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

473: Fanboats and Coattails

M1 Ultra, Mac Studio, Studio Display, iPhone SE 3, iPad Air 5, and… baseball?

Episode Description:

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

Chapters

  1. Pre-show
  2. Fashion
  3. TV+
  4. Green phones
  5. iPhone SE (3rd-gen)
  6. Sponsor: New Relic
  7. iPad Air (5th-gen)
  8. Sponsor: Kolide
  9. M1 Ultra
  10. Mac Studio
  11. Sponsor: Hover
  12. Studio Display
  13. Mac Pro?
  14. Ending theme
  15. Post-show

Pre-show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really know if you need me for this one. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco honestly… LAZARTE What

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are you talking about? CRAIG So, because I really just want to go watch the Letterkenny special

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that came out yesterday that I haven’t had time to watch yet. So, I don’t even know why I’m here right now.

⏹️ ▶️ John LAZARTE Are you like in denial about the announcements or something?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey CRAIG We’ll find out. So here’s the thing. I’m gonna do that thing where I’m not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell you whether or not I bought anything until later on in the episode. So you have to listen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although, I will also say that my brand is very strong. My brand is very strong because I got

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of tweets with people saying with questionable amounts of sarcasm,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, oh gosh, are we going to have to listen to KC Plug membership 85 times this week?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The answer is probably. And I’m a little concerned that this is my brand now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey He’s just yelling for our own membership, but that’s okay.

Fashion

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have anything to talk about this week?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, there’s nothing really happened, did it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, nothing at all. This was a big week, my goodness. Oh, wow. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can start with standard ATP fare. We should talk fashion.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you bought any new watch brands in the spring collection?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there actually, all kidding aside, is there a new spring collection? Yeah. Because I missed it, if so. Oh, really? I honestly didn’t realize.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is one of those things like in recent years, like, you know, not just recent years, you know, Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time now, debuted new like Apple Watch bands and iPhone cases,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, usually at least once or twice outside of the usual, you know, fall

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey events. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. And usually there’s a spring collection and there is indeed a spring collection. You gotta get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice new yellow and a new orange and I think a new green maybe. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, anyway, that’s the spring collection. Are you talking about the green phone though? Is that what we’re talking about?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, not even that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if the watch bands are going to be like, I was going to say like beanie babies, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they do that thing where they introduce them, you know, and spring and fall. But the other part of that is that they go away.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, so if there’s one particular shade of like purple that you really liked, but they only sold it like

⏹️ ▶️ John three years ago in the fall, you may never see that again. So I wonder if someone’s just like collecting them all. And

⏹️ ▶️ John like at the end of this, we’ll just have like the ultimate collection of Apple watch bands. I have all the colors. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John impossible to get them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I know that this was a thing, that the watch band collections was a thing, but I had no idea that they actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really did do a new one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, something’s okay. I, I might freak out for a moment here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The white sport band is gone. That’s what I’m telling you. They go away. The white

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sport band though. That’s always, that’s my band. What? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the white band is your band? What did it just happen to you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Johnny Ives band too, right? I mean I guess he’s gone and honestly he’s looking at this event good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rated. I guess we’ll get to that. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco man, what what am I gonna wear? I guess I’ll have to switch to like lemon zest or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna become like me, you’re gonna stock up on them like cheese graters you have in the basement. Just 50

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco white watch bands.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Starlight just looks dirty. Dishwater they call it. Yes, dishwater white. Which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly the white the white band does get dirty easily, but I just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know, I clean

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So for the record listeners, before we started recording,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John before we did anything,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John says, you know, as long as we don’t get mired down in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John early

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco stuff, we’ll go real fast.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Side tracked, whatever. As long as

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t get sidetracked. Why would we get sidetracked? I will take the blame for

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this one. We are

⏹️ ▶️ John on line one of the notes.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We haven’t even gotten to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey line one. We’ve gotten to Apple event. That is literally the only thing that we’ve gotten

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, line one, yeah, that’s the heading, though, the first body line. All right, go ahead,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey. Okay, so the fashion I was trying to talk about before we went down this rabbit hole is astute

⏹️ ▶️ Casey individuals, of which I was not one of them, noticed Tim’s combination of shirt color

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and watch band. And I’m going to choose this was to choose to believe this was deliberate, and I’m here for it. He

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a very lovely blue shirt and a very yellow watch band. What could that possibly indicate?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He could just like lemon zest, which is the color that he was wearing. However, yeah, it’s definitely a Ukrainian thing. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely. Although it is interesting that like, so he has this idea, I should wear

⏹️ ▶️ John colors for solidarity with Ukraine. Great. Right. So he goes to his wardrobe and he’s like, well, I’ve got the yellow watch band. That’s part of the new

⏹️ ▶️ John spring line. I’ve got to get a blue shirt. But I guess his closet simply doesn’t contain

⏹️ ▶️ John any shirts that are close to the color blue on the flag of Ukraine.

⏹️ ▶️ John He just has like a tasteful like Tim Cook kind of blue. And so that’s what he wore. Like I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like he didn’t bring himself to wear like the actual colors because it would just not be appropriate

⏹️ ▶️ John for Tim Cook.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s a limit of how much excitement Tim Cook can display.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the yellow wristband, that’s his limit. It’s very exuberant. Yes, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as exuberant as he can be. Indeed.

TV+

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the attempt to move it right along, Apple starts announcing things. They start with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a recap of some of the things. Not even a recap, it’s both a recap and a preview of some of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their featured films, most of which actually I was not aware of. There’s apparently a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new animated series, or excuse me, not animated series, but animated film. Lucky, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think is the name of it. And I- I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it’s called Luck, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John was it Luck? Okay. Maybe you’re getting confused with the David Milch show about horse

⏹️ ▶️ John racing, maybe?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, let’s go with that. And so as per upgrade this week, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe that this is Tim Lester’s new place that’s doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a spy movie of some sort with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the dude from Witcher, Henry Cavill. There’s all sorts of different stuff that’s coming, some of which looked really, really good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then they also announced, Apple announced, that Friday Night Baseball is coming to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV Plus if baseball ever comes back. So two episodes every Friday night.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It will be available on Apple TV Plus and for a limited time without the need of a subscription.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a post from friend of the show, Jason Snell, and also a huge baseball fan about this, which we will put

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco show notes. Wait, hold on. Honest question. Is baseball not back? I have no idea. No. Really?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. So there’s supposed to, oh, well, I probably know the most of the three of us

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, and I know very, very, very little. So take everything I’m about to say with a grain of salt.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But my limited understanding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is… Welcome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the show. You know as much about sports as we know about a lot of the stuff we talk about.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it is supposed to have been back, but the owners and the players are bickering

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the owners not thinking they’re rich enough and the players feeling like they deserve a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey small cut of the ridiculous riches that the owners have. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason apparently is listening live and is correcting me already. He said it’s an owner lockout. So the owners refusing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, if I understand it right, let any of the games happen because they’re greedy jerks. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, uh, so there’s no baseball yet. In fact, I believe breaking news do, do, do, do, do, do, just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey before we recorded, I believe they have announced another like couple of weeks delay in the season or something like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Um, so yeah, it’s, it’s kind of ugly and interesting time for Apple to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey announce that they’re getting Friday night baseball, assuming it ever comes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John back.

