456: The Monitor Situation
11 Nov 2021More MacBook Pro joy, the future of the iMac, a pile of iPhone 13 Pro cases, and Casey’s new-yet-again setup.
Episode Description:
The ATP Store IS BACK! Grab your fancy new M1 Pro or Max shirts, winter hats, or classic merch until the end of the day THIS FRIDAY!
Remember, ATP Members get 15% off on time-limited sales like this one!
- Follow-up:
- iMessage in iCloud Security Overview
- Apple’s T2 Macs and Monterey
- Avoiding the notch using RDM (via Roberto Jung Drebes)
- Casey’s MacBook Pro Updates
- Marco reviews iPhone 13 Pro cases
- Apple Silicone
- Nudient Thin v3
- Peel Clear White
- Totallee Pearl White
- Totallee Clear Soft
- Caudabe Sheath
- Pitaka MagEZ Case 2 (not tested)
- Bullstrap (not tested)
- How Could One Improve the MacBook Pros?
- A None-Too-Brief Aside About Apple External Monitors
- Post-show
#askatp:- Why don’t we talk about processor clock speed anymore? (via Yossi Kanner)
- Would we rather use a previous-gen MacBook Pro with an M1 Max, or the new MacBook Pro with an Intel CPU? (via Joel Short)
Sponsored by:
- Lutron Caseta: Smart dimmers and lighting control.
- RevenueCat: In-app subscriptions and payments made easy.
- Connection: An Apple US Corporate Reseller, Higher-Education Reseller, and Apple Service Provider.
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Chapters
- Casey’s Fine Setup
- ATP Store 🖼️
- Messages security vs. iCloud
- Monterey T2 issues
- Notch avoidance
- Sponsor: Connection
- The MacBook Pro joy continues
- MBP Xcode benchmarks 🖼️
- Memory pressure 🖼️
- 16” vs. 14” thermals
- Sponsor: RevenueCat
- iPhone-case mega-review 🖼️
- Sponsor: Lutron Caséta
- Next-gen MBP hopes
- Big-iMac SOC?
- Wishing for a monitor
- Ending theme
- #aftershowaskatp: M1 GHz?
- Old MBP w/M1 Max or new MBP w/Intel?
Casey’s Fine Setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, with that said, I would like to serve you a second crap sandwich. If you’re just joining us and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re not a bootleg listener, I just beat up Marco for about, I don’t know, 10 minutes about Under the Radar. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to atp.fm.com and you can hear me beating Marco up about Under the Radar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I would like to serve you a second crap sandwich. Last week’s episode, while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was an unequivocal mess slash disaster, it was one of my favorite episodes in a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time because of the utter disaster that is both Marco and my personal setups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decided to turn our setups on our heads. With that said, Marco, I have completely turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my setup on its head yet again. Oh my God. So if this recording works, it will be a miracle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As of literally two-ish hours ago, maybe a hint more than that, I I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have now been using an LG 5K, baby. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installed, I’m using it. And in fact, my USB Mix Pre 3 is connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the monitor, which is connected to my computer. And oh man, if this works, I’ll be impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re running your sound interface through one of the ports on the back of the UltraFine? Yes, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ha ha. So Marco, I love you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I really do. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this is gonna be an adventure for all of us. So, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta help you with the drift. The only thing is you better be recording on that MixPre and with its built-in SD card.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am. Because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey gonna be the only drift-free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recording that you get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And all kidding aside, if it is a disaster, I expect, I know you will tell me, but I expect you to tell me and I’ll rejigger things for next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. But I wanted to give it a try and I thought, you know, why would I only plug in this monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and use that for power for my computer? And ethernet, by the way, is also on this monitor. Why would I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only- Oh my God. do Ethernet and power, why not just do the audio interface there as well? Just really go for broke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so here you go, Marco, there’s your second crab sandwich. I hope you love it. Oh, you’re missing
⏹️ ▶️ John a piece of bread. That’s an open face crab sandwich.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s more of a melt. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should talk one last time, and I can’t sing, otherwise I would, one last time about the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store, which is back, baby, but it’s on its way out the door. You can go to atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash store, and you can get all sorts of sweet merchandise, which at least if you’re in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contiguous, whatever, continental US, I always get the word wrong. If you’re in the big part of the United States, you should,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no guarantees, should get it by the holidays. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t Alaska a pretty big part of the United States?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s just the Mercator projection.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s big, but not as big as it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks. I’m so sorry Alaskans. So here we go. We got the M1 Pro shirt. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got the M1 Max shirt available on black colored cloth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either tri-blend or cotton, and then rainbow print on the front and a monochrome version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the respective chips on the back. Then we’ve got the M1 Pro shirt, which we’ve curiously named
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monochrome, which does make sense because the print is monochrome, and yet these are on many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey varied colors of shirt. So you can go colorful ink, black shirt, or you can go colorful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shirt, white or black ink, depending on which shirt color we’re talking about. We also have the ATP winter hat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Note, this is a turkey hat. It is not a chicken hat, but it is still very, very nice. We’ve also brought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back the ATP hoodie and additionally the ATP logo shirt, the classic, classic ATP logo shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here’s the thing, as we record this, it’s Wednesday night. We are probably going to be releasing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it Thursday sometime by, I believe it’s Friday evening. Is that right, gentlemen? Yep. Friday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey evening, ATP time, the store will close for the sweet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, uh, like click Kickstarter style stuff that we’ve got going on now. And then sometime over the weekend,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will go back to the print on demand stuff, which is far more limited. So as always, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are driving, if you are walking, if you are biking, if you’re a rollerblading, if you’re unicycling, whatever you may be doing, if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moving in any way, please gently and gracefully stop and move to the side of the road
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or sidewalk that you’re on and go to ATP. and check out the wares and perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make a purchase. Now, a couple of quick reminders. Number one, if you are an ATP member, go to your member page
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on atp.fm, and there will be a unique coupon code that you can use to get 15%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off on these limited time sales like the one we’re talking about right now. And if you wanted to be a member,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey become a member again, atp.fm. Additionally, I believe I talked about this last week, but I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to reiterate that Cotton Bureau, who is our fulfillment and print people, They’re excellent, excellent, amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friends of ours. They have rejiggered their shipping system such that it should,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no guarantees, should be cheaper for anyone who is not American. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many cases, including for Australia, I don’t know if any of the other Southern Hemisphere countries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are the same way, but at least for Australia, the VAT and some of those other taxes, they will do their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best effort to calculate that at purchase time so you don’t get a sweet holiday surprise, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your friends at ATP. So again, ATP.fm slash store, you are running out of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Every time you guys, one of you says, oh, I meant to and I forgot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it too, yes, it’s too late. Go now, ATP.fm slash store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like people do that now just to troll you. They do. Which is funny, because they literally like miss out on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sale just as a method to troll you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you know what? It’s their loss, not mine. Well, it is kind of mine, but still it’s also theirs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So ATP.fm slash store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember, this is the holiday sale. So if you’re thinking of getting, even if you don’t want one of these things, or if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John being subjected to this podcast, say you’re a prisoner in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a car and someone is
⏹️ ▶️ John playing this podcast and you don’t want to hear it, but you think you might want to get the person who forced you to listen to this podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John you might want to get them a nice gift, go to atp.fm slash store quickly, very, very quickly, because this
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably like a day or less, depending on when you hear this, very quickly, like basically now, and secretly
⏹️ ▶️ John buy them something, and then maybe you can bribe them into not playing this podcast when you’re stuck in the car with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then if you become a member, remember, if you become a member, remember, you do not have to cancel,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey despite what John thinks, and you can enjoy the sweet, sweet benefits like the bootleg, for example. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear the first of the crud sandwiches that I served Marco earlier this evening. So check that out, atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Join atp.fm. Store. door now.
Messages security vs. iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow-up. We talked last week, I believe it was, about how, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genesis of this was that I do not have messages in the Cloud or in iCloud turned on. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think you guys might have made fun of me a little bit. I said, I was worried about encryption and so on and so forth. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey waved our hands at it because we weren’t entirely sure of the specifics of it. A few people wrote in and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pointed out the specifics about encryption and iCloud and messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from the iCloud security overview, It says, for messages in iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have an iCloud backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This ensures that you can recover your messages if you lose access to your keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off iCloud backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages that is not stored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Apple. So if I read this right, the short, short version is, it is still end-to-end encrypted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even with messages in the cloud, as long as you do not have iCloud backup turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. The moment you have iCloud backup turned on, though, all bets are off in terms of end-to-end encryption. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John fair? You should listen to ADP, because we talked about this before and said the exact same thing. But not everyone has heard every
⏹️ ▶️ John episode, so it’s good to hear this. I think the reason we didn’t mention this specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John is because, in general, we assume that everybody has iCloud backup turned on. Do you have iCloud backup turned
⏹️ ▶️ John on, Casey? I’m pretty sure I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Pretty sure or sure? You know, I never used to. But then once I started doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Apple One plus whatever thing, I finally had the space in which to do it. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I do, I’m trying to stall for time and figure that out, but somebody else can start talking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I would recommend people use iCloud backup and I assume most people do use iCloud backup if they can, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a very convenient way to get your stuff backed up and it’s, uh, it’s kind of like what time machine wishes it was, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, someone hits a switch in a setting somewhere and then never has to think about it again. And that vastly increases the
⏹️ ▶️ John odds that if they, you know, drop their phone into a lake, uh, and don’t have someone dive down and get it for them, that they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have their data protected. So the reason we say, oh, messages in the cloud means Apple can get
⏹️ ▶️ John access to your messages is because we just assume people have iCloud backup turned on. And honestly, you should in general.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, obviously, you really, really are paranoid about security. I guess don’t turn it on
⏹️ ▶️ John or use a different app like Signal, or I don’t know what you want to do if you’re that paranoid about security. But for the average person,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t turn off iCloud backup because you’re afraid of Apple having your encryption key. It’s better for you to have pictures of your
⏹️ ▶️ John kids than to worry about Apple looking at your messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and to get ahead of the inevitable feedback, yes, hypothetically, law enforcement could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compel Apple to give them a view into your messages, theoretically.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I know. But I’m saying like, it’s which one of these things is the more likely bad thing to happen to you?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you have to choose amongst them. It’s not great to have all those choices. We wish there was a way to do these double-ended encrypted, but as
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple explains, they’re trying to save your bacon. Because the way iCloud Keychain works is if you do lose
⏹️ ▶️ John all your quote-unquote trusted devices, there’s nothing Apple can do to get it back, right? And that’s a thing that can happen
⏹️ ▶️ John to people, especially say you had just one iPhone and you lost and broke that iPhone and it had no backups and that had
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures of your kids on it for the past two years that you don’t have any place else. That’s not good. Apple doesn’t want that to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is far more likely to happen than you to be the person who the government compels Apple to give your
⏹️ ▶️ John secret encryption key and look at your messages and so on and so forth. Not saying this is a great choice for people to have to make,
⏹️ ▶️ John but these are the choices given to us. And of those two choices, I would recommend using iCloud Backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real-time follow-up, I do have iCloud backup turned on, and again, I think that’s only been since I joined Apple One, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is on. That’s good.
