453: As the Prophecy Foretold
21 Oct 2021The new MacBook Pro.
Episode Description:
- Apple’s “Unleashed.” Event
- Start Up
- John’s Tweet
- Apple ✔️s (scroll way down)
- Monterey quick hits
- Monday, 25 October
- Tabs that look like tabs!!
- M1 Pro & M1 Max
- New MacBook Pros
- Our orders
- Marco
- 14”, M1 Pro, 16-core GPU
- 16GB RAM
- 1TB SSD
- Casey
- 14”, M1 Max, 24-core GPU
- 64GB RAM
- 4TB SSD
- John
- …AirPods.
- Marco
- Post-show: Rumor round-up
- 9to5Mac on the ransomware leak
- Bloomberg/Gurman’s Roundup
- Which Intel Macs remain?
- Mac mini
- 27” iMac
- 21.5” iMac
- Mac Pro
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Chapters
- Intro
- Start Up by A.G. Cook
- Apple Music Voice Plan
- HomePod Mini colors
- AirPods (3rd-gen)
- Sponsor: Linode
- Safari tabs are back! 🎉
- M1 Pro, Max for M1 Pro Macs
- Sponsor: Stripe
- C-Fed, briefly
- The new MacBook Pro
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- The new MacBook Pro (cont’d.)
- Ending theme
- Rumor report card
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to say anything. I don’t want to spoil the show, but I’m excited. It’s gonna be a good one. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am also excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I’m a little pissed off at the two of you. I understand it in knowing what we knew at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I stand by it, but I am a little pissed at the two of you for blowing our opportunity for we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are the champions on the stupid Mac pro, which you didn’t even end up buying, which by the way, I do owe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you probably publicly a, uh, a, I don’t know, an apology, a accolade, something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for not having bought a Mac Pro, I absolutely lost a bet with myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I figured you would have had one within six months at the earliest, and probably six—or excuse me, at the latest—in probably six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks, but you held out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I bought the XDR instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure how much credit I deserve here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although you did hold out on that for a pretty long time as well. I did. You know, the sick thing is—the really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sick thing is—now I am spoiling the show just ever so slightly. I’m now trying to think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about what my new computing life will look like. Save it. And I’m looking at the monitor situation and I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, this is not good. This is not good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. I got problems. I got problems, my dude. I got problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You just watched over some future episode of this show where I’ve just purchased a Jeep Wrangler and you’ve just purchased an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will say that you’re gonna hate what I ordered, but that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I mean, unless you ordered like the Intel iMac, like I think it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I just really wanted that nice warmth and the fans that blow my hair back. I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just one more time. It was, I think the last in-person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC show that you two made a terrible mistake. And I was complaining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Marco about this before John got on the call. You used it too soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You blew our opportunity to edit in right here, we are the champions, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gentlemen, we are the champions today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All three of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who are the champions?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All three of us. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about laptops. Your work does, and you still have a jobby job. All three of us are the champions,
⏹️ ▶️ John was the moment. I’m only the champions if I get one of these at work, and the prospects of that seem dim.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You will, you will eventually. Oh man, so the rules state that we are not allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do any sort of follow-up and we need to just dive right in. So, big week?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not stopped like happy crying in days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I am genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprised how excited I am about everything. And we’re going to talk a lot about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our reactions. We’re going to talk a lot, obviously, about this event. But something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve realized is, you know, every year I get excited for new phones, even if it’s a phone that I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have anything to be excited about, I’m still excited for a new phone. But this year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this event, I am more excited than I ever would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected about what has happened and what I’ve purchased. Now we are going to talk about what we have or have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not purchased. If we have time, we’ll talk about how I’ve ruined my own life with my purchase, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll get to that later. But nevertheless, I am just overjoyed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Apology Tour has commenced and almost all of our wishes are coming true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I am beyond excited. I know, Marco, I heard screams
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from all the way up in New York of excitement, even though I was down in Virginia, I could hear it. You were so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited. And John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I think I heard one- I’m sure there wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the touch bars being murdered. That might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco have been. Although that would have been from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey West. All screaming out at once. That would have been from the West, not the North. But yeah, and then John, I thought I heard one grunt of satisfaction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point. So I feel like we are all indeed the champions.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was excited about all this. Like, I’m just saying, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the champion thing is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you didn’t even have to wait 10
⏹️ ▶️ John years and you know, the Pro Max or any, anyway, I feel like the Mac Pro was the appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John time to use We Are The Champions. I understand the spirit of your request, but your request is denied.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we also, we also never thought we would get this. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, when, when we were, you know, hoping for the Mac Pro to come back at all, the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of redesigning the laptops in a radical way that made them significantly more appealing to us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not seem like a possibility that was that was on the in the cards. Like it’s everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we, you know, quote, got from this. We’ll get there. But everything we got from this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would never have guessed two years ago or three years ago, whenever that was, I would never have guessed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was a possibility for the next MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because it’s a move backwards. Anyway, we’ll try to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know it’s not that too.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. But like, that’s why we were just sort of resigned to our dissatisfaction and would just complain
⏹️ ▶️ John and grumble and be left in the dustbin
⏹️ ▶️ John history like a bunch of crusty old men, but it turns out we were right. We’ll get to that at the end.
Start Up by A.G. Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we should probably try to move through this and get to the good stuff as quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as possible And that’s it. We can get to the good stuff right now because it’s the very first thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so freaking jazz No, I’m not. It’s a voice plans five bucks a month. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s right. I’m sorry. You’re right. You’re right. You’re right. I completely skipped over it You are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was and I know now that’s called start up by somebody named a G cook who everyone knows except me because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I never know popular people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s half true. Everyone knew except you and me. However, I did listen to some of his stuff and it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so this has been, I think this was probably my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple intro video in a number of years. What I loved about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only was it clearly like a love letter to the Mac, which was a theme for the whole event,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was obviously very high budget and high produced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and very corporate friendly to this corporation and normally that would not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be something that I would care about very much. But as the Apple events have increased
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their production value and pre-production as we’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the COVID times and nobody has live events anymore, we’ve said in the past it’s gotten increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s watching a big commercial because that’s really what it is. And when you have a live event and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have live people on stage you can put more humanity into it. it feels less rigid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a little bit less rehearsed, even though they always were pretty rehearsed, but the pre-recorded events are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so sterile and so formulaic and they have so much of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soul sucked out of them that to start it with something that fits their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco format, but it’s just a really good version of it, I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. It set the tone that, yes, I’m about to watch a corporate promotional video that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had infinite money and is going to make me spend infinite money. But to start that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with something that was truly delightful and really nice and for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once it didn’t feel like just so forced and artificial and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t wait to see what you do with it. It was none of that crap that usually the videos that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they start with are kind of saccharine to me. And this wasn’t, this was just really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. And maybe I’m just buying into the hype or whatever, but this one just hit me in a really nice way and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was just so well done and it fits so well on theme, both as part of a corporate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco event video, but also as this love letter to the Mac. It was really, really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I strongly agree and gosh knows that all of the old time Mac users like John and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stephen Hackett, I’m sure you guys were overjoyed with it. John, did you enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it was great. I love the song, I love the music, I love making it out of Mac sounds. That’s all great and all. My one complaint was, how
⏹️ ▶️ John is this connected to new MacBook Pros? And the answer is, it’s not really, but it’s cool. All right, granted, it is cool. I
⏹️ ▶️ John liked it, but I was so impatient, I was like, get on with the show, which really will let you know how I
⏹️ ▶️ John felt when the next section was about music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first we had to see Tim Cook getting a bunch of ticks in the field.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s exactly what I said. As soon as I saw him in the grass, then I saw Tiff tweeted the same thing. So Long Island
⏹️ ▶️ John sees tall grass, think ticks and Lyme disease.
Apple Music Voice Plan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have Zane Lowe telling us about the there’s playlists based on moods and activities,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which in principle, I think is neat. I’ll probably forget that that’s a thing in about a day, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can get behind the principle of it. And then all joking aside, there’s a new voice plan. It’s five dollars a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s going to be available later this fall. And in the kind of short, short version is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s all of Apple music, but you can only interact with it via Siri, which is a very interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and at first glance, peculiar choice, but I think this is based, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really for people to use with their HomePods, if I’m not mistaken. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t have ads, we don’t think, and there are other things, other similar plans at similar prices from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their competitors that do have ads. But I mean, I don’t have a problem with this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be honest, it’s certainly not for me, but hey, if this is something that you want in your life, especially if maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you aren’t all in on Apple everything, but you have a HomePod or two or 10 and you like them. Yeah, man,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like my tweet thoughts that I put in my tweet is still my thoughts on this entire feature, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John how much frustration are you willing to put up with in order to save some money on your monthly bill, right? Because the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of having access to the world’s music, but you have to interact with it with Siri, which I know technically isn’t true, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it was framed in the presentation was like cheaper at the cost of your sanity because
⏹️ ▶️ John now you have to do battle with Siri to get to play the song that you want and I really hope it doesn’t have any words that sound like
⏹️ ▶️ John other words in the title. But yeah, it seems like a competitor to other services. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you look at the big we’ll put a link to the big like checkmark thing they have on apple.com slash music saying, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what you get for five bucks a month. And here’s what you get for 10. And here’s what you get for 15. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see how someone in a meeting was like, look, this is going to be a cheaper plan. And we have to remove some checkmarks because the whole idea is you
⏹️ ▶️ John pay more, you get more. So what checkmarks can be removed? is the upsell to paying more and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they have a reasonable list of features. The one that really burns me though is when you use the music app according to Gruber.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you go to the music app, the interface is just serious suggestions in your listening history. It’s like, come on, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that feels punitive. Like that really does feel like we’re forcing you to use the voice assistant because like the upsell
⏹️ ▶️ John is hey, you don’t have to just use our voice assistant. So it shows that it is valuable to be have something in addition
⏹️ ▶️ John to the voice assistant and then they take that away for this plan. So that makes me a little bit upset. But the other thing I’ve seen from
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people is like, look, old is flutty dutty. Regular people don’t listen to music the way you think you do. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go browse artists album track. That’s not how the youngsters listen to music. So maybe this does
⏹️ ▶️ John fit in. But anyway, we’ll say a cheaper plan is better than not having one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think this is a direct shot at the echo plan like for ever since the Amazon echo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco existed, you could ask it for music. And if you didn’t have an Amazon music plan, it would offer you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to subscribe to Amazon music right there on the echo to your Amazon account all done by a voice and it was something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like four or five bucks a month if you wanted a plan that would only play on that one echo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that would but but for many people that’s great and actually we subscribe to that plan for four years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before we eventually wanted to get like a second echo and then we want then we had to get like the full-blown Amazon music plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that to work very well but this I think makes total sense in that context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when compared to that you actually got a lot more access to that membership with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with with the Apple Voice plan. That being said, it is a very weird product. I don’t expect it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be something that we ever really talk about again, honestly. And they might end up having millions of subscribers to it, but we just might never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about it again. But ultimately, I think this is a supporting role to the HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m gonna tell you how much I love what we have to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after this segment, that I have a HomePod rant that I’m going to save for another
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s strong. You really upset about the new colors?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, it’s about my HomePods. Okay.
HomePod Mini colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the HomePod Mini comes in colors
⏹️ ▶️ John soon. Hooray! There he comes in colors now. Topic done.
AirPods (3rd-gen)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So they’re available next week. They’re there. Look vaguely or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than vaguely. Actually, they look fairly similar to the AirPods Pro, but they are all plastic. They don’t have a little rubbery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit at the end. It now has spatial audio. It has adaptive EQ.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Five minutes of charge gives you one hour of use. The charging case gives you four full charges. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MagSafe charging, which is different than AirPods case in the past, right? Because those were cheap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not specifically MagSafe. These look good. I was hoping for a revamp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the AirPods Pro. I’ve never had any AirPods except the… I’ve had the first two generations of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straight up regular AirPods. I’ve never had a Pro, never had a Max. And I’d like to try the AirPods Pro because I’d really like the noise cancellation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t want to buy them until there’s a new one and there isn’t a new one yet. But these look really, really good. $180
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available next week. I think you can order them now. I’m not sure about that, but they look good.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can because I did. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. Are you excited? Yeah, the rumors exactly nailed all the
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures of these for months. This is them. I really hope they fit my ears well, but the good news is they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John selling the old AirPods as well, so I didn’t have to buy two of them. I just bought these, and if I don’t like them, I’ll just give them to a kid
⏹️ ▶️ John and buy another pair of the old ones, or maybe two pair or three pair of the old ones, depending on how paranoid I get about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, my only complaint about these is that the engraving is now in all caps. Oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s too bad. It looks shouty. I didn’t like it, but I got it engraved anyway just so I can tell my AirPods from the million other
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that are floating around the house. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’ll tell you what I think of them when I get
⏹️ ▶️ John them. My date is out into the future because engraving always pushes a date back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of my favorite things about it is that the like ear tapping gesture is gone now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like because that that always, you know, in the brief period where I used standard AirPods that always drove me nuts and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it felt uncomfortable in lots of ways and everything. So they went to the click sense like the pros. One thing I really like to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is MagSafe on the case. That was a really nice touch. What many people don’t know is that MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco puck chargers are also Qi chargers and you can already without anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new put your Qi compatible AirPods case on a MagSafe puck and if you center it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly right it will charge.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do that’s what I do with my the only thing I use my MagSafe puck for. Right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know having MagSafe in it to make it automatically align and automatically center itself is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice little convenience feature and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mentioned. Do you know that it does that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, that’s an interesting question. Cause they could just, it could just be the same as it was in the previous case. I mean, now they just call it
⏹️ ▶️ John MagSafe. I’ll tell you when I get them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought like the, when they put it on in the event, it looks like it kind of clicks into place, but maybe I, I maybe I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John The current one also kind of clicks into place. Like you’ve done it, right? You feel, it does have a centering
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Cause I think there are
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. Really? Yeah. It’s, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Try it when, if you get off the air, take your regular thing and put it on your pocket. It kind of, anyway, I’ll tell you when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. said that the AirPods Pro case from this point forward is also now quote updated with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s probably better alignment. Yeah, it’s probably some kind of actual hardware change in the case. Anyway, that’s nice to see.
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Safari tabs are back! 🎉
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So about 15 minutes into the broadcast, and gosh knows how far we are into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our broadcast, but it was about 15 minutes for Apple. We get to the Mac, and we’re going to interrupt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very quickly what Apple did. And let’s talk, John, about Monterey. What would you like to tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they didn’t announce the release date in the keynote, which is weird because it’s not like they had, it’s not like it was long, like they
⏹️ ▶️ John had plenty of room. But anyway, it’s out on Monday, October 25th. So that’s good. We’ve got a date for that. And that That means
⏹️ ▶️ John all the developers finally got an Xcode build that will build for that, which is nice. But the important news as far as we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John concerned on this program is, as foretold by me, sort of an episode
⏹️ ▶️ John or two ago when I said, they still have a chance to fix Safari in Monterey. Like, no, they’ve already released it. The garbage
⏹️ ▶️ John one is out. I’m like, but no, but Monterey’s not out. Well, as far as we can tell, it looks like from Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John webpages for Monterey and from the reports from people who have seen the latest build, that they did fix
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari in Monterey. that it has normal tabs when you’re not in the quote, unquote compact
⏹️ ▶️ John mode, like just like, just like the tabs look like in Safari 14, as far as I can tell, there may be some other weird glitchy
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, but compact mode is still there, which again is the mode where the address bar and it becomes a tab
⏹️ ▶️ John and the tab becomes an address bar, which is, again, I don’t know why I didn’t see more people reiterating this, we’ve talked about it many times.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only reason the tabs look like that is because they used to be the address bar. So when they moved them and they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco weren’t the address bar
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore, it didn’t make any sense, but it was like, hey, why are the tabs like this? The answer is because it used to be the address
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. Right? So anyway, compact, the tab is still the address bar, but in non-compact mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have regular tabs and they fixed it on iPadOS 15.1 apparently too. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John count this as the second major Safari redesign, maybe third if you count the iOS one, along
⏹️ ▶️ John with toppy tabs and Safari 4, or whatever the hell that was, that Apple tried to do and could not make happen
⏹️ ▶️ John because, well, in this case, because it was bad. Toppy tabs wasn’t necessarily bad, but they couldn’t make it happen. This
⏹️ ▶️ John time it was bad and they wound it back for a good idea. So kudos to Apple for at the last
⏹️ ▶️ John minute realizing the error of their ways. And you know, you don’t even know it’s last minute because they could have decided to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this reversion like a month ago. It just takes a long time for us to see the result of it. So I’m going to give them credit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why I held out hope. It’s like it takes a long time for these things to appear in public builds or anything. They probably made the
⏹️ ▶️ John decision to revert a while ago and just have to make sure that everything still works. So I’m happy about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I this is like an extra little bonus, you know, cherry on top for for the the wonderful day that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had. I haven’t actually seen this yet because the version of Safari that is still the live version for Big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sur is unfortunately still the version I’m still using. But I’ll tell you one thing, you know how people always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade their versions of iOS for stupid reasons, like they wanna get the new emoji? If Big Sur,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or sorry, if Monterey has this nice tab design with Safari and Big Sur
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t, I will upgrade to Monterey on day one. Like that’s how much I hate these terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John blob tabs. Like just. It’s the same theme as Apple fixing the laptops. We’re desperate to get what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. But in this case, we’ll get to the laptop stuff in a minute, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the criticism the laptops have seen are like, oh, they’re just bringing us back 10 years, whatever. And no, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the laptops case, they actually are moving forward into quite a number of areas that are very important, whereas so far, we literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just want them to give us what we had before. But at least it didn’t take them five years to do it this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hooray. All right. So…
M1 Pro, Max for M1 Pro Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Without further ado, let’s talk at least the chip section of the new MacBook Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John Ternus came out briefly to talk about how they’re, quote, completely reimagining, quote, the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. And we are going to have to revisit the city of chips image that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you put this together. Is that correct? This was
⏹️ ▶️ John I was always surprised when I look at how long ago these things were. This is May, May 2021,
⏹️ ▶️ John as evidenced by the tweet I tweeted about it and the date in the URL. So this is when we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumors, I forget where the source of rumors, I think was Grumman, had the rumors about what the various
⏹️ ▶️ John dyes would be, the Jade Sea Dye, Jade Sea Chop, all that stuff like for the future Macs. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I was so fascinated by the rumors that I said, I’m going to mock this up. I’m going to draw what these would be like
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the rumors and specs or whatever. And this is May, right? So this section of
⏹️ ▶️ John the event, where they said, let’s talk about chips, they basically announced Jade Sea Dye and Jade Sea Chop,
⏹️ ▶️ John more or less exactly as the rumors indicated. Obviously these fanciful diagrams that I make that have no
⏹️ ▶️ John bearing on the actual floor plan of the chip were not a match for anything in the event, but the number
⏹️ ▶️ John of components represented, which is the whole point of these abstract diagrams, was right on the money. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they bought out Johnny Sruji to talk about it, and they introduced, well, they started by
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, and we have a new amazing chip, blah, blah, blah, and we’re calling it M1 Pro. And between
⏹️ ▶️ John the last show, where we all made our name predictions that we’ll talk about later, And
⏹️ ▶️ John the event, we actually did hear the rumor, I think again, German got it a couple of days before, that
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Pro and M1 Max were rumored names. So it wasn’t actually a surprise. I didn’t get the
⏹️ ▶️ John shock of saying, what do you mean M1 Pro? Because I’d heard the name before. But I was hoping the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t true, but they were. It not only doesn’t ruin our plan t-shirt design, but it’s also,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll talk about the names in a little bit, probably in the after show. But here’s the chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they showed it and they said, here are the specs. And it’s got eight performance cores and two efficiency cores and a 16 core GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and a 16 core neural engine. And the RAM is up to 32 gigs. And a lot of people were flipping out on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John when that came up on the scene. They’re like, oh no, 32. Wasn’t that John’s big fear that’s gonna cap out at 32? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I did not fear because the rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the rumor that
⏹️ ▶️ John German had said for the names was M1 Pro and M1 Max. And I said, oh, well, this is just
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 Pro. The M1 Max will surely have 64 gigs. And spoiler alert, it did. So anyway, these
⏹️ ▶️ John are the specs, but the other thing is, this is Jade C. Chop. He’s just describing Jade C. Chop. He just looked at the graphics
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, yep, check off the marks, yep, this is exactly what it was, 16 core, all the whole thing. But then they started to
⏹️ ▶️ John get into the stuff that we didn’t know, which is like, how does this thing perform? Not just how many execution units does it have,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what is it like? What do we do? And so one of the first things they talked about was they doubled the memory interface
⏹️ ▶️ John to 200 gigabytes per second, which is apparently three times what the M1 was. And from what Ann and
⏹️ ▶️ John Tech can tell, They used to be a 128-bit bus, and now it’s 256-bit bus. And they said the old one was LPDDR4X,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now it’s LPDDR5. Did they say it was 5 nanometers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They did, yes. They specifically mentioned it.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Obviously, they didn’t tell us if it’s the, I should remember, 5N, whatever. 5P or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. They didn’t go into that level of detail, so we still don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got twice as many transistors as an M1. And they talked about how much faster
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, the old thing, 16 GPU cores, which is double what the M1 has. So it’s about twice as fast
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s how GPU cores work. It’s convenient. All sorts of video acceleration, lots of good stuff that we
⏹️ ▶️ John all love. And so that was not surprising at all. But what
⏹️ ▶️ John it meant was that if that was dead on and we have the M1 proname and that
⏹️ ▶️ John became true, then it’s time for M1 Max, which is the- Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. But you skipped over a couple of quick things. First of all, two external displays, still the case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the M1 Pro, which is a little bit surprising to me. I’m surprised there wasn’t more support for more displays.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I called out a quote right at the beginning of Johnny’s presentation that I thought was interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he said, “‘We started by re-architecting the chip fabric to enable the system on a chip to scale.’”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Didn’t say how far it wanted to scale, just that they want it to be able to scale. And that brings me back to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey City of Chips image where, you know, I forget the name of them, I don’t have the image up in front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me, but the basically forthcoming Mac Pro city of chips is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey metropolis of chips, but all the same stuff, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it kind of hinted to me, and I’m probably reading the tea leaves a little too strongly, but it hinted to me that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically taking the M1 and making it so that they can multiply it. And I thought that that was unsurprising,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll get to that because where you see the big graphics later in the thing, I have some stuff to say about that theory.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, so this is the CHOP version and then a Jade C-Die is the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John Max. And this is gonna be difficult on a podcast. M1 space M-A-X.
