But I should just buy another Eero thing and stick it down
⏹️ ▶️ John there. So I’m like, oh, I’m gonna go to the Eero website, see what they got. What things should I buy? It’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could buy the super cheap thing and just plug in and it would work fine. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t wanna buy it, like, cause you get like one of those beacons or whatever. You know, that’s older
⏹️ ▶️ John tech. Like there’s newer stuff that’s out. So maybe if I’m buying something additional to my Eero network, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I should buy one of the fancy ones with Wi-Fi 6 just because, yeah, it wouldn’t do me any good now
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, but like eventually I maybe I’ll slowly replace all of my Eeros. So if I buy one Wi-Fi 6,
⏹️ ▶️ John one, then another one, then another one, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. And the other thing I had to keep in mind was, even though the Wi-Fi signal was not great in my finished room in the basement,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the same room that has my Synology in it, and that’s wired, right? My ethernet takes a visit to that room,
⏹️ ▶️ John thanks to the magic of drop ceilings and basements. And so I have wired ethernet in that
⏹️ ▶️ John room. And I actually considered, well, maybe I don’t need an ear or an all, maybe I can just have a wired ethernet snake over to the desk in that
⏹️ ▶️ John room, and people could use that. But I’m like, oh, no one wants to plug into ethernet. People want wifi, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I decided I needed a wifi thing, and that means I couldn’t use a beacon, because if you don’t know, the Eero beacons just plug
⏹️ ▶️ John into the wall, but they don’t have any ethernet ports on them. So I needed an Eero with ethernet on the back. And so I’m looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John your various options, and they have a bunch of these different size and shape little white things.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, and me being somewhat like Marco in this regard, I’m like, well, if I’m gonna buy any of these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, what’s the difference in price between the lowest end and the highest end one with ethernet? It’s not that much. and I just get the
⏹️ ▶️ John best one. I’m like, oh, but I’m gonna add an Eero Pro 6 to my existing
⏹️ ▶️ John network of these ancient Eero’s because I have like, kind of like Casey, it’s not like the original one,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s Eero Pro, but it predates, you know, Wi-Fi 6. I think it might even
⏹️ ▶️ John predate 802.11ac. I don’t know, it’s pretty old, right? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the beacons are slightly newer because the beacons didn’t exist when I first bought this stuff. So what I did
⏹️ ▶️ John without much time and effort was convince myself, all right, I should just wipe the slate
⏹️ ▶️ John clean and buy an entire new setup with just Euro Pro 6s for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, wow. See, I did the cheap man approach, which was I replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Euro Pro, I think that’s what I have, I think you’re right. I replaced the Euro Pro with the Euro Pro 6,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I moved the Euro Pro to be in place of an original Euro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was across the house. So basically it was a trickle down, just like I plan to do with my Apple TV, if it ever fricking ships,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it just trickled down. So I am still a two-wired Eero house, but one of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the fancy pants brand new one. And the other one is a more modern one, the one that was running,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was the router, but it’s now as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an accessory, a remote accessory, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I just decided to go for the whole thing. Cause like, originally I was like, well, I don’t even have any devices
⏹️ ▶️ John that support Wi-Fi 6 or even 802.11ac, but that long since has changed. Like we all have new devices
⏹️ ▶️ John now. They all actually do support these things. Why don’t I just do that? And by the way, you can mix and match
⏹️ ▶️ John these things. If I wanted to, I can continue to use the beacons. I could continue to use my Eero Pro, like if I really wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to. But, you know, it was just, it’s a question of how good a signal I was gonna get. So I bought
⏹️ ▶️ John the new, you know, Eero Pro 6. I used our ATP code,
⏹️ ▶️ John which for some reason still works, even though they were a sponsor months and months ago. So I got free overnight shipping.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not an ad for Eero. that’s gonna sound like one in a second. I was in the same situation as Casey. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John really? Really, you just got your network working
⏹️ ▶️ John and now you’re going to literally replace every component of it? Does
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like a good plan to you? Because again, my error is my router now, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just my wifi, it’s my router as well. And it was so painful for me to get everything set
⏹️ ▶️ John up for my old thing. How do you replace the thing that is your router,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I’m like, oh, that’s risky. Like, am I gonna have to manually enter all my config again? Am I gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ John to redo all the stuff that I had to do to get it set up? Are my smart outlets gonna stop working and then replacing everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else? I was just dreading this. And I looked at the support document, and I’m like, well, they make it sound easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, the things arrive. First mistake. When I ordered these things, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I know what Eero’s look like. The original Eero was like a white rounded rectangle with a
⏹️ ▶️ John little light on it and ethernet ports in the back, right? And then I got the beacons, which are even smaller. They
⏹️ ▶️ John just have a plug. They plug directly into the wall. They just look like a wall wart, right? This is my conception of Euro. So I go to their webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m looking at these various little rounded rectangle white plastic things and I’m like, all right, I’ll get the
⏹️ ▶️ John fanciest one, right? Now I’m gonna be the Marco and buy all the fancy stuff and just replace everything, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John On the webpage and the link that we’ll put at euro.com slash compare, they compare them
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can look at the features and compare them to each other or whatever, right? And they also have about
⏹️ ▶️ John midway through the page, a little diagram showing them each of like, here’s the size and they have dimensions,