Monterey T2 issues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, go team. Apple has had some problems with Mac OS Monterey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it kind of bricking some T2 enabled Macs. Can you tell me about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John People keep using the term brick. I’m wondering if it’s one of those terms is going to lose its original meaning and I’m not going to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John yell at people for using it wrong because it’ll have the new meaning. But anyway, the original meaning for brick is that your computer becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John a brick basically as useful as a brick as in this is a piece of hardware that cannot be resurrected,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is now like someone will have to open this up and do stuff inside it to
⏹️ ▶️ John resurrect this. It is basically a brick. Like that’s where the term comes from. Not that this isn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ John bad bug, it was. There was something with the Monterey update that would hose the Bridge
⏹️ ▶️ John OS thing that runs on the T2 chip, and that would just cause your computer not to boot correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you could resurrect it. You could do what I had to do to my Mac Pro when I did the same, you know, an old, I think it was like a big
⏹️ ▶️ John Sur update or something. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John my Bridge OS. There’s a way, you have to have another Mac, which is not a problem in this house, but for some people it might
⏹️ ▶️ John be. But you can resurrect another Mac using the Apple configurator
⏹️ ▶️ John too, and it’s a whole big weird procedure, but you can do it. That’s why it’s not bricked, because if it was bricked, you
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t be able to resurrect it. Like, it would, just like you can’t resurrect a brick. Anyway, setting aside the pedantry
⏹️ ▶️ John about the term brick, there was a bug with the Monterey update. Apple says they have identified and fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John the issue with the firmware on the Apple TV security chip, blah, blah, blah. And they say the updated firmware
⏹️ ▶️ John is now included with the existing macOS updates. So it’s not like they had to release a new version, I guess. I guess if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John run the updater now, you’ll get the new firmware. So whatever. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Ars Technica article that we got this from points out that this Apple statement doesn’t address similar complaints
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who had pre T2 Macs. So maybe there’s still a problem with really
⏹️ ▶️ John older Macs. But like we said last week, Monterey seems pretty safe. I’ve upgraded all my computers. It’s been fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you had a T2 based Mac and you were worried about it, apparently Apple has fixed that bug and you’re fine to upgrade. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got a pre T2 Mac, Perhaps there are still problems, but hard to say.
Notch avoidance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then tell me about ways to avoid the notch, which by the way, I really don’t think is necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my personal estimation, but a lot of people seem to be very worked up about this. So how can you avoid the notch?
⏹️ ▶️ John Roberto Jong-Dreves says the cleanest way to get rid of the notch without having to deal with suboptimal resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John because we were talking last week, like when you said that compatibility thing, it shrinks the whole image down to non-native
⏹️ ▶️ John res, is to use RDM. I don’t know what that stands for. I tried to look it up, but it’s a project on GitHub.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll put a link in the show notes. Using RDM, Roberto says, I can switch the new MacBook Pro resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John from the native 1512 by 982 points to 1512 by 945 points,
⏹️ ▶️ John which makes the notch permanently go away. So what this thing does, this is the utility is just letting you
⏹️ ▶️ John pick resolutions that aren’t offered to you in system preferences because you just get those five choices or whatever. This lets
⏹️ ▶️ John you see way more choices. And one of the choices is a resolution that falls short of where the
⏹️ ▶️ John notch is. So, you know, if you, there was a tweet, Roberto had a tweet on this, You can see a picture of his
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and lo and behold his Mac has a taller Black forehead around
⏹️ ▶️ John the top border of the screen just like all the old Mac books used to so if you want to just sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John Throw those pixels back in Apple’s face Apple gave you all these extra pixel pixels of the sort of ears around the notch if
⏹️ ▶️ John you just want to throw those pixels back In Apple’s faces, you know what? I’m not gonna use those pixels. I’m gonna pretend those pixels aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John there I’m gonna set my screen to a resolution that falls below where the notch is
⏹️ ▶️ John and just ignore all those pictures and pixels and they’ll just be turned off all the time. And hopefully I won’t have any mini
⏹️ ▶️ John LED blooming reminding me that that’s actually a screen behind there. That is a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John just forget about the notch entirely and pretend that Apple gave you a smaller screen And they actually
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The MacBook Pro joy continues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have both Marco and me, some more MacBook Pro observations and so on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just some quickies for me. So over the last week or so since we recorded,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve taken the occasion a couple of times to work with the MacBook Pro outside and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it may all be in my head. I don’t think it is, but it may be all in my head. But one of the things that I’ve really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoyed about working outside with this thing is that I feel like the screen is legitimately brighter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know they talked about, oh, it’s, you know, a thousand nits or whatever at peak brightness. But I don’t recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what my last year’s MacBook Pro was. I don’t really know what the numbers say to compare. It honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t really matter. All I can tell you is that my lived experience, placebo or otherwise, is that it is genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a bit brighter and easier to see outside, which is great, even in sunlight, which is very impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why you’re doubting your experience. Yeah, it’s way brighter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, well, no, because I don’t know if the numbers, I don’t know if the numbers would say.
⏹️ ▶️ John The numbers are big. I think like your old one is probably like 300 nits max. And this thing goes up to a thousand, but it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John displaying at 500, but either way more than 300. There you go. So, yeah, you can look up. I’m just making up
⏹️ ▶️ John the numbers. I’m just like, yes, this, it does not surprise me that you’re much brighter screen looks brighter. Turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, additionally, so I have, uh, really enjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from time to time going and working at like a park, especially, uh, in pandemic times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once we came to realize that, you know, if you’re more than 10 feet away from somebody, especially outside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then, you know, you should be pretty safe, you know, knock on wood, all things being considered. And, um, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I’ve tried. Uh, from time to time to go and find places to work. And, you know, I used to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to like a local grocery store. It’s a very fancy grocery store and it has like a little cafe area.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not a coffee drinker, so I didn’t really ever go to Starbucks, but if I was, I would have gone to Starbucks. And, but since,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the pandemic has happened and is happening, I’m still mostly allergic to the indoors. So I’ve been trying to find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outdoors places to go and work. And there’s a lot of really great parks in the county in which I live,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and other things like that. And so over the last year and a half or two years, I’ve been amassing a private
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Maps collection, I think they call it, that I call Places to Work. And I’ll take a note
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, oh, right here in this park, there’s some picnic tables that are shaded. Or over there, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a shady area that has picnic tables underneath it. Oh, and these ones have power, and so on and so forth. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things that was a real struggle for me is if I wanted to sit down for like several hours and do work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly outside, irrespective of like my internet situation, which was often but not always tethering,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my old laptop, like I really needed to worry about power after just an hour or two. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a USB-C battery pack that I can use. It’s big enough physically in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, milliamp hours or whatever, that I can power a computer with it for some amount of time. But even still,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would only have, I don’t know, three or four hours or something like that on my last year’s laptop. And let me tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, I spent all morning outside at a botanical garden here in Richmond, don’t be creepy, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was on like 75% battery or something like that when I left, I should have actually taken note
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of how long I was there and how much battery I used. But the point I’m driving at is, I really don’t need to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power as long as I’m not gonna be out literally all day. And I know that this is old news for those of you who have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had M1 Macs before, but even with the M1 Macs and 64 gigs of RAM and 24 GPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is real nice not having to worry about power for like three and four hours at a time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is super cool and I’ve really appreciated it already. Now, in the spirit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me rejiggering my desk setup, I realized, well, I’m going to be unloading this iMac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which by the way, if you’re interested, please reach out, but I’m going to be unloading this iMac Pro in the next couple of weeks, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will presumably be sending the keyboard and trackpad that came with it to the next owner. So now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need a new setup unless I’m going to live with the keyboard and trackpad that are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey physically on the laptop, which when I’m at home, I don’t really want to do because it’s not terribly ergonomic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I went to the Apple store and I bought myself a fancy new 100 and whatever key extended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard with a numpad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The one with Touch ID?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, the new one with Touch ID and then a new trackpad, which I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in most ways the same as what I had except white instead of much more attractive in my opinion, dark Gray,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I bought one of, you know, a trackpad and a new keyboard. Do you have any idea how friggin expensive these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it was like the keyboard. I think it’s 150.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The small one is, I believe. I believe the big one was 180. Oh God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the, yeah, the small, yeah, they were right. The small one, Touch ID is 150. I’ve been thinking about ordering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, but, but yeah, the, the, um, the trackpad I think is also about 160 or 180. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was 130. I don’t have these numbers in front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of me. It’s expensive. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it doesn’t matter if I don’t have it exactly right, but all told, between the two of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them, and I also got a second MagSafe, you know, an additional MagSafe cable, but I think it was like 310, 320 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for just the keyboard and the mouse or something like that. Like it was preposterously expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just hilariously expensive. And to get ahead of people asking, like I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t necessarily want the keyboard with the numeric keypad. It is what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chose, but it’s not what I necessarily wanted. but did you remember the Achilles heel of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the smaller sized keyboard that does not have the numeric keypad on it?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got the messed up arrow keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s got the piss poor arrow keys. And since I’m used to the extended version, cause that’s what the iMac Pro came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with, I thought to myself, you know what? I’d rather have the proper arrow keys and the numeric keypad, which I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use from time to time, but not enough to really justify it in the grand scheme of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I ended up splurging for the $180, I can confirm that now $180 magic keyboard with touch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ID and numeric keypad for Mac models with Apple Silicon, hyphen US English. That’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard anyway. And by the way, that little keyboard that we’re talking about, like what are we saying by the messed up arrow keys is
⏹️ ▶️ John it has the style that used to be on all the Mac laptops where the up and down arrows
⏹️ ▶️ John are half size and wedged into like a single key caps space. And then the left and
⏹️ ▶️ John right arrows are full size keys. So you have three keys in a row, left,
⏹️ ▶️ John then the up down, and then right, that are all kind of the same height. And what we wanted on the laptops, what we got
⏹️ ▶️ John on the current laptops is what we call the inverted T where the left and right arrows are half height, and you would
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s worse, you’re making the left and right arrows smaller, they must be harder to hit. But the key about them being half height is
⏹️ ▶️ John now you can feel for that T because you can feel the half height key and then the full height up and
⏹️ ▶️ John down pair and then the other half height key that goes to the right. And it’s easy, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an obviously the full size keyboard has an inverted T as well. You can actually feel for the keys without looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at them. And if you’re used to that, going to the full-size left and right keys was a downgrade for a lot of people and apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple agreed because they changed it on their laptops. But this one keyboard, this one dinky tiny keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John that comes with the iMacs and that you get if you don’t buy this extended one, it has
⏹️ ▶️ John the full height left and right arrow keys. And the reason it has the full height left and right arrow keys, if you look at the picture of
⏹️ ▶️ John it, is that if you tried to make the right arrow key in particular half height it
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t quite work because the corner of the keyboard is rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John and so that key would not just be half height but it would also have its corner chopped off so this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a one of the few remaining examples of fairly egregious form over function where someone
⏹️ ▶️ John decided that it was really really important for this keyboard to have rounded edges at the
⏹️ ▶️ John cost of the arrow keys being easier and more comfortable to use for most people that’s not a good
⏹️ ▶️ John trade I know it It looks cute when the keyboard has rounded corners. The keyboard you bought, Casey, has rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John corners. And so the Enter key is rounded, the Control key is rounded, the Escape key is rounded, and the F19
⏹️ ▶️ John key are rounded. And it’s not that bad, but they’re still pretty big keys. Like Enter and Control and Escape are much
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger than a normal key, and then F19, who hits that? It’s not a big deal. But for the little
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard, they sacrificed the usability of the arrow keys just so it could have extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John rounded corners. I think that is a bad trade. I hope Apple fixes that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That seemed like it was like directly from like the ghost of Johnny. I like somehow Johnny came back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the building and I guess his key card still works probably. And he came back in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow he convinced like one person like, Hey, just, you know, just do this for me. I can’t live with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less rounded keyboard corners that would otherwise make usable arrow keys. I can’t, I can’t tolerate that. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got to round it a little bit more and make it a little bit more like this wonderful generation of keyboards you made from 2016 to 2019. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please make it more like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why, like, you know, it’s not like the keyboard that I’m using right now, the one that came with my Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like it doesn’t have rounded corners. It does. The radius is just smaller of the rounding. Like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like, it’s not like this has sharp corners that needed to be fixed. And it’s also not like the keyboard that I’m using right
⏹️ ▶️ John now is somehow a giant battleship like the Apple Extended Keyboard 2 or something. It’s so tightly
⏹️ ▶️ John wrapped around the keys, it’s like it disappears. And yet this tightness and this
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of rounding was deemed insufficient for the new computers because the radius of the rounded corner should be
⏹️ ▶️ John similar on the screen and the keyboard. It’s like no, fine, you can do that, fine, but if you want to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John either make the border on your keyboards bigger or, I don’t know, like just don’t mangle the
⏹️ ▶️ John arrow keys for it. It’s a bad choice. But anyway, I’m glad the extended one doesn’t suffer from this. And it’s, I know Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t want the extended one because most people don’t want a numpad, but page up, page down, home end, and real
⏹️ ▶️ John full-size inverted T arrow keys. It’s a great way to live.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And delete, yeah, forward delete or whatever it is. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward delete without hitting FN. Yep, yeah, all these are very true. So it’s, I shouldn’t complain. It’s the thing I’m complaining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about more than anything else is that it was a hundred, I’ve now looked it up, $180 for the keyboard and 130 for the Magic Trackpad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So $310 frigging dollars for peripherals for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this stupid computer that I actually absolutely am in love with, but nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, I got,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man, the more I’m using this computer, like, oh man, the new MacBook Pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey They’re so good. They’re so good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I was, it was funny too, because after I was doing work at the Botanical Gardens, Declan was in school, but Aaron and Michaela
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came and met me and we walked around, had lunch and stuff. And I was saying to Aaron, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey liked using my old laptop and it was perfectly sufficient, but it was always a little bit of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pain because it was demonstrably slower than the iMac Pro. And so if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m choosing to say, work on the screened-in porch, unless I pull an MKBHD and haul the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac Pro down there, I’m still using a slower computer. And it’s frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s just annoying. Whereas here it was, I was in the middle of a garden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a computer that was tethered to nothing with a cable and tethered to my phone for internet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so incredibly fast. Like I cannot oversell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how fast it is to build and run this new thing I’m working on. It is so fast and so nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s so amazing to not have to feel like I am, I am crippling myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I step away from my desk. Of course, now that I say that, that’s a perfect segue to the LG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K, which I have acquired secondhand. Now, this person did not ask for a plug,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but my friend Chris Gray, who is part of, with Glenn Welsh, the Starport 75