⏹️ ▶️ John It sounds exactly like M1 space M-A-C-S. Good job, Apple, really, real helpful there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the M1 Max have the M1 Max in them. It’s great. So same
⏹️ ▶️ John deal. It’s eight performance cores, two efficiency cores, 32 core GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John which is four times faster than the M1 you can just do the math in case you haven’t figured out if You know if you’re comparing the same GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores it scales pretty much linearly So yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM is from 32 to 64 so there’s your 64 gig thing again at this point in the presentation They’re just talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about chips. We don’t know what are these chips gonna go into it We all know they’re going to Macbook pros But anyway the fact that they’re talking about these chips,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we know they’re going to Macbook pros yay Macbook pros with 64 gigs and they doubled the
⏹️ ▶️ John memory bandwidth again. So this one does 400 gigabytes per second, which is six times what
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 has and a 512 bit interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this just using like two different chips? Is it like, you know, the C chop only uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one memory chip and then the C die uses two memory chips maybe? It’s the other way
⏹️ ▶️ John that the chop uses two and the die uses four, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John okay. Yeah, that’s what it’s. So you saw the diagrams where it shows like the Mickey Mouse ears of the RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I guess the M1 had two chips next to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s two and four. And again, when we get to the Anatech section, you’ll see the little memory interfaces labeled by Anatech
⏹️ ▶️ John in the article. So yeah, this is Jade C. Dye. And
⏹️ ▶️ John here we are in the Anatech article. So they go into detail on this. Apple itself in the presentation put up
⏹️ ▶️ John a picture that is ostensibly of the actual chips, like the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John silicon if you chop the top off of a chip and you could actually see all the transistors. Ostensibly, this is what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is showing. So they show the M1. It’s the one where it’s like everything’s like rainbow colored because the features are so tiny they refract the
⏹️ ▶️ John light or whatever Then they show the m1 pro and then they show the m1 max And I hope Marco will put this
⏹️ ▶️ John as the chapter art, but if not, you can just go to the presentation and fast-forward to
⏹️ ▶️ John 20 minutes and 7 seconds and see the diagram what I want you to notice Those of
⏹️ ▶️ John you who are looking at the show notes, which I guess is just Marco and Casey Yeah, and again,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know how accurate these are as and what we are We’ll get to that in a moment but essentially these are the real chips. If you take the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Pro, which is Jade C-Chop, and you grab that thing, and you place it over the
⏹️ ▶️ John top of M1 Max, it essentially matches up. The M1 Pro is just the M1 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John with literally the bottom chopped off, just like when we were talking about, what does that mean, chop? And we
⏹️ ▶️ John had someone in the Silicon industry say, here’s what it means. It means you just chop the bottom of the thing off. The picture Apple showed,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could have just taken the M1 Max and used like the, you know, rectangular selection tool and
⏹️ ▶️ John grab the top half of it. And that’s the M1 Pro, right? Because the bottom half is all those
⏹️ ▶️ John other GPU cores and the other two memory interfaces. So here is the Anandtech article and they
⏹️ ▶️ John have the blocks labeled and then the M1 Pro they show, here’s the CPU part with the eight
⏹️ ▶️ John performance cores and the two efficiency cores way up in the corner. There’s the little neural engine. You see the 16 core GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John taking up most of the space. And then you see the 128 bit LPDDR5 memory interface,
⏹️ ▶️ John one on the left and one on the right. And that’s where these sort of RAM ears hang off,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s the CHOP. But then when you go to the MAX, it’s exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as the CHOP, except for this GPU cores keep going. And there’s two more memory interfaces for the other set of
⏹️ ▶️ John ears, two more 128-bit LPDDR5 memory interfaces.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s the rumors come to life. That’s what they’ve built. But we have to mention that the
⏹️ ▶️ John MAX can support up to four video screens. So, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, I think it’s more than that. the 36k well that we’re talking about machines and we’re talking about chips and not machines
⏹️ ▶️ John we have the machine in a second but anyway it has more video decode stuff as well now
⏹️ ▶️ John as for these floor plan things there’s been a lot of consternation about
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at them because if you look at the m1 max and you say okay I see how like it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John that the top half is the same as the m1 Pro but look at the bottom half even if you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re looking at you can just sort of pattern match do you guys both see like the two little
⏹️ ▶️ John E’s facing each other?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah. And then do you also see, if you look at the 16 core
⏹️ ▶️ John NPU in the M1 Pro on an Anand Tech diagram, you see that little feature there?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco processing unit? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like copied and pasted from that. Do you see another one of those on this chip? It’s not copied and pasted because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s different like shading. Do you see where the other one is? Like in the bottom left half? Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There are elements in the M1 Macs that look like they are
⏹️ ▶️ John duplications of elements from the top of the M1 Pro thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which seems weird because the M1 Max still just has a 16-core neural engine. But if you look at the floor plan of the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Max in Apple’s own picture, there’s a whole second 16-core neural engine
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting down in the bottom half of the chip. And so a bunch of people who
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, Silicon mavens were speculating about that, getting back to what Casey said. So here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what Wild Crack said on Twitter. The M1 Max die shot shows a duplicated NPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and many other repeat components at the bottom of the chip. Maybe Apple is duplicating these structures
⏹️ ▶️ John on the die shot to mask what is really there, which is chip to chip logic for Mac Pro with four M1
⏹️ ▶️ John Max dies on one package. And Mike Goldsmith says, well, that could be true, but they could
⏹️ ▶️ John also just use additional PCIe interfaces to link the chips together. Looking at the images, I don’t think they need to take
⏹️ ▶️ John that much artistic license, and reality is they may have indeed Duplicate a certain IP so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s possible that they are printing a whole second neural engine in that spot, but it’s also possible that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is Somewhat faking this floor plan diagram To hide
⏹️ ▶️ John what is actually there It seems more likely to me that we just don’t know what that thing is and even though
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like it’s exactly the same Shape is this in the core neural engine that it maybe only comes into play
⏹️ ▶️ John when you connect four of these together or two of These together for the Mac Pro and then suddenly that part of the chip is active like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s kind of like a redundancy thing where if one of those is bad, they just use the other one. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John But either way, part of the question about like, and I’m gonna, you know, we’re gonna get to
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Pros in a second. Part of the question about the bigger computers is, okay, this is Jade-C-Die.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the first half of the diagram. It’s like, you’ve got the M1, Jade-C-Die, and Jade-C-Chop. Has come to fruition just as
⏹️ ▶️ John the prophecy foretold. The second part of the diagram, the bottom is Jade-2C-Die and 4C-Die, which are
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro size chips, or maybe even iMac Pro size chips. But if you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John size of the M1 Max, which is basically Jade-C die, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really print something four times that big. We talked about this before. Like you can’t make a single die
⏹️ ▶️ John right now the size of Jade-4C die in any kind of reasonable economical way.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re gonna probably print a bunch of Jade-C dies. That’s why it’s called Jade-C die. And you put them
⏹️ ▶️ John in a multi-chip package. So you don’t print them all together. You print multiple ones, but then they have to talk to each other somehow. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta be some kind of interconnect interface. Maybe that’s at the edges of the chips and so on and so forth, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it also probably means that now we know exactly how big this stuff and those rumors were true, that if you’re thinking there’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a single die the size of Jade 4C die, that seems highly, highly, highly unlikely given
⏹️ ▶️ John the massive size of that thing. So, you know, as my little graphic from May
⏹️ ▶️ John says, Jade C die, the building block for Pro Mac system on a chips
⏹️ ▶️ John the building block meaning this is the thing they’re gonna make and they’re either gonna give you like 3 4ths of one,
⏹️ ▶️ John the chop, one, which is the M1 Pro Max, or two or
⏹️ ▶️ John four in a multi-chip package using some magic that we don’t quite understand. So stay tuned for that with the Pro Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John but, um, and also the other thing to keep in mind is this was May, here are the chips, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumor in May, here are the chips, by the time we get to the period of like the Mac Pro, it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be like a year from now, and these rumors could be stale or wrong. So I just want to throw that out there as well, that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the first half coming true it like by the time you get to the second part of the diagram
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot might have changed especially if the new Mac Pro comes out in December 2022 which it seems like it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I mean well on the timeline I think what’s interesting is you know we this again there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumors as you said been here since May and gotta say German nailed it on this one like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all so far has panned out um like exactly as he said it would so you know good job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco German there was a rumor that came out, I think yesterday, that there’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be an iMac with a 120 hertz ProMotion screen coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out this coming spring. If that ends up panning out, display leaks, which is what this is based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, tend to be somewhat reliable. And so if that pans out, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the schedule that we might have is all the Jade, C-Die, and C-Chop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now known as M1 Pro and M1 Max, those products are out now. And this is it. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t get the Mac mini or the iMac with these products in it, which is curious. But maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we’re gonna have then is in the spring, a spring event where we get what will most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely be called the iMac Pro at the larger 27 or 30 inch size, whatever it ends up being,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly using Jade 2C die, so two M1 Maxes. And then maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new Mac mini there that also has that as an option, maybe if it fits. I don’t even know if it’ll fit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then maybe the Mac Pro comes either at that event or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later in the year. Because it sure seems like this two year timeline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going, like we’re gonna be taking all of it. It’s not gonna be like accelerated early. They’re gonna take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of it. So it would not surprise me if the spring event we get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pro, possibly quote Mac Mini Pro, whatever that would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then those would be the 2C, rather the dual M1 Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designs. And then maybe WBC or maybe later next fall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s when we get the new Mac Pro with quad M1 Maxes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that point, the M1 core would be pretty much done, it would be two years old at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then maybe we get the, you know, maybe that same spring event, we get the rumored MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air with the first M2, and then maybe like later that fall, Maybe we get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first M2 Pro and M2 Max products. So we’ll see what happens. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the springtime will answer a lot of questions for us with like filling in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the rest of the product line.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, before we leave behind the Pro Max that weren’t introduced to this event,
⏹️ ▶️ John the question of what Jade 2C and Jade 4C would be called because Apple being the wonderful naming company
⏹️ ▶️ John they are decided to call their big one Max. What’s bigger than Max?
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra Max, you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You can just say it
⏹️ ▶️ John has two or four M1, it has two or four M1 Max’s inside it. Like we don’t know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve kind of, they’ve messed, they’ve painted themselves into a little bit of a naming corner. If they had
⏹️ ▶️ John just called it M1X, they could have called the Mac Pro an M1Z or who knows. Anyway, they’ll figure it out. The names don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean anything, but it’s a bit of a conundrum. Well, we’ll see what they do with that. So for,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just gave the specs on all these things, but actually, as we’ll find out when we go to the products, what it’s worth talking about now, they give variants
⏹️ ▶️ John based on how many things don’t work on the chip they printed, right? So you can get the M1 Pro in three different
⏹️ ▶️ John variants with eight or 10 CPU cores. And again, they all have,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, 10 CPU cores, but maybe sometimes some of them don’t work and you get a cheaper one. And the GPU cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get them with 14 or 16. So the pairs are, you can get 814, 1014, and 1016. And again, that’s all the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ John chip. It’s all JDC chopper. And 24, right? Can’t you get 24? Not on the Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t believe. Oh, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is very confusing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is, because like, remember, the chop is just the max with a bunch of GPU cores, like they’ve been chopped off, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, so yeah, the M1 Pro, it’s the same chip all the time, just depends on how much crap is broken on it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the cheaper ones have more broken stuff, right? And then M1 Max, M1 Max comes
⏹️ ▶️ John in two variants. It comes in a 10 CPU core and 24 GPU cores and a 1032. Right, so the 1032 is everything
⏹️ ▶️ John working on the big chip and the 1016 is everything working on the small chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s a quite like, obviously there, you know, that’s another Mac type of thing. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John tend not to, they don’t do that with iPhone chips. You don’t have a choice of like, well, I can get one with how many cores working out. They’re all have to
⏹️ ▶️ John work, right? And even for the laptop ones. But as they get, as you get into bigger and bigger chips and you’re gonna have more
⏹️ ▶️ John errors or whatever, they have to find a way to make money off of those. And they do it by saying, well, we
⏹️ ▶️ John could throw this away and make $0 off of it. Or we could just disable the cores that didn’t come out right from the oven
⏹️ ▶️ John and sell it in a cheaper Mac. And I think that’s great because a lot of people don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John either all those GPU cores or all the CPU cores, or if you can save 200 bucks, right, to sacrifice
⏹️ ▶️ John two CPU cores, it’s worth it if you’re just gonna be web browsing and stuff on it, or you just, you know, you want a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit more GPU grunt than an Air or the lesser Pro. So kudos to Apple for actually
⏹️ ▶️ John offering all of these variants. I know it’s confusing. It’s a little bit of a, I already saw people asking, I don’t know, should I get
⏹️ ▶️ John the eight or the 10 CPU cores or should I pay extra for the GPU cores or whatever? GPU is easier. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you care about graphics, there’s something you’re doing that uses the GPU that’s slower,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll know how much faster it will be because it scales linearly. CPU is harder because people don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re using all the CPU cores, but you know, given that the only choices for CPU cores is one variant has
⏹️ ▶️ John eight and all the rest have 10, it simplifies it a little bit. So I like that there’s variations and I like
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s some pricing difference. And as we’ll see when we get to the actual products, which I promise are coming up, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is pretty nice in the pricing, so it all works out.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But before we get to the products,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to talk about performance. Oh, great, you got all this crap. What’s the performance like? And it’s time for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s favorite charts, which I don’t know what we’re gonna call these. They’re like the sloping line charts.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve used them for all the Apple Silicon stuff. It’s a bunch of these weeping lines. And honestly, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it does not convey what they’re trying to convey in a way that is understandable to most people,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is kind of a shame.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I’m glad you said that because I was looking at these. I re-watched the presentation this morning And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking at these graphs, and I like to think of myself as not a complete moron, and I’m looking at these graphs, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not feel like they do a good job of explaining what they’re trying to explain at all. So I’m glad I’m not the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only one that is dissatisfied.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because they’re trying to show two pieces of information. They’re not just like, people need simple charts, which is just like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only one dimension. The taller bar is better, or the taller bar, or the shorter bar is better, right? But these are trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John show things in two dimensions. One dimension is power, one dimension is speed, and so that’s why you get these curves, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not easy for people to look and say, which curve do I like better? I mean, I guess the one that’s purple because Apple made it purple. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, we’ll get to that chart in a second. I just want to start off with some observations from folks on Twitter that I thought were fun based
⏹️ ▶️ John on the March of Progress. So this is from Scott Perry. He says, M1 Max’s DRAM is as
⏹️ ▶️ John fast as Intel’s on-die LLC, last level cache, from 2016. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the DRAM, the main RAM, like the main pool of RAM is as fast as what Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John used as last level cache in 2016. Also, between this and the SSD performance,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is as fast as RAM was 10 years ago, Apple is making a mockery of memory hierarchy. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the asset, because they, we didn’t mention that, but we’ll see in a second, but they did make the SSDs even faster. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like 7.3 gigabytes per second in these products that we haven’t yet talked about, right? And Josh Rogers says, so these
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t just any GPUs that Apple is comparing against in its charts. They came out of nowhere with Nvidia competitive graphics,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s what the charts, again, failed to communicate. They show these lines and they say, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 Macs against, again, and they haven’t even shown the machines yet. The line is labeled with the
⏹️ ▶️ John chip. There’s a disembodied chip represented by this curve right here. And here is a
⏹️ ▶️ John compact Pro PC with laptop graphics and here is a high-end PC laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a high-end PC laptop graphics with no hyphen, good job Apple. Anyway, what the heck are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco those machines?