⏹️ ▶️ John You should read that post because even if you don’t care about baseball, because it talks more about like, uh, you know, streaming

⏹️ ▶️ John services and how that intersects with the way sports has traditionally been funded and viewed

⏹️ ▶️ John by sports fans. Uh, so even if you’re not into sports, uh, you might be interested in that because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John all of our future. We’re not going to get into now cause we’re not getting sidetracked, right? Casey, next item.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. That’s right. Moving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right along. Speaking of disputes, I have no ferry service right now because of a dispute.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know we heard,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey did we hear? I didn’t hear this. A

⏹️ ▶️ John couple shows back. He said they’re going to stop ferry service.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah. And they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco did.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one thought they would actually do it. They did it starting yesterday, so we have no ferry service.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. If

⏹️ ▶️ Casey only you had a vehicle you could drive on the sand and go somewhere. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just going to make them buy a boat. Stop.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone’s boats are still, you know, in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John marshmallow wrap.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You

⏹️ ▶️ John know, one of those off-road vehicles that turns into a boat, a duck boat or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, don’t even tease. Or like, what was it? A Gibbs Aquatica? Oh, man. Duck boat would fit under your house.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Take a measurement. Would it? They’re pretty big. No, it would not. They are massive. Don’t they have them in Boston? They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking huge.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John This

⏹️ ▶️ John house is very high though.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The duck boats are significantly larger than you think they are. Yeah, they are. They’re absolutely massive. Like they barely fit on the road.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I thought they had them tooling around Boston. Am I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John making this up?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they have duck tours.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you not seen them? They are massive.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’ve ridden on them. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I went

⏹️ ▶️ John on a duck tour.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What about one of those fan boats they use in Florida? Would that work here or is the bay

⏹️ ▶️ John too

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco choppy?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not good for the winter.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the bay is really shallow, which makes it hard to drive a lot of boats on it. But like, you know, you figure one of those fan boats are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually probably really nice for show.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey What is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that actually called? I’m drawing a blank. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco think it’s called a fan boat.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it really? No, I thought there was another name for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a hovercraft, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey a different thing. No, no, no, no, I know exactly what you’re thinking of. On the Everglades.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, in Florida. What

⏹️ ▶️ John was that show that was on the Everglades? You probably saw it on Naked Knight. What the hell was that called? Oh, I have no idea. Probably not Dexter.

⏹️ ▶️ John Jason, you’re talking to Jason. Jason, what was the show where they were on the Everglades?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea. It doesn’t really matter. I guess fan boat is what we’re going to go with. You see, we keep getting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco distracted.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Us? Oh, God. Totally not my fault.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, not at all. Definitely not at all. All right, moving along. These show notes are already

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mess. We’ve got Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Watch bands,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Beanie Babies, Gibbs Aquatica, duck boats, fan boats. Oh my gosh. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an air boat. Yeah, that’s what I do. I put in a link to the Luck TV show. Don’t forget to get that. Oh yeah, the Luck TV

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show. Oh golly. This is a mess. This is an absolute mess, But this is what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the people tune in for.

Green phones

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so moving right along, there’s new colors. There’s green and other green, otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ Casey known as alpine green.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is actually interesting because, you know, normally in like the spring event, for Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to release a new color of the like mainstream slash value phone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s been fairly common in recent years, but to release a new version of the pro phone is less common,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe. When was the last time that happened? I mean, I think they did a Project Red a while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, but I don’t remember the last time they did a new pro color in the spring.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I can’t remember one off the top of my head either, unless you count when they tried to release the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey white, what was it, iPhone 4 for like 18 months? I never quite got around to it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Other than that, I can’t think of any. But yeah, so Alpine Green and Green, And they look good at a glance.

iPhone SE (3rd-gen)

⏹️ ▶️ Casey New iPhone SE 3 for $430 as introduced by Francesca Sweet Using

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 15 apparently it is quote incredibly popular with new iPhone users quote They also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey made an offhanded comment that they’ve added more new users to life to the iPhone 13 lineup than each of the prior five

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Launches the iPhone SE 3 gets 5g I I believe I might be wrong about this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I believe it does not get the millimeter wave wideband ultra wideband Whatever it’s called

⏹️ ▶️ Casey super fancy technology but it’s a lot of phone with Touch ID for 430 bucks, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ain’t bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s following the SE pattern of, it’s been a couple years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco since the last SE, and they gave it in the spring, what the flagship phones had in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall guts wise, with a couple things cut here and there in an old case design.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My question is, do you think this is the last Touch ID phone finally that we will see?

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope so, but I mean, not that I’m against Touch ID, but it’s just weirder and weirder to see it. It looks

⏹️ ▶️ John like it from a different era, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, on the other hand though, like they leaned into that hard. Like when they were showing it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they showed a huge shot of the bottom half with the big Touch ID sensor. They mentioned the Touch ID

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensor. They showed a screenshot of Touch ID working. So I think clearly what they’re going for here is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people still love Touch ID on their phones and don’t want to move from it. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are keeping this around for a reason. Part of it is, you know, budget and price and segmentation.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think part of it is like, just trying to keep those people happy that insist on Touch ID

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still. And that might be a while before it goes away. So like, might this be the last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one? Or maybe it won’t be. Maybe they’re gonna keep this style around even longer than we think,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because those like last Touch ID holdouts aren’t really going anywhere. I

⏹️ ▶️ John keep hearing how expensive, how surprisingly expensive, relatively speaking, obviously. Face ID

⏹️ ▶️ John is to deal with, I guess, all the sensors or whatever, and we still haven’t really seen, we saw a little bit of consolidation with

⏹️ ▶️ John when they made the notch smaller or whatever, but that may be the limiting factor. Not that

⏹️ ▶️ John they, you know, or maybe they would do something like they did with the iPad Air, which we’re gonna get to in a second, where it’s like, well, we’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John give you the new design, but no, you don’t get Face ID because this is the budget price or whatever. So,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you can’t do that with a phone, right? You can’t, well, can you put Touch ID in the power button

⏹️ ▶️ John on a phone size device? Probably not, I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t know. I

⏹️ ▶️ John had to do the measurements to figure it out, But I think I feel like that’s what’s holding this thing here. It’s not so much that they love Touch ID

⏹️ ▶️ John is that the replacement for it would bump this price up too much right now. At least that’s my impression.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could be both, honestly, but there are a lot of people who love it. Like if it was if it was purely a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco value move, I don’t think they would have accentuated as much as they did in the presentation.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s a differentiating factor. It’s like, hey, if you like Touch ID, here’s the one. Like, obviously, you’re going to pitch it for how

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s different from the other phones. But you know, that that could be just selling what you have versus, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, updating. But anyway, they did not, to spoil it, they did not update the Super Chief iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John to have flat size, but they did update the iPad Air, which was nice.

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iPad Air (5th-gen)

⏹️ ▶️ Casey New iPad Air, which is in many ways not that different from the old, but it does have an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey M1 in it, so that’s exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not an A15. Yeah, this is an interesting choice. In the past,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPads, like the bigger iPads, would have the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco X versions of the system on a chip. And of course, that one Z one, that was weird. But for the most part, it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, you’d have the X version that had like, you You know, same base cores as the, you know, A whatever, iPhone 1 of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that number, but then more GPUs, or maybe one more CPU core. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s interesting in this case to not do that. So to give it the M1, first of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, that actually will hurt it, single-threaded-wise, and in certain tests,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the M1 is based on the A14 cores, which of course we’ll get to more later. So to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch a new M1 iPad today, I thought was a little bit surprising,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also giving it all that heft. It’s going to have,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe somebody confirmed it has 8 gigs of RAM, or at least it can have 8 gigs of RAM, I don’t know. And all that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive CPU and GPU cores, huge parallel performance on the M1.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have that in the iPad Air and the iPad Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely leaves the gap as a weird question mark. I’m like, well what does the Pro still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer above it? And there are some things. I made a quick list here. The big thing for me is that the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro has speakers on both sides still, and none of the other iPads do as far as I know. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have it in landscape, you have sound coming out of both sides, which is nice. Pro also has Face ID,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has 120 hertz, the big triple camera system with the LiDAR, and the Pro’s USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ Marco port is a Thunderbolt port, whereas the new Air is still just USB-C.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they said they made it a faster USB-C data rate, but it’s still not Thunderbolt.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s USB 3.1 Gen 2, which to figure out what that means, you have to go look up in

⏹️ ▶️ John the weird chart and realize that they renamed everything recently. But yes, it’s faster USB.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it’s interesting, but I feel like it’s, Now that the Air

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has so much of what the Pro has, it’s pushing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Pro more and more into specialty markets, which makes me think that maybe the Pro is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that the Pro is kind of expected to have an update later this year, so maybe this will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make more sense when that happens, but it does seem like there’s decreasingly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a gap between those two feature and spec wise, and yet there’s still a pretty substantial

⏹️ ▶️ Marco price difference and it’s still a different model line. So I am kind of curious like where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna go with this.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think the, this past year where only the big iPad Pro had the good

⏹️ ▶️ John mini LED screen, right? That seems temporary to me. And I would imagine that

⏹️ ▶️ John when the new iPads both have mini LED and both have M2 or whatever, other this will

⏹️ ▶️ John make more sense. It’s just that the cadence of iPad up is always weird and very often you get these strange things. I mean, even just like