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast, which I’ve guested on a handful of times, and I actually plan to do so again soon. It’s a Disney-themed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast, and it’s really good, and they have a great chemistry, the two of them. Well, Chris didn’t want his LG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K anymore, and so he sold it to me at a tremendously great deal and so I felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot better spending the money I spent on it rather than spending like $1,300 or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is to get a brand new one. That being said, I haven’t exactly canceled the order I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the brand new one and I know I should but I can’t quite bring myself to do it because I think it would be so awesome to have two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these but nevertheless, the LG 5K in terms of the screen based on three hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of use, the screen is great. It’s not as great as the one in the MacBook Pro but it’s great. It’s perfectly fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine, perfectly serviceable. And it has four USB-C ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that you started out with great and then you went to perfectly fine and then you went to perfectly serviceable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re not wrong. You’re not. No, it is great. In my opinion, it is really great. However, would you agree that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s fine? It is ultra fine, baby. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stand is just as crappy as everyone says it is. It is so bad. Like I try to bring it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to full height and I don’t know if maybe it’s because I have a couple of things plugged into it like Ethernet in the USB pre
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or excuse me, the USB mix, USB mix three. Uh, but whatever it is, when I raise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stand up to full height, you know, it just, and shrinks down like two inches,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just settles back in like an old desk chair that’s been at the office for too long. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is very funny to me and I might just get a visa, visa, whatever it’s called mount for it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me tell you, based again on just a few minutes of use, it is so nice. pairing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MacBook Pro, which is so fast, with this beautiful screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is basically the same as what I had in my iMac Pro. Like maybe it is on paper, but it’s effectively the same to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I am so happy having this thing here. This is so great and I’m so excited. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only problem I have with my computing life right now is for the longest time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like that I was a Bluetooth unicorn. And so many people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whine and moan about how like Bluetooth is garbage for peripherals and it’s always laggy and this and that and the other thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for years, I’ve never had this problem. And I feel like it may be all in my head, but I feel like I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of like stuttering and lag off of the new Magic Trackpad. And it’s brand new with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a brand new computer. So it’s gotta be like some interference or something. I don’t know. But it’s really bothering me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s happening at all. So I’m hopeful I’ll be able to report in a week that it just has, it stopped. Or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once I unplug the iMac, that’ll fix it, who knows. But this happened before the LG for the record. the LG wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here yet when I noticed this. But all told, I am so freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy with my computing life right now. I cannot overstate how happy I am. And the track, the touch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ID and the keyboard works so well. The external keyboard, like I’m so happy, you guys. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, so happy. My life is so good right now. Marco, let’s keep it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. Tell me how your life is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s similarly really good. Good, good. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These computers are so good. So my current setup is, it’s basically what it was last week. I don’t think I changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. I’m waiting on a couple of Thunderbolt hubs to come in to make this a little bit nicer. But the gist of it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that right now I have my 16-inch desktop laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off to the side in a vertical clamshell stand, like some kind of wood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that stands up vertically. And I have it so the vent is on top, like the hinge, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen hinge is on top. The downside of this, So there’s a little quirk about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design of these. If you’re gonna use it in like a vertical stand, the Apple logo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the MacBook Pro etching on the bottom are in opposite orientation. So no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter how you stand it up, one of those is gonna be upside down. But the way I stand it up with the hinge on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top, the Apple logo is upside down, but that doesn’t matter. That’s like facing into the speaker next to it, so I don’t see it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so I have access to the ports on the side, on one side, and the other side I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like plugged into like the main docking stuff. So I have like, I can reach over and access my SD card slot because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that side of it’s facing me and it’s off to the right side of like my center monitor thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And anyway, it looks cool and it works really well and I figure having the hinge slash vent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top should help convection cooling and help the fans not need to work as hard. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally I will be, like if I’m doing something intensive on the processor, I’ll reach my hand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over to see if I can feel hot air coming out the top and it’s never gotten and beyond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like slightly warm. So this thing really does have a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredible cooling system. I’ve never heard the fans as of yet. So far, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very happy with that. And the 14 inch has been my around the house, you know, workout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FaceTime slash upstairs slash, you know, portable needs. And it’s been fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did actually, I’m experimenting with a change. My
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad is, it’s still the, it’s the first 11-inch model, which I believe was the 2018 model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m barely using it anymore because frankly Mac laptops got so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better than they were. And every time I use my iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish it was a Mac laptop instead. And so I’m temporarily trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just use my M1 Air right in place of the iPad. So, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kitchen, on the counter, I ordered one of those little plastic keyboard overlays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to keep some dust and crumbs out of it, because sometimes I’ll operate it with slightly damp hands, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I’ll have something on my hands from cooking or something. But I’m trying just having that be the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air. And so far, I’m kind of loving it. So we’ll see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I really don’t want to replace that iPad with another iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because I’m not iPad-ing enough. whatever value iPad power users get out of it as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like their like glorious everything machine, I’ve never really gotten there with it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a MacBook Air in that context for me, especially since I already have it, like it’s not like I had to go buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something separate. I already have these things. And it’s only a question of like, you know, which one do I give away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash sell slash trade at some point or save for my kid to have to use when he needs a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, something like that. But like, now that I had both in my house, it’s really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice to just have a small Mac on the kitchen counter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of an iPad for my personal needs and preferences. Because so often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m doing anything on an iPad, I run into something where I’m like, oh, I gotta save this for next time I’m on a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I could do this so much easier or better if I was on a Mac. And so now I’m just on a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s a lot nicer. So yeah, and it does feel like a little bit wasteful of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a powerful computer. But at the same time, if I bought a new iPad today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would have similar processing power, and I would only be using it mostly to type notes and add stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Amazon in my shopping cart in the kitchen when I run into something. So it would be a waste of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing potential either way. Might as well have the computer that I can do lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more stuff on that I need to do, as opposed to the one that I so often will hit a wall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be like, well, I guess I gotta save this for later.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think the Mac is probably slightly more vulnerable to kitchen hazards than the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, and that’s why I got, why I wrote that keyboard cover, and I know it’s still gonna be a little more vulnerable, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not a super big risk of getting wet, Casey. It’s more,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bigger risk is just that my hands might be a little bit dirty while operating it, just because of where it is. It’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far from any water sources. But, and I also figure, because it’s the fanless MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air, that whatever ventilation it would get from sucking air in through the keyboard, it isn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. So covering that keyboard with a plastic, you know, cover thing shouldn’t be a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, you talking about this reminded me of a couple things. First of all, at the moment, I’m currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running the MacBook Pro adjacent to the LG 5K. So I’m using two screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the first time I’ve done this for more than a few minutes in a long time, and I’m not sure if I’m gonna stick with it. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m using, I think this is originally, it was a hand-me-down, I think it’s the 12 South Lake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget what they called it. I’ll try to remember to get up for the show notes, but it’s a thing that lifts up an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the desk because iMacs are notorious for being way too low. And I’ve put my MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that. So now my computer’s elevated off the desk. I hope you guys are very happy. Luke
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gromen Oh, that’s good. So now you can you can spill up to like three inches of water and it’s not a problem. Jim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Collison That’s true. And the only thing I have to worry about is my $310 of peripherals I just bought. right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then actually, speaking of peripherals, I forgot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to mention earlier, I think we might have spoken about this before. So forgive me if I’m repeating us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash myself. The peripherals come with braided USB-C to lightning cables, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are delightful. These are so nice. Yeah, they’re really nice. I don’t know if we talked about that before, but they’re so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. We did last week. Okay, I just want to make sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John’s in charge of telling us what’s on the show. It’s not that long ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I can’t remember what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I had for dinner. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what I said last week? I said, oh, we talked about this before. Remember when I was getting all braided cables for my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Pro and you said, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Oh gosh, I’m so sorry everyone.
MBP Xcode benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, quick little update about the benchmarks on the new MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pros. When I last gave my benchmarks, I only had the 14-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 Pro version with the 16GB of RAM. I now have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 Max, and I have the 16-inch which gives me the ability to run high power mode, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to test low power mode as well. So here’s how that all went. Here’s how it all turned out. So, if you recall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to the M1 Mac Mini, this is using an overcast build, So, you know, Overcast is a moderately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sized app. It’s not huge, it’s not tiny, it’s a moderately sized app. It’s a lot of Swift and a lot of Objective-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a clean build on an M1 takes about 30 seconds. On an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 Pro, it took about 19 seconds. So significantly faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then on the M1 Max, it’s also 19 seconds. In fact, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco test I ran, all the Xcode tests, clean build, incremental, large and small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of them took exactly the same amount of time, you know, give or take. I mean, this is like me, you know, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timing things like stopwatch based. So maybe like a half second imprecision, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they all had the same results. So I could not tell a difference. And I should note also, this is both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M1 Pro and M1 Max had the same 10 CPU cores. I had not tested the like low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end eight core model. So M1 Pro versus M1 Max, as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this kind of, you know, moderate developer workload, No difference between those two chips, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not really using the GPUs for anything, and it seems like the CPU needs are the same. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no difference between 14-inch and 16-inch for this purpose. You know, the 16-inch does provide a much larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cooling system, but that seems to mostly only be a benefit to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU-heavy workloads that video people are doing, and I’m not doing any of those things. So for developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say any M1 Pro or M1 Max is going to be probably about the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you. With the exception of that low-end 8-core model, again, that’s probably going to be a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slower. But it would still be really fast. And then finally, I decided to test high-power mode and low-power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode. High-power mode could not tell a difference at all with anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this makes sense based on what we’ve been told about high-power mode. It seems like it doesn’t increase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the clock speed of the chip or anything like that. All high power mode seems to do is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run the fans at higher speed and allow them to run like even higher if necessary. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re doing some kind of like very heavy CPU and GPU sustained workloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like again like video people would do that’s when you’re looking at high power mode on the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being a potential gain for you but for developers it seems to make no difference whatsoever at least nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I could notice. Finally low power mode I haven’t tested any kind of like battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impact on low power mode yet, because that battery test takes a very long time and I haven’t had time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance wise, low power mode seems to be about 15%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slower than regular mode. So not, it is noticeable, but it’s not a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference. You know, like my, my 19 second build took 21 seconds. Like it’s not, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was pretty consistent. Like I could measure it over and over again and it stayed like exactly in the same range. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low power mode, all the tests I did, about 15% slower. Which is interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d love to learn more about it, but that’s a small enough difference that I think if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a big battery impact, it would be totally fine to, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it automatically switch to low power mode anytime it’s on battery, which is one of the settings you get in the power system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prefix pane. You can have it always run low power mode when it’s on battery, or you can manually switch it whenever you feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessary. Maybe if you’re on a flight or something like that. But right now, I set my 14-inch to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low power mode on battery and I haven’t noticed any difference whatsoever. So maybe I’ll just get even ridiculously more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better battery life. So yeah, overall, very impressed. But it also doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to matter really which of these chips you get for developer workload, which is great news. That means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can be more flexible in your buying decisions and kind of, you know, get whatever you want. I also did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not notice a difference in this particular benchmark between the 16 gig and 64 gig of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM option. But that being said, one more week of usage, I totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice a difference in my actual day-to-day usage having all this RAM. Because I’m not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running Xcode builds over and over again, I’m bouncing between lots of different apps. I have Logic, I have Xcode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have Adobe’s garbage apps. Which by the way, I’ve, I briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flirted with the idea of updating Quitter to terminate all of Adobe’s background crap processes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instead, I just wrote a shell script and made launchd run it every 15 minutes. Nice. So it’s fine. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works great. So I’ve totally solved my Adobe bloat problem with a shell script.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe I’ll post it somewhere. I don’t know. Oh, that’s very nice.