⏹️ ▶️ John What are they talking about? And why is Josh Rogers saying it’s competitive with Nvidia? Well, if you look at very, very, very tiny type that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t tout anywhere, the things they’re comparing it against, The big one is a gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop called the MSI GE76 Raider, if you thought Apple had bad names,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it goes on with more letters after that, right? That’s the gaming laptop they’re talking about. And the other one is a
⏹️ ▶️ John Razer Blade 15, advanced mode, Nvidia, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, the big honking
⏹️ ▶️ John MSI laptop has a GeForce RTX 3080 laptop GPU with 16 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John of VRAM, which is a really good laptop GPU. It’s not as good as like a 3080 or 3090 desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s a really good GPU, right? And if you look at Apple’s graph, you’ll see that since
⏹️ ▶️ John performance is on the Y-axis, that the NVIDIA RTX 3080
⏹️ ▶️ John actually goes up a little bit higher than the M1 Max. Again, it’s hard to see in this diagram. Like, try to, you have to like
⏹️ ▶️ John draw a line with your eyes and say, hey, the gray line actually goes a little bit higher than the purple line. It totally does. It does go higher
⏹️ ▶️ John than the purple line. That means that laptop is faster than whatever is represented by
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Max in this thing, which is probably a MacBook Pro that we’re gonna talk about in a second, right? But what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wants you to see in this two-dimensional graph is, but look how much farther to the left the purple line is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so here is someone found a review of the MSI GE76 Raider. The name is on the tip of everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John tongue today. Right? I invite you to read the review just
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a glimpse of this laptop. But here’s a quote. MSI says the Raider has a 99
⏹️ ▶️ John watt hour battery, a 99.9 watt hour battery. And we all know that’s because 100 is the most you can bring on a plane. Right? So it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest battery you can put in it, just like Apple’s big laptop. but our testing showed around three hours
⏹️ ▶️ John max out of the laptop during standard use. You can get a tad more with battery settings and tweaks, turning brightness
⏹️ ▶️ John down and lighting off, but it’s still not amazing. So this laptop that is marginally faster than the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John Max here, M-A-X, gets three hours of battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s what this diagram is trying to show. See how far it is to the left? That’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John we use so much less power. So we’re almost as fast as a RTX 3080 laptop GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we use massively less power, like a hundred watts less power, which they did put in purple
⏹️ ▶️ John on this diagram, right? And so that’s their performance story for these laptops. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that if I made a product that was competitive with like one of the best
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop GPUs that you can buy, I would name the chip. I wouldn’t say high-end PC laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John graphics or compact PC laptop graphics. Everyone wants to know, well, Apple laptops are good, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not as fast as… I would name it. Maybe naming it would get into the thing that’s like, well, who cares, because you can’t play any games on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac anyway, because it doesn’t run 32-bit games from Intel, and Rosetta is slow, and
⏹️ ▶️ John games aren’t ported to M1, and there’s all sorts of reasons why it may not be good for quote-unquote games, but there’s tons of
⏹️ ▶️ John other things you can do with the GPU. What this is trying to say is, the GPU cores
⏹️ ▶️ John in here, as we knew from before, for, they’re really good. And the straightforward math of multiplying them by how many GPU scores
⏹️ ▶️ John that math works. And when that math works, the result is absolutely amazing GPU cores. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the numbers we didn’t have before when we were doing this back of the envelope is okay, yeah, but how much power and the answer is
⏹️ ▶️ John much less than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think this is why I don’t I don’t think we’re ever going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac Pro with Apple Silicon that has slots for other manufacturers GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, maybe they’ll put slots in to put more of Apple’s GPUs, even that I think is a stretch. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that the way forward for the Mac Pro in the age of Apple Silicon is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of Apple’s chips that have more GPU cores in them, like as we’re seeing with this strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This slide right here shows, yes, this is still in laptop land and we’re not in desktop land
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I know things are bigger and different and hotter and have giant fans and hair dryers and everything, but this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows right here, Apple does not need third-party GPUs. for their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purposes, for the computers they make and what they sell and who they sell them to and the app they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to run, Apple’s showing right here, we don’t need NVIDIA, we don’t need AMD,
⏹️ ▶️ John So the thing about the Pro ones though is that because you can have multiple GPUs in there, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John show many moons ago when we did this, did the back of the envelope, we said that it was totally plausible the Jade 4C die would
⏹️ ▶️ John be competitive with the best desktop single GPUs out there. And that’s still totally true. In fact, it may even be underestimated
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the performance of this one, right? But if you get a Mac Pro today, you aren’t limited to just picking
⏹️ ▶️ John a single one of the best GPU. You can get four of the best GPU. And there’s no way that you can compete with four
⏹️ ▶️ John of the best GPUs. That still leaves the line of slot open. It’s not what Mark said is true. Doesn’t mean you have to put Nvidia or AMD
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. You can put those Apple, like Apple has these GPUs, like, oh, but they only make integrated GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could take these GPUs that they’ve put on this thing and put them on a card, easy. Like they, it’s there. Like the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John is there. Yes, it’s on the same die as the thing. Yes, unified memory is weird and different to everybody. But if Apple wanted to,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like they have to start from zero to say, Oh, we have to make an external graphics card. What will we ever do? They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John more than 50% of the way they are already with what we’ve seen them release. So if they really wanted to, they could
⏹️ ▶️ John make an Apple GPU card. I’m not sure they want to. That would only
⏹️ ▶️ John mean that for the purposes of Apple thinks its computers should be used for that they can
⏹️ ▶️ John get by with this. And whatever purpose you’re using your four AMD Vega two GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John for, like whatever that purposes, Apple will say, like, say you were
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do, you know, ProRes, 8K ProRes video
⏹️ ▶️ John decoding. Apple will say, okay, but you don’t need 4GPUs to do that anymore. We’re able to do that now with less, which
⏹️ ▶️ John they demonstrated later, like, that this thing can do more 8K ProRes video decoding than
⏹️ ▶️ John the current Mac Pro with the afterburner card, right? So, for the things that Apple thinks you should use this
⏹️ ▶️ John for, they may say, yeah, you can’t have that many teraflops of GPU power, but you don’t need them because the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John you were doing, whatever it is, video rendering, decoding, whatever, you can do that even
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than you could before. So don’t worry about the four cards. Having four cards is not a feature being able to do the job that you
⏹️ ▶️ John could do with or with two cards with four GPUs is what you want it for. So Apple could make that argument, or they
⏹️ ▶️ John could just sell their own GPUs or they could continue to put third party GPUs we don’t know. It’s not supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be talking about the Mac Pro. Let’s move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. I’m sorry, before we move on really quickly, the MSI GE 76 Raider. If you look at this Pocket Lint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey review, and you scroll down, there’s a close-up image of the left-hand side of the laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just love this. If I’m looking at this right, the humongous exhaust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fan, next to it is a USB-A port where it is aligned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the top of the exhaust fan. Next to that is a USB-C port where the bottom of the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port is aligned to the bottom of the USB-A port. and then I believe next to that is a headphone port where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe the top of the headphone port is aligned again with the top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the other two ports but the USB C port is kind of floating in the middle scroll down a little more and I dare you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not to vomit over the font choice for this keyboard it screams I’m an 18 year
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got RGB lights underneath it though so it’s cool oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s so bad okay so I’m going to disclose something now. I don’t want to get into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but Tiff just upgraded her gaming PC to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other PC in this diagram, the Razer Blade 15 with the RTX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than this crazy-ass thing. I mean, Casey, in MSI’s defense,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody who’s buying this G Raider thing, I don’t think they’re looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aesthetics as a reason to buy this, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would even say that. I would say that these aesthetic, God, I can’t talk. These aesthetics are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably good for the kind of buyer that would want to buy this computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s what they want. They want a lot of lights and they want it to look all cool and computer-y. The other thing, we didn’t put this diagram
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes, but remember the thing they said, but look how much worse performance these things get on battery power and all the little curve lines shrunk
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, yeah. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not really true that like, if you unplug this laptop from power, it gets like 1 18th the
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU performance. That seems wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know by default, they do scale things back. A lot of that is because- Like a power saving feature? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of these have dual GPUs. And so they’ll switch over to the Intel one on battery power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s a common thing that I was running into, but yeah. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John so maybe you can disable that. And maybe that’s where they get the three hours of battery life is like, well, you’re not gonna use the integrated graphics. So just
⏹️ ▶️ John make the discrete running all the time. Anyway, we’re not getting PC laptops, doesn’t matter.
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C-Fed, briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we had a brief appearance from everybody’s pal Craig. And honestly, I didn’t think there was that much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be covered here, except Craig specifically said you can compile more code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a single charge, which was exciting because I’ve been doing that a lot lately. He also noted that every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app made available, every pro app made available by Apple is optimized for Apple Silicon. And there’s 10,000 universal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps and plugins on the App Store. Just worth noting. it.
The new MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, between John Ternus and Trudy, we got to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the new MacBook Pros. Holy fing s, you guys. I’m so excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for these. I’m so excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When this video was playing, I was just like, every two seconds, oh my god, they did that!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god, they did that! I was just so giddy over it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t believe. And the funny thing here was that there weren’t a lot of surprises,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the rumor mill had been surprisingly accurate. Literally, I think everything that had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco credible rumors behind it, I think we got it all. Steven Paulus Even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the not credible ones, like the notch, even that happened. Jared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Polin Yeah, that came in kind of last minute, but that ended up being correct. And there are some things like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not expect 120 hertz. That was very new.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so much of this was rumored. And when we were talking about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last, geez, two years, that maybe this has been rumored, when we were talking about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we would always disclaim, like, well, if this is actually true, and maybe we’ll get some of this, maybe half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this stuff is true, you know, at best, because even we couldn’t believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much that we would possibly get that was, you know, what in a good way would be called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan service. You know, it’s changes to this laptop that were things that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t think Apple would do just because they’re Apple and they’re stubborn and they have their way and they always think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. And yet they did them all. They made this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I understand, again, we’ll get to some of the complaints that people have about this. I understand that not everybody is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pleased. I think the ones who aren’t pleased are wrong. But, you know, we’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John I think if you listened to last week’s episode, I was the one who said, there’s no reason we can’t get all of
⏹️ ▶️ John this. If they really have changed the ethos, as I said in the last episode, of their design, there is no reason for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John try to bargain away of these things, so there’s no reason we can’t get it all. My question was, have they really changed their ethos?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer is 100% yes, they have changed the ethos. Like everything about this computer says,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re now thinking differently about how to make a laptop. Like it is so clearly just a
⏹️ ▶️ John different philosophy embodied in every aspect of starting from, I mean, obviously when they did the flyby, they showed
⏹️ ▶️ John you all the things that we know, like they’re showing us the ports, they’re showing us the keyboard, they’re showing us all, it’s like, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all super excited about it. And it also looks like the rumor of things or whatever. But yeah, this is the new design, either. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess we can start with like, physically, what are these things like? Well, they look like the rumors, surprise. Oh my God, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so giddy. It’s just like seeing the ports come around. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, can we get a picture of Shruti Haldia, like the Shepard Fairey Obama thing, like just home, like just ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I don’t know, just whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just, we must bow down to Shruti for giving us everything we wanted. Like, oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, I can’t believe how good this is. And John, like, you know, what you were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying last week about, you know, we can have it all. I remember something you said, I think three years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuck in my mind, that you said, we were talking about what we want in the next MacBook Pro, and we were kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, well, I would love if they just give us one little thing, just give us one port back, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one little change. And you said, John, I’m tired of the bargaining. Why can’t we do it all? Why can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the laptops just be good again? And for the entire 2016 to 2021-ish,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We wanted, you know, there’s a lot of things that went poorly in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world during this time. A lot of things that made people feel like things were just bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that things couldn’t get better. And this got so much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all these ways that we thought we’d be lucky to get one or two of these and we got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of them. It’s such a different feeling. feel so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only validating that the things that we were complaining about it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just us and Apple came around to that many of their customers felt this way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much so that they convinced Apple to feel this way and that’s a huge thing and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so to have our own feelings be validated because there was so much time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during the 2016 laptop era you know first with the butterfly keyboards that that was the biggest problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where we just felt like, we felt like we were the crazy ones. We felt like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Apple keeps saying these are really good, and you know, they don’t seem good in these pretty big ways to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us, and then they would release an update. Hey, here’s the new MacBook Pro update, and it would be exactly the same in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the bad ways. Like, nothing would be changed. And they would keep saying, we made it better, we made it better, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would still be terrible. And to finally have something that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really great. I mean, unless, again, none of us have these yet, so maybe there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of major downside that we’ll find out later, but honestly, I doubt it. It seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they really have their heads on straight and they seem to put a lot into this, and I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just so relieved and thrilled, and I’m really excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again about the MacBook Pro, and it’s been so long since I’ve been able to say that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I am super amped to get the computer that I bought, which we’ll talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later. Uh, I cannot tell you how excited I am for it. And I am just so much more excited than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I expected to be. I knew I was going to like this event and I pretty much always like Apple events,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this one, it’s it just, I loved it. Shruti did an incredible job of introducing everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and of kind of acknowledging the foibles of the past without dwelling on it, without really falling on her own sword,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a good thing when you’re in her position. I’m just. I’m overjoyed. I’m so excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like my laptop that I have now. I have a year old laptop and I’ve never been more excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even with a phone, I’ve never been more excited to dump year old hardware because even though this laptop is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually very good and it’s probably going to be for sale if you’re interested, contact me. It is very good, but I’m so excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this new one. I am so amped. So we should probably, I could go another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour just gushing over how excited I am, but we should probably talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John People miss this, but in the pre-flight, we were trying to say, everyone try to save your summary of how you feel
⏹️ ▶️ John about these laptops at the end. Marco made it pretty far, so let’s give him credit.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco He made it past the chip section, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I, I, I, what I’m saying is I echo Marco sentiment. He, he’s, we all feel
⏹️ ▶️ John similarly. And yes, this is a very exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one thing. This is John’s excited voice. Yeah. One thing we
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t tell from the, from, you know, the fly around or whatever. And we could see that we got
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that we wanted, but we couldn’t tell. Yeah. But like how big are these compared to the
⏹️ ▶️ John other ones? Right, like did they the rumors were Marco was afraid they might make it thinner at this point We don’t know how big the
⏹️ ▶️ John batteries are because we’re just watching the video. Did they make it thinner? Did they make it thicker? It’s so hard to eyeball this type of thing So here
⏹️ ▶️ John are the stats that hopefully I got everything right on for the 16-inch. It is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John 0.02 inches thicker so they did not try to make it thinner or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the height I’m not sure if that includes the feet or not But the point is they didn’t really try to make this thing thinner is either the same
⏹️ ▶️ John or a little bit thicker The width it is 0.08 inches narrower, so about the same. The depth it
⏹️ ▶️ John is 0.09 inches deeper. The weight it is almost half a pound heavier, again
⏹️ ▶️ John indicating that they were not going for thin and light, they were going for something else. They wanted it to be unleashed,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t want it to be thin and light. And then the interesting thing is, the weight
⏹️ ▶️ John when you get it with the M1 Pro is less than the weight if you get it with the M1 Max. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey notice that, that’s hilarious.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think that’s because of the part of the silicon chip that they chopped off for the JTC chop. It’s probably like a
⏹️ ▶️ John heat dissipation, like heat sink type stuff. But anyway, it’s 0.4 pounds heavier than the outgoing 16
⏹️ ▶️ John inch model in the M1 Pro and it’s 0.5 pounds heavier. So anyway, it’s 4.7 and 4.8 pounds, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on which one you get. And they say, they have a little disclaimer and all these things, weight varies
⏹️ ▶️ John by configuration and manufacturing process. Oh, interesting. What does that
⏹️ ▶️ John mean? Configuration, sure, like, oh, if you get the bigger chip, we put a bigger heat sink in there, whatever. manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John process. I’m not sure if this is legally easy. You have to cover your bases cause it’ll be a few grams different depending if they got
⏹️ ▶️ John the copper or the aluminum version of part X or something like that. It’s a weird disclaimer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or even just like how much of the aluminum case got milled out. You know, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John could be something. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, I think this was one, one of my big question marks here and, and this, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of gets to what I bought, which I’ll get to later. But one of my big question marks here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I would love to know what kind of internal differences there are between the different configurations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that weight difference as you mentioned that’s not just the chip you know so does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the figurations have a more you know appealing to me cooling system for instance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like maybe one of them has a bigger heat sink or one of them has only one fan instead of two fans or who knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there could be differences like that there have been in the past with their with their previous models so I’m curious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see like once people get these and start to you know seeing iFixit teardowns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. What are the internal differences between the configurations? Because I don’t think we know the full
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s probably just like the PS5 where they revised the manufacturing process and basically made,
⏹️ ▶️ John put less heat sink material in it. So it weighs less, basically 600 grams. And people freaked out about the length saying, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want the one with the bigger, heavier heat sink. Cause why would you, if you take out heat sink material, that seems bad. But
⏹️ ▶️ John then they tested them and measured them and it actually isn’t that big of a difference. It was all YouTube controversy that you probably missed out on. But I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that, yeah, but if the bigger chip is 0.1 pounds heavier, it’s probably heat pipes and heat sinks.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure all the 16 inches have two fans. I don’t think that’s the difference, but we will find out. The 14 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ John similar story. It is exactly the same thickness as the outgoing
⏹️ ▶️ John four port 13 inch Intel MacBook Pro. We’re not comparing it to the 13 inch M1
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro, which is thinner. We’re comparing it to its direct competitor, which is the one with quote unquote all the ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John The four port Intel 13 inch MacBook Pro is 0.61 inches thick and so is
⏹️ ▶️ John the 14 inch MacBook Pro. Width wise, it’s 0.34 inches wider, depth it’s 0.35 inches deeper,
⏹️ ▶️ John and weight it is again, 0.4 pounds heavier. So it is 3.5 pounds instead of 3.1
⏹️ ▶️ John pounds. So moral of the story in terms of size and weight, these are roughly the same size,
⏹️ ▶️ John but a little bit heavier and a little bit thicker. These are not going for, hey, you’re gonna be amazed at how much thinner it is than
⏹️ ▶️ John last year’s. What you’re gonna be amazed about these is the performance and the features and what it can do for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the extra millimeter we shave from it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m so happy about that too. Because for years you’ve been saying, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let the pro machines be pro machines. No one is saying, wow, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wish my video encoding laptop could be two millimeters thinner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one wants that at the cost of its ability to do those video encodes. The reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why you buy high-end hardware is not to make it as thin and light as possible, it’s to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end tasks. And so the hardware should be designed to not compromise on the ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do those high-end tasks to whatever degree possible. So for this whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past generation, it seemed like they were applying the same trade-offs to the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lineup that you would apply to the 12-inch 1-port MacBook 1. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was so frustrating for pros who were like, no, I don’t need a zero thickness keyboard. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need to have as few ports as possible. I don’t need all this compromise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want the high-end specs and make the computer whatever thickness it needs to be to accomplish that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it seems like, again, they saw the light on this. They did this right. They said, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what? Pros are okay with these things not getting thinner this year and actually getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavier or bigger or whatever because what they want is pro hardware doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro jobs without compromises. That’s what pro hardware needs to be. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did it, even going against what any commentator would have said a few years ago. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would never make the next generation of laptops thicker and heavier, but they did slash the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s, and they seem to be better for it. I’m just so happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John think that it’s not, when we were talking about the ugly, what the hell was it, the Raider, MSI Raider
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, that’s not what these are like, just to be clear. It’s still a thin, svelte, beautiful, Apple-looking
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Like it’s basically the same-ish. The weight you probably will notice much more than the thickness,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, like when people think, oh, what you want is for them to make one of those giant gaming laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John with, you know, giant vents in the side and it weighs 15 pounds, that’s not this. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John these are still Apple-looking laptops. So what we’re saying is just don’t try to shave millimeters and they didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m happy with that. In terms of the design, again, it looks like the rumors. For people who remember the Thai book,
⏹️ ▶️ John the titanium power book, that’s the most similar historic Apple design because
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike the rumors, yes, it does have flats, quote unquote flat sides, but unlike the rumors, it has, and absolutely has
⏹️ ▶️ John a curve at the bottom for you to get your fingers under it. And it also has fairly tall feet. So don’t worry about not being
⏹️ ▶️ John able to pick these off off the table when we were talking about from the rumors, because people were doing renders where it’s like literally flat sides
⏹️ ▶️ John that just came to a right angle. That’s not this. There is an absolute pretty big curve in the bottom. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just not the same curve as we’re used to. It’s curved like on the PowerBook G4 or on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Titanium PowerBook. The TideBook is the closest one because the top doesn’t have the same curve as the bottom. The PowerBook
⏹️ ▶️ John G4 had the same radius on the bottom and the top, but the TideBook had a big
⏹️ ▶️ John radius on the bottom and very little on the top. So that’s what these look like. You can just look at Apple site and take a look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the pictures. The feet are taller and more prominent. Why are the feet taller and more prominent?