⏹️ ▶️ John having the iPad mini have a better, you know, CPU than the iPad air for a while. They’re just all

⏹️ ▶️ John out of sync on the iPad line. So I think we’re always have these periods where it looks a little bit weird. But who cares? This is a great product.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’ve always been recommending the iPad air to people because it’s got the new design new pencil, but it doesn’t have all the features

⏹️ ▶️ John that most people don’t care about the very fancy screen and you know, even face ID.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s interesting too is if you actually I just I just expect if you spec them up spec by spec, which you have to like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to spec up the air to match the 256 configuration of the pro because they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have a matching base level. But if you spec them up both to 256, the pro is only $150

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than the air. So it’s actually a smaller difference than I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco initially assumed. So maybe, maybe the answer is that the air is just, you know, they’re pushing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the air higher end. Because I feel like if you buy an iPad, either you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco care about the cool features of it, or you don’t. If you don’t, you get the cheap one, period. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what most people buy. You get, you know, the base level, you know, iPad nothing and everyone buys that and they’re mostly happy with it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you want anything else besides that, you’re going to be spending 900 bucks, like whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, however you spec it, you know, you’re, you’re going to be, you know, you’re not, no one’s getting a $500 iPad anymore. I have no problems with the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco air.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I recorded an episode of clockwise earlier today where the, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thesis that was presented on clockwise was that it’s kind of a weird in between product

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it’s not super duper duper cheap like the regular iPad or or the iPad mini, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the super baller pro. So it’s kind of this weird in the middle. I don’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Casey begrudge that. I think it’s nice for Apple to have an offering at basically any price point, but it is a little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit, like you guys are saying, it’s a little bit of a weird in the middle area where I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hundred percent sure who the right market is for it, but it looks real nice and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not extremely expensive. And $600 to start is not terrible. And I don’t know, for me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t need, in my experience anyway. I don’t need a whole ton of storage on an iPad. Maybe I’m using my iPad wrong, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, 600 bucks for 64 gigs, that ain’t bad, that ain’t bad at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John Should take a moment also to reflect on the ridiculousness of the Air suffix on this

⏹️ ▶️ John product. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we just

⏹️ ▶️ John ignore it now, but like it does not, there’s no analogy to the MacBook Air. It is not

⏹️ ▶️ John any particularly airier than the iPad. It’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just called this because that’s what it was called a long time ago. and at one point it was actually pretty thin, but

⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s just the same as the Pro. I guess it does have more air in it. I don’t know, it doesn’t make any sense.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, the Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has more air because the speakers have a lot of air in them.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the Pro might be heavier,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. One thing, air in the Mac line, when the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air first launched, yeah, it was this thing that was premium because it was so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco small and everything, but that was very short-lived. What the Air very quickly came to mean was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one most people should buy because it’s pretty good and pretty small and light.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that doesn’t connect with Air. And the thing is, Air got undercut by the skinny, plain old MacBook Adorable,

⏹️ ▶️ John but then the Adorable died, and the Air is like, now I am the skinniest.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, well, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Adorable was never the cheap one. Like, well, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in some certain ways. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was the airiest. Right, but what I’m saying is when Apple says Air, they usually mean this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, it’s small, but it’s also like the entry-level one and also the mainstream choice that you should probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy. So it’s interesting that in the Mac, it is the entry level one, and it has been for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very long time. But so really I think the iPad Air should be the lowest end iPad. It should be the lowest

⏹️ ▶️ John without the plain old iPad, without a suffix, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I guess it would be the question of what you call this one, because it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Pro. I don’t know what they would call it. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would call it the iPad Studio, of course.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, that’s a good point. Spoiler alert. No, I think the most reasonable thing, if not going the studio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey route, is the current, the cheapo iPad becomes the iPad Air. So the thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is now iPad becomes iPad Air.

⏹️ ▶️ John After they update it, hopefully, to the flat sides.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, fair. But, and then the iPad Air becomes just plain iPad. So iPad, no qualifier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the default. iPad Air becomes the cheapo. iPad mini is obviously tiny. iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro is if you have too much money, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re trying to rationalize their naming, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because

⏹️ ▶️ John we know how it got to this point historically, but then on top of that, what we mentioned before, that the iPad updates are always weirdly

⏹️ ▶️ John staggered. So they’re never like in lockstep with each other. There’s always leapfrogging each other in odd ways and encroaching

⏹️ ▶️ John on each other’s supposed market segments. But we know the next update is coming to rationalize. They never settled down

⏹️ ▶️ John to be like, here’s the iPad line and all the prices and form factors make sense. Especially with the whole Tim Cook,

⏹️ ▶️ John practice of selling the old form for years and years and years.

⏹️ ▶️ John Instead of just saying flat sides everywhere on all iPads, you won’t see that other design. It’s like, nope, you’re gonna be seeing that design for a long time

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not gonna make sense. the names aren’t gonna make sense and the update cadence isn’t gonna make sense but for the most part they’re still

⏹️ ▶️ John good products. And anyway I think I would much rather have this get the M1 than, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John a lesser chip and economies of scale, making a lot of those M1s.

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M1 Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then we get to the Mac and this is where everything got really interesting to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me ask you, and John, I think you’re the most likely to remember this. Do you recall exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when this whole Jade, Jade 2C, Jade 4C discussion happened? I believe it started with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco German

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John report. It was

⏹️ ▶️ John like last spring. Sometime last year. It was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a long time ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And do you have like a date on your diagram that you, I don’t have the URL handy, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you if you look at the URL to them, I put the date, the date is actually in the URL. And so you can see like

⏹️ ▶️ John how long it was, I think my diagram was like May, maybe you can look it up, look up one of my tweets

⏹️ ▶️ John in a second. But I will, I will start this section by saying something that someone else noted, I forgot who it was somebody on Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ John made a little montage video of, oh, no, it was Ben Thompson,

⏹️ ▶️ John a little montage video of this presentation saying how he in this presentation in particular, and historically, you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John recognize this pattern. But in this in this presentation, it was it was notable because they did it almost every single time,

⏹️ ▶️ John before they would talk about a product before everything we just talked about before they talked about the iPhone, the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, se the iPad air, they would start by talking about here’s the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John silicon that lets us make this great thing, even though it’s not new, you know, the M one we know about the A 15.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not like there’s new they didn’t have any silicon announcements. But they would, you know, add add a silicon

⏹️ ▶️ John section to all those products just to to emphasize, like, you know why we’re great? We have great products, yeah, but the reason

⏹️ ▶️ John we have great products is because of great silicon. And for a while now with the Macs, which obviously it makes sense because they’re transitioning the Macs

⏹️ ▶️ John to these new processors, they would begin the Mac section by talking about a processor. Before they

⏹️ ▶️ John even announced any Macs, they’ve done it in many press presentations and they did it again. So let’s talk about the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John And what’s the first thing they talk about? Not a Mac. They’re just gonna talk about chips for a while.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then you’re gonna see, you know, the Mac that that chip is in. I mean, I don’t mind that. I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a great way to start it. We get to see Johnny Siruji in his little lab telling

⏹️ ▶️ John us very emphatically about their awesome chips. And for the most part, they are awesome. Did you find the date

⏹️ ▶️ John on the?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m looking as we speak in the chat room, let me down. I’m sorry. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John think you just put that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. May 21, May 21 of last year. So May 21, 2021. Yeah, so

⏹️ ▶️ John that was, to refresh everyone’s memory, it was the German rumor and he described a bunch of stuff. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then I made this diagram saying, okay, if we take what is described in this rumor and make pictures

⏹️ ▶️ John of it, what does it look like? And I mostly did it just to see how big would they be? Like, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, at that point we just had the M1 and I wanted to see basically, M1 is a square this big. If

⏹️ ▶️ John we map out all these rumors, how big did the squares get? And, you know, figuring out that they get monstrous

⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ve been talking about these things for, you know, over a year now and Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ John been knocking them down. First, they came out with like, you know, I said, the second row of the diagram showed

⏹️ ▶️ John what would eventually become to be the M1 Pro and M1 Max.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then in this presentation, we did the third row of the diagram, which ended up being called the

⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Ultra, which is more than Max, because Ultra is obviously more than Max. The

⏹️ ▶️ John theory I had earlier today was that Max does not stand for maximum, but is short for Maximilian,