Memory pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now as you’re talking about memory stuff, I’m looking at, so in iStat Menus, you can get a historical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey graph of your memory pressure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I didn’t know about that until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few days ago. It’s great, so okay, anybody using iStat Menus, go turn on a memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pressure widget, because it only records this graph if you have a widget on. But go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn on a memory widget of some kind in iStat Menus so the memory switch is enabled,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you can see a history of your memory pressure up to 30 days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since you’ve had it enabled. So you can actually see over time how much memory you might need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so I’m looking at my memory pressure since I got the computer. And I’ve been using it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much full time since, I don’t know, day two or three. My iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally got moved off my desk like two or three days ago, poor thing. I love that computer so much, it pains me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much that it’s not my primary machine. But it’s not as fast. So anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my memory pressure at its worst, would you gentlemen like to guess the percentage of memory pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had at its worst? 10%. It’s stunning. Okay, Marcus at 10%, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John People were showing these graphs before and memory pressure is already a fuzzy thing. What the heck is the percentage? What
⏹️ ▶️ John does 100% memory pressure mean? This is all meaningless numbers. I have no idea what the number is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, my worst memory pressure was 5%. 5% of what? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, but it’s not a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I can tell you that. It’s low, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t, yeah. Mine’s nine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, it just made me laugh. And so I probably did not need, almost certainly did not need 64 gigs of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but no regrets. I am so happy that this machine, as obscenely expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it and its stupid peripherals were, I am so happy with this computer, I cannot even tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I felt, I do think I felt equally happy with the iMac Pro when it was new, and actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to some degree, still to this day, it is such a nice computer. And I’m only slightly saying that because I want to sell it soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it is such a nice computer. but being able to pick it up and move it without a Pelican case MKBHD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey style is also so freaking great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, the iMac Pro is and was amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in so many ways. We just have better computers now. Like, because the iMac Pro is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty old. I mean, that was also, what was that, 2018 model? 2017, I think, right? Yeah, 2017, yeah, yeah. Like, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s been a while now and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was never updated. So, you know, that’s not recent anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When it came out and for the many years following, it was fantastic. But, you know, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this much time has passed, better things are going to come out.
16” vs. 14” thermals
⏹️ ▶️ John One final note on the 16 inch versus 14 inch. So there’s been lots of like hardware teardowns of these laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John now and people have done more extensive tests. And it’s about what you would expect. So the 16 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ John as Marco noted, it has a better cooling system. It has bigger heat pipes. It has bigger fans
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s just plain more room in there. The air slots are bigger for entry and exit. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can equip that computer with exactly the same system on a chip as you can in a 14 inch. So
⏹️ ▶️ John to no one’s surprise, the 14-inch has more trouble
⏹️ ▶️ John moving heat out of it and generally tends to get slightly hotter. That said, these
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops are so power efficient and the fans are so low RPM and so quiet, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a thing that you should worry about. This is only just to say that like, if you are wondering, does the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John have higher cooling capacity than the 14? The answer is absolutely yes, it does. But it actually is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to demonstrate that because you have to find a test that stresses every single part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the system on a chip. The CPU, the GPU, the memory subsystem, the SSD, stresses it all at the
⏹️ ▶️ John same time in a sustained manner and then run it for a long time and then carefully measure.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you do all of that, you can demonstrate that yes, under extreme situations, the 14-inch will thermally
⏹️ ▶️ John throttle by a tiny amount and the 16-inch simply won’t. So it makes me wonder, because high power
⏹️ ▶️ John mode is only on the 16-inch, right? Correct. It makes me wonder what the point of high power mode is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can’t even get the 16 inch to throttle no matter what you throw at it. Like, oh, I’ll run the fans
⏹️ ▶️ John faster? Why bother running the fans faster? Apparently running the fans normally
⏹️ ▶️ John has no thermal throttling. So I don’t know, maybe there are some workloads that people haven’t found yet. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the 16 inch does have a bigger, better cooler system, but it probably shouldn’t matter to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wouldn’t it be kind of funny if high power mode is literally just like the door close button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on elevators? It’s just there to please the YouTubers.
⏹️ ▶️ John They very well could be. You can see the, well no, it actually does make the fans spin faster. People are doing all the little things
⏹️ ▶️ John that show you the actual fan RPM, and when you put on high power mode, the fans preemptively run a little bit faster, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the idle higher, essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, sure, but maybe it doesn’t actually need to be that way for anything that anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might actually do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it may be that people just haven’t found the right workload, because people are just
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to find, what can I do that stresses everything? There are artificial ones that just,
⏹️ ▶️ John do a bunch of math on all of the units to try to make the thing melt. And I bet maybe one of those would make it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John know, stressing the GPU as well would make it get hot. But yeah, this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What happens if you run Slack and Dropbox at the same time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nothing can Marco, nothing can.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the thing though, like all like, oh, I’m doing, you know, if you do anything you think would normally cause your
⏹️ ▶️ John fans to spin up on an Intel laptop, it’s not going to on these, because all of those things that we talk about,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t touch the GPU at all. It’s just something grinding your CPU. It’s grinding the CPU in these computers
⏹️ ▶️ John is not going to make them break a sweat. Most of the chip is covered with the GPU area and they’re so low power and the cooling
Sponsor: RevenueCat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by revenue cat revenue cat
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco customer analytics, data integrations, all this giving you time back from dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only the initial API’s, but also all the edge cases that you got to consider. And as things get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updated across all these platforms, revenue cat handles all of that for you. It’s created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by developers for developers and frankly it shows. I’ve heard from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of friends and other developers who use RevenueCat and everyone is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco satisfied with it because I know how crappy it is to write in that purchase code. I’ve written tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, especially when you get, you know, a little more edge case stuff like subscriptions which are now becoming more mainstream.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is hard stuff to write yourself. It’s hard to cover all the edge cases. It’s a pain in the butt to handle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like the server-side side validation and all this stuff. It’s just complex and it’s stuff that you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the author of an app, shouldn’t usually need to worry about. So Revenue Cat makes so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense to help them take care of your payment system so that you can focus on your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and the thing that you actually wanna do. I’ve never met a developer, myself included, who enjoys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco writing or testing in-app purchase code. And so leave it to Revenue Cat, it is fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thousands of the world’s best apps use Revenue Cat to power their in-app purchases
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iPhone-case mega-review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am really excited to hear your iPhone 13 Pro case review and there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are like 34 different bullets in this document. So why don’t you run it through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run through all of them with us, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So after great lengths and actually spending a good amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of time with each of these cases, I got a bunch of different iPhone 13 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases, some of which have MagSafe, some of which and I finally have opinions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I wanted to share them before this phone got too old, and it didn’t matter anymore. Where we last left off was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe I had the Nudiant case that Casey, you also have. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, which is like, it’s like a kind of, you know, nice middle of the road, you know, it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MagSafe in it, like it has its own magnets. It’s kind of medium thickness,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medium grip, kind of medium everything, medium attractiveness. Like it’s just kind of medium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. It’s fine. It’s not amazing in any possible way, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally fine. One area that I was not happy with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Nudiant case though, is the first time I took it into my car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the MagSafe magnet on it, it was not strong enough. I use a MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car mount and it easily and repeatedly would fall off the mount if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco applied a little bit of pressure to the bottom half of the screen, where it would lever itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the mount, and the bottom of the screen often contains controls in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps like Waze that you might be using in the car. So that was kind of a big problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I decided, let me look at more cases, and I wasn’t super happy with the Nudian’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appearance either. You know, it doesn’t look that good. It’s fine, it’s a piece of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blue matte plastic. But it did feel pretty good, so I thought, you know, this is good, but let me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see if I can do better. I also, I did try using the Apple silicone case a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit more. I gave up on it. It’s too much friction going in and out of pockets. I thought it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be different this time for some reason. I don’t know, maybe I’m just, you know, hoping for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that will never come. But I think just materially, that’s never going to be good. It’s never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have a lot of friction going in and out of pockets with that material. So whatever, you know, a lot of people use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silicone case and enjoy it. More power to you, it’s not for me, for my needs. I would also say that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Silicon case, I got that blue jay color, thinking it would look kinda cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It actually kinda looks flat and cheap. I think one thing I have learned in this process,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these inexpensive materials that are used in cases, you’re best off with darker colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kinda like John’s theory of bad car body design, or like cheap paint or whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, light colors kind of show how low value
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s the shape. My theory for cars is the lighter the color, the more you’re able to actually see the shape of the
⏹️ ▶️ John car. Whereas you have a car in all black, it hides some of the curves, which may be undesirable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing with clothes. If you’re trying to, you know, accentuate curves, bright colors, if you want to hide them dark.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should buy more dark clothes then. So I learned kind of like the lighter colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going for didn’t often look good in these cases. and I’ll get to a little bit more of that in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco After the Apple Silicone case and the Nudient, I was kind of like, eh, let me see what I can do. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asked people on Twitter and people on the show wrote in, and I got a number of recommendations. There were a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I could not test, because they either aren’t in stock yet, or I ordered them and haven’t arrived
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. One of those is the Bullstrap leather case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m actually not entirely sure I want leather anymore, but I did actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pre-order one of these things forever ago. It still hasn’t shipped. It was estimated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, quote November, so it could show up any time. And then I also, many people recommended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Pitaka MagEase case series. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not available for the iPhone 13 Pro yet in the blue color,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the color I would want. The rest of them are kinda, it kinda looks like carbon fiber-y. It’s not like a super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attractive look, if I’m honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I didn’t test either of those, even though they both came with a lot of recommendations. So anyway, moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on to what I did test. Everyone suggested that I try Peel. Peel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a apparently famous brand of ultra thin cases. I decided,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I went to the super thin Peel iPhone 13 Pro case and I decided to, they had a color that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was advertised as jet white. It says it has a glossy finish, closely resembling the jet black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone finish, but in white. And I thought, well, that’s interesting. I loved the jet black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone, and I wanted to see, like, does this actually feel that way? So, sure enough-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey white just happened to you, did it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just so happened to be white. Isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey something? That can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen. That’s something that does happen from time to time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, isn’t that something? So, first of all, I have to, before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case even arrived, I had gotten a mailing list email from Peale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entitled, quote, let’s talk about lifestyle. That was apparently the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a planned series of emails about minimalism. And I felt like that was overreaching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the nature of our relationship as, I just ordered your $35 iPhone case, that’s it. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t even arrived yet. I don’t want your emails about your minimalism theories. Like that’s fine, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really don’t need that, thank you. So, oh, and thanks also for opting me into your email list without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a checkbox I could see. That’s real cool, Peel. And then when the Peel case arrived,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it arrived in a box the size of a shoe box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with tons of packaging material. Like, it was so, I’m like, okay, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far as I can tell, Peel is a mostly, maybe a marketing company,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because one thing I also tried from people’s recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the Total E with two E’s, Total, two L’s, two E’s, Total E matte case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, I’m sorry, what color was the matte case?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was also, sorry, pearl white is the color I got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just keeps happening to you, Marco, isn’t that weird?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had the theory that maybe a white case would look good. You know, I’m living my beach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lifestyle, I got a lot of light colors here, you know, like white, blue, like, you know, a lot of like light colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going on in my current life right now. So I thought maybe that would be cool. So I got the Totally case, it came with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way less packaging and I was not subject to any minimalism emails and I had to put a post-it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco note on the Peel and the Totally just so I could tell them apart, just so I could tell which one was which rather,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because these things are identical. I would be shocked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if these were not the same case. This is the same case made in the same factory, I guarantee it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no way that it’s two different cases. So anyway, Totally appears to just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same, Whatever factory they’re using, it’s the same. And they even have the same color options and everything. So as far as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can tell, this is the same thing. So if one of them appeals to you more than the other one, go for it. The prices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are around the same. It doesn’t, you know, who knows? So anyway, Peel and Totally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of these white cases feel okay. They’re very thin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as promised. They look like garbage. If you’re gonna get one of these cases, get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dark colored one because it’s just a thin piece of plastic. It looks like I wrapped my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in heat shrink tubing and ran a blow dryer over it. Like that’s, it’s not a great look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it feels okay, but it’s like, I can do a lot better than this. Now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also ordered from Totally, their transparent soft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear, so it’s a soft clear, I don’t know, yeah, clear soft is what they call it in their options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, Peel now also offers that exact same configuration. What a coincidence. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the clear, the soft clear Totally case, I absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love. I never thought I would. So the downside to the soft clear Totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case is that it does not have a MagSafe circle. Neither do the UltraThin, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So none of these have MagSafe, and it’s a little bit thicker than the UltraThin one, but it has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like a gummy case. You know, if you’ve, there’s people who’ve been making phone cases out of this for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. I don’t know, I think it might be like a thick, soft TPU or something. I don’t know what this material