⏹️ ▶️ John The two obvious reasons you think they would be. One, better cooling, because the taller the feet, the more air you can get under it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And two, to help you pick it off the table even more, right? Because it gives you a little bit more right height to get your fingers underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John the slightly flatter sides. So I think I’ll have to see
⏹️ ▶️ John these in person to see how like, how does it hold together as a thing? Because I’m just so used to seeing like the current design.
⏹️ ▶️ John The current design is beautiful, I think like graceful sort of tapered edge with the, you know, tapered curve
⏹️ ▶️ John with the sharp edge kind of, We all know what the current things look like. These don’t look like them, and I don’t really know what
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to be like to see one of these sitting on the table or to pick it up, but I’m excited to have a new design
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is definitely about time.
⏹️ ▶️ John much as I love the old design as a sculpture, this one seems also
⏹️ ▶️ John nice looking and is certainly better fit for purpose, to Marco’s point. And the other weird thing about this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to tell from the pictures, but the bottom looks like it has like a carved out
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro, like they etched into the case kind of deeply the words MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I have the etched ATP pint glasses and sometimes when I’m drinking out of them, I feel, you can feel
⏹️ ▶️ John the etching with your fingers. Like it’s an indentation. I kind of feel like that’s going to be on these too, but since
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s on the bottom, you’re not going to see it when you’re using it and you wouldn’t even really feel it when you’re carrying it because you carry it by the edges.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s an interesting design element. Some people really seem to hate it, but I think it’s kind of cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean the bottom otherwise is, of most laptops it’s kind of this generic, well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see feet and the dust on the feet and maybe some vents and screws and regulatory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco labels and you know that’s, so it’s normally a pretty unappealing place to look. So to put something cool there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m fine with that. I don’t see why people would have a major problem with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Battery life, in case it’s not clear from the dimensions and the weight we just gave, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t skimp on battery. So the 14 inch has a 70 watt hour battery which is 12 more
⏹️ ▶️ John than the outgoing 13 inch. The 16 inch has 100 watt hour battery, which is the most you can fit and still be allowed on planes
⏹️ ▶️ John in the US. So that was pretty easy to predict, but again, they didn’t shrink the battery. Yet again, something that I feared.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said, I’ve been saying for weeks, like, oh, please
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t shrink the battery. The battery life is so good on the M1s. And normally, you know, previous,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, dysfunctional Apple would say any opportunity they’d take to shrink the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and keep the same battery life, they would take it. And they didn’t do that. They kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 16 inch battery the same because they can’t increase it really. And they increased the 14. And that’s, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the biggest reasons why the 14 inch is heavier than the outgoing 13 inch, in addition to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it literally got bigger. But, you know, also it has a substantially bigger battery. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this context for a pro laptop, I think that is the right trade-off. You want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good battery life. You want great battery life. and it’s achievable, so give it to us.
⏹️ ▶️ John So one more trade-off that they gave related to battery life is, and you’ll see what the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John of these machines is, obviously they can’t make the 100 watt hour battery any bigger. They made the 14 inch one, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably as much bigger as they could. But in many contexts, and they didn’t really emphasize this,
⏹️ ▶️ John these laptops may not get as good battery life as, or certainly won’t get as good
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life as their lesser powered M1 brethren. So the 13 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 MacBook Pro gets better battery life than the 14 inch. Because the 14 inch is way
⏹️ ▶️ John faster and does more stuff. And so in the area of compromise, I said, look, if we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to sacrifice battery life, let it be for performance. That’s what they spend the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life on. These do get better battery life than their predecessors, because obviously they’re competing against Intel, forget about, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, whatever. But these things have way more power hungry, hotter components inside
⏹️ ▶️ John them. They need these bigger batteries and they will chew them up. That’s the point of the battery. It’s there for the power to
⏹️ ▶️ John be used. So if you want, if you get this like, wow, it’s got such a big battery, bet it’s gonna get great battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ John The 13 inch gets better battery life because it’s less powerful. It has less stuff inside it, right? And that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John proper trade-off. You want the big monster hungry machine with all the cores. There’s only so much battery
⏹️ ▶️ John we can fit in a 14 inch laptop. We make it as big as we can. But if you want maximum battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life, don’t buy the thing with 10 cores, okay? That’s just, you know, whatever, 64 gigs of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John 32 GPU cores, because yes, you can get the 14 with all the good stuff in it, right? That’s what these machines are about.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re about power, and they will spend all of their battery life on it. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then to charge those batteries, they have the fast charge thing, which always worries me, because I’m always like shortening the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life. But anyway, it will charge from zero to 50% in 30 minutes using the fast charge,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do the right charging dance, which is, all right, what do I have to plug this into?
⏹️ ▶️ John and what power brick. And so like, speaking of that, this I think is the first time Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has ever let you pick which power brick you want when you buy. And that’s probably not true. I think there might’ve been a choice on some power
⏹️ ▶️ John brick way back in the day. But anyway, if you buy the 14 inch and you pick the base model, you have a choice
⏹️ ▶️ John of which power brick you want. You can get the 67 watt power brick, which is the default, or for 20 bucks more, you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John the 96 watt power brick. And then for the high end 14 inch, you just get 96. And if you get the 16 inch, you
⏹️ ▶️ John get 140 watt power brick, with all of them, no matter what. And this was very confusing,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like the old iPad, iPhone, which thing do I have to plug it into to get
⏹️ ▶️ John it charged at the maximum possible rate and all this other stuff. Jason Snell had a good breakdown that we will link in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John that I mean, I guess clears it up, but it’s still kind of confusing. Anyway, he says, on the 14 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John models, the larger 96 watt USB-C power adapter is required for fast charging. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John fast charge either via MagSafe or via standard USB-C cable attached to that adapter. However, on the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John model, all of which come with a 148-watt adapter, you can only do the ultra-fast charging via MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ John While there’s a new specification that allows for much higher power delivery levels over USB ports, the Thunderbolt 4 USB 4
⏹️ ▶️ John ports on the MacBook Pro don’t support it. You can still charge via those ports just now at the ultra-fast speed. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of an unfortunate timing issue. The USB-C power delivery spec does allow
⏹️ ▶️ John for, in one of the latest revisions, does allow for enough power to fast charge them, but these laptops don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have that. So if you want 50% of your 16-inch MacBook Pro’s power to come
⏹️ ▶️ John in 30 minutes, you have to charge through MagSafe because the USB-C ports on that machine do not
⏹️ ▶️ John support that level of power delivery. But getting back to one more thing, and Mark was saying we get everything. Remember
⏹️ ▶️ John we were fretting a little bit, oh, if they bring back MagSafe, I’ll kind of miss USB-C charging. No, you won’t, still charges via
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And you’re like, oh, I don’t get the mega fast charging. You don’t have that now. You don’t have the fast charging now.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you just wanted to preserve, and the reason they couldn’t support it like just, you know, the USB-C power
⏹️ ▶️ John delivery spec, like the lead time these machines didn’t allow it. So they did
⏹️ ▶️ John everything we wanted for charging. MagSafe is back, by the way, if you look at the new MagSafe port, it’s basically the same size
⏹️ ▶️ John as a USB-C port in terms of thickness, maybe a little bit thicker, it’s hard to tell in the pictures. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there’s MagSafe 3, as if MagSafe wasn’t confusing enough. Yes, it’s the thing on the back of your phone and it’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John the power connector anyway. But you can also charge by all the USB-C ports and
⏹️ ▶️ John the power bricks, I’m not quite sure why they gave you the choice. Maybe you just want a smaller one for travel,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But I’m like the fast charging, maybe it’s because I’m just not used to it and don’t have it, but I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure how much of an attractive feature that would be. And I almost kind of wish with the 16 inch that there was a choice for a
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller power brick because the 140 watt one is pretty darn big. A smaller power brick that just didn’t do fast charging,
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe they just need the 140 watt just to be able to handle like when this thing’s running at full tilt,
⏹️ ▶️ John or they don’t want to revise this thing when later they put an even bigger chip in it. But the power story is slightly confusing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John basically you have all the options that you could ever want. Oh, and by the way, the MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, it’s just the cable. One end of it is USB-C that plugs into the power brick and the other end is MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ John So unlike the old MagSafe things where the cable would get frayed, you have to throw out the whole power brick. That problem doesn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ John at all anymore either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m super excited about MagSafe coming back. I have caused
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptops, my adorable this one. I mean, I’ve never damaged any of them because of it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve caused them to fall off of my lap, off of the couch, numerous times. In fact, more than the children,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, have caused it to fall. And it’s all because of power. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am super, super pumped to have MagSafe coming back. The only problem I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have with this, and in fact, I think there’s only two problems I really have with this new MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And number one, I’m gonna wanna get a gazillion MagSafe cables, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to be not cheap. How much is the cable alone?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, they sell you the cable. So is it 50 bucks? Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes with one in the box, so you don’t have to worry about that. But if you want extra ones, they’re not cheap. But they are like the nice cloth
⏹️ ▶️ John covered thing. Yeah. So and the third party ones will surely. Well, I don’t know. Will they surely be out? Because doesn’t Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John like try to keep a tight rein on the MagSafe spec? I’m not sure if they let third parties do it. Anyway, knock off third party ones that may burn
⏹️ ▶️ John down your house will probably be out soon for cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other problem I have with these MacBook Pros is have you seen the URL on Apple.com? It’s apple.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Macbook hyphen pro hyphen 14 hyphen and hyphen 16. Come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on, guys. That’s not great. It’s not great. I thought what I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought you were going to say is the problem related to charging with these is people like, great, I have all these options.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I don’t have to occupy one of my Thunderbolt ports constantly with the thing that just does charging. But then
⏹️ ▶️ John people say, yeah, but there’s only three Thunderbolt ports left.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, we’ll talk about the parts
⏹️ ▶️ John in a little bit, but there are only three Thunderbolt ports. So if you thought you were getting back a Thunderbolt port by having MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ John you are not. There are only three of them and then there’s a MagSafe thing. And it’s good that you don’t have to occupy
⏹️ ▶️ John a Thunderbolt port with MagSafe, but you only have three left. If you’re wondering why you only have three left,
⏹️ ▶️ John from what I’ve been able to determine, that is a limitation of the M1 Pro and the M1 Max. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple designed the M1 Pro and the M1 Max, so somebody inside Apple decided this is a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John trade-off. And when we get to what all the other ports available on the machine are, I’m kind of inclined to agree
⏹️ ▶️ John that this is a reasonable trade-off because You know surface area on that system on a chip is
⏹️ ▶️ John not free You have to decide which features you’re gonna support in which you don’t and we haven’t even got through all the things that this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing Supports and it supports a lot and it’s got a lot of ports and a lot of capabilities part of the beauty of Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John is Three Thunderbolt reports gets you pretty darn far Especially if you’re willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to dedicate one of them to a breakout box with a gazillion things on it, right? You only have a limited amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of bandwidth Thunderbolt ports seemed so precious before because there was literally nothing no other parts in the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing But now we’ve got more and so like people may be disappointed They may wish
⏹️ ▶️ John that this wasn’t a limitation of those ships But if you’re expecting that they just did this to save space on the case or something like that
⏹️ ▶️ John Again from what I’ve been able to determine that is not the case if you are expecting there will never be an m1 pro Or
⏹️ ▶️ John m1 max Mac with four Thunderbolt ports on it and all these other ports And I,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that trade-off is reasonable and fine for what we got in exchange for it. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a Texas size 10-4. We get 50% more air at lower fan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speeds. And they specifically said that the fans never have to turn on for most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the tasks that you do. You know, I’m glad that the three of us aren’t bothered by fan noise at all. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this doesn’t really matter to us. I just thought I would mention it for those who do care about fan noise, because I know none of us
⏹️ ▶️ John I always wonder when they said they mean like literally don’t spin in their stationary or do they just mean it’s like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It yeah like what he what he said was The fans never even have to turn on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most of the tasks you do all day Yeah, there you go so turn on is pretty that’s pretty clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as in like they are spending or they’re not spending So that that’s really interesting if that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like some kind of of speak-o, typo speak-o?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Suffice it to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, the cooling on these supposedly really good.
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The new MacBook Pro (cont’d.)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, moving on very quickly to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard. Actually, it won’t be very quickly because hey guess what’s missing? Marco, I’m so sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know how much you love the touch bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much you just enjoy playing with the brightness and the volume and sliding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your finger left and right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t forget first tapping it to wake it up because I was watching a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey video. That’s true. Well, tapping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to wake it up, tapping it to wake it up, then tapping it to hit the volume button and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sliding back and forth. Yes, I know you can slide on the volume button, but that’s not always what you want. Yeah, no touch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bar. So as much as I snark, I actually am very ambivalent about the touch bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t typically use it for any of the fancy touch bar things outside of messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found the one place I really consistently use the touch bars for doing tap backs and messages, and that’s about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, I don’t actively dislike the touch bar, but I can tell you I am not gonna shed tears that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s gone. And not only that, but we are getting full height function keys for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first time on a laptop, an Apple laptop in gosh knows how long.
⏹️ ▶️ John In case you’re ever wondering how Apple is gonna spend something in a keynote, one of their classic moves that they employed this time
⏹️ ▶️ John is to basically say, whatever thing that we’re rolling out, that the reason we might be embarrassed to say it is
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is like going back on something that we previously did, like in this case, like what we think of Touch Bar is great and now we’re taking it away.