⏹️ ▶️ John height and width and they show the ethernet ports. And I’m looking at these diagrams going like, okay, great, they all have two ethernet ports. That’s what I need,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s fine. Let me just do that. What I did not look at is the eye chart text that is next
⏹️ ▶️ John to the dimensions that says, here’s how big these things are. So I get the Eero
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro 6, the box comes, I don’t think anything happened, I open it up and it’s like I’m in The Hobbit
⏹️ ▶️ John all of a sudden or the Peter Jackson movie, like forced perspective. Like suddenly I’m Frodo
⏹️ ▶️ John Baggins everything is scaled up proportionally to make me seem like I’m hobbit size because it
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like my existing ero but it’s like 75% bigger it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like comical because if you have something that’s 10 times bigger it’s not comical but if it’s just slightly bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John like you give someone like when you go to those like science museum things and you sit in a chair that makes you feel like kid size because the chair
⏹️ ▶️ John is scaled that’s what it felt like these things are comparatively comically
⏹️ ▶️ John huge. It looks just like my old Eero, but it’s, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, it’s just too darn big. I’m like, Oh, what am I going to do with these giant bricks? Well, it turns out it’s not that bad because I have
⏹️ ▶️ John places to stash them, but buyer beware. They’re not, even though on the
⏹️ ▶️ John webpage it looks similarly sized, they’re not. And the pro six ones are way
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger than the old pros. They’re just, they’re just, they’re just very large. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John comically They’re exactly the right amount larger to be… I don’t think they’re that big, John. They’re exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the right amount larger to be funny. Because if they were like 10 times bigger, it wouldn’t be funny. And if they were 1% bigger, it wouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John funny. But they are the exact funny size, just like in The Hobbit, of all the props made to be a little bit bigger to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the normal human-size actors seem like hobbits. That’s what these things are, right? But anyway, getting back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the replacement thing, I followed the procedure of saying like, I’m about to replace the gateway, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the literal heart of my network, right, that runs everything in my house. and I’m gonna do this
⏹️ ▶️ John by taking my phone app and go, all right, I go on and replace this. And it’s like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John do this, do this, do this. I did it, and it’s like, you’re done.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? What are you talking about? Like, I, you know, I said, unplug it, plug it back in. Ta-da!
⏹️ ▶️ John Literally everything worked. Like, it was just like, follow, it was, there was no step three, like the old iMac commercial. It was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John unplug the thing, plug in the new one, and here you go. And everything’s exactly the way you had it. This is the magic
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, Eero and they’re installing all this configuration in the cloud and Amazon spying on me and whatever. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John all the answers, but bottom line is, this is something anybody could have done.
⏹️ ▶️ John No technical expertise required, especially if you’re not too clever like Casey and don’t realize that, you know, because I think a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John person would assume, take out the old device and put in the new one. The new one does in fact come with a power cord. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John did that and everything just worked. And I was so suspicious, I’m like, that can’t possibly have worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like how could that, and I’m going around, I’m like, turn on the lights with my voice and I’m checking that everything
⏹️ ▶️ John works. I’m like, that’s amazing. And so then I just ran to the rest of the house, pulled the beacon out of the wall,
⏹️ ▶️ John put in a new one, plugged it in, said, now you’re the new beacon. And it’s like, okay, I am. You’re the
⏹️ ▶️ John beacon now, dog. Right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John my two beacons with the things, and then I took my old EuroPro, and I brought it down to the basement,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I plugged it in the ethernet, and I said, now you’re part of the network too, and I plugged you into ethernet. And when it
⏹️ ▶️ John initially connected, it was like, okay, I’m part of the network too. I’m like, hey, but why are you still connecting by Wi-Fi?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re plugged into
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ethernet. That happened to me
⏹️ ▶️ John too. I couldn’t get the thought through my head before the little icon changed in the app and said, oh, now I’m plugged into ethernet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it was the most seamless networking upgrade experience I’ve ever had in my life. And I already knew that, unlike Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you don’t have to call Fios. Like, they don’t do that MAC address validation stuff anymore, because I’d already just replaced
⏹️ ▶️ John my Airport Extreme with the Eero.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, which is why I thought I wouldn’t have to. And then when the thing was like, no, I don’t have internet. What should I do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then I thought, oh, I guess that really is still a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re lucky you got any light on the thing, because I’m amazed if it was undervolted or whatever, that it wouldn’t just be yellow light, but
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing would happen. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ John call Fios, at least in my region, and it seems like also in Casey’s region. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ John just worked, and I completely replaced my network, adding one more wired node
⏹️ ▶️ John to a new location, and it was 100% seamless, and I was just absolutely amazed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, this is not an ad for Euro. They have been a past sponsor. I did use my own code to get free overnight shipping,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is the reason I recommend Eero to my relatives. And I have in fact bought several
⏹️ ▶️ John Eero setups, both for myself and for my relatives, so I don’t have to hear about their wifi.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just say, look, just do this. You literally won’t need me. Follow the instructions that are in the box. You can get
⏹️ ▶️ John it set up, plug these things into your house, somewhat widely separated, ta-da, internet.