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is officially called, but if you’ve ever felt like a rugged case, like in an Apple store,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like from whatever brand sells like the little ruggedized ones, it has that feel to it. So it’s actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels kind of like a, like a non-sticky gummy candy, if that makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the result is, first of all, it looks amazing because I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my little like, you know, baby blue iPhone Pro in there, and you get to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the iPhone through it. Now you don’t really see the side bands very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like just the design of the material is such that you don’t see much of the detail through the sides.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you do see the back color totally fine. And it looks fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it feels the best. This is by far the nicest feeling case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have. Again, the only downside here is no mag safe, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also recognize that putting a MagSafe circle of magnets in the back would also kind of make it uglier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I understand, just like the Apple case, right? So I understand why they didn’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the Apple case, the Apple clear case, I mean, if it was squishy plastic like this, instead of the hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plastic that it is, that would be perfect. And I would get that every single time now, because I love the way this looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I love the way it feels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very surprised by this. So it’s the totally iPhone 13 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transparent, clear, soft. Like, that’s not necessarily the name, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just want to make sure I’ve got all of these right. Correct. And so, how soft is the soft? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s clear plastic, I’m having troubles computing how this can be soft.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look at the picture. They show someone bending it. Like, one of the pictures shows it bending, to give you an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John okay. Yeah. What do you
⏹️ ▶️ John call it? OtterBox makes cases of this type, too. My daughter’s phone has a case like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, OtterBox. There was that one brand, I forget what it was, but it had that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strip of yellow around the outside band for like a they had a case band for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like an impact strip or whatever they told him in apple stores adam had a an ipad case like that a while ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels just like that like you if you’ve you’ve probably felt this material before in an iphone case or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an ipad case like it’s not this is not a new revelation this is a common material i just don’t know what it’s called but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is it is awesome and i love how how it feels. I do worry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit that because it’s so flexible, you could easily just scoot it over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away from the case with your finger, like around the edges, and I worry that maybe a lot of dust might get in the edges that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John What you should be worried about is moisture, because I’ve seen this happen again with my daughter’s phone. If you get kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like a water stain or like water trap between, condensation trap between the case and the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah. It can happen. I mean, you can either just live with it or you can take the case off and scrub
⏹️ ▶️ John it out and try to be more careful. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, wouldn’t that be a problem with any case? And wouldn’t a clear case actually alert you to the problem earlier so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John could fix it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but you wouldn’t see it with a real case. Like it makes it uglier. It’s an aesthetic issue, not a water danger issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just looks like, you know, especially if it’s just clear. Like my daughter’s is made of this material, but it also has
⏹️ ▶️ John like designs painted on it, but it’s mostly clear. But if it was just entirely,
⏹️ ▶️ John it also depends on what color the phone is. It’s an aesthetic issue. It doesn’t bother you. I bet people get this and never care that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s like a weird, you know, area that’s darker or lighter because of some condensation
⏹️ ▶️ John that was there once or whatever. But you know, you can always take it off and clean it, but just that can’t happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I didn’t know that. Okay, thanks. Yeah, so I spent most of the time in the intervening,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, time between when we last talked about this and now I’ve spent most of that time with this case on, because it’s the one I’m happiest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with overall with the exception of no MagSafe. And that’s a big exception, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels so good and looks pretty good otherwise, I was willing to make that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exception when I wasn’t driving. But that being said, when I switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to this case in a minute, after I review the other one I have here in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta figure out, I think I might just have to keep a different case that has MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my backpack that I bring when I go on car trips, so that I can swap cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m in the car. I mean, I’m not driving every day, I’m driving every three weeks, so it’s not that big of a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so that’s the totally clear soft case. love it but no magsafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then finally a few people recommended the I don’t have pronounced Caudabe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Caudabe? I don’t know it’s C-A-U-D-A-B-E. Oh and I should mention to the peel and totally have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no branding whatsoever which is great the Caudabe has a small logo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this the Caudabe case is not attractive it has like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a almost like a pebbled or textured plastic finish it kind of looks and feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a popcorn ceiling. It’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my. And it’s moderately, it’s like medium thickness. It’s not an ultra thin case. It almost feels like coarse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sandpaper. But what’s nice about it is that the overall grippiness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tackiness of it is actually fairly similar to leather, I would say. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having used leather phone cases for many years, I think this is very close to leather without being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leather, which has some benefits, you know, and things like water resistance and, you know, humanitarian, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues and environmental issues. So this is, this is pretty nice functionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it has very strong MagSafe magnets. So I love it for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just is kind of boring and ugly looking if I’m honest. And it’s not, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel nice. It just feels functional and it’s highly functional. And after like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, I’ve had it on for about a week and after about a day, I stopped caring about how nice it wasn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it does work really well, but it’s not like, it doesn’t give me the nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feelings that the clear one did. The clear one both looks and feels better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t have MagSafe. And this has like the strongest MagSafe of anything I’ve tested. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall, the Caudet Ricotta Bay sheath case, I like it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t love it. This might be the one that I put in my backpack for car trips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it has such good MagSafe. But I think I’m gonna switch back to the totally clear case for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time case. That being said, a few people recommended an option that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hadn’t considered, that I didn’t even know existed, and once I heard about it, it made perfect sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A sack, you put the phone in a sack anytime you’re not using it. A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pouch, I believe. No, it’s bumpers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John bumper cases, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, so an option I didn’t even realize existed. For very cheap amounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money, you can go on Amazon or eBay and buy MagSafe rings of magnets that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick onto anything. Oh my goodness. And so I got a couple of them here, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure enough, they work totally fine. And you can therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically, you could convert a non-MagSafe case into a MagSafe case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re putting them on the outside of the case, to be clear, right? Well, you could do either. Now, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem. I put them on the inside of the case. You can either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick them on the outside, which would work great in the sense that it would stick really well for MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then you have a ring of magnets stuck to your case that you have to feel all the time and look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all the time. And I don’t want to feel or look at a ring of MagSafe magnets on the outside of my case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you put it on the inside of the case, now I feel like you’ve created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a glass breaking risk on that back glass because you’re introducing by putting something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moderately thick between the case and the phone, which are made to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no tolerance between them,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You made a place to catch all the excess moisture and now crumbs and the edges of the
⏹️ ▶️ John magnets can scratch the back of your phone and you’re distending the case, which is gonna make it fit less well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah. So I tried it on the inside for like five minutes and I’m like, no, I can’t do this. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John So. It’s like having like a seed stuck between your teeth constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I couldn’t abide that. So for now, I couldn’t find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a use for the two little magnet sheets I bought on Amazon, but it is a cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option to know you can do that. And at some point, maybe this might be useful for a project, like if I wanted to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a place to stick an iPhone with MagSafe somewhere, like that could be useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t try bumper cases?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t try bumper cases, no. My assumption is that it would increase the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pocket friction in and out problem because it would have to be fairly thick to even stay on and work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But maybe, I haven’t tried a modern bumper. Maybe I could be wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think the pocket friction would definitely be a thing. You’re probably right. But it’d be interesting to
⏹️ ▶️ John try one, just see what it’s like. I mean, the obvious downside is you’re still gonna screw up the back of your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’ll scratch it up or whatever, but hopefully you won’t break it because the bumpers usually do stick out pretty far
⏹️ ▶️ John from the front and the back. And I think it will also make your phone feel bigger than one of these cases, just
⏹️ ▶️ John because, again, the bumper to do its job, its whole point is to stick out beyond the back and beyond the front
⏹️ ▶️ John by enough to catch your phone and absorb the impact. And I think that’ll make your phone feel thicker, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I still have fond memories of the iPhone 4, 4S, whatever it was, bumper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I should also clarify, buttons-wise, both the KataBay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case and the squishy clear case, both have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco covered buttons, and both of them cover them with nice plastic buttons. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not metal, it’s the same material as the case, it seems, but they’re nice. They’re nicely covered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only the mute switch is uncovered on both, and otherwise covered. Also, all of these have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco covered bottoms. So, sorry, John. I know you like your naked bottoms.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, no, I don’t have an iPhone 13 anyways, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care, but yeah, they’re all covered bottoms, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no good. Yeah, so very happy with the Kotabe and the clear squishy totally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for two very different reasons. Kotabe works really well, has the best MagSafe I’ve found,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but is kind of ugly and not very nice feeling. The TPU, you know, squishy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally clear case, is awesome and looks and feels great, but has no MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s it. Those are the two I’m gonna stick with, I think for the time being.
Sponsor: Lutron Caséta
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco act smart. And there’s all sorts of ways why this is great. You know, smart bulbs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not really compatible with non-nerds in my experience. Like, you know, if kids
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or other family members or spouses or visitors flip the switch off to that light,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of a sudden you can’t control it anymore. Or if there is no switch or you’ve kind of taped over it or blocked it off, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how to turn the light on. Caseta switches solve this problem. The switch itself is smart, but to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone else, it’s just a light switch on the wall. So you can control it through all of your smart stuff, whatever you want
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a button on the wall and they can just push it and it just works every single time. Of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they support everything you might need, voice assistance, apps, automations and everything. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a smart away feature that can randomly turn lights on and off during the evening to make it look like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home, even if you’re not. You can base scenes on things like sunset time, so that’s what we have. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have our lights turn on a certain amount of time before or after sunset, because that’s when you actually need some of the outdoor
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to Caseta for turning all my lights on and off in a very smart way and for sponsoring our show.
Next-gen MBP hopes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I think you in particular wanted to talk about, hey, you know, let’s assume for a second that these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pros were not perfect because man, they sure seem like they are. What could you do to make them better, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because we’ve just done a couple of shows a couple of weeks talking about how these laptops have fulfilled all
⏹️ ▶️ John our wildest dreams and everything we wanted came true on them and they, you know, they’re great. And
⏹️ ▶️ John all of that is true. But people may be thinking, well, now that they’ve perfected the laptops, you’ll never
⏹️ ▶️ John have to talk about them again because the laptop problem is solved. But of course, nothing is so perfect. These laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco when they’re released,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very clear that there are things about them that could be upgraded. But this is good. The things I’m going to list
⏹️ ▶️ John off here, and it’s not a lot of them, are going to be the things that you would expect of any technology
⏹️ ▶️ John product. When a technology product comes out, even if it is as perfect as it can be, which these laptops are
⏹️ ▶️ John not necessarily, but they’re really good, but not as perfect as they can be, technology marches on.