⏹️ ▶️ John How do we spend that? The way to do it is to look for literally any other product that you make that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have the thing that you’re taking away and say, the thing that we’re replacing it with,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know that people love the insert feature that exists in some random obscure product. And therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ John we decided to bring that to insert product where we just took away something and brought back an old thing, right? And so they did that here. They said,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know that people love the full-size function keys on this external keyboard for a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that nobody buys. Like, you know that people love the full-size function? Who says that? Have you heard
⏹️ ▶️ John from anybody, literally on any podcast, any blog, I love the full size arrow keys on the new keyboard that came with my iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, nobody says that, but Apple has to find a way to spin it. And I say, whatever lets you
⏹️ ▶️ John sleep at night, Apple. We just want the good keyboard. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like they always have to find a way to spin it as a positive. It’s not that we took away the touch bar that most people weren’t super
⏹️ ▶️ John into. It’s that we’re giving you the thing that we know you love. All we hear about all day here at Apple are full size function
⏹️ ▶️ John keys. So here they are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What can I say except you’re welcome. And just to be clear, they are half height arrow keys. They are full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey height function keys. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry. Yes, I’ve been misspeaking a lot lately. And when I hear it back, it’s terrible. I said PowerBuck on the other show and
⏹️ ▶️ John neither one of you called me on it either.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, I left it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right there. I figured it was nicer. Yeah. PowerBuck has always been a better name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, function keys. And by the way, so function keys, of course, are full height. I do kind of wish that they
⏹️ ▶️ John were spaced out from the other keys. It’s another thing that Apple hasn’t quite gotten on board with yet. I feel like there’s a lot of room
⏹️ ▶️ John on the top of a 16 inch laptop for a more expansive keyboard, but baby steps. Full height
⏹️ ▶️ John function keys is a step in that direction, but also the escape key is big.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s like Macbook escapes
⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing. Before we had the escape keys as a stupid image on a screen, and now not
⏹️ ▶️ John only do we have a real key, which we got back a couple of generations ago, it’s a real key and it’s really big.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you love the escape keys there, and of course you have touch ID, which is great. And speaking of the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John arrow keys, when I’m not misspeaking, It’s the good ones with the half height of right and left keys so
⏹️ ▶️ John you can feel for the inverted T. And, you know, we saw, like, when Apple took that away,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it might have been good, but we all tried it and it felt like it was inferior because apparently we all find where the arrow keys are
⏹️ ▶️ John by touch or whatever, right? And so they brought them back. But the reason, when we talked about this in the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I just assumed that they did the full height arrow keys is because of Apple’s obsession with symmetry. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not nice to have these two half spots where the keyboard isn’t, right? That’s their whole thing with the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason why they keep making stupid decisions about utility is but we want the outline of the keyboard to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John perfect rectangle and we want the perfect rectangle to be totally filled with a field
⏹️ ▶️ John of buttons. We don’t want a section of the thing where there’s no button because you want half-height arrow keys.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple still has that instinct. They want it to be symmetrical. They want it to be beautiful. But they knew
⏹️ ▶️ John that their customers wanted half-height arrow keys. How did they solve this problem? They didn’t solve it by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John just take the full head hour keys and like it. Tough luck, right? That was the old Apple. The new Apple says we
⏹️ ▶️ John have to give them the half head hour keys. The new ethos of our laptops is we give the customers what they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we also feel really bad when things are asymmetrical. What can we do about that? And the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is paint the background of the keyboard black. Because that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s an entirely filled uniform rectangle. And you can’t even tell that the hour keys are half
⏹️ ▶️ John height because the background is black too. So this is an example of correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John balancing aesthetics and functionality. Do we care that the background is black? Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not, especially for backlit keys or whatever, but it makes it a more appealing
⏹️ ▶️ John visual aesthetic. You’ve, you’ve, you know, done something for the sake of visuals in a way that does
⏹️ ▶️ John not sacrifice functionality. We got the functionality and also arguably got
⏹️ ▶️ John nice aesthetics, according to the people who demand that thing be a perfectly uniform rectangle. So thumbs up Apple good
⏹️ ▶️ John job balancing multiple stakeholders people who want good arrow keys and people who like
⏹️ ▶️ John a uniform rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m excited for this I think it’ll be really great so we can finally get to it Connectivity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what they called it on the right hand side You get HDMI quote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for conveniently connecting to displays and TVs quote you get Thunderbolt 4 and you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that thing that Marco Arment has been waiting for for years. Marco, are you shedding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tears of joy? You get an SD card reader.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The tears have not stopped flowing, Casey. This whole, this all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, I’m so happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You get an SD card reader, quote, for enabling fast access to media, quote. Imagine that. Imagine you would want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do, I don’t know, professional things with your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John professional computer. Imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I shouldn’t snark because I really am so happy, but it’s just, it’s been a long time coming. on the left-hand side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we can recap. Well, before
⏹️ ▶️ John you get to the left-hand side. On the right-hand side, Marco should also be crying tears of joy because what isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John on the right-hand side now that we’re done with the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right-hand side?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s true. That’s true. There’s no headphone jack over there, is there?
⏹️ ▶️ John headphone jack is not on the right-hand side and Marco likes that too. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They finally moved it back. They moved it back to the left. They didn’t get rid of the headphone jack, thank God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just moved it over to the other side. This is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wonderful. And then the hits keep coming. This was the Marco Arment section of the entire presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not only do they have the headphone jack, not only is it on the left-hand side,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they specifically cited, I could swear they said your name, high impedance headphone support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, which it always had. Translating that from Apple speak to reality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounds like they’ve given it a better headphone amp and that’s great because the headphone amp in there was already pretty decent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you were putting in like 250 ohm headphones, it was a little weak for that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was passable. You just couldn’t like really blast your music. But now it’s going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even better support for that, it seems, so that’s fantastic. Oh, this is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. It’s just every part of this, it’s just like they heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything we wanted and they gave it all to us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I swear this presentation, while it was a love letter to many, many, many people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was very much a love letter to Marco Hartman. And so-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, but it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just me. That’s again, like what I was saying was validating is that obviously I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the crazy one in this world. I mean, maybe for different reasons, but the things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought were obvious things, turns out they were obvious things. That it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just me being this one crank all these years saying, why do they do this? Why didn’t they give us this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough other people agreed with that, that Apple had to react this way. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly validating and really very, very nice. You know, not just from like, I told you so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point of view, but also just that they fixed it. So now we can all have these problems be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solved. Like with this new port arrangement, I don’t think I’ll have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carry a dongle. I will still carry, I think I’ll still carry one of those USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C to A things, just speak like one of the little like passive Apple one they sold back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five years ago just because I Occasionally have to plug in a USB a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the most part like I’m my big multi-port dongle I don’t think I’m going to need to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything with it ever again. This is the most common needs I have HDMI if I really need it, which is probably never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but more importantly I have SD cards It’s it’s just so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy the only thing if I could complain and I don’t want to the only thing I would say I wish it had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an ethernet jack. And I totally understand why it
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’ll fit, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Probably not. And honestly, I don’t really begrudge them for not including it because for any normal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey human being, you don’t need an ethernet port on this thing. I plug in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an ethernet dongle to my laptop probably four or five times a week because I’m a weirdo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But other than that, this is excellent. And so continuing on the left-hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John side, we get Nexus.
⏹️ ▶️ John on the ethernet topic. So they don’t have it on the machine, which is too thin, you’d have to use a dongle.
⏹️ ▶️ John They also don’t have it on the power adapter, which was a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey possibility. Not really
⏹️ ▶️ John rumored, but they did it on the iMac, which is like, how do you get a port on something that
⏹️ ▶️ John you would only use in a desktop situation anyway? It actually kind of makes more sense for a laptop than the iMac, right? Because the
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac is thin for quote unquote no reason, right? But this thing is like, you’re not gonna use ethernet when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re on the go probably, probably you just use it at your desk. And then that’s where you have the power brick plugged in. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what that would mean is, instead of having MagSafe 3, which does not have the capacity to transport
⏹️ ▶️ John ethernet in the way Apple has released it, you’d need something more like the iMac thing, but that’s too big to fit on a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you need a new connector. And bottom line is they just didn’t do it. And I don’t really particularly blame them, but I will say this,
⏹️ ▶️ John this line of computers, the new MacBook Pros that are actually for people who want to do things, one
⏹️ ▶️ John feature that would be appropriate for a future MacBook Pro, if they can pull it off somehow, is 10 gig ethernet,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? My Mac Pro has it, and I know it seems silly because who has 10 gig ethernet in their house, but as wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John gets faster and faster, ethernet has also been getting faster. If you really have some demanding use and you’re connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to some sort of network attached thing, one gigabit ethernet starts to become like, I should just use 5G because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s faster, right? Why am I even bothering with this stupid cable? It’s slow, right? But the point is that cable doesn’t have to be that
⏹️ ▶️ John slow. 10 gig ethernet exists, 40 gig ethernet exists, or whatever, like higher standards exist, Apple ships computers
⏹️ ▶️ John that support it. should, is it plausible and reasonable for the
⏹️ ▶️ John highest end 16-inch MacBook Pro a few years from now to have 10 gig ethernet as a port? I say yes. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the kind of feature that this Apple that made these laptops would put on the table for the next generation
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro and I’m looking forward to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so continuing on the left-hand side, we got MagSafe 3. I believe we already mentioned you can still charge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the other ports. A lot of people were complaining and moaning, I guess just for the sake of complaining and moaning, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t really have a choice of what side to charge the computer on. Well, that’s not really true. You do have the choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t have the choice specifically with MagSafe, but you can charge with USB-C in any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the three USB-C ports. So I’m really, really, really pleased that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t ditch power in on the USB-C ports because it is convenient. Like just the other day, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside at a park or something like that doing work and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a USB-C brick that I was using to power my laptop just because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was gonna be there for a few hours. And this laptop that I have currently, it has a pretty good battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s not as good as these are. And so being able to power your computer via just about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any USB-C charger, I mean, power output notwithstanding, that’s really convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then when you’re at a place where you want it, you can use MagSafe if you so desire. So I’m really excited that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t cheap out or take the wimpy approach and say, well, sorry, MagSafe for power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s the only choice you got.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s again, one of those areas where they could have taken a step backwards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they didn’t. And we even cited that as a thing. In our past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes, in our predictions, we said, we really hope they can still charge via Thunderbolt ports. And sure enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can. This is so nice. I’m still crying.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the only step they need to take, as we mentioned before in the past reviews from Jason, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a one step higher USB-C power drill respect that would let it, they would give it power
⏹️ ▶️ John parity with the MagSafe connector to be able to do the 50% charge in 30 minutes or whatever. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John this one doesn’t have that, but I don’t think there’s anything particularly about this design that precludes
⏹️ ▶️ John that maybe we’d have to wait for an M2 model or whatever, but that’s like just the next step for them to take. Again, giving a, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, if people are complaining, they don’t have that feature, like who knows how much people really care about that feature, but
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as you can power the laptop from one of the other ports, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s only true on the 16 though, right? Because on the 14 you get the fast charging As long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you have the right as long as you have the right power adapter you get fast charging anywhere you want It’s the 16 that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s that it’s only on MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, which it’s all about wattage you know, you the USB C ports can take in power up to 100 watts the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 16 needs 140 watts to fast charge and so yeah, it’s it’s just different models for a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and then finally they made mention of displays so with the pro chip you can do two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro display XDRs. I would like to meet the person that has paid for their own dual setup of pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display XDRs, but nevertheless you could do it. Actually. I don’t even joke. No, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidding. Oh my God, for a fleeting moment I was like, he did not. And then the max chips can do up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to three XDRs and a 4K TV. And I think it was Trudy that specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said all without a single adapter.
⏹️ ▶️ John But how does it do a 4K TV? Oh, you can plug HDMI right into the computer. Imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that. So speaking of HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John though, I don’t have full information on this, but I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John that the HDMI port, well, here’s the thing, we’ve talked about this before, the HDMI spec is weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You can have a quote unquote HDMI 2.1 port that doesn’t necessarily support 48
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabits per second, doesn’t support all the different resolutions and so on and so forth. But I think that this
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI port does not, for example, support 4K at 120 hertz. Does it support 4K at 60 hertz?
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably, maybe. I just don’t know what standard it is. Is it HDMI, technically HDMI 2.1,
⏹️ ▶️ John but without the full bandwidth, kind of like a lot of TVs are, or even the PS5 is, I think. Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI 2.0b? I looked in the specs page and couldn’t find anything. Yeah, chat
⏹️ ▶️ John says it’s 2.0b 4K at 60. That makes sense, but like anyway, that’s the thing about the HDMI port,
⏹️ ▶️ John and in this machine, it’s a little bit of a, like there is some more headroom, because why would you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John plug in an HDMI, something to the HDMI port, aside from like presenting your slides, right? There are pro scenarios
⏹️ ▶️ John where the reason you wanna plug in an HDMI, maybe in that fantasy scenario where you have three XDRs and a 4K
⏹️ ▶️ John TV, who’s doing that? Someone who would be using the TV to say, show me how the
⏹️ ▶️ John video I’m working on is gonna look on TV, which is fine, except that I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if the thing you’re working on is like HDR, I’m not sure if you would then be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to output it on that HDMI port to the TV. I mean, you could, the ProDigit XDRs
⏹️ ▶️ John have HDR on them or whatever, but anyway, if you’re trying to use it as kind of like a TV mastering monitor for
⏹️ ▶️ John reference display to say, here’s how it’s gonna look on someone’s actual television, I think you might want a little bit more of the HDMI port,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m not entirely sure. But anyway, this is all just an embarrassment of riches. The fact that you can have three XDRs,
⏹️ ▶️ John or like, needless to say, you know, three of literally any other monitor that’s not 6K, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got plenty of GPU grunt to do that, or a Thunderbolt breakout box with who knows what
⏹️ ▶️ John else shoved on the thing like three Thunderbolt four ports and this GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John combination here is a lot of bandwidth. So if you were annoyed that the previous laptops couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have many monitors attached, I think all those concerns are gone. Cause this is just like directly attached to your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could probably connect like nine regular PC monitors to this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John using Thunderbolt and the various, you know, adapter boxes and stuff like that. and still have your HDMI port available to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So speaking of displays and refresh rates, we had a presentation from Kate, where she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about how the displays got really freaking good. I kind of hoped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and assumed that maybe we would get mini LED like the fancy iPad Pros have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not only did we get that, but we got ProMotion as well. We’ve got 120 Hertz with variable refresh rate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and mini LED. I would say this these screens are better than y’all’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fancy pants monitors because they at least have 120 Hertz. So they’re Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I mean and mini LED is better than us, too
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean we ours are mini LED but with fewer fewer zones probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes. Yeah. Yeah, that’s true But what’s most important is that they fixed the resolutions?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The default resolution that these screens are in is no longer a scaling mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is true 2x with actual 2X pixels backing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the resolutions that they’re supposed to be for modern Macs. Oh, again, one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that was rumored and we thought, well, I mean, come on, that’s such a nitpick that only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I care about, right? Nope, that’s not just a nitpick. A lot of people care about it and they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and they didn’t have to do it and they did it anyway. God, I’m happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and the variable refresh rate. So kind of like we talked about before, like the first time we saw a variable refresh
⏹️ ▶️ John rate and I think Apple’s phone was on the watch and it went down to one hertz, right? And then we got it on the phone. What
⏹️ ▶️ John was the minimum on the phone? I think it was 24. 24, I believe, or 10
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or 10, I think. Or 10, maybe. Anyway, on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Max, it’s 24. And there’s a,
⏹️ ▶️ John the explanation for that, the technical explanation for this makes a little bit more sense because unlike the phone and the watch,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Max don’t have OLED screens. It’s an LCD. And on LCDs, there
⏹️ ▶️ John are sort of timing constraints related to how long you can hold the pixels before
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to refresh them. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that this only goes down to 24 hertz is somewhat explicable by the screen technology. Presumably, eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John someday, maybe Macs will have OLED screens on the laptop, so right now they don’t. It shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make that much of a difference because 24 hertz is still pretty low, and obviously you won’t notice any of this. And to that end,
⏹️ ▶️ John Jeff Nadeau from Apple, he’s a frameworks engineer, said, “‘AppKit automatically drives updates “‘at variable refresh rates to take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of ProMotion while also balancing for power efficiency. So just like on the phones and the watch,
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, you know, ProMotion is not just so you can see cool 120 Hertz, especially on things that run
⏹️ ▶️ John off battery power. It’s also a way to save you power by lowering the refresh rate when exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff isn’t going on, which probably is, you know, even more likely on a screen if you’re just staring at
⏹️ ▶️ John a web page and not moving your cursor or whatever, it can drop down to 24 Hertz and save you power. And the same thing for if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John watching full screen video on a plane or something, it will drop down to the frame rate, presumably, of the movie that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re watching and save a lot of power. And then the specs of this, as Casey said, like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got a higher refresh rate than our screens than the Pro Display XDR, but it has basically
⏹️ ▶️ John the same specs, 1600 nits peak, 1000 nits sustain, which I think is the same as the XDR. Oh, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like a little miniature XDR. And speaking of miniature, we didn’t talk about this before, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like in the pictures that the lid might be a little bit thicker. Maybe it’s just because it has blunt sides.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, there’s a lot going on in there. Apple touted this in their presentation of showing how do we manage
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a really cool mini LED display in here, because on the iPads and stuff that has it, like, yeah, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad is actually pretty thick in the grand scheme of things. How are you gonna fit it into a little skinny laptop lid? Apple managed
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it, but it seems like there’s a lot of stuff packed in there because this is a really good display. Like, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John better than many, it’s better than, for sure, most desktop displays on computers in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? because people don’t buy good displays. It’s actually hard to find a desktop display
⏹️ ▶️ John that does 1600 nits peak, 1000 nits sustained, has the color gamut that this has, does 120 hertz. Like that’s, it’s not even defined, that type of display.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this thing comes with one. So this laptop is probably going to look fairly amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re used to, if you have like a really old laptop and you’re like, oh, I’m gonna use my laptop or it looks so dim and dingy.