⏹️ ▶️ John so it makes perfect sense. Good old M1 Max, old Maxie.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I feel like the focus on the chips as the primary introduction to the computers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, in this day and age, especially in the context of a desktop, but you know, in this day and age, I think that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco matters more because it helps dictate what these machines actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are. Like it helps dictate what class of machine you can build, how good of that version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or how good a version of that can exist. And so by leading with the chip,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then by eventually showing the enclosure, which we’ll get to, of like, well, here’s just like a box,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. It’s a nice looking box. It’s a box with a lot of useful holes on it, but still just basically a little box.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because when you’re using a desktop, it doesn’t matter. This, I feel like, is such a great breath of fresh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco air compared to the unedited Johnny Ive worst days there, where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the form of the machine was held as higher importance importance and a higher

⏹️ ▶️ Marco priority in its design than the stuff that went inside of it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by having that as their priorities, like look at this gorgeous object, by the way it has some Xeon in it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but look at this gorgeous object. What you ended up with is gorgeous computers that didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve their needs as well. Whereas now they start with what kind of amazing chip

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can we make for, you know, market segment X, you know, pro desktops or small laptops

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever and they make the chip and they design the computer around it and in certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases we’re seeing this like over the last couple years in certain cases certain parts of the enclosure have to get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less beautiful or bigger or heavier but that then makes a better product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I feel like Apple of you know seven or eight years ago wouldn’t have done that and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they didn’t do that and it was to their to their expense and to all of our expenses

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas now, leading with the chip and designing the computer around the technical needs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the user’s needs, like, oh, I know we’ll get to this, but when I saw the holes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the front of the Mac Studio, I almost cried, I was so happy. Like, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a company that is now valuing usefulness and its customers’ actual needs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over visual purity in so many ways. And this just makes me so incredibly happy as a Mac user.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the interesting thing about, uh, you know, so designing the chips and dying around them, getting back

⏹️ ▶️ John to the diagram is that what the rumor, what the rumor laid out over a year ago and what this diagram shows is,

⏹️ ▶️ John um, you know, when Apple is making its own chips, uh, you think, oh, now Apple can make whatever it wants, but

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is still subject to, you know, economies of scale and all

⏹️ ▶️ John the other factors that. You know, make it not possible for Apple to make a brand new

⏹️ ▶️ John custom made chip for every single possible application. So instead Apple wisely had a plan and

⏹️ ▶️ John the plan was we’re going to make building blocks And we’re gonna use those building blocks to make a bunch of very similar chips

⏹️ ▶️ John that we think we can assemble into Final products final system on a chips that are appropriate

⏹️ ▶️ John for the various products we have planned but they share a lot and that’s the point of that diagram that the Jade C die

⏹️ ▶️ John is the building block of the future of You know high performance arm based Macs

⏹️ ▶️ John and here’s how you use that building block to build up We have the M1 but the you know, the M1 was not the building

⏹️ ▶️ John block. It was Jade C That was the building blocks. We get the chopped version, which is the pro we get the unchopped version, which is the max

⏹️ ▶️ John and now we get the Fused together unchopped versions, which is the ultra and

⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I bring this up now is because at the the start The start of this presentation

⏹️ ▶️ John blame Apple. They did the sequencing they said and I think this is a direct quote We’re adding one last

⏹️ ▶️ John chip to the M1 family. This is before they introduced the M1 ultra one last chip chip. So

⏹️ ▶️ John the diagram has another row. That’s a fourth row because the first row is the M one and then it shows

⏹️ ▶️ John the max and the pro and then it shows the ultra and then it shows the what I don’t know the hyper

⏹️ ▶️ John the ultimate the super the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey epic the plaid.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’re not doing plaid the ludicrous whatever it shows like basically, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ John for Jade see dies the Jade was called Jade for C die or whatever. Yeah. And when we talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John this in the past it was like look there you can’t economically make a chip that big you can’t even economically

⏹️ ▶️ John make a chip as big as the ultra which is why they didn’t they do the thing that they’re gonna talk we’re gonna talk about in a second where they sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John have them communicating to each other over this very high-speed bus with an interconnect that we talked about in past shows right

⏹️ ▶️ John but you can’t have that but so but so what if they hadn’t said this line it would be like okay well boy I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John wait to see what the you know the one in the Mac Pro is gonna be is it supposed to be four of these these rumors has been dead on every

⏹️ ▶️ John you know every step of the way over the course of year, these rumors have been, remember from a year ago, it’s turning out

⏹️ ▶️ John to be true every time, you know, we didn’t know the names, but you look at them, it’s like, yep, same number execution units. It’s made the same way. Everything

⏹️ ▶️ John is just coming up just the way we expected. Right. Um, but when they said

⏹️ ▶️ John one last ship, it’s like, well, I guess maybe there’s not going to be a four

⏹️ ▶️ John way thing. So here’s what I have to say about that. So in, in episode four 53, how long ago was that?

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, it was 21st of October of last year. Back in October. I tried to give a warning

⏹️ ▶️ John to everybody and from something I’ve been thinking about and you know Mulling over for a

⏹️ ▶️ John while now that that rumor is so old and that the Mac Pro is going to

⏹️ ▶️ John be in theory So late like maybe the end of this year or whatever That a lot might have changed

⏹️ ▶️ John by the time we get to making the Mac Pro like maybe The whole almost all that diagram

⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna come true at that point that the middle part hadn’t even come true yet Well, maybe almost all the diagrams gonna come true, but the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro one is so far off in the distance That if anything is gonna vary it’s going to be that

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they couldn’t make that in time Maybe a different roadmap interrupts that maybe they have something else planned for the Mac Pro or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John And so when they said, you know, and that’s what I said in that episode back in October Like don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John put all your even though it looks like oh this it’s coming true Just like the diagram shows that last

⏹️ ▶️ John step was gonna be a doozy. So they said one last chip So that makes it sound like there

⏹️ ▶️ John won’t be any more chips in the quote M1 family. Now, what is the M1 family? The

⏹️ ▶️ John M1 family is whatever Apple says it is. But we think of it as chips made with cores based on the M1 because

⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 had the word of the ice storm and firestorm cores. Those are the things that make up Jade, Jade C-Die and their,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, stuff. So lots of people saw that and said, oh, the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro, it’s going to have an M2 based system on a chip with 40 cores.

⏹️ ▶️ John And as we’ve discussed in past shows, I will be extremely surprised if a 40 core

⏹️ ▶️ John M2 base ship ships this year for the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. Because that tends not to be how Silicon is done. You don’t say we have

⏹️ ▶️ John a brand new chip and the first one we’re gonna make has 40 cores. Like you usually start smaller and

⏹️ ▶️ John you build up. You start with the small chip and you make it bigger, slightly bigger, slightly bigger, as you get better at making the components

⏹️ ▶️ John of that ship. Now, just because that’s the way it’s happened in the past doesn’t mean it’s physically impossible to do

⏹️ ▶️ John that. It is plausible that it could, but I would be very surprised, and I think a lot of people would be very surprised, just

⏹️ ▶️ John because historically that’s not how chip making has gone. So before we, I know we’re getting derailed into

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro territory already, but it’s their fault for bringing this stuff up. So I just do want to talk about the possibilities

⏹️ ▶️ John for the Mac Pro. This is the last chip in the M1 family. One possibility is the Mac Pro just has an

⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Ultra. That’s crappy because the M1 Ultra does not have enough GPU cores to be

⏹️ ▶️ John remotely competitive with the current Mac Pro. Right. So I hope that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not the case. But hey, that could be a thing. Who knows? And by the way, the reason we’re talking about Mac Pro is Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John later confirms at the very end of the presentation of the Mac Pro is absolutely coming. So this is not speculation.