⏹️ ▶️ John And eventually there are better things you can put in them. And so rather than the past many years, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John had gnashing our teeth about the fundamental design of these products in terms of what features
⏹️ ▶️ John does the product have? What shape is it? What holes does it have on the side like really basic stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John We have the luxury now of talking about computers the way we used to be able to talk about them with is, let’s talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about the actual technology in them and see if there is an ever so slightly better technology that they can replace it with. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at these MacBook Pros and say, hey, in next year’s model or the year after or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John in what ways could these be improved? Here are the list of obvious improvements, some of which we have touched upon before.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve got an SD card slot now, that SD card slot does not support all of the latest
⏹️ ▶️ John SD card standards. Not a big deal, because most people don’t have the high end ones. In fact, some of these standards
⏹️ ▶️ John are so new that you can’t even find cards that support them yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the one in the MacBook Pros is like, it supports UHS-II speeds, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ John UHS-III is out, SD Express is out. The other thing to consider for
⏹️ ▶️ John the SD card slot is some, like Sony cameras have a slot, have
⏹️ ▶️ John two slots in some of them, that takes either an SD card or a CFexpress
⏹️ ▶️ John Type-A card. CFexpress Type-A is a little bit obscure. I think only Sony cameras use it, but the point is you can
⏹️ ▶️ John actually have one slot that takes both SD cards and ZF Express. Any one of these updates, either
⏹️ ▶️ John just make the SD card fast slot faster by supporting SD Express or UHS-III, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or make it a combo slot that supports both. That’s an easy upgrade. You’ve already got the slot, it’s there,
⏹️ ▶️ John make it faster and better. And the speed differences are big, like the UHS-II
⏹️ ▶️ John is 156 megabytes per second, UHS-III is 312 megabytes per second. That’s full duplex, so double those if you use all the bandwidth in one direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John CF Express goes from like a one gigabyte per second up to four gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John per second. So there’s lots of headroom to make that SD slot better. So that’s good, let’s upgrade that.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the same vein, HDMI, we’re complaining that it’s not HDMI 2.1. What’s an obvious upgrade? Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the next round of these with the M2 Max and M2 Pro or whatever, make the HDMI support,
⏹️ ▶️ John the HDMI port support HDMI 2.1, 120 Hertz, 4K, HDR,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the good stuff. put in a better chip that converts from DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Again, we’re not saying you need to fundamentally change anything, it’s just you’ve got an HDMI port, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John make that HDMI port fit better. One more easy one. Camera. Hey, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a 1080p camera, that’s great, but, you know, Logitech sells 4K
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras, maybe it’s hard to fit one of those in the tiny skinny screen lid, I understand that. If you can’t fit in a
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K camera, then maybe you find a way to get a wide angle camera so you can support center stage.
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera can be better. We should continue to ask for the camera to improve. We should not be stuck
⏹️ ▶️ John with another decade of that same cruddy camera in there, even though, yes, I know they just updated it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The screen, now we start to get into sort of optional extra stuff. The screen, it’s great, everyone loves the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a time when the MacBook Pro offered you an option for a glossy or matte screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The iMac’s still right. You can get
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac with a nanotexture screen, right? The big one. Yep, and of course the XDR
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a ridiculously expensive nanotexture screen. Whether it’s nanotexture or just plain old matte, for professionals,
⏹️ ▶️ John some people might prefer a matte screen. That would be a cool option to have. That’s something we can roll out in the next
⏹️ ▶️ John generation if there is any demand for it. Or even just improving the anti-glare coating that’s on the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John something in that vein, right? Cellular, we didn’t get to this year, we still seem
⏹️ ▶️ John to think it’s possible. You know, iPads have it, they’re very similar on the inside now. It would be cool to
⏹️ ▶️ John have cellular. Hell yeah. Yeah. Ethernet on the power brick. There’s no room on the other side
⏹️ ▶️ John of these machines because they’re too skinny. You can get an adapter or dongle to do it. MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t seem like it has a way to convey ethernet to the power brick. So maybe this would have to be a USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you couldn’t use MagSafe if you wanted ethernet on the power brick. Maybe you could do an optional. Hey, this is like, I think the first
⏹️ ▶️ John year that Apple’s gave us an option to choose power bricks. So maybe one of the options could be forgo MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ John in exchange for a USB-C power brick, but you know, or a power brick with ethernet on it, with USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John on both ends that is essentially a Thunderbolt cable of some kind. That would probably be weird and expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that would be an interesting potential option. And the final one, and we’re really reaching to the bottom of the barrel here, is
⏹️ ▶️ John for like, what, is there anything people don’t like about this machine physically speaking? Some people still think the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John is too big. I know that seems weird. Isn’t a bigger trackpad better? It’s nicer to sort of swipe around?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s about accidental input. A lot of people will find it difficult to use this laptop without accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John touching the trackpad. And yes, Mac OS has sort of accidental input rejection, but those features
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes are a little bit unreliable and can be more annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John than useful. And, but if you turn them off, you have to deal with your own accidental input. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not, I mean, have they struck the right balance between comfortable, useful trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John size and avoiding accidental input? They may think about adjusting that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just excited to be here to list off this thing, this list of obvious improvements and
⏹️ ▶️ John have them be just like technological improvements. Oh, and you know, I could add things like Thunderbolt 5, which probably won’t be out in time for
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but like, but yeah, like we feel like you’ve got the, you’ve got it right. Like, you know, you’ve got the design
⏹️ ▶️ John of this product right. It’s like, you know, a car, it’s got an engine, it’s got wheels, next year just make the engine faster and get better fuel
⏹️ ▶️ John economy and make the body nicer looking, make the seats more comfortable, like all the normal stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John we expect to happen year over year. And these machines, despite us being, you know, like a
⏹️ ▶️ John glass of ice water in hell for us, right? despite them being, oh, thank God, they finally fixed everything about the computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Almost every single thing they put in them, because these computers were designed years ago and technology markets on, could
⏹️ ▶️ John be upgraded. And I basically listed them in the order of, I think, their usefulness,
⏹️ ▶️ John and getting down to trackpad shrink and matte screens or whatever, but yeah, to upgrade all the ports. If
⏹️ ▶️ John make Thunderbolt faster when you can, make the SD card slot better because it’s already kind of slow, make HDMI better,
⏹️ ▶️ John make a better camera, all that good stuff. And so we are on the other side
⏹️ ▶️ John of the valley of doubt, whatever we were calling it before, the valley of doom for these laptops. And now we can just
⏹️ ▶️ John start asking for them to be better in plain old boring technical ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is a great place to be. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yeah. I’m not complaining.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember back at, I mean, this show existed for a few years before the terrible 2016
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops came out. There was a time when we were just kind of like, oh, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This thing hasn’t updated in a while. Whenever you update it next, hey, wouldn’t it be great to have this XYZ?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a wonderful place to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, couldn’t agree more.
Big-iMac SOC?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so in this kind of similar vein to what we were just talking about, but a corollary of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we were to make new iMacs today, let’s just concentrate on the CPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What system on a chip would you put in an iMac these days, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s been a lot of discussion about that. And I just want to reiterate a point that we’ve made in the past, because it seems like people are
⏹️ ▶️ John getting stars in their eyes with all the rumors of the Jade 2C and 4C die
⏹️ ▶️ John of of like, you know, basically taking multiples of the M1 Macs and
⏹️ ▶️ John just putting two or four of them inside the thing. Like, that’ll be great for an iMac. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John want people to sort of come back to earth a little bit by just reminding everyone that the exact
⏹️ ▶️ John same chips that they put in these laptops, the M1 Pro and the M1 Macs, are perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John fine for a big iMac. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be a bigger, battered chip, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying if you get, if they sell, you know, an iMac with a big screen on it, right? With a big,
⏹️ ▶️ John really nice HD, like take the 16 inch laptop screen and blow it up to 27 or 30 inches, like that
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of quality screen. And then just literally take the insides of the laptops and put them in an even better
⏹️ ▶️ John cooling solution than an iMac. There’s nothing wrong with that computer. These are the appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John chips for an iMac. Because remember, the iMac doesn’t have to be the pro computer, whether they call it iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John or not or whatever, it doesn’t have to be a pro. And I wouldn’t, I think the iMac with a big screen
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a worse product if you couldn’t get these laptop chips in it. Because the M1 Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 Max are great chips for, yes, a desktop computer, because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John that good, right? Yes, if you can get a J2C die in there and have it be like
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac Pro that has twice as many cores. Great, you can do that too, depending on how big you wanna make the iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re trying to make it as skinny as a 24 inch, you might be a little constrained. But I just want everyone to
⏹️ ▶️ John stop thinking that the new iMac, the new big iMac is going to come
⏹️ ▶️ John out and it’s not going to share chips with these laptops. It has to, it will, it must, unless it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be out like two years from now. Cause these chips are perfect for an iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John for a slim, quiet, all-in-one, you know, desk, yes, desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. It doesn’t have to be as thin as the 24 inch, it can be thicker than that, hell, it can be as thick as the 16 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop it wants, but the M1 Macs, thumbs up for that in an iMac. And also thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ John up obviously for doubling that or quadrupling it or whatever. You wanna do the big honking chip in the iMac, I’m all for it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I love it, it’s great. But if you don’t, that’s fine too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because if you look at historically, if you rule out the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pro for a minute, the large iMac for years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before that and after that always had roughly the performance envelope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the 15 inch MacBook Pro. it usually had like similarly classed chips, but the desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of those chips, but you had generally similar core counts, similar performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iMac could go a little bit higher with everything because it had more power and more heat,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermal transfer capacity, but for the most part, the iMac and the 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro were usually like very closely performing. They were in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same performance class.
⏹️ ▶️ John In CPU, the iMacs tended to have way better GPUs just because they had more cooling capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, right. But, so I think for the large iMac, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still, you know, that’s still an unanswered question on how that’s going to move to Apple Silicon, but for the large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac, I think it is almost certain that it will have these exact chips in it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only question mark is why we haven’t seen it released yet, and that might be as simple as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they sell way more laptops, and maybe they wanted, maybe they didn’t have enough M1 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Mac’s chip capacity to release both of those products at once, so maybe the iMac will come in the spring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like that. Or maybe there’s some other thing they’re waiting on for the iMac or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I’m with you. I don’t expect the Jade 2C and 4C kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t expect that for the iMac, and I don’t expect there to be something like the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro in the past, in the sense that it was the Mac Pro’s processors in an iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If we get that as an option, that’s great. And I’m not gonna complain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we get that, but I’m also, I wouldn’t hold my breath for that. Because I think what we’re seeing here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really quite elegant. We have a large slice of Apple’s product line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the M1. We have now a moderately sized slice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the product line using the larger version of that, the M1 Pro slash Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in the future down the road, we will most likely see the Mac Pro offering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big multi-die version of that, however they choose to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that’s the only computer we’re going to see that in. I think it’s only going to be the Mac Pro where we get that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big, because I think that’s going to be a very expensive processor for them to make. However they do it, whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one giant die or whether it’s chiplets or whatever, stuff we don’t really know that much about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however they do it, it’s going to be big and expensive. So putting that in a Mac Pro makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco total sense putting it in a like two thousand ish dollar 27 or 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch iMac makes a lot less Financial sense
⏹️ ▶️ John if they have a product called iMac Pro I can see j2c die in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I think first of all it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Apple silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition of the large iMac is called iMac Pro Even if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t have the Mac Pro chips in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean these chips are using Pro So, you know, MacBook has pro at the end of it as well in these chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so that’s why I think we’re moving towards a future, actually probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty near future, where the MacBook Pro and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large iMac, which might be called the iMac Pro, will use the same chip. And then the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller MacBook and the smaller iMac will use the same chip, which by the way, iPads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the high-end iPads also use that chip. And then the phone and the low-end iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the A series of chips. And then the watch and the HomePods use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S series of chips. These are all scaled up and scaled down versions of very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic building blocks of the basic core designs. And that allows them to spread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out the R&D costs massively, that they’re doing all this R&D anyway for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone processor, and they get to spread it across their entire product line. That’s an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale thing they’re doing and it’s very clever and it’s resulting in really great output. But I think what this ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will lead to for us customers is fewer choices of how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different processors are gonna be in the products. So I don’t expect there to be a lot of variation here. Frankly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only reason I think we have variation now with the M1 Pro and Max and the different core counts and everything, I think it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco binning issue. And as the manufacturing process of these gets better, some of those options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might go away. like some of the low end options might just disappear.