⏹️ ▶️ John This will not look dim. Like you’ll turn the brightness down so you don’t burn your eyeballs
⏹️ ▶️ John out, believe me. Oh yeah, one more thing on the screen. As far
⏹️ ▶️ John as I can tell from the pictures, I don’t know anyone who’s seen these in person yet who has confirmed this or not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like the top of the screen is actually rounded, as in it’s not like the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John chopping off the corners, but literally on the iPads, the screen has rounded corners on the top. Does
⏹️ ▶️ John that match your perception?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what people seem to think, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the bottom of the screen is not rounded. The bottom of the screen has sharp,
⏹️ ▶️ John right angle corners, which is a little bit weird, but just if you care about that, no more gonna get to that in
⏹️ ▶️ John a second because it’s the very next section. The screen has a couple of quirks that you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want. Well, but if you look at the design of that whole lid, that does make logical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense. Because the upper corners are nestled within the curved corners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the casing around it, whereas the lower corners, there’s a gap there and a big flat area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before it gets down to the curvature of the case. So logically, design-wise, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does make sense given how it’s built.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, and now we get to the thing that, again, this snuck in, the rumors for this
⏹️ ▶️ John snuck in between our last show and the event, so we didn’t really get a chance to talk about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there were rumors that the new MacBook Pros would have a notch, which sounds ridiculous because
⏹️ ▶️ John why would they put a notch on a laptop? Why, this doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, it’s got a notch,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now that it has one, and now that we see the design, it actually does make sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think not only does it make sense, I think there is almost no reason for
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone to be afraid of the notch or think they’re going to dislike it with one minor exception that I’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John to in the end. But we’ll talk about the notch in a minute. So what we mean by a notch is, if you’ve ever seen an iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John you see the screen doesn’t go up to the top of the iPhone. Instead, there’s a little section that does not have screen on it. There’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John section cut out of the screen, like a little notch, and there are no pixels there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in that place on the iPhone are a bunch of sensors and cameras and all sorts of crap like that, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John for face ID, but also the front-facing camera and the microphone, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the speaker rather. There’s a bunch of crap there, and that’s why there’s no screen there. But they wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John as much screen as possible, so they brought the screen all the way up and on your phone. What you see up there is like the status bar and your little
⏹️ ▶️ John battery thing and the time, a bunch of crap that’s in sort of the ears around the notch, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John This laptop has a notch, and the way they’ve done this, and by the way, I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna give, let me scroll down a little bit, I wanna give David Schaub credit for this. I think it’s the same David Schaub that’s in our
⏹️ ▶️ John chat room because how could it not be? This was from the 16th, which I think was two
⏹️ ▶️ John days before the event. He did some math based on the rumored screen resolutions and he put a little picture of his
⏹️ ▶️ John solver, a sheet here and basically came down to say that if the notch takes up 74 points
⏹️ ▶️ John or pixels, then both MacBook Pro screens, according to the rumored resolutions, have
⏹️ ▶️ John a safe display area that is perfectly 16 by 10. And you can look at the math on his thing
⏹️ ▶️ John And sure enough, this all essentially came true. If you ignore the notch and just
⏹️ ▶️ John start the screen below the notch on these MacBook Pros, the part of the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John that does not intersect at all with the notch is exactly 16 by 10. That’s its
⏹️ ▶️ John aspect ratio, right? So it’s a little bit taller than 16 by 9. It’s exactly 16 by 10, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s what the previous screens always were, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they varied a little bit over the years, but yeah, more or less. 16 by 9 is a little bit too wide, and Mac users don’t like that, but they actually
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be even taller. Like the 12 inch PowerBook was like four by three or some weird ass thing. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John is what people are used to. What these laptops give you is say, okay, we give you a 16 by 10 screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead of thinking it as a screen with a notch in it, think of it as a 16 by 10 screen with ears because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John giving you extra pixels. And the reason they did that is essentially, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of theories about why they might have done this. First theory when I saw it, I was like, please let this thing have face ID. It does not, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ll talk about that in a second, right? But why would they do this? Why wouldn’t they just put a 16 by 10 screen in?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if they had a 16 by 10 screen, it would be like every other laptop that has come,
⏹️ ▶️ John not every other one, but if you look at the predecessor laptops, you will see that if you look at the screen, the
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of border around the screen, the amount of area that is not screen, there’s more of it at
⏹️ ▶️ John the top than the sides. So there’s a thin border on the left, an equally thin border on the right, and a wider
⏹️ ▶️ John border at the top. Why did they do that? Look at your MacBook Pro right now and look at
⏹️ ▶️ John how big the border is on the top compared to the sides. You will see that it’s taller on the top. And the reason it’s taller on the top is because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where the camera goes. The front-facing camera has to be there. And they could make the borders
⏹️ ▶️ John that thickness around the whole thing, but then you’d have a smaller screen, right? So what they want to do is maximize the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen area while minimizing the borders, and in this case, trying to make them uniform. So in
⏹️ ▶️ John these lines of computers, the top border is essentially the same thickness as the left and the right border,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? but they need some place for the camera to go. And to fit the camera in,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have created a notch. And that’s why this thing has a notch, and why doesn’t it
⏹️ ▶️ John have face ID as an X-square? It’s like, great, so you’ve cut a notch out of my screen, you’ve given me quote unquote more pixels, and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get to the software complications of that in a second, but if you’re gonna give
⏹️ ▶️ John me a notch, why not at least give me face ID? That notch looks pretty wide, doesn’t it? And if you look what’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John the notch, you’re like, I just see the front-facing camera there. Why is the freaking thing so wide? Now
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know the answer to this yet, but good old iFixit will tell us. And I’m going to say that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John when iFixit rips this thing apart, what they’re going to find is that what’s in the notch there
⏹️ ▶️ John is yes, the front-facing camera, but also like the light sensor or whatever for True Tone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that the stuff that is in the notch takes up a surprising amount of room
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the notch once you start looking at the parts, because this is a very thin screen lid, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You just rip open any of the current ones, How much room does the camera take up? And by the way, this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John better camera than before. Is it a good camera? We’ll see, but it’s 1080. Exciting,
⏹️ ▶️ John welcome to 2015. There’s a 1080 camera in the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they said a larger sensor also, which again, like, you know, where we’re coming from is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad that this, it doesn’t mean much to say it’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I really think they were concentrating, like they emphasize in the video, like I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, we’re all on our, you know, Zoom calls all the time and we’ll use the image signal processing and all the other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that we use. So I really have some hope that this camera will actually be much better than its predecessors, right? But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if, you know, that’s why the notch is there. It’s to give you more pixels, not less.
⏹️ ▶️ John And why is it so wide without face ID? Probably because to just fit the stuff that is in
⏹️ ▶️ John there now, they had to squish it out. Now, there’s lots of conspiracy theories that are like, oh, the next one’s gonna have face ID, or they made the
⏹️ ▶️ John notch this wide because they wanted to have room for face ID. Look, if they’re not pre-widening
⏹️ ▶️ John the notch to make room for a feature that doesn’t exist, They’re trying, they would try, Apple doesn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John the notch. Okay, so we talked about this with the original iPhone X. Apple doesn’t like the notch. It has embraced it because it has
⏹️ ▶️ John to, but it doesn’t like it. If it could get rid of the notch, it would. Look on the phone. When they could make
⏹️ ▶️ John the notch smaller, they did. They didn’t keep it the same width for uniformity or branding, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this watch is probably as small as it can be. And if someday they need to make the notch bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John for Face ID, they will, right? So that’s what I think they’re doing with this. Now, software-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS, kind of like iOS, has crap at the top of the screen most of the time. And most of that crap
⏹️ ▶️ John goes in the left and the right side. So kind of like the status bar on your phone where they got away with, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are we gonna use all that extra screen space for? It’s stupid. Well, we actually have stuff to put there. The little bars for your signal, the battery,
⏹️ ▶️ John the time, all the other stuff, right? On the Mac, what goes there is the menu bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, the menu bar, unlike those little status things, is a thing that grows
⏹️ ▶️ John in both directions. The more menus your application has, the more it grows from the left to the right. And the more little
⏹️ ▶️ John icons like Casey that you have growing from the right to the left, the wider that goes. And eventually you’re gonna hit that stupid notch.
⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously you can’t display things behind the notch because then the user wouldn’t be able to see them. The user
⏹️ ▶️ John probably could click on them, by the way, because the screen really is there behind the notch and you can bring your cursor behind the notch and you could hide buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John there probably in your app, behind the, lots of cool things you could do with the notch. But practically speaking, don’t put stuff there unless it’s a practical joke, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So the menus, you know, Apple’s frameworks will flow your menus around the notch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing with the little icons in the menu bar in the upper right. They will flow around the notch. If there’s not enough room for
⏹️ ▶️ John them, they will truncate and do all, you know, they’ll do all the things, right? That’s how they handle the menu bar. Interestingly
⏹️ ▶️ John though, the menu bar, as it’s sized on the Mac that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John probably looking at now is not as tall as the notch. So they made
⏹️ ▶️ John the menu bar taller, which you may remember from past discussions of us thinking, Oh, they’re making the menu bar taller to support touch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Seems like they’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the menu bar taller to support the notch, which was not one of our theories at the
⏹️ ▶️ John time. But not only did they make the menu bar taller, as far as I can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell from the screenshots, the menu bar is also slightly taller than the notch.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they did this to avoid tangents, essentially, another aesthetic choice. Tangent is when like the
⏹️ ▶️ John edge of one thing hits the edge of the other thing, creating sort of a line that you didn’t intend to be there. In other words, if the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar was exactly the same height as the notch, it’s actually slightly less aesthetically pleasing than having
⏹️ ▶️ John it extend slightly past it, right? But anyway, that’s what they did. So the menu bar is taller,
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially roomier, easier to hit. Remember, this is all bonus space because starting below the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar or starting below the notch anyway, is starting below the menu bar or the notch, I’m not sure which it is
⏹️ ▶️ John because David Shaw was working off a theory of how tall the notch was and we don’t actually know right now, I don’t think,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where your 16 by nine screen begins. And that 16, or 16 by 10 screen begins And that 16 by 10 screen
⏹️ ▶️ John does not have any portion of it taken up by the menu bar because the menu bar is up there in the ears out of your way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Now here’s where we get into the one thing that Apple I think fumbled. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can tell an application, any application on Monterey to launch
⏹️ ▶️ John in compatibility mode for on these laptops. It’s a checkbox and the get info thing in
⏹️ ▶️ John the finder. If you go to an application in the finder and the applications that doesn’t hasn’t done something else throughout
⏹️ ▶️ John the notch, you have a checkbox that says go into compatibility mode. When that app runs, it will just think the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John is the 16 by 10 part without the notch, right? So it will just be like, I don’t even see those ears. I’m just running in
⏹️ ▶️ John this part, because then the perfect compatibility is 16 by 10 screen. It’s this, you know, square
⏹️ ▶️ John edges. It’s got all the pixels, it’ll work perfectly fine, right? But of course, app developers can say no, my app knows about
⏹️ ▶️ John the notch. And I swear I’m not putting any UI there. And it’s not going to break my app and do all that stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The other option also is when things go into full screen same deal when you go into full screen if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know anything about the notch it will just consider oh full screen doesn’t include the ears because I know your app doesn’t even understand those
⏹️ ▶️ John ears are there so we’re just gonna full screen you below the notch so you don’t have to worry about trying to watch a movie in full screen
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know get hidden by the notch or whatever either your player is savvy about the notch in which case the app has been updated to handle
⏹️ ▶️ John it or your player is not savvy in which case it doesn’t even see that portion of the screen the one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should have done I feel like to well not should have done I say if Apple wanted to have
⏹️ ▶️ John no complaints from anybody. What Apple could have done is put an OS level mode that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what? All right, the notch doesn’t exist for me, turn off the ears.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then just literally only ever lit up 16 by 10 pixels, right? And just given the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John a taller forehead, but a taller border, that black border, just like on the MacBook Pros before this, when you see a taller
⏹️ ▶️ John black border, Apple could have done that. As far as I know, there is no mode to run Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John like that to say forget about the ears. It’s invisible to the OS, it’s invisible to the apps, I am just
⏹️ ▶️ John opting out of the ears, I’m opting out of the notch, I have a 16 by 10 screen where
⏹️ ▶️ John every single pixel is lit up and it has square edges. They could have done that, it seems like they didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that would just eliminate all complaints. For the people saying, oh, there’s a notch taken out of my screen, I’m losing pixels, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could say, no, you’re not. And by the way, half of Apple screenshots essentially do this by either having dark mode
⏹️ ▶️ John on or showing an app in full screen with that area black or whatever. You can forget about the notch entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re really that bothered by it. I think the reason Apple didn’t do it is the same reason when no one cares about the notch on their phone anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Could you get used to it? Software is updated to handle it, and it literally becomes the non-issue. Is it good?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Nobody likes the notch. Apple doesn’t like the notch. I don’t like the notch. But the way they
⏹️ ▶️ John implemented it is basically a no compromises. You can either accept the bonus
⏹️ ▶️ John pixels we’ve given you or don’t accept them. But either way, you’re still getting either the same or
⏹️ ▶️ John more. So stop complaining.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this to me, I’ve seen, I was actually very surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see how much notch hate there was after the event. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like my Twitter mentions have been full of people all day complaining about it. Like it seems like it’s a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very common to hate on the notch right now. People saying that, you know, they’re never going to upgrade to it. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, all the usual stuff that we all say when, when something that we, something that we don’t like. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really do think, you know, we saw this exact same stuff when the iPhone came out. And as John said, we all just got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to it and it’s fine. You know, it’s a compromise that we all accepted. And I agree, in this case, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does seem like because they’re just giving us free additional area up there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s that bad. I do, as a light mode user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think it’s gonna be more noticeable for me than it would be for dark mode users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that being said, I’m looking at my screen now and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the menu bar now looks like a bunch of wasted space in the middle because it’s always just displaying these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grayish pixels that are just blank
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco middle there. To
⏹️ ▶️ John that end, even in dark mode though, and this is why Apple has to carefully choose their screenshots, I’m pretty sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially on the 14 inch, if you launch Xcode, which is a thing that people who have Pro laptops often do,
⏹️ ▶️ John the set of menus that are in Xcode is like past the notch. And so you get that gap, you get
⏹️ ▶️ John all your menus. I think actually it was, maybe it was Xcode or some other app. The only menu that ended up to the
⏹️ ▶️ John right side of the notch was the help menu. So it was like, here’s all my menus. And then there was
⏹️ ▶️ John another one saying, help. Like you got ejected. And especially in dark mode, it’s like, why is there, why aren’t all my menus
⏹️ ▶️ John together? Well, oh, the notch is there, right? But even in light mode, yeah, the menus are going to flow around
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And as people have been jokingly pointing out since this rumor started, one of the early Mac OS X betas had
⏹️ ▶️ John a non-functional Apple logo dead center in the menu bar and your menus would flow around
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It wasn’t the Apple menu, you couldn’t click on it. It did literally nothing. All it did was make it so that as your menus
⏹️ ▶️ John expanded, if they hit the middle, they had to flow around an Apple menu. That’s another thing that Apple wisely chose not to ship. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s awkward. Apple doesn’t want to do that notch. Nobody wants to do the notch, but they decided that, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John no conspiracy theory here. They’re just like, how can we maximize the number of light up pixels on the front of a screen of this size? And
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer is cut out a little notch for the camera. And so they did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, just aesthetically, while a notch is not ideal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the complaints that many people, including me, have had over the last five years is that Apple’s laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were starting to look very dated compared to PC laptops that were on the higher end. PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops have really done a very good job over the last few years of optimizing their screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for especially this 13 to 14 inch size range. There’ve been some really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice looking PC laptop screens that had really tiny bezels and really maximized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the space. Apple was very much behind in that area. The way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those PC laptops would handle questions like, well, what do you do about the webcam, was really weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes they would just have a really crappy one stuck in the top bezel. Sometimes they would have those weird pop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up or pop out webcams and different, sometimes they just wouldn’t have webcams to get around that issue entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a very strange set of compromises that we were seeing in the industry. What Apple came up with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is one of those compromises for sure, like by having a notch, but I think this is the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple-y way they could have done it for now. And the result is, yeah, we get free screen space. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. John, your idea of basically having it be, having there be a mode that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disables that whole area of the screen entirely, that’s a solid idea. And that’s something they could just very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily throw in display preferences if they wanted to. And time will tell if they actually need to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That also is the kind of of thing that a third party utility might be able to do by itself, like some kind of display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hook utility might be able to do that. So that need might be solved, but ultimately I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are going to really complain and moan about it until they get it, and then they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it for a few days and forget about it. And they’re gonna say, oh actually it wasn’t a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I think they didn’t include that option, because it’s like they know from their own experience of using it that it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John not a big deal. And the problem with allowing that mode is if someone instinctively puts it on the first day they get it and just
⏹️ ▶️ John leaves it on there, they paid for pixels they’re not using, right? They could be getting more screen space. Because really, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s one of the things people complain about, the menu bar, and the reason why auto hide menu bar is a feature, and it’ll be interesting to see how
⏹️ ▶️ John that interacts with the notch, I don’t actually know yet, but like, it’s like, why can’t I get those pixels back? Well, here you can. We found a place
⏹️ ▶️ John to put your menu bar that doesn’t cut into your quote unquote normal screen of 16 by 10. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re getting benefit from it, right? In most cases, you essentially get back all the pixels that the menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ John was taking and then some. And so now you have more room for your actual application. That’s the whole point. Why are you trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to light up as many pixels as possible on a lid of this size? Because you get more pixels to show your stuff, right? You
⏹️ ▶️ John get a bigger screen, essentially. It’s 16.2 inches. It’s taller than you would have expected. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and of course the notch isn’t now an Apple branded thing. So it’s perfectly in keeping. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John a few more things before we leave that little notch in the camera. Why not Face ID? Why is there no Face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John in this laptop, right? I, I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John again, people like want to sort of assign malicious intent to Apple. I saw a couple of people
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about their pet theory and agreeing with each other. Yes, totally why they did it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The best one I saw was they didn’t want to put face ID in the Mac because they want to make people buy
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones. And if they put it on the Mac, people wouldn’t buy iPhones. Does that hold together for you? Are these
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive products? I was gonna I was gonna buy an iPhone, but then I saw the Macs have Face ID, so I decided
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want an iPhone. It doesn’t… Anyway. Let’s think about Face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John in this context, right? As far as I can tell, by looking at iFixit things,
⏹️ ▶️ John and just, you know, basically measuring things, the Face ID module
⏹️ ▶️ John in your iPhone will not fit in the lid of this laptop. I mean, I think that’s a thing that we can all just sort of determine
⏹️ ▶️ John by, again, looking at iFixit teardowns, and getting out a ruler and just looking at these pictures, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t fit. It’s not thick enough. The screen is really, really thin, right? So that’s why Face ID from
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone won’t fit in there. You know, if they wanted to just reuse it. Now, could they have made
⏹️ ▶️ John a brand new Face ID module that would fit in a Mac this thin? Maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they didn’t, right? And if they did, the notch would probably have to be even bigger than
⏹️ ▶️ John which isn’t that big of a deal, but they chose not to do it. Second thing is, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about this before, we’re talking about Face ID on the Mac, the Face ID module that is in
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPhone is meant to be used from the distances a person holds an iPhone from their face.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that a long enough distance for it to work on a laptop? Maybe, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not depending on, like it just, take this measurement yourself and just put your laptop down where you normally use it and sit
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of it and sit down in your chair and see and measure from your face to where the camera is.