⏹️ ▶️ John Second possibility put two M1 Ultras in there. Oh, we didn’t make another chip. It’s just two M1

⏹️ ▶️ John Ultras and they’re connected by a different interconnect between the two M1 Ultras or Or it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John two M1 Ultras back to back and stuck together and we don’t call it a new chip. It’s just M1 Ultra, LN1 Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ John X2. That would have 40 cores. It would, you know, be plausible. It would be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and then the final possibility is the Mac Pro is not going to have an M1 based chip

⏹️ ▶️ John in it at all. It’s gonna have an

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco M2 based

⏹️ ▶️ John thing with 40 core. And it’s gonna come out in 2023. I don’t even know. So

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple continues to be extremely frustrating when it comes to the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John by like, if they hadn’t said this, we would all just be blissfully unaware. And we’re like, here we go on our way to 40 core.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s gonna be great. But then they just have to throw this in there and say, you thought you knew what the Mac Pro was gonna be, but you actually don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe you do, but we’re just screwing with you. Ha ha, one last chip in the M1 family. So that was frustrating,

⏹️ ▶️ John slash intriguing. On the subject of having an actual like

⏹️ ▶️ John four, Jade 4C die, like the possibility of that, Hector Martin, who’s been porting Linux

⏹️ ▶️ John to the M whatever chips, looking at the M1 Max and had this to say in a tweet,

⏹️ ▶️ John the IRQ controller registers on the M1 Max go die 0, die 1, and then other stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John There is literally no space for dies beyond those two to exist in there. If they somehow glued four chips together,

⏹️ ▶️ John one pair wouldn’t be able to send interrupts to the other. That doesn’t make any sense. And conversely, the IRQ controller

⏹️ ▶️ John claims the theoretical design maxes 8 dies, so it’s not like they were stuck with 2. They could have instantiated with room for

⏹️ ▶️ John more dies, but they didn’t. So the implication seems to be, both physically speaking and looking at the innards of

⏹️ ▶️ John the chip that the M1 Max at the very least, which is what he was looking at at the time because he hadn’t seen the

⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Ultra then, was not designed to have more than two. And lo and behold the M1 Ultra is two

⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Maxes stuck together with this cool internet connect thing, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So can there physically be four M1 Maxes stuck together? Is M1

⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra really just two M1 Maxes stuck together? Sure, it looks like it. So that’s that’s another nail

⏹️ ▶️ John in the like there’s not going to be for you know Jade 4c die in the way

⏹️ ▶️ John that you think just because It seems like the M1 Max wasn’t made to do that and the M1 Ultra does not do

⏹️ ▶️ John that And it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to make that work. Maybe they can be backed back But it

⏹️ ▶️ John just doesn’t seem like that’s that’s in the cards from what we know now It’s hard to know because we don’t know what you know, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John doing for the Mac Pro The second thing is if it’s two M1 ultras, it’s like oh we didn’t make a new chip is just

⏹️ ▶️ John two M1 Ultras, how do the two M1 Ultras talk to each other? You would think that’s not a big problem. That’s a multi-processor

⏹️ ▶️ John Macs for a long time. That used to be the way they made high-performance Macs. You get multiple processors, right? But those

⏹️ ▶️ John Macs did not have the RAM stuck, you know, wedged, welded to

⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU. And so what you’d end up with is a good old NUMA. Numa, Numa Numa?

⏹️ ▶️ John There wasn’t a meme about that somewhere. Yodel-a-hee!

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Sorry, go ahead.

⏹️ ▶️ John Easy peasy. NUMA stands for N-U-M-A. It’s non-uniform memory access. So what it basically means is that if you had two M1

⏹️ ▶️ John Ultras in there, they would each come with their own complement of RAM that is sort of, you know, unchangeable and connected

⏹️ ▶️ John to the CPU as the unified memory architecture, right? But they would each have their own pool of it. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanted to have a Mac Pro with 256 gigabytes of RAM, you’d have one M1 Ultra with 128 and

⏹️ ▶️ John another M1 Ultra with 128. But each one of those M1 Ultras would be really close to

⏹️ ▶️ John its own 128. But, you know, theoretically, not physically

⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, but like, latency-wise, farther from the other 128, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what non-uniform memory access means. It means that you have some pool of memory that’s quote-unquote close to you that you can get

⏹️ ▶️ John at fast, and there’s some other pool of memory that’s far away. When you had traditional multiprocessor

⏹️ ▶️ John chips, instead you’d have two CPUs, you’d have one pool of memory that they both accessed that they were essentially both

⏹️ ▶️ John uniformly far from, right? Memory architecture having the RAM really close to the system on a chip

⏹️ ▶️ John is great and gives incredible memory bandwidth But if you put two M1 ultras in there Now half

⏹️ ▶️ John your RAM is really fast and half your RAM is less fast now Maybe they have a cool new interconnect that is

⏹️ ▶️ John Different than the one that we’re gonna talk about in a second for the M1 ultra that it connects the two

⏹️ ▶️ John M1 ultras So it’s not that bad and the distant RAM is not that bad and it just looks like one pool of memory

⏹️ ▶️ John You know just like the M1 ultra does we don’t know we still have to wait for that Mac Pro, but it is mysterious and

⏹️ ▶️ John intriguing and slightly concerning to me. We’ll get to that maybe at the end when I talk about the possibilities

⏹️ ▶️ John for Mac Pro stuff. But in the meantime, let’s look at the M1 Ultra and what they actually did do

⏹️ ▶️ John by I keep trying. I keep trying so hard for this whole section not to say they took two M1 Maxes

⏹️ ▶️ John and put them butt to butt because it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco movie reference and I don’t want to do it and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s unseemly, but they really did. So Casey, please save me. It’s okay. Butts are funny.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I remember and I will be the first time the world’s worst memory, but I swear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that when you were working on your chip diagrams that eventually made it onto shirts and now we don’t know what we’re going to do about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shirts yet, but should wait should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we just make pants.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I have somebody suggested

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a onesie raincoats

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah there’s all sorts of ideas

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know each leg is an m1 max and you know not that long they just join in the middle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shorts then we should make shorts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yeah that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely it what do you call it when you have the tails on your coat isn’t their name for that other than tail.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John called Coattails. Yeah, Fanboats and Coattails. There

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you go.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John The title.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I remember, I swear to you, I remember that you were working on these diagrams and you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were looking closely at the diagrams that Apple had showed and like the scans that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they had showed and you had said to us, I could swear that it was John that had said

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to us, there’s this section off at the bottom or left or right or wherever it was that they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never really explained. What is this about? And I swear we talked about this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point on some show. We did, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t like I discovered it. Everyone was talking about it. In fact, on the very last episode, I just mentioned casually

⏹️ ▶️ John offhand, and of course, there’s the chip interconnect. So it becomes so accepted as like, you know, accepted

⏹️ ▶️ John wisdom based on the shots that there was some kind of interchip interconnect. That was sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of an open secret, you know. But yeah, we did talk about that back when the original diagrams came

⏹️ ▶️ John out. We still don’t have the mystery solved of why the execution units were repeated and whether they were trying to hide the internet

⏹️ ▶️ John or whether they just have redundant stuff. You know, we don’t know all the answers. But anyway, this is not a shock. What they actually did was not a shock. They have

⏹️ ▶️ John two M1 Maxes and what do they call the thing? Ultra Fusion?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s a die to die interconnect.

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like they’ve used the word fusion like one too many times.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, I mean, words

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have stopped having all meaning when the Max is not the biggest chip.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s Maximilian. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just his name. All right. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so Srouji says the Ultra Fusion architecture uses a silicon interposer that has twice the connection density

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of any technology available. It connects over 10,000 signals and provides an enormous 2.5 terabytes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey per second of low-latency inter-processor bandwidth between the two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dies using very little power. That’s more than four times the bandwidth of the leading multi-chip connector technology.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The result is an SoC with blazing performance due to low latency, massive bandwidth, and incredible power efficiency. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thanks to the magic of the UltraFusion architecture, it behaves like a single chip

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to software and preserves the benefits of unified memory. This is cool stuff. It really, really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the big advantage, in particular for the GPU stuff, because typically like dual GPU things, like

⏹️ ▶️ John the games would have to be aware of it or whatever. So even though this is, it’s two M1 Maxes

⏹️ ▶️ John shoved together, they’re shoved together and sort of connected in such a way that you can just think of it as

⏹️ ▶️ John one giant chip. Again, there’s no way that you could economically make Jade 4c die and apparently making a Jade

⏹️ ▶️ John 2c die is also not particularly economical So they made them separate and they just take the good ones and they stick them together

⏹️ ▶️ John With this interconnecting technology and I believe we had someone write in With I think was the first time you know, whatever was

⏹️ ▶️ John six months eight months ago The first time I saw the word silicon interposer And here it is coming back up again

⏹️ ▶️ John Because we were discussing like how you could when we talk about city of chips how you can connect all this stuff together

⏹️ ▶️ John If you if you have them as separate dies how do you get them into one package so that they talk to each

⏹️ ▶️ John other in a high efficiency way? And this was, this kind of technology was one of the options so lo and behold, here it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is things that people don’t need to know about but it just goes to show that Apple is not immune from the economics

⏹️ ▶️ John of making Silicon chips. They have just found very clever ways to maximize performance

⏹️ ▶️ John while not breaking the bank.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so the M1 Ultra can have up to 128 gigs of unified memory, a 20 core CPU

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 16 high-performance and four high-efficiency cores, a 64-core GPU, a 32-core neural

⏹️ ▶️ Casey engine, 800 gigs a second of memory bandwidth, which according to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is 10 times the latest PC desktop chip. This thing sounds like it is going to scream.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as the owner of a mid-range M1 Max, I can tell you, I don’t exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long for power today. I cannot fathom what this is gonna be like.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s Jade 2C die. Here it is. All the specs are the same. We’ll get to the more interesting parts

⏹️ ▶️ John of the, again, the economics of this product. But if you get one where all the parts work,

⏹️ ▶️ John you get 2X the parts that you would get in an M1 Max. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs more or less scale linearly like you would expect. And the multi-core scales according to your workloads.

⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re continuing along on track, despite the fact that Apple essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John totally derailed the train at the start of this by saying this is the last M1 chip. We don’t know what that means.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So then we had a testimonial, which normally I wouldn’t call out, but I did enjoy that it was all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey women during that testimonial. And this was released, I should say, on International Women’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Day, That’s pretty cool.

Mac Studio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then, speaking of women, we had a friend of other shows, and not ours,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Colleen Avielli. Colleen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the product manager of the Mac Studio. She’s a friend of ours. I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey declare that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. Never met her, never talked to her. She’s a friend of ours.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, if only there was an episode where we discussed who is and is not a friend. But I guess she is a friend of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ours, whether or not we’re a friend of hers, or maybe, did I get that backwards? You know what I’m saying. One way or the other. It’s a single-

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco this like a mob thing? Yeah, I don’t know. a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John linked list. It’s a it’s a link. Not a not a not a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doubly linked list. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, moving on. So Colleen Novielli introduces the Mac Studio.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There were some rumblings in the days leading up to the event that studio was going to play a role

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this and there’s going to be a product or products announced. Honestly, I don’t even care about the Mac Studio. Can we talk about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next thing they talked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John there. We’ll get there. Let me

⏹️ ▶️ John let me start on the Mac Studio. First, I want to say that it’s a shame that we once again, like just missed the last minute rumors.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, this is, you know, it’s hard to pick the right day for the podcast. I think we still have the right one because we tend to go after events.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it seems like like whenever there’s going to be an event we have, we do record an episode and then the late breaking rumors

⏹️ ▶️ John come out and all late breaking rumors were like studio studio studio. So if you know, if you listen to

⏹️ ▶️ John listen to last episode you’d be like, wow, these guys got things totally wrong. But the thing is, by the time the event came,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you had read the rumors, a lot of this stuff leaked out. And obviously we’ve been talking about this for over

⏹️ ▶️ John a year like the rumor I think was also or from German, the quote unquote half size Mac Pro. And then eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John in the week leading up to we got the the tall Mac Mini. They’re going to do a tall Mac Mini is a tall Mac Mini. The same

⏹️ ▶️ John thing as the half size Mac Pro. All sorts of late breaking stuff. All extremely

⏹️ ▶️ John accurate. And, you know, before we start talking about the reality of the machine, I just want to say

⏹️ ▶️ John that I think a tall Mac Mini is not attractive.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John sorry. I’m sorry, Mac Studio.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not. I agree. Like when they were doing that video where they were showing it like in everyone’s workspaces

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right after the introduction of it I I think it kind of looks bad sitting under a monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not great like and I I am so happy that this computer is what it is in so many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other ways But I do agree. It is not attractive

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not I’m not slamming it. I’m saying like this is not a beauty contest like like Marco was saying I don’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ John care that you’ve made the most beautiful object. I care what’s inside It’s what’s inside that counts and also

⏹️ ▶️ John the ports to get to it. Both of those things, just like people. That

⏹️ ▶️ John was, all right, Marlon will appreciate that one. Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I really do think that there is a certain something missing

⏹️ ▶️ John from the design of this product. Now part of it, granted, part of it is because the Mac Mini has been a product for so long and we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John become so accustomed to it. But to that I will say the Mac Mini has gone through many iterations of

⏹️ ▶️ John its rounded rectangle extrusion form and almost all the iterations have looked progressively nicer

⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe it’s because they’ve gotten lower and wider like the sports car thing You make a car lower and wider people find

⏹️ ▶️ John it more attractive, right? So the Mac mini has gotten lower and wider and I think it’s look cooler and this reverse that trench

⏹️ ▶️ John by taking it lower and Wider and saying now you are a top hat It’s just like there’s no, and I

⏹️ ▶️ John know

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they pointed out like, that it’s made of one thing

⏹️ ▶️ John of aluminum. I’m sure it’s gonna be solid as a bank vault. I’m sure it’s going to fulfill its function well. Like I’m not saying this is

⏹️ ▶️ John a bad computer design and I’m not just saying

⏹️ ▶️ John that my Mac Pro is prettier, although it absolutely is, for a bazillion times the price and half the speed. But anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t forget the power consumption. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah, yeah. This is not a particularly

⏹️ ▶️ John attractive computer I kind of wish that they had made it a little

⏹️ ▶️ John bit nice. That’s it. I don’t want to slam it too much. That’s just my personal opinion. I think it gets the job done.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing is, it is small. It is not big. It’s not going to dominate your desk. So I think it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I completely agree with you. And I feel like part of the problem I have with it is that the front of it has so much just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dead space on it. As tacky as I would normally find this to be, I almost

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wonder if, what do you call, is it embossed that’s on the bottom of these laptops, the new laptops where it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John goes on? No, no, no, just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like studio on the front of their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in Boston. Oh, come on. At least it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would, at least it would break up all that dead space. How about RGB lighting?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. That makes everything better. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hear

⏹️ ▶️ John about a series of really complicated holes that people can’t figure out how to make.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. All the trip to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phobia people really messes them up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right, right, right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I gotta say when we started this episode almost an hour ago, I did not expect that by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the midway point, maybe we would be wearing top hats and have coattails

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and be getting on airboats. Like, this is a journey

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that I was not prepared for. The Max

⏹️ ▶️ John Studio has a five head. What?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A

⏹️ ▶️ John what? A five head. Wasn’t that a Seinfeld episode?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think so. It’s like a forehead,

⏹️ ▶️ John but taller. It’s a five head.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that would be, like, you know, edited out, like, you know, the cutting room

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John floor of the Seinfeld writers room.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not making this up. Five head is a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All right, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey moving on, moving on, moving on. So this is the Max Studio. You know, I I gotta say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not buy one of these. And if this had come out before

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 14-inch MacBook Pro, which by the way, still freaking love, I would have been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really tempted by this, even despite the relatively hefty price tag, which we’ll get to, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m living a pretty good life right now and I don’t wanna mess with my system. And honestly, I don’t long

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for power right now. Remind me of this in like a year when they come out with an M2 and I must have it. but sitting here now,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t long for power. And as much as I am so genuinely excited about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this machine, in so many ways, they did exactly what I slash we want.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is what you were saying earlier, Marco, they didn’t do what they wanted, largely. They did what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want and what you want and what we want. And that is so exciting. And this is the same thing we saw with the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptops. They were giving us our ports back. They’re giving us things that help us do our jobs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine this, a bicycle for the mind that helps you actually do your friggin’ job.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, how exciting is this? We’re back and better than ever, baby. So I did not buy one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these. Marco, how many have you bought?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just last week, I said I have been very happy with my desktop laptop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and separate laptop situation. Although I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have to format

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and repave the laptop laptop because I got some weird stuff going on. Like, it doesn’t get,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, I don’t know, sidetrack. I have to reboot it for FaceTime calls to come