⏹️ ▶️ John And depending on what choices they make for the industrial design of the big iMac, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is possible that they could clock them higher and heat them up more because you can put a hell of a lot more cooling
⏹️ ▶️ John in a behind like 27 inch or 30 inch screen, if you choose to. If they go super duper thin,
⏹️ ▶️ John then it’ll probably just be clocked like the lap, like the laptops are or whatever. But, you
⏹️ ▶️ John as that events from the 16 inch having a little bit more headroom than the 14 inch one under a super duper load, that’s how,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you might think, Why would anyone buy an iMac? It’s not differentiating itself. It’s a desktop computer, but the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John are just as fast. The iMac can be faster if Apple chooses to make it. You know, just clock it higher,
⏹️ ▶️ John burn off more heat, put bigger fans, like there’s plenty of room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a good point. And historically, you know, when the iMac has been faster than the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, usually it’s faster, you know, excluding GPU stuff, usually it’s faster by,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, not a massive percentage, maybe 10% or something like, you know, not usually a very, very big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal. And so they could get that kind of gain by just minor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clock and cooling changes if they wanted to, but still using the same chip. So that wouldn’t surprise me if they do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you look at the M1 iMac, I think performs exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same as all the other M1 Macs, right? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is it like slightly faster? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thinner than all the others. I know, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely, that computer is extremely thin. I really hope the big iMac, they don’t try to go for that thinness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s honestly, I’m really curious how they’re going to do that, because I’m sure they are tempted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they have the ability now. If you look at the MacBook Pros, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty damn thin and you could make an iMac Pro that thickness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have all the same guts. Keep in mind, all the previous,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the Intel iMac cases were designed to accommodate spinning hard drives and 3.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch spinning hard drives at that, big ones. So that’s why they have that giant hump in the back and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had larger cooling needs most of the time. When the iMac Pro came out, the iMac Pro never supported a spinning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drive, but they replaced that, they kind of used that interior volume they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put this massive cooling system in so they could put Xeons in there. With
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever they do with the Apple Silicon ones, they won’t need to do that anymore. They have both no spinning drives. By
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, the 21-inch iMac that had the spinning drive and was non-retina was finally discontinued, like last week. Yay!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We finally, Apple stopped selling spinning hard drives like last week. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then on retina screen, I believe that also had. So we finally finished the retina transition nine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years into it. My goodness. Oh no, more than that. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco count retina starting with the iPhone 4 instead of the 15 inch MacBook Pro, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco began in 2010. So anyway, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retina transition on Macs took nine years to complete. Anyway, so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they can, physically they can go ultra thin on the iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the large iMac slash iMac Pro as well if they wanted to. And the only question would become like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where do they put ports and stuff like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John What do they
⏹️ ▶️ John put the SD card slot?
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna be a test of like, what lessons have they learned? Like they had many years of complaining about the laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have people, you know, they haven’t removed, I mean, they removed it from the little iMac, but like, ah, it’s a little iMac and it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John thin you can’t even fit a USB-A port on the back of it and you can’t put a headphone, you know, like we understand
⏹️ ▶️ John that product. It’s the consumer product, it’s thin for, mostly for fashion reasons, we excuse it, we
⏹️ ▶️ John allow it. But if they replace all of the big iMacs with iMacs that are as thin as
⏹️ ▶️ John that small one and you can’t put a headphone jack on the back and you can’t put USB-A and you can’t fit SD, and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John then why did you make a big one, right? So I do hope they don’t go quite that thin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I hope you’re right because the large iMac served me well for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so long and it served so many people well for so long because it just was an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco balance of like pro quality performance like pro performance levels even before the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pro itself like really pro performance levels for many definitions of pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and ridiculous capacity for you know for performance and cooling and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these ports and it was it was just a fantastic line of computers and I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When they I hope the next version of the large iMac doesn’t reduce the utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it At the expense of coolness that being said The small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac when it came out Really did make a splash like as we mentioned when it came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People were talking about the design of a desktop in in 2021, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never happens. No one cares about desktops anymore except pros and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerds, basically. But most people, the vast majority of people, would never consider buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a desktop. And that computer slightly bent that curve. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect it to be a permanent thing, but now, for the first time in a long time, people go into an Apple store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they see a really cool-ass looking desktop and they think for a split second, oh my god, I have to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. That’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think most of the energy is going to be redirected towards the redesigned MacBook Air next spring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that same energy of, whoa, color exists and it can be fun again. Like, I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to mostly go to the MacBook Air and that’s gonna sell like hotcakes if they do that to the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air. That’s gonna be incredible and I hope they do that as the rumors indicate because that’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ridiculously fun computer that people will just devour. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, anyway, they did succeed in making this desktop something cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and noteworthy for the first time in a long time, in an era where nobody thought that was possible. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they do something similar to the iMac Pro, I wouldn’t necessarily blame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them for it. Even though I’m with you, John, I think they should prioritize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco utility on that machine first, rather than, you know, thinness and appearance. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the direction of the new MacBook Pros suggests that they’re willing to do that, because that’s what they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on them. The new MacBook Pros are not more attractive than the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. I think they’re differently attractive, but they’re not more attractive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are way more useful and way better suited to the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs of the actual people who buy them. And so maybe they’ll make that same trade-off with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big iMac. Maybe the small iMac is fine to be the like, you know, kind of minimal functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that prioritizes looks and coolness, and maybe they’ll let the big one be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco utilitarian one for professionals. So if they do that, I think that would be a good balance overall.
⏹️ ▶️ John If the iMac product designers are listening and you really, really want to make a super thin, big
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac, you know how you can do that real easy and no one will yell at you inside or outside the company?
⏹️ ▶️ John Say it, we all know the answer. Like how do they, I’m not gonna say it myself, you too. How does Apple do that? How does
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple say, we really wanna make a thin, big iMac and we don’t want people to be mad at us. What’s the solution?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they put the guts of it inside a half basketball-shaped thing and put that somewhere else on the desk and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John this thin panel.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no. Casey, you’ve got your chance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea. Call it something that’s not an iMac? We
⏹️ ▶️ John all know the answer.
Wishing for a monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John Do we just make a good external monitor?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because then you don’t have any excuse. You got the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John for the big people, right? And the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco big people, your
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is like, well, what if I don’t want a Mac Pro? You’re telling me I have to get a Mac Pro if I want a utilitarian big desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John computer? No, you’ve got the Mac Mini, you’ve got these other things, just make a big Apple monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John It solves so many problems for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you because then
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly everybody has more options in case he’s not hemming and hawing about buying a used LG ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John fine monitor. Oh God, like, and then you can make a pro version of the Mac mini, like, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole world opens up because I feel like the Mac Pro allows the iMac to not have to bear
⏹️ ▶️ John that burden anymore of being the big monster machine. Great, right? But if you really, really want to make it super
⏹️ ▶️ John thin because you think iMac is all about super thin, fine, go ahead, all we need is an external
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor from Apple that connects to all the other computers that Apple makes. And then we can build our systems the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you’re so right. It’s funny, I had lunch outside with a coworker of mine at my most recent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jobby job. And he was basically the IT director, still is. And we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about, because this was before I had figured out what I was gonna do with my monitor situation, because this all happened really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quickly. And we were talking about what the monitor situation is for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro today. And this is relevant because when I first went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey digging to try to find a monitor, a retina external monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three, four years ago, this was like 2017, like four years ago, it was with my friend Rory,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the two of us were trying to figure out what monitor should I get? And that’s how I ended up on that LG 4K I talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently, which is not the LG UltraFine 4K, just a straight up LG 4K panel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s what I had used at work because it was the best like bang for the buck to get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retina screen. And it was so frustrating over the last week, looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the monitor situation today in 2021 and realizing it’s actually a hair worse than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was in 2017 because there was a Dell 5k that was supposed to be very good and not exceedingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive that has no longer been made for the last like two or three years. So my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John choices in 2021 are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse than they were in 2017. It’s preposterous. So yes, Apple, please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make a less than $6,000 external monitor pretty please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does feel like Apple is in settling old business mode. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think we will get this monitor. I do too. But the only little drips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and drabs of rumors that we heard about it suggested that they might have only started to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it like this spring or last year. So, and that kind of thing tends to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a multi-year timeline, maybe like a two or three year timeline. So I think the earliest we would get it might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next WBDC. Which wouldn’t be that bad. I mean, if it’s next June or whatever, that’s not that bad, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t expect to see it sooner. If we do, that’d be great, but yeah, I wouldn’t get my hopes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up too much on that. But yeah, that would be wonderful because we’ve made such an incredible leap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Apple Silicon chips in terms of what kind of performance you can get out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of laptops. Right now, I have this incredible workstation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sitting next to me and I don’t hear a thing and it’s a laptop. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have connected any other laptop I’ve owned, with the exception of the M1 Air, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way I have this laptop connected as my desktop right now, clamshell mode, running a giant external monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recording a podcast, running Zoom and Audio Hijack, and all this stuff, there is no way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other laptop I’ve ever had would have inaudible fan noise in this configuration.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be hot, the fan would be spinning, that level of heat would eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, cause risk of damaging the screen in clamshell mode or other problems. They would eventually clog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with dust and it would fill up with even more heat and even louder fans. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop enclosures have not been this good ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of like the amount of power delivered for the amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat and noise being produced. It’s never been this good of a ratio. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the need for many many people has already left in terms of desktops, you know, over the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two decades. But I think the amount of performance you can get out of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco particular laptops, this family, the M1 and the M1 Pro and Max, is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high. You get such ridiculous performance that I think many more people are no longer going to need a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who were using one before. Or who even, you know, need is a weird word. I think many more people are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to choose not to have a desktop, who were using them up to this point. Because the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are way better, clamshell mode is way more reliable and works way better than it did on the Intels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, external monitor support and everything, it’s all, it’s so much better. Now we can have external touch ID with certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple keyboards. Like, things are getting really great for using a laptop as your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop when you need that. And then it’s also a laptop when you want to take it somewhere with you. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so compelling. Again, that was already the most popular thing people were doing, I think. but now it’s even more compelling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so anything that can make that even better for people, and number one problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the monitor situation. That is the number one problem. Like, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple could make that better, that changes things for so many pros and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power users. So many of us use laptops in a desktop context,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either on a stand or in client-shell mode with external monitors. And if they can fix that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which again, I think they are. I don’t know anything more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody else knows. I just have a hunch that this is the kind of problem they would eventually fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this major course correction that we’re seeing them go through.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would so radically change things that the need for the high-end iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be much more powerful than, to be any more powerful than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end MacBook Pro, I think that need just disappears.