⏹️ ▶️ John and then try your iPhone Face ID unlocking by this same distance. It’s probably close,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it might be a stretch, right? These are all choices Apple makes, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s possible that they could have found a way to get Face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John into there, right? It’s possible that they could have, I think we talked about this a while back on a past
⏹️ ▶️ John show, had a camera bump on the MacBook Pro, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, Face ID is too thick to fit in your lid? well, don’t make the whole thing thicker, just make a little bump there. Apple’s not above making
⏹️ ▶️ John a bump when they need to for a thing. But on a laptop, that’s a different kind of compromise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s more awkward to slide in and out of things. You can’t really stack your laptops on top of each other anymore, which
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, you should probably not do, but people do, especially in the context of, you know, an IT department
⏹️ ▶️ John at an office or something with a bunch of laptops stacked or whatever, they had a lump, that would be a compromise, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So for a variety of reasonably good reasons, but some reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John that mostly have to do with the question of how much time and money and effort do you wanna invest in the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Still, the Mac has not been deemed, this Mac anyway, these laptop Macs have not been deemed
⏹️ ▶️ John able, worthy of Face ID, because it would essentially require some custom engineering,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of which may be hard or possibly impossible, depending on how thin that crap can be, right? Another
⏹️ ▶️ John question related to that camera, and I’ve asked this question about other Macs, and we’ll talk about that in a second. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John no center stage? Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John stage looks cool. Sometimes people gather in front of a laptop. Why can’t we have center stage, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, one of the things that makes center stage possible is a camera with a fairly wide angle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because center stage crops out a portion of that. The camera that they put into this laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is not as wide angle as it would have to be. And if you wanted to use a wide angle camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John chances are good that that wide angle camera would be too thick to fit in this lid. Again, the thin lid. You
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think about but iPads are thicker than this lid. Phones are thicker than this lid. Everything is thicker than this lid. This lid
⏹️ ▶️ John is really, really thin, right? And even with a notch, you gotta fit all the stuff in there and run all the wires to it and do all the things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, Apple doesn’t actually make any cameras or IR
⏹️ ▶️ John blaster or dot things or like, Apple doesn’t make those, they buy them and they can try to get components in
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever sizes or request a component to be made custom for them or whatever, but they do have some
⏹️ ▶️ John limits, right? And if you wanted to say, oh, why doesn’t Apple just use the let’s say why doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple just use a center stage camera that’s in the iPad. I think if you rip that out and look at the iPhone’s turn,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will find that that camera is too thick to fit inside the lid. And also, those
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras make different trade offs in terms of image quality and light gathering and so on and so forth. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to me that the focus of this laptop’s camera is to look good on your zoom meetings, right? Not to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to do center stage. So if your choice is a single person looks better sitting in front of this laptop, versus a single
⏹️ ▶️ John person looks worse, but now we have a wide angle camera and now we have a camera bump forward or now we have to find someone to manufacture
⏹️ ▶️ John wide angle camera that fits in that small space. So the image quality is even worth worse. I think they made a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John trade off. I’m still annoyed that we don’t have it, but I’m annoyed from a technological progress perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John and slightly annoyed from a R and D resources, money and prioritization thing. But given
⏹️ ▶️ John how much amazing stuff we got on these laptops, these are two compromise and these weren’t rumored
⏹️ ▶️ John either. They were just like kind of like the the bonus super bonus wish list items. If you’re wondering why we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John these things. There are reasons. Most of the reasons are good. Some of them are the reasons you don’t like, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple sells more phones than laptops. And in terms of how much they invested, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John they already invested a lot of money to make these things amazing. Just not enough money to totally redo
⏹️ ▶️ John Face ID or find a wind out camera that will work and all that other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I honestly, you know, the center stage thing that that could be nice if they could do it. Face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID, I still don’t think it’s that necessary in the MacBook line because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Touch ID works really well in that context. Physically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not operating the MacBook frequently one-handed with gloves or wet hands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re always having your hands in or on the keyboard area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while operating it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unless you’re in clamshell mode, in which case you can’t use Face ID in the laptop either, you could use external face ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if you’re in clamshell mode, you can’t do either of these things right
⏹️ ▶️ John But you could do external face ID, just like you can do external touch ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, that’s true. But that would be even more weird hardware to put somewhere. I love
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But if you put it in a new Apple monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not an XDR, we didn’t get that either. There we go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Yeah, and we didn’t get cellular either. That was my, the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major feature that I would have loved to have that we haven’t seen yet is cellular.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew that was a stretch to even hope for that, especially given that there were literally no rumors to that effect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I hope still someday that we get cellular, but the lack of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pales in comparison to all of the stuff that we did get that we never thought we would.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we also have some good guidance that Linda Dong put up a Twitter thread about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. She’s a designer at Apple. There’s also a couple of things in the HIG, the Human Interface Guidelines,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we can link to that we’ll also put in the show notes. Moving right along, camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and audio. Oh, actually, I guess we talked about the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John But the audio is another kind of nice surprise. Six speaker stereo, a six speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John sound system. I don’t think we’ve ever had that before, have we?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so I forget. So what the six speakers are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still just a left and right tweeter and then there’s a left and right woofer. But now they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have dual woofers on each side. So there are basically four woofers and two tweeters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, six speakers is maybe pushing it a little bit, but that is what they call it. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are pretty damn great for laptops in general.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know the 16-inch sounds pretty good already, like the outgoing 16-inch Intel model sounds pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To have force-canceling woofers in laptops is also a pretty big deal. This is, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, to have force-canceling woofers in anything is a pretty big deal. If you look around the industry, there’s not many of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even like for home theater options, There are very few force-canceling woofers for home theaters. I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the Sonos Sub and one $5,000 option from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco KEF, and there’s not much else. But what this means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically is they align the two woofers at opposite phases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically when one moves one way, the other one moves into it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such that the sound waves come out but that there’s the vibration of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them is cancelled out and so you hear the bass but you don’t hear like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the floor rattling or or in this case the case of the laptop rattling which is often a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem when you’re designing subwoofers in you know small enclosures and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco force cancelling is very very nice feature to have and they have it they I’m pretty sure they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had it in the 16-inch already though but now they have two on each side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s great and and then to have that come to the 14 inch, that’s what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most excited to see because we’ll talk about what we bought in a minute I think, but what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very curious about is how much worse is the audio in the 14 inch compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the 16 inch, the speakers in particular. Because historically it’s been a pretty big step down because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just much smaller and that’s understandable. But in this case, one thing I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about these laptops is that in many ways, the 14
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 16 inch MacBook Pro is a lot like this year’s Max versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro iPhones. They’re basically two different sizes of the same hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s almost no differences between them. You can spec them both up to all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the numbers, all the gigs, all the terabytes. They both have 64 gig options. They both have the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processor options. They both have eight terabyte SSD options. Like it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are very few differences between them except size. And then again, this is one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons why I’m curious to see the teardowns. You know, what kind of thermal differences are there? Can, you know, will the 14 inch throttle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the 16 inch will, just because there’s less space for heat sinks? Like who knows? And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, that all remains to be seen. But what an amazing pair of products here to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have basically all of the same capabilities and just two different sizes. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome. I’m so happy for that because, spoiler alert, the one I’m more interested in is the 14-inch for my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco personal needs. And to have there be, from what we know today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently very few to no compromises in that model is really quite something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. To go back just very briefly to the audio, they also mentioned that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spatial audio on these laptops, which I don’t think was the case in any prior Apple laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might be wrong about that, but nevertheless, there is spatial audio in these. And it occurred to me that my home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey theater has a couple of year old LG 4K OLED TV, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just stereo speakers. And I, at some point, am probably gonna get a soundbar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, but-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh God, please don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or I was talking about the Sonos soundbar I thought was approved. Is that not approved?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Sonos amp with regular speakers is great. The Sonos sub is an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subwoofer for what you get for it. But yeah, please use real speakers, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, we’ll argue about that another time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But nevertheless. Even crappy real speakers are better than the best soundbar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so one way or another, the point I’m driving at is that this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might be the best listening experience and viewing experience I have to watch a movie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I don’t have any AirPods with spatial audio. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV doesn’t have surround sound in the sense that it is not set up for surround sound right now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this fancy pants, mini LED display, XDR display, and the spatial audio, this might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the best way for me to watch a movie.
⏹️ ▶️ John You got better blacks than your OLED TV. That’s true,
⏹️ ▶️ John true. Just look at a star field and the mini LED blooming will convince you that your OLED is still better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, and also, you know, the audio, like remember when the 16-inch MacBook Pro came out a couple years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, Apple also touted that they really had improved the microphones. And in fact, this is one of the things they mentioned for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well, that they even further improved the microphones now. And they did this whole demo in the press area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like, this is really studio quality microphones. And yeah, you know what, I tested it out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s really good for a built-in laptop mic, but it was nowhere near like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other regular microphone, just because physics get in the way. And the audio here has the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. These are gonna be really good speakers for laptop speakers, but they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a very small case with very small drivers. Like there’s only so much they can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the realm of physics. And so I’m sure these are gonna be great for what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, but you have to put it in context of what they are. And the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be great for your movie watching, but the sound will not be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. Anyway, prices start $19.99 for the 14 inch, $24.99 for the 16 inch, silver and space gray.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could order them already, and hypothetically they’re available next week, although I will tell you that my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order is not coming for quite a while. So John, I’m sure you’re most excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to share what you ordered. Would you like to go first?
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually, I’ll back up a step and just read the stat for the other, one other spec in the thing, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is 7.4 gigabytes per second read from SSDs, which exceeds the minimum spec required for the PS5
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD. Not that you can take them out of here, but just FYI. These are really fast SSDs that are in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And just one more reminder on the M1 Pro versus the M1 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M1 Max has double the memory bandwidth because it’s got two extra years full of RAM. It’s got two extra
⏹️ ▶️ John memory controllers in the thing, right? So when we talk about what we buy, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re getting already getting a lot of questions about this and people will keep asking because you have so many options because both machines
⏹️ ▶️ John have all the options. There is a lot of confusion of should I get the Max? Should I get the Pro? God,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate these names. It’s so hard to distinguish. Anyway, what do I care about? Do I care about GPU cores or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John there are other distinctions that you may or may not care about. What do I care about memory bandwidth? Do I do something that takes
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of memory bandwidth? Will I notice that difference? It’s actually not particularly easy question to ask because people don’t think about their workloads
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of those specs. But I just wanted to remind people that the difference between the M1 Max and the M1 Pro may
⏹️ ▶️ John be insignificant and pointless to you or may be incredibly important if the thing you’re currently doing is constrained
⏹️ ▶️ John by memory bandwidth because you get double the memory bandwidth. And then for the SSDs, faster
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs may matter in the thing that you’re doing or they may not matter at all because you spend most of your time waiting on network or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. It does get confusing, but these are, I mean, maybe these are not the problems that you like
⏹️ ▶️ John to have, but these are exactly the problems the computer herders like is like, what kind of thing do I care about?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I have all these options. And we started talking about the pricing a little bit. Maybe we’ll go into a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit more when we talk about what we bought. The pricing for these is really good in
⏹️ ▶️ John the grand scheme of things. Like when you go for the options, very often it’s like, oh, for $200 more,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can get this thing. It’s not like Mac Pro money where it’s like add $7,000. Like that’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco configuring this is
⏹️ ▶️ John like. Almost everything that you care about is like a $200 Delta, right? And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like just the right amount of money if you care about that, like, oh, I really want the maximum
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU stuff. So I’m getting a max, but should I get the one with some broken cores with the 24 GPU or should
⏹️ ▶️ John I get the 32? Oh, it’s only 200 extra for the 32 and you just spring for it because you know like you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John get that amount more, right? It’s like, it’s a linear scaling of what you’re gonna get. Those kinds of
⏹️ ▶️ John increments are great. So you can really tune the pricing of the thing that you decide to buy based on the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that you care about as long as you know about all these little technurity things that we just discussed. Of like, what is the dividing
⏹️ ▶️ John line between pro and max? What does it actually get me? Do I care about that? It’s complicated, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like buying pro things is often complicated because good pro things have a lot of capabilities and features
⏹️ ▶️ John and you should be able to pay for the ones that you want and these products fulfill that. As for me, what did I buy?
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought nothing because I don’t like laptops and I’m waiting for the cool Pro Max that are gonna be even faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, I bought AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m excited to put those in my ear, but yeah, this is all you guys, go nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I would like to, let me call up the Apple store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey page. I would like to guess what Marco bought. So let me go. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think you went full bore M1 Max, 10 core CPU, 32 core GPU. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am tempted by that, but I have not ordered that, and I’ll tell you why.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting, okay, tell me more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the question that I pose to myself is, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my computers am I replacing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this is a very difficult question to answer because I had the same conversation with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m very, you know, as discussed during the transition to M1, I was first using just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Air as my only computer, later got a Mac Mini as my desktop and have used the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as my laptop. And I really enjoy that two computer setup. There’s very common needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The most common role that my laptop plays is three times a week, Tiff and I work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out with a trainer over FaceTime. And so three times a week, that laptop has to be brought out to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco living room and set up on a chair with FaceTime. And I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Virgamiva’s sound source to boost the volume up a little bit so that I really can drive those little tiny MacBook Air speakers nice and loud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we can hear him really well and you know maximize the screen so we can see him really well and turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the brightness all the way up so you know so if that were my if I was still using only that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one computer as my desktop it would be very disruptive to have to unplug my desktop three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times a week and you know reset all the positions of all the windows down to the built-in monitor like you know bring it bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it over there to use there they bring it back and then plug everything back in and reset all my window positions so I really enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having two different computers having the laptop for to do that role and having a desktop to be a desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, I didn’t get my high-performance desktop this event. I was hoping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have at least like another Mac Mini with the bigger chips in it, and I don’t have that. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my laptop, I don’t really need more performance than what the M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air affords me. I’m very happy with the M1 MacBook Air as a laptop. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, it’s great in many ways. That being said, because of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most common use of it being these FaceTime workouts, having louder speakers would actually be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantial boon and having a brighter screen would be a substantial boon. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I do travel with it, having more performance and having all the port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conveniences is a huge boon. Because when I do travel, I do bring that as my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only computer usually. So I don’t really need to replace my Air. I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy with my Air, but I want to replace it with this just because I love what this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has become so much. I want to be able to use it. I and so I am I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know frivolously replacing my MacBook Air with a 14 inch and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ordered the 14 inch base model the one terabyte 16 gig because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only will would it arrive on day one. So I got day one delivery so I can actually get it and talk about it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know be able to use it for this show and and everything, but also those are the specs of my air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s been great, it’s been fine. Where I want the more cores and the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM is my desktop. So what do I do about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One option I considered is what if I buy two and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have one that I use docked as my desktop the vast majority of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then maybe if I’m going on a trip where it would actually be convenient or useful to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my desktop files and everything set up, maybe I bring that one instead of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote little one for around the house use. I did consider this option and I could do that. I could,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I were doing that, I would go with probably the M1 Mac, the 24 core GPU because I don’t need all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GPU cores. I’d probably, I’d do the 10 core CPU, 24 core GPU, probably 64
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs of RAM and two or four terabyte SSD because that’s, my current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac mini is two terabyte. I fit into it with a little bit of room to spare, but not a lot of room to spare.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I could do that, and I could still do that now. I could have, I could order this, it would be here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now in about a month for that kind of configuration, and I could have that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to wait and see how much I like the 14-inch that arrives,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the, you know, my quote low-end one, and I wanna see all the teardowns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff to see what are the differences between them, What are people finding out? How do they work in clamshell mode? Are there any weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotchas? What are the thermals like? What’s the noise like, et cetera. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really want to replace my Mac Mini with a laptop. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace it with a faster desktop. So even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am running into the walls of this performance every day, it’s mostly what I need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as a desktop, it works fantastically. So what I should do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meanwhile, I don’t know if this is what I will do, but what I should do is just wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the desktop. Just have this time period where my laptop’s going to be faster than my desktop. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. And then when the time comes that a good desktop that has these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster chips is released, then I upgrade them. And that might be next spring,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be another year from now, it might be next fall. I think that’s kind of like the outer limit, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the longest it will probably be is a year from now. But the soonest it could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be is maybe in the spring. So maybe half a year. So that’s what I should do is wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I will probably do is see how these end up, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check into teardowns and thermals and reports from people and how much I like it, and then maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replace my Mac mini with an even beefier 14-inch model. or maybe even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 16 inch if the thermals work out better for that because I wouldn’t be moving it very often. Who knows? But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s my current plan. So I’m gonna have my quote low end one arrive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on day one, sit on Long Island for a day, ride a boat over here the next day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I’ll start playing with it and be able to talk about it for the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why didn’t you get 32 gigs of RAM? Is it just so you could get day one with delivery?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s because, two reasons. It’s number one, day one delivery was very important to me for that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And number two, I really have not needed more than 16 gigs of RAM for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop role in my life. For my desktop, I would love it. I would I would jump at that in a second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that was off on the desktop. But for the laptop, I’m still okay with 16 gigs most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m sorry, so just to make sure I’ve got this straight. So you got the base base base model, the the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight core CPU, 14 core GPU with 16 gigs RAM and a terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage? Sorry, no, I guess not the not the base base. It was I got the 10 core 16 gig one terabyte.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so it’s a pro not a max 10 core. Correct. Gotcha. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John What what Jeep? What number GPU cores because that’s you didn’t specify that as an option.
⏹️ ▶️ John we gave it all the variants. The choices are, you know, there’s one eight core CPU and all the rest are 10 cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then for your GPU, you can have a 14 core, a 16 core 24 core 32. I got it. 10 16 core
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU, 16 core GPU, 16 gig, one
⏹️ ▶️ John you pick the middle CPU option on the 14-inch, basically, because there’s two that are lesser, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John two that are greater. You’re right on the edge of max. If you had gone up one more CPU, you’d be getting the max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the all parts work of the pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, yep, that’s exactly what it is. And then you did one level up for
⏹️ ▶️ John the SSD, because the base SSD is 512, and you went up to one terabyte. So again, I’m amazed that you didn’t go to 32.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, because this is still an in-stock configuration that they keep. If you go to the right side, they have the left side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the super cheap one. Then you go one model over, and it’s still a stock configuration.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any stock configuration was delivering for day one delivery for the first half hour they were selling them. And then if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you customize it, it was well into November.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just have to say that Marco gave his reasons for why he got this computer. But if you’re listening, this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John weird configuration to get. Unless you have Marco’s exact specific needs, but you probably don’t, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John almost never recommend this configuration to anybody because you spent
⏹️ ▶️ John up to get the CPU better in a way that you probably won’t notice, but then you cheaped out on the RAM. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that people will notice, regular people, is RAM and SSD space will extend the life of
⏹️ ▶️ John your thing. And most people will never notice the difference between the middle CPU, GPU, and like
⏹️ ▶️ John the basis of base one. So I would have shifted this money around differently for like the average consumer. But given
⏹️ ▶️ John your needs, especially the needs for day one delivery, this makes, and the fact that you’re fine with 16 gigs and
⏹️ ▶️ John all your specific reasons that you listed, this makes sense for you, but if you’re listening, don’t just copy the computer Marco got. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably not the right choice for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, and the reality is, what I am using this computer for, the Air, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solves this need fine. Like, it’s, this computer makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to not spec up the other two things and to prioritize shipping time because I’m a podcaster who wants to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it and I’m an impatient jerk who wants to get it faster and because I’m not replacing my desktop. If it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be my only computer or my primary computer, I would spec it very differently. I would spec everything much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher. So, although actually, I would not pick a different CPU. I would,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh no, I guess I’d probably go with the Max just for the memory bandwidth. So, but I would go with the 24 cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would you like to guess what I’ve bought? Would you like me to set the stage as to what I’m doing with this computer? Do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just wanna just guess right off the bat?