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get alerted. It’s as if it’s in Do Not Disturb, but it isn’t. Anyway, I don’t know what that’s about. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta format and reinstall it. There’s a couple other weird things about that installation. I don’t know how it happened, it was clean. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, but I was just saying last week how my desktop laptop, I was super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy with this setup. I too have chosen not to buy the Mac Studio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stunned! Well because here’s you know in a world, in a world, where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the laptops were what they were a few years ago. Hot, compromised,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco loud, you know desktops could outperform them you know pretty well for the kind of tasks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was doing. You know the laptops a few years ago sucked. The laptops now don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re really great and what you were just saying a few minutes ago how you’re not really hurting for performance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of the time I’m not either and in most of the ways that I would be hurting for performance I’m not even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure how much more of the same CPU cores would help at this point because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m usually not waiting on all my cores to do something anymore. Like the M1 Max is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome. Like I really am not hurting for performance most of the time and again and I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I were to buy like you know the M1 Ultra Max Studio I think it it would drop my build

⏹️ ▶️ Marco times by maybe 30% at most, but they’re already so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco short that I’m not sure that that’s worth the downside of not having it be a laptop anymore. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the MacBook Pro seems to suffer from almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of the shortcomings that laptops used to suffer from, I would actually be losing functionality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by going to a desktop right now, because I do still go back and forth between a couple of places

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a regular basis. I do still very occasionally travel, although I haven’t been on an airplane in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of years. But it is really nice to be able to just take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my laptop, my desktop laptop with me, and to have all my files as a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop when I do travel. But then, you know, but to not be constantly unplugging it and plugging

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like as my only portable thing. Anyway, so I really do love

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the desktop laptop lifestyle. And the other factor that will play into this significantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the latter part of the show, is that I already have the XDR. I kind of already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made this ridiculous setup, and I love it, and anything I would change about it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with what’s available right now, I think would make it worse in some way that I care about,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco without making it better enough to make the change worthwhile. Now that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said, if I was still on an Intel Mac, and I was looking to get a new desktop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup, you know, maybe I’d make a different decision.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hypothetically.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Suppose I had bought a very, very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey large, very large, very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive, cost more than my first car, Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Just hypothetically.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just hypothetically. This would be a really compelling option. Especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I wasn’t really using what makes the Mac Pro currently differentiated,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like card slots. You know, like, I think this would be very compelling.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But right now, my personal needs don’t really have a role for this, but that being said,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am so happy this exists. And because, I’ve seen a number of reactions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this. Kind of themes to the reactions. Some of the themes immediately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about half the people who I saw react to the price of the Mac Studio, we’ll talk about the monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco later, the price of the Mac Studio, about half the people were like, yeah that’s about right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the other half were like, oh my god, $4,000 for the big one! And then,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, people even freaking out about $2,000 for the like base model, and it’s like, you know, we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been waiting for a reasonably priced pro-level performance Mac desktop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time. The last time a reasonably priced pro-level

⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance Mac desktop existed was I believe the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2006 Mac Pro where there was a configuration you could get for like $1800 or $2000

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that was more than a decade ago and so to have this come out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be that level of performance, the base model I’m talking about first, that level

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of performance with just the M1 Macs in a very you know port covered well-cooled

⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop for 2,000 bucks in today’s dollars? That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good. Now I understand that PC hardware is cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you get what you pay for right now. PC hardware right now sucks. And Mac hardware right now is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good. So, good for you on your PC. By the way, I own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco PCs. Actually, I just bought, I had to replace Adam’s desktop, or Adam’s gaming laptop. It’s really having problems now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m pretty sure blue screening when I plug in an HDMI cable, it’s probably not a software problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so that’s sort of another day. But so I say this as a PC owner, right? We now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own four PCs. Oh my gosh. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a multi-Mac owner, obviously over time, PC hardware, you’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you pay for with a lot of that stuff or less. And this hardware, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the base model alone here, the base model of $2,000 for an M1 Max, 32 gigs of RAM, 512 gig SSD,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s an awesome machine for what is a very reasonable price for what it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. And so, and if you are balking at that, wanting like, I want the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco X Mac, an expendable tower made of component parts, that look, that doesn’t exist, and this shows you that will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never exist, but the role that we all always wanted the X Mac to fill,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, what to Apple was mid-priced, but to many of us was high priced. Like, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a Mac Pro until 2008. In 2006, I couldn’t afford one yet. Like, it was $2,000. I couldn’t afford $2,000 in 2006.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was so upset in 2008 when it came out, when the next one came out and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like 2,800 for the configuration that was reasonable. But now it’s, you know, 12 years later, 14,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, I can’t do math, 14 years later, to be $2,000 for what this base model offers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then to have some headroom on that, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want or need more than that, you can spec it up, four grand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the highest CPU, or almost highest CPU, I guess there’s the extra GPU

⏹️ ▶️ Marco model for an extra thousand bucks, whatever, but most people don’t need that. Four grand for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the highest CPU option, basically, 64 gigs RAM, one terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSD, that’s really good. If I look back at how I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco configured my iMacs over the years, where back when I was using those as my desktops,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco configuring an iMac really high to this level of performance or to these capacities

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is usually more than this. And yes, this doesn’t have a screen, we’ll get to that in a few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes. But even when you factor in the price of the future discussed screen,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is actually pretty much in line with where things have been for quite some time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you consider what you’re actually getting, again, compare spec for spec, and consider inflation,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think these are very, very well positioned. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think what you’re getting for the price is very good, and it is right in line with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we would expect Apple to charge for such a thing, without being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco super outrageous on that scale. So thumbs up for me. I’m not buying one yet,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but thumbs up for me regardless.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a couple of points here. First of all, I would like to publicly acknowledge your restraint because this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John multi-day… Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s only been a couple

⏹️ ▶️ John of days. Give

⏹️ ▶️ Casey him

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a minute.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For Marco, that’s… I mean, Marco’s usually measured in minutes, not days.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, this is… No, he’s

⏹️ ▶️ John had this

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing

⏹️ ▶️ John where

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey he

⏹️ ▶️ John has kind of like a delay period where he thinks about it and tries not to give in, but we’ll see how long this

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco lasts. Yeah, fair enough. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Kramer walks in, I’m out. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it’s like… Yeah, right. Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and the other thing I wanted to point out is you’ve changed… you’ve introduced a little bit bit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of new thought technology for me. So, um, I, one of the things that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac studio and the, and I’m jumping ahead ever so slightly, the apparent death

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the 27 inch iMac is that it leaves a hole in the lineup. And I think that hole

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is there, but it’s not quite as big or wide, if you will, as I thought it was, because I’m thinking back to my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac pro, which I loved so much. I really did, but I believe in this was somewhat my own choice,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, because of the spec I bought, but I think I paid like $7,500 for that thing or something like that, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the number was, it was ridiculous. And for the Mac studio with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M1 ultra and the, I don’t know, this thing I’m excited to talk about in a minute,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the studio display, you know, you’re looking at what a little less than $6,000. I mean, I’m not trying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say the $6,000 isn’t a crap ton of money. It absolutely is a crap ton of money,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this is not an unprecedented price point for the performance that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting. And I think you’re right, Marco. I didn’t really think of it that way. But this is the compute

⏹️ ▶️ Casey component of an iMac Pro in spirit, if you look at it in the right light.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And yeah, I mean, you look back, the iMac Pros that I’ve bought over the years, usually they cost so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much I wouldn’t even want to discuss it in public. I’ve usually, well over $5,000 for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in almost every case. I think my most expensive might might have been like 6800 or something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the, when I got the four terabyte SSD back when that was fairly new. That’s what you get a lot for that. But you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, going back to this, again, we’ll talk about the display. But you know, the display being, in my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco opinion, only, and we’ll get to that too, $1,700 or whatever. Is it 1,600 or 1,700 or whatever it is? You know, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the price of the, of the like, you know, M1 Max, not the super big CPU. So like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco base model Max Studio plus Max Studio display, you’re looking at like $3,700.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s actually really not bad when you look at the price of what a 27-inch iMac specced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this level actually cost.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and the iMac Pro started at five grand, didn’t it? Or am I making that up?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. But it came in space gray. I mean, let’s be

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fair. Well, that is actually a genuinely

⏹️ ▶️ John good point. That makes it tremendously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster. Well, it makes it better looking. Should’ve had racing stripes or maybe a little fin on the back.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, easy, big fella,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John easy. You

⏹️ ▶️ John two have made a mockery of my show notes here. Let me try to get this back on track. Sorry, Dad.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was going to say in the preflight, I meant to say, but I totally forgot in the preflight that we should talk about what we did and didn’t buy and

⏹️ ▶️ John say that to the end. But you two didn’t do that, but I’m going to do that. So you’ll have to wait till the end to hear what’s going on over here

⏹️ ▶️ John in

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey terms of purchases.