⏹️ ▶️ John because then it would be taking advantage of its all-in-oneness. Like it would be the same design brief as the 24-inch, it would just be bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, oh, it’s great, it’s all-in-one, it’s minimal. And if you want more flexibility, if Apple makes a monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, if you look at the last monitor they made, they were already going down this path, which was we wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John make a monitor that allows people to make essentially a desktop system out of
⏹️ ▶️ John either a non-desktop computer or a different desktop computer, whether it’s a Mac mini or a laptop. Remember the big rat
⏹️ ▶️ John tail that would come out? It had a MagSafe power adapter and it had a bunch of other things. Like that was to basically say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you have quote unquote one cable, ha ha, it’s a giant rat tail, but yeah, one cable that connects to your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John and it charges it and it connects it to this monitor and the monitor has ports on it. Well, guess what? We’ve had that technology for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Apple has just not taken advantage of it. We now have the ability to plug one tiny cable
⏹️ ▶️ John into a Mac mini or any Mac laptop and power
⏹️ ▶️ John all the ports in the back of the monitor. And now, by the way, the laptops also have a bunch of ports on them. and the Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ John has a bunch of ports on the back of it, right? That’s why we say this thing gives you the flexibility. Suddenly the iMac can be
⏹️ ▶️ John this smells very thin, all in one, very elegant, no cables, no connections thing, and fulfill that role
⏹️ ▶️ John without sacrificing the utility. Because if you’ve got an Apple monitor, you can connect any of Apple laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John or the Mac mini to that and have an amazing desktop setup. And still Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John handles the super duper high end. Setting aside now the half size Mac Pro, whether that’s the only Mac Pro or
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a half size and a big one, Like the Mac Pro has got the high end covered, the iMac, if you want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be super thin and 30 inches, fine, just give us a monitor so we can turn
⏹️ ▶️ John your other computers into a really awesome desktop setup. And the Mac mini, it is a desktop computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s begging for a good monitor to connect to it. It’s begging to have an M1 Pro and M1 Max in it probably as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s the lineup for 2023. Just an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple monitor, a cheap Apple, quote unquote cheap Apple monitor for 1500 bucks it’s 5K or 6K or something, HDR, mini LED,
⏹️ ▶️ John like all the great things with Face ID built in, with a Thunderbolt cable coming out of it that you can connect to any of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome laptops or any of its awesome Mac minis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not 1500 bucks, by the way. My current thinking is if they do release a 5K 27 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would probably call it XDR, it would probably have micro LED and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1799? 2000 minimum, possibly 2500. Ugh. I’d still buy it, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s look, that’s look, that’s modern Apple. Like modern Apple is, we will eventually give you what you want, but it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost 40% more than you thought it
⏹️ ▶️ John The laptops were any more expensive. Like I said, they passed the savings on to you. Those laptops, you’ve got amazing laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John for similar prices or some, in some cases less, much less if you benchmark them against
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous computers that cost that amount of money. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true. No, but if Apple does make an extra monitor, it’s going to be expensive. Like, you know, let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me look at the XDR, you know, the $6,000 XDR. They only released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a pretty short time ago, and it doesn’t have some of these features you’re talking about, and it’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much bigger than those.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s 6K, we’ll go, we’re fine with 5K, right? No one’s begging for 6K.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, but I think a 5K Apple monitor released today by today’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple would be minimum $2,000 and possibly even $2,500. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my brain knows you’re right, but my heart is so sad about this just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John listening to
⏹️ ▶️ John you. I’m still holding out hope for 17.99, but you’re right, it’s probably 1.999. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, if they do that, I think that’s fine. Because that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of like the deal between pros and Apple. We bug them about what we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually need. They eventually make it, and it’s always more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than we want it to be, and we suck it up and pay it. Because that’s just the relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between Pros and Apple. It’s been that way for a long time. It’s going more and more in that direction. And look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro. Everyone wanted an expandable desktop tower, and they finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, okay, we’ll give you an expandable desktop tower. It’ll be 15 grand, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll give it to you. We’ll give you this external monitor. You want a nice external monitor to go with it? Great, $6,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So whenever this monitor does come out, if they are doing a 5K 27 inch, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna be under two grand. That’s, I would love it if it was, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s unrealistic to expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $2,000 for a 5K monitor makes me kind of sick, but $2,000 for a 5K monitor with 11 gazillion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mini LED zones, just like the MacBook Pro screen has,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and HDR and all this other fanciness. You know, if it has, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s a 27 inch sized version of this MacBook Pro monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eh, $2,000 may not be so unreasonable. It’s if it’s just the LG 5K repackaged in an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey package. Yeah, that’s a waste of money. But if it’s nice, like super nice, if it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just ultra fine, if it’s ultra nice, then yeah, I can get behind that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was looking at pricing for, I’m always looking at replacing my PlayStation monitor with
⏹️ ▶️ John another monitor. My PlayStation monitor is a 4K monitor, but it’s not 120 Hertz, right? And PlayStation 5
⏹️ ▶️ John can do 120 Hertz in some games now, including Destiny. And so I wanna see that, right? So I’m always looking for, I should replace this
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K monitor, it’s an LG 4K. I should replace it with a better 4K. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, same resolution, 4K, that’s what the PlayStation Outputs, but I want HDR and I want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be an IPS because I don’t really care about response time. I just want it to look really good and have good viewing angles, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I keep looking for, okay, I want, you know, it doesn’t, you know, it’s not, I’m not looking in the world of Mac monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a plain old 4K monitor, HDR with good brightness. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even care if it’s mini LED. Like I just want, I just want it to have, you know, high peak brightness so I can actually see the HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John effects like I can on my XDR, and 120 hertz. And if you put those specs
⏹️ ▶️ John into like a search all available monitors, you will find some. Like I’m looking at a 32 inch 4K HDR 1600 nits,
⏹️ ▶️ John 1,152 mini LED zones, 120 hertz, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a $3,000 monitor. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s because like this is an Asus monitor that I’m looking at, I think it’s $3,000. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s always their top of the line, like for like artists, super calibrated. It’s not a gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor because no one who wants a gaming monitor cares about this stuff. They all care about like, oh, one millisecond response
⏹️ ▶️ John time, like 300 nits max brightness. And like, get that crap out of here. I’m not a pro
⏹️ ▶️ John gamer. I want things to look pretty. And then so I end up, you know, in this thing. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not looking good for the mythical $1,800 5K monitor if it had HDR of any
⏹️ ▶️ John kind, which is kind of sad. But I, you know, and so I did this look and I’m like, okay, it’s not time for me to replace my PlayStation monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll check it again next year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the only thing that would support, you know, it being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat reasonable to be in that price range is if they don’t go super, you know, HDR, XDR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it, because they’ve been selling the 27 inch 5K iMac for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, six years now, something like that? Longer, maybe seven or eight years after that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer has existed. Wasn’t 2014 the first one? So yes, so they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been selling that panel, that’s in Casey’s totally fine monitor, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey a long time. Ultra fine, Marco, ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve been selling it in a computer that starts at like 2000 or 2200 bucks. So I think they could easily justify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they were still selling a monitor with that kind of spec, they could easily get that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like the 1800 dollar range. But I don’t think that’s their style anymore. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think what they’re going to do is the next high-end iMac is going to have the nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, XDR style thing that the current MacBook Pros have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, and that’s gonna probably be a, you know, $2,700 starting price for that iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And therefore I think a monitor worth that would be around 2000 starting at minimum. Because it’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer Apple style to try to make low-end products in areas like this that are kind of accessory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas to their main products. this kind of thing that’s like a kind of higher end kind of pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style mostly accessory they’re gonna only make the high-end ones and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna price them at very healthy margins and that’s why you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that’s why we have their current only external monitor being this ridiculous $6,000 beast I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to aim similarly high with their smaller one and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the market tells them please make a $1,200 monitor, they’re gonna make a $2,000 monitor. And we’re gonna buy it anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s gonna be the best option for a lot of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Correction on those Asus monitors. Sorry, the one I was looking at is $5,000. Oh, what a bargain.
⏹️ ▶️ John put a link in the show notes if anyone wants to see it. This is a 4K monitor, Greg. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a 6K monitor. This is a 4K 32 inch 16 by 9 HDR mini LED 120 Hertz monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Lutron Caseta, Connection, and Revenue Cat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can go to atp.fm slash join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to help fund Casey’s XDR monitor. And we will talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey to you. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. We’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do any research, Marco 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 you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental, tech podcast so
#aftershowaskatp: M1 GHz?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ll do a little bit of Ask ATP because it is piling up and we keep running out of time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do it. And that’s that’s our bad. But we figure we’ll plow through one or two of these depending on how brief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can be. Famous last words with three of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, come on. It’s Apple’s fault. It’s not our fault. They released amazing computers that we talk about a lot. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their fault. That’s on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re just so happy. All right. Yossi Conner writes, why is it we no longer talk about processor speed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in regard to the M1 at least in terms of gigahertz and instead only talk about the number of cores? What’s up with that, Jon?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an easy answer to that one. Apple doesn’t sell them based on different clock speeds. You can’t choose
⏹️ ▶️ John the clock speed. So there’s no real reason for us to discuss it. If they did offer different clock speeds, you can be
⏹️ ▶️ John sure when you’re discussing it, we’d be saying, oh, you got 16 inch. What CPU did you get? What speed did
⏹️ ▶️ John you get? But that’s not an option that Apple offers. That’s the main reason. The second reason is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like it was the old days where the processor ran at a certain speed and they could put that speed on a spec sheet. These
⏹️ ▶️ John processors change their clock speed all the time. Not only do they change their clock speed, the parts inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the system on a chip run at different speeds at the same time when the chip is working. So it’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ John like you put one number on it and say this chip is running at 3.2 gigahertz. Really? Every part of the chip is running at 3,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, not really. It’s way more complicated. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John A, very difficult to talk about. Obviously lots of people still sell chips this way because they’re basically saying here’s the fastest it can run
⏹️ ▶️ John or here’s the fastest it can run in a sustained thing or whatever. But B, they’re just not
⏹️ ▶️ John sold that way. So that’s the answer. It’s not worth talking about because there’s nothing we can do about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good talk. That was quick. I’m stunned. That was very quick.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, the reason I wanted this question to be in there is it’s a good question. We used to talk about gigahertz all the time, but it’s like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not something that, if it’s not something that we as consumers have to choose among, especially when looking at pro hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John like do we have to, I have to like, talk about the clock speed. Do I want the more clock speed? Is that gonna burn more of my battery? That’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John a choice we have anymore. So it’s not worth discussing. But the second part, the technical part is the thing that people might not realize is
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s not really one number you can put on modern chips. And so it’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ John a useful thing to talk about anymore, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then this one I really like and wanted to talk about, and Marco did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. And it is a failed question in the get-go, at least for John, because John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not believe in hypotheticals. But I do, and I think this is fun.
Old MBP w/M1 Max or new MBP w/Intel?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joel Short writes, if you had to choose, would you rather use the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generation MacBook Pro bodies, you know, all USB-Cs, with an M1 Max chip,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the new generation MacBook Pro with, you know, all the ports and an Intel chip? For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is unquestionably, don’t even have to think twice, the old body with an M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max every day of the week and twice on Sunday, because I’ve already converted my life to USB-C and dongles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I need them. So I’ll take the processor hands down. What about you, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, to me, this is interesting because the question is a little bit vague. You know, so it’s a fun question, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the previous generation MacBook Pro body with the M1 Mac chip, well, which MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro? Is it the 13-inch with no touch bar and only two ports?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it the is it a 16-inch with with the touch bar, you know, and then does it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the butterfly keyboard or does it have the magic keyboard? You know like how far back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the previous generation started with the butterfly keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John think any of these things are gonna change your answer though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no! So if it is the immediately preceding you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know the 2019 or 2020 models that had the fixed keyboard like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual good magic keyboard I would choose the older body with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new M1 Mac chip because even Even though I love all the new ports and everything that we have on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new ones, the M1 series of chips and the performance they give and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermal and battery characteristics they give are more substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me in my own personal utility for these machines, even though I would have to tolerate the touch bar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably with that choice. But no question for me, except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the question becomes the butterfly keyboard. I would rather use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good keyboard with a 486 in it than a butterfly keyboard with an M1 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you would still pick the M1, you know why? Because you’re not even touching your keyboard. Your laptop is folded up like a
⏹️ ▶️ John book and sitting next to your computer. Like you’d still buy it with the butterfly keyboard and you’d slam that thing shut
⏹️ ▶️ John and shove it into your little bookshelf thing and never look at it again because you’re basically using it as your
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop laptop and it would have the M1 Max in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I guess I was thinking about it in the desktop context. I was thinking about it as actually using it a laptop?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who uses laptops? Laptops stink.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, did I not just talk about how much fun I had at the Botanical Gardens earlier today? Come now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean the butterfly keyboard. Like, I hope not. Who would
⏹️ ▶️ John do such a thing? Yeah, that’s just cruel. Nobody deserves that. And that’s not the previous generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the previous, previous generation. Like, they did fix the keyboards before they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Agreed. All right. So, John, tell me why this question is utter trash and then do your best
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s fine. It’s fine. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s a hypothetical making you choose between two things that are both
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, but which one is less bad? Yeah. But the answer is you get the M1 like, cause yes, they are, the
⏹️ ▶️ John ports and everything were bad and the, you know, even the butterfly keyboard is better. I think, but just the M1 is just so much
⏹️ ▶️ John better. And the M1 makes the old design less crappy. Cause one of the things that was
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy about the old thing was the fans would run all the time and they’d run super hot and they were super noisy and the M1 fixes
⏹️ ▶️ John all of that right so yeah I would yeah the M1 in the old design
⏹️ ▶️ John is the less bad the a significantly less bad choice than Intel in the current design.