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna try to guess without knowing because I think, let’s see, so you got 14 inch. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you say, I’m assuming you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have also guessed 14. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jeez. What you should have chosen
⏹️ ▶️ John is the top CPU choice, but I don’t think you did. I think you probably, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s see. No, I’m gonna go with that. You should have chosen the top CPU choice and because there was a little me and Marco on
⏹️ ▶️ John your shoulder when you were buying it, You did pick the top GPU, the CPU choice, great.
⏹️ ▶️ John with 32 by default, which is what you got. The only one I can’t figure out is the SSD space.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t remember what your baseline is. I’m gonna say you went with two terabytes. So I’m saying 14 inch M1 Max, 32 core GPU, 32 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM, two terabyte SSD. What did I get wrong? Literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh crap, all right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, anyway, Casey, this is one you should have bought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would guess M1 Max 24 core GPU, 32, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was gonna say two terabyte also, maybe four terabyte, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can see Casey really balking at the SSD pricing. So maybe-
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody should be, if he got the 24, that’s exactly the reason, his cheap instincts. He shouldn’t have gotten 24.
⏹️ ▶️ John He should get the one where all the parts work, but he might.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m actually, okay, I’m gonna say 24 core GPU, 32 gigs of RAM, one terabyte. Ugh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Neither of you are correct. And coincidentally, Marco, you already described what I bought almost exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not just a moment ago. You did about five or 10 minutes ago. Oh no. So, here’s the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fellas. I want the option of replacing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iMac Pro with this, because I’ve never properly used an M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac. And I have a feeling that even if I were to use MacBook Air, I would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at my iMac Pro and say, this is really slow, why am I using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? I might as well get rid of it. So, with that in mind, if you’re in the market for an Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac Pro, that might also be available for purchase sometime soon, let me know. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have any third party RAM in there, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I do not. I had to think about that for a second, but no, I do not. So anyway, so I wanted the option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this to be my only computer. Now, the real big problem with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, and I think the only problem with this, is that there is still, well, two problems actually. There’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no good display story. I really, really, really like having a 5K display.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to have a 6K display, but I am way too cheap for that. So I really like having a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K display, but there really doesn’t exist any other than the LG Ultrafine, which I am not above.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I would rock an LG Ultrafine, but it’s not great, especially since, well, it’s not great in comparison
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to what I suspect to be a really phenomenal screen on this 14 inch. But I’ve been doing a lot of development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my Intel MacBook Pro that I have right now, which again, I really do love this machine, but-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You won’t anymore. Well, I won’t anymore, first of all. Second of all, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have an overabundance of screen real estate. It is enough to get work done, but it is not an overabundance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. And that is frustrating. And so I can absolutely sit on my screened-in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey porch and do work for a couple hours or go to a park and do work for a couple hours, and that’s not bad, but it is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freeing and refreshing coming back to the big, beautiful iMac Pro display.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So even though I want this to potentially be able to replace the iMac Pro, I really haven’t solved the display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey story. And I’ve doubly not solved the display story because I spent $5,000 fucking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollars on this laptop. So what did I buy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bought the middle of the road of the processors available on the fancier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the two 14 inches, which is to say I bought the 24 core M1 Max. And the reason I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did that is because even that is quote unquote only $200 on top of five fricking 1000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I really don’t expect myself to ever need to use that much GPU horsepower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for anything. I really don’t. So even though it is probably silly of me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not to have gotten the beefiest processor and I mostly on paper agree with you, John, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn’t bring myself to do it knowing how much I’d be spending on the rest of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it actually does make sense. I was just teasing because I figured if you’re gonna go, go all the way. But you do not have
⏹️ ▶️ John a need in anything that you do with this laptop for the 32 versus the 24. Like you made the right choice. In fact, in
⏹️ ▶️ John some ways it’s almost kind of a shame that you can’t get the Max with fewer GPU cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, I would have. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it makes sense. I mean, because like you don’t need that GPU cores, but you made the right choice by stepping up to Max for double the memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and I would have make the exact same choice. And in fact, I would also say like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one of the downsides, I think, of this new structure of designing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems around, that now that they’re bonding all these things into these common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip blocks, and the way you’re going to get more CPU cores, you have to also add a bunch more GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores. I think what this is going to result in is people who prioritize CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over GPU are going to have to massively overbuy on GPU just to get the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, but at least you get to save money because like think when they have 128 CPU GPU cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John like maybe like half of them are broken and you get a good deal on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John saved 200 bucks by buying on with some broken GPU or so he doesn’t need. So you’re right that it’s a shame they tie them together. But
⏹️ ▶️ John at least like this is one of the cases they actually do pass those savings onto you, right? Like instead of just offering the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones with all the parts work where you really have to like, Oh, I want the most cores, but then I have to pay for these stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs. I can Casey’s getting away with not paying for what eight cores that he doesn’t care about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So I went the 24 core GPU. Basically, I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get into the Macs, but I did not care any further because I knew I wouldn’t use the GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My iMac Pro has 64 gigs of RAM. So this machine will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have 64 gigs of RAM. Useful? Maybe not. Necessary? Absolutely not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I didn’t want to go backwards if this is going to eventually be my only machine, which I’m I’m not entirely sure it is, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want that option. Storage, my iMac Pro is four terabytes. This has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four terabytes to the tune of $1,000. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one that hurts. Apple’s SSD prices do not make sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s all the more,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re wondering how they get 30 something percent margin on their Macs? Increase the storage, you’ll find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ve looked briefly, I hovered ever so briefly over the eight terabyte storage option,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but at 1,200 additional dollars On top of the thousand I already added, I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it. So what I ended up with is $44.99 plus AppleCare plus tax.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That puts you at about $5,000. Yeah, if I was gonna replace my desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s exactly what I’d replace it with. Yeah, and you said that earlier. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you recall, but you basically rattled off this exact machine
⏹️ ▶️ John Once you’ve spec’d it up like this, and I was looking at those prices, it’s the floor mats phenomenon of like, do
⏹️ ▶️ John you want the floor mats on your $30,000 car? formats are quote unquote only $150. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the car costs so much money, the $150 format seem reasonable when really they’re not reasonable in any
⏹️ ▶️ John plan because $150 is the same amount, whether it’s next to the $30,000 or in isolation. But
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at your spec and I’m saying, Oh, well, the 32 core is only 200 extra bucks. And so I’m already spending five grand.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just throw it in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, yeah. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I can make it I could make a passionate argument that I made the wrong choice. I could see it either way.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you made you made the right choice. I’m just saying that this buying this fallacy of buying things is what would
⏹️ ▶️ John have made me go to the 32. But I think you did make the right choice. And just put it look at it this way. If those eight GPU cores
⏹️ ▶️ John are actually powered down, you’re saving battery power to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody in the chat room as you know how much space you’re actually using. So on my iMac Pro right now I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to you know, in the about dialogue that I’m using three out of my four terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I’ll be the first to tell you, I have cruft all over this thing. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess I’m probably actually only using about two terabytes and the rest, and I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an additional terabyte of just nonsense all over the place. But I never, ever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever want to be in a position where I’ve bought a machine and then like a year later, I think to myself, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screwed that one up. It is not my style to buy a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like my one-year-old laptop, which by the way is available. It is not my style
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy a laptop and then like Marco, change it a year later. It is, that is not my normal way of doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, but the struggle I have all, all snark and all jokes aside is. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suspect that I’m going to run Xcode and I’ve been doing a lot of Swift and Swift UI development recently because I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a whole different new thing, not goaltender, but something else that I’m working on. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been doing a lot of Swift and Swift UI development. And I have a feeling once I try that on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new MacBook pro, which by the way arrives somewhere between November 5 and November 10.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I try doing Xcode development on this, I have a feeling I will say, well, that iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is getting sent somewhere because I never want to touch it again. And that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bummer because I really, really, really love this iMac Pro. And maybe it’ll end up that I won’t say that. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll still love using this iMac Pro for reasons other than the beautiful screen. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really suspect that I’m going to be, that I’m going to be in a position that I want to just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use this machine or in a money no object world, Mac mini or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that connected to an XDR if I had infinite dollars as a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then use this as a laptop. But given that I’ve already spent an obscene amount of money by the way, ATP.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash join, since I’ve already spent an obscene amount of money on this laptop, I suspect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my future is going to be that the iMac Pro is either downgraded to, don’t say this or don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let John hear me, downgraded to some sort of like server or something like that to replace my ancient Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have, or I’ll even more likely just unload the iMac Pro as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then perhaps with the proceeds from that sale, get myself some sort of monitor. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still can’t swing a XDR unless many, many people go to atp.fm slash join,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I could see myself getting like an LG 5K or something like that. And I think that’s what my future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will bring, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. We’ll see what
⏹️ ▶️ John Did I just black out or did you just say you were gonna use your iMac Pro as a server?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why would I do that? That’s obscene. You absolutely blacked out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sell the iMac Pro for God’s sake while it’s still worth anything. And then when I upgrade my desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll sell you my Mac Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’ll still be slower than my MacBook Pro. That’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, not for your desktop, for your server role.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, actually, well, we should take this offline. But all kidding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco aside, I might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take you up on that. I might very well take you up on that. I misunderstood what you were saying. So that’s the thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really and truly, I’m not trying to be funny, I’m definitely going to unload the Intel MacBook Pro, which is a great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey machine. And probably by Thanksgiving time, I will almost surely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end up wanting to unload the iMac Pro, which again, is a phenomenal machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should not wait, you should make the decision soon because those Intel Macs are going down in value
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing is, I need to have that machine physically here before I can get rid of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not gonna be here until November 5th at the earliest. So I figure even if it comes on the 10th,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll need about a week to get everything squared away. And then at that point, it’s effectively Thanksgiving. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how I landed on that math. But I am super excited. I am so excited for this computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I’ve probably said the word super excited about a hundred times during this episode, but I’m so happy. I’m so excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this machine. I really think it’s going to be phenomenal. I genuinely believe that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to make me more productive, which maybe is me just justifying this obscene, ridiculous purchase to myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it probably is. But I really have been feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Xcode and Swift and Swift UI development is pushing the limits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the machines that I have today. And anything else, literally anything else I do is not pushing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limits, but that specifically is, but that’s what I, that’s what I spend most of my week doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so at this point, I really feel like that I genuinely do need it for my work, as silly as it sounds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I say it out loud. And so that’s why I did it. And surprisingly, the family CFO
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not take any particular umbrage with it and basically just rolled her eyes and said, yeah, whatever, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here we are. Hopefully, I’ll be able to sell some machines to some of you fine, lovely listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime over the next few weeks. But I am super excited to get this. I don’t know if I can show up to the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until mine shows up, because I’m just going to be unbelievably, woefully jealous of Marcos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Oh, what a great time this is. I’m just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy and relieved on so many levels. But it’s, oh, what a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Apple and Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. Also, Squarespace, Linode, and Stripe. And thank you to our members who support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly. You can join and help fund Casey’s XDR purchase in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John at https://www.hp.fm.com/.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Join. We will talk to you all next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anti-Marco-Armen, 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 Accidentals, Accidentials Tech Podcasts, it’s so
Rumor report card
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I wanted to do a quick recap of some of the rumors that we had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier in the year. And I think this was spurned by John making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or bringing up an old tweet of yours, I think, with the Chip City. And you had mentioned, oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode of ATP. And then I got looking back for whatever episode it was. And unfortunately, I don’t recall which one it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we mentioned a couple of different rumors over that episode of ATP and maybe one or two others.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I wanted to quickly check back in on them. And we made mention of this earlier briefly, but one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them was a ransomware rumor. So this was when, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forget what supplier it was, but one of the suppliers for Apple, Aquanta, Q-U-A-N-T-A,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently had some information stolen from them and then it was auctioned off or,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, it was ransomed so that the bad people said, if you don’t give us a whole pile of Bitcoin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably or some other silly fake currency, then we’re going to start releasing these documents,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s what happened. And so I was looking back at this Mac Rumors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or excuse me, 9to5Mac recap, and here’s what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaked things said. They said on the right side of the forthcoming Mac, oh, and I’m sorry, this is dated 21 April, 21 April.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the right side, there will be HDMI, USB-C, and an SD card reader. Check, check, check.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the left side, MagSafe, two times USB-C, and headphone port. Check, check, and check.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also no more touch bar. Check.
⏹️ ▶️ John Absolutely nailed it. Did they show the positions? Didn’t this one also have like the image that showed like the position? So the positions,
⏹️ ▶️ John relative positions were all exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right as well? No, I don’t think, I don’t know, maybe they were actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it did. It was like, this was right on. And this was in April. We had the port layout
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was confusing because now that I look at it, I realize it’s upside down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that took me a while to
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out. Yeah, it’s yeah. Now that I know what it actually looks like, I’m like, wait a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I see it because I think I saw that I think I thought the HDMI was magsafe But really magsafe is as small
⏹️ ▶️ John as USB C So yes now seeing the actual products look at these and like yep, they got it It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just I was totally confused by what I was seeing in these line art drawings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then Mark Germans round up dated 18 of May This is where we started learning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the Jade dies and I’m gonna read a excerpt about that in a minute But in short Mark said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there will be eight performance cores to high efficiency cores check and check 16 core GPU check, 32 core GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check, 64 gigs memory check. The only thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was missed was the 24 core option, which as it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John out is what I bought. But that’s just a binning, that’s just a binning thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I don’t think, I wouldn’t call that a miss cause he was just telling you how many things are on the chip, not how many will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be working. Yep, that’s fair. And then there was mention of a four port Mac mini with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M1 Max or M1 Pro, although they weren’t called that at the time. That hasn’t shown up yet. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t mean that that German was wrong. It’s just not there yet. And then I wanted to read the excerpt about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Jade dies just because I thought it was interesting given all we’ve spoken about. Codenamed the Jade 2C Die
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Jade 4C Die, a redesigned Mac Pro is planned to come in 20 or 40 computing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey core variations made up of 16 high-performance or 32 high-performance cores and four or eight high-efficiency cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The chips would also include either 64 core or 128 core options for graphics. The computing core counts top the 28 core maximum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offered by today’s Intel Mac Pro chips. while the higher-end graphics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chips would replace the parts now made by AMD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was all in May. Like that’s… that all… you know, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you mentioned, with the exception of, you know, we don’t have the Mac Mini yet or the Mac Pro, but… so far, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco German nailed these chips in May.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s what gives me pretty good hopes for the rest of this most likely coming true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well, the way he said it would, because whatever info he got that outlined the Jade dies and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was on, like that was right on. So this is probably gonna be how this goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the, you know, Mac mini and Mac pro. And I’m really looking forward to that because that sounds awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So sitting here now, and I was, this is not in the show notes actually, but I’m curious sitting here now, Marco, are you going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get a Mac pro assuming it follows the specs that we expect sitting here today?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, knowing nothing else about it, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I think that’s fair. John, would you replace yours, upgrade yours?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, absolutely. Will I be in a position to do so financially? Maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I would absolutely upgrade to the thing that is rumored in these rumors. No hesitation
⏹️ ▶️ John whatsoever. In fact, that’s kind of my plan, but I mean, it depends on
⏹️ ▶️ John when it comes. December 2022 is a while from now. Maybe I’ll feel like, you know, saving my pennies.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll see. And actually I don’t have to buy another $6,000 fricking display and stand and all that other stuff. So maybe it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be a bargain. I’m already convincing myself to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, my concern over that though, is you know like when the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Retina first came out in 2012 on that 15 inch Retina Mac, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone and iPad both beat it, but when Mac Retina first came out, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kinda ruined all other Macs until Retina could go across the entire product line, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the giant desktop monitors, and that took a while. I wonder like, is 120
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hertz on the laptop going to ruin my XDR? and I’m gonna be just like miserable
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’re okay for the most part there because I don’t think this machine is even rumored
⏹️ ▶️ John to have any port that can drive a 6K display at 120 Hertz. That’s true, yeah. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s even in the cards in the timeframe we’re talking about. Eventually it will be possible, but I don’t think Thunderbolt 4,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is what these things are gonna have, or any of the DisplayPort specs, or they could try to run it with two cables,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t think that’s in the cards. So don’t worry about that. you will at least have a
⏹️ ▶️ John time in the sun with a 60 hertz XDR and a bazillion ARM cores sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John inside some kind of Mac connected to it. Because yeah, because we just don’t have the bandwidth. Like if you start doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the math, even with display stream compression, you know, we have to use display stream compression
⏹️ ▶️ John to get 60 hertz at 6K in some GPU combinations. So I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John worried. And although I like, the question is, would Apple, I mean, we assume the XDR is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be around for a long time. But if that’s not the case, would Apple try to do
⏹️ ▶️ John 8K at 60 Hertz? You know what I mean? Yeah, right. Which is, I think feasible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t done the math, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let me tell you, John, if you’re worried about being able to fund a yet another Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listenersatp.fm.com. Oh yeah. And then finally, I did wanna make a very brief check-in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I looked through Apple’s website earlier and I tried to amass a list of every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intel Mac that remains. and I believe the list is the Mac Mini, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a single model available, a three gigahertz six core model for $1,100,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 27-inch iMac, which obviously hasn’t been updated yet, which has a handful of different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey options, the 21.5-inch iMac, which there is one Intel option still available,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2.3 gigahertz dual core, also for $1,100, and the Mac Pro, but who would buy those anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, all desktops, in other words. Like there’s, so there’s no, so here, Intel is dead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco completely in a laptop line. The Touch Bar is also totally dead in the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line. Thank God for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, that’s not true, right? Cause can’t you get the 13 inch MacBook Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Can you still?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or is that? I thought, maybe I’m wrong about that, but I thought so. Yeah, MacBook Pro 13 inch. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, yeah. You can still get it on the 13 inch MacBook Pro. That’s the only one that you can get a Touch Bar right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you’re right. They do have a Touch Bar on that M1. I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s right. They didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John change the feature set of the cases, more or less, they just changed the guts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please don’t buy that, anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the two-port one, right? Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, please, everybody, if you’re gonna buy a 13-inch sized M1-based laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy the MacBook Air, it’s better in most ways. And if you’re gonna buy, if you want more performance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy the new 14-inch. Please, if you already have a 13-inch, you know, fine, you don’t like set it on fire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything, that would be wasteful, but if you’re buying new today, don’t buy the 13-inch M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro with the touch bar and everything, that’s not a good choice. When we have better choices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, please buy the 14 or the Air.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unless you really love the touch bar, kind of like me with the old AirPods and you just want to get the last one before it’s gone, that seems like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it does seem like it has quite a future. Yeah, good luck. Good luck with