⏹️ ▶️ John So one tidbit about the the Mac Studio, if you get it with the M1 Ultra, it’s two pounds heavier

⏹️ ▶️ John because they use a copper heatsink instead of aluminum. I like the fact that the Verge article that got a quote from

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple about this, giving the explanation. explanation by the way um it has a copper heat sink

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic i was wondering like if they just gave you like half of a heat sink like you got like you know the left half

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right because

⏹️ ▶️ John remember that the the uh you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know

⏹️ ▶️ John well yeah we’ll see when they crack these things open but the the whoever authored the verge

⏹️ ▶️ John article they did the work they did the due diligence they got the quote from apple that said it’s you know it’s because of a larger

⏹️ ▶️ John you know copper heat sink whatever uh and then they said at room temperature this is the verge article

⏹️ ▶️ John at room temperature copper Copper is 8.96 grams per cubic centimeter, whereas aluminum is 2.70 grams.

⏹️ ▶️ John That means

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that the design

⏹️ ▶️ John of the heatsink is exactly the same. The copper version would be over three times heavier than the aluminum one. Yay.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yay, physics and chemistry. You make me make mine with the tungsten heatsink. I wanna see how that feels. So that’s cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just to get to what this machine actually has on it. It’s got on the back of it, so much, just so

⏹️ ▶️ John many ports, just the best, all the ports.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m so happy. When they’re going

⏹️ ▶️ John from left to right and panning across them and, sorry, not panning. Sorry, sorry, Todd. when they were doing a tracking

⏹️ ▶️ John shot

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco going across the ports in the back.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got four Thunderbolt ports,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Wait, what’s the difference? Is panning like your feet are still, but the camera moves, whereas tracking your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feet

⏹️ ▶️ John move? Panning is you have the camera on a tripod and you twist it on the tripod. Right. And tracking is you

⏹️ ▶️ John have the camera on a set of wheels and you move it in parallel with the, you know. It’s like moving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus strafing in a first-person shooter.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, looking versus strafing. Yeah, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re moving forward and back, that’s dollying, right? And then tracking is- I don’t have the diagram in front of me, Casey. Don’t quiz me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John looking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it. I’m looking for it. Here it is. Here it is. All right. We’ll put in the show notes. I’m so sorry, Todd. I apologize on behalf of all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us. We are all a mess.

⏹️ ▶️ John Send the joke one that has the, what is it, the director’s version, not the director’s, or the-

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Camera movement guide versus client camera movement guide.

⏹️ ▶️ John There you go, client. That wasn’t director, because that would be the director’s noticing, but clients don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not getting sidetracked. 10 gig ethernet. That shows that it’s a pro computer,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s pro computers have 10 gig ethernet. Two USB-A, yay! Like, I know people,

⏹️ ▶️ John who cares, it’s USB-A or whatever, but that shows that like, they could have left those out. It’s weird, they’re not super pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John Johnny Ive would have left them out, but you’ve got room on the back of the computer. USB-A doesn’t take that much bandwidth.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got these monster chips in there. Just put some USB-A ports and you know what? It’s got them. Love it. Two of

⏹️ ▶️ John them, not just one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we still use them. Like, I still, you know, every desktop that’s out there, you probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have at least one thing you’re gonna plug into USB-A. Like for me, I plug my keyboard dongle into that. Like everyone has stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and again, you’ve got room on the back. It’s not a big computer, it’s not huge, it’s mini-ish, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco got it there, so put it in. It’s got

⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI for the same reason. Who wants HDMI? Isn’t everyone gonna have a fancy monitor? No, maybe you have an HDMI monitor,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine. Put the port there.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Or what if you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanna run it headless for some reason and you need one of those silly little dongles, like I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John have a My Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Mini. The pro audio jack for high impedance headphones, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because make the good version of everything. And then it’s got ports on the front, which no Mac mini has ever had before

⏹️ ▶️ John because apparently people didn’t sit in front of their Mac minis. Let’s not start this again.

⏹️ ▶️ John It says ports in the front. It’s got two USB-C,

⏹️ ▶️ John but if you get the Ultra, those front ports become Thunderbolt 4 because there’s just so many freaking Thunderbolt, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John controllers inside the system on chips. The front ones can be Thunderbolt as well. So

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s six Thunderbolt 4 ports on the Ultra, I guess. That’s what you get when you throw two Maxes

⏹️ ▶️ John in there, I guess. And then SD card. The only real disappointment in terms of the slots is the SD card

⏹️ ▶️ John I think is still not one of the faster SD card standard things. Again, it’s an obvious

⏹️ ▶️ John update, just like we talked about in the MacBook Pros. Maybe on a $4,000 computer, put in a better

⏹️ ▶️ John card reader, but you know, whatever. You can always attach one to it, attach one to one of the USB-A ports maybe if it’s fast enough.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, that’s all great. And they brag about what you can connect to. You can connect four Pro Display XDRs

⏹️ ▶️ John to it, plus a 4K TV. It’s kind of interesting that you can’t connect six Pro Display XDRs,

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s got six Thunderbolt 4 ports, but I guess they run out of bandwidth eventually, but no one’s going to have that set up because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also, you know, they did mention, you breezed by it a second ago, that the front ports

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not Thunderbolt. They’re only USB 3 if you have the M1 Max instead of the M1 Ultra, because I guess you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need the additional Thunderbolt controllers on the M1 Ultra to make them Thunderbolt. So maybe they’re just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, not worth, you know, like, I wonder if maybe the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 Ultra versions do actually support six displays and they just didn’t wanna say that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid confusion? I don’t know, maybe not.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’d be weird having monitors connected to the front of your computer though. Yeah, that would be weird. I mean- You could just rotate it sideways

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything’s coming out of the side. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco very symmetrical.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so they did a bunch of bragging about performance. I mean, the M1 Max is the M1 Max. Like it is what it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t say it was clocked higher than it was in the MacBook Pro, but conceivably it could be. And, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John so this is a small-ish computer, but it is a five head and it is taller than a Mac mini.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think a single M1 Max in there, even overclocked, there’s gonna be cooling

⏹️ ▶️ John to spare. Like they emphasize how quiet it is and so on and so forth, but just remember an M1 Max fits

⏹️ ▶️ John in a laptop. And now it’s in a case that’s not only bigger than a laptop, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John way bigger than a laptop. There’s so much room in there for the fans and the blowers and the heat sinks. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John if you get an M1 Max version of a Mac Studio, it will essentially be silent. Like I don’t see why it wouldn’t be,

⏹️ ▶️ John because it is just over-provisioned for cooling. Because it’s got to have, in that same size case,

⏹️ ▶️ John they have to be able to cool twice as much CPU heat, or system-on-a-chip heat,

⏹️ ▶️ John because the Ultra is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2x that. Yeah, I mean, I would even say the Ultra, with its better heat sink,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might even be quieter under moderate loads. Obviously, the Ultra will be able to go higher

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and generate more heat, so that the ceiling of how loud the Ultra can get is probably higher than the ceiling of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Max, but it might even be quieter. But I just I loved I loved when they when they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco briefly showed like the like the cutaway diagram of this case And they showed they were showing the big blower fans

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you could see like about half of the height of the case is just those big fan more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than half Yeah, it’s it’s a huge proportion of the height is just cooling. That’s amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They do not want to be painted into a thermal corner ever ever ever

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of thermal corners, I feel like this case design it’s a little bit odd in terms of,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a lot of people are comparing it like, oh, it’s like the G4 Cube. Oh no, actually it’s like the trash can. But

⏹️ ▶️ John both of those two computers had a more straightforward and sensible cooling strategy,

⏹️ ▶️ John which was cold air in the bottom, hot air out the top. This one does not do that. There are no holes in the top

⏹️ ▶️ John of this computer. It’s like a Mac mini up top there, right? It’s a single piece of aluminum, right? So this does cool air from the bottom,

⏹️ ▶️ John hot air out the back,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is not bad. I mean, at least you can’t put a piece of paper on top to make it shut down.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s fine. Like I’m sure it’s fine. I’m not saying this is bad cooling, but like part of the trash can design,

⏹️ ▶️ John it was just like totally embraced the idea of hot air rises, cool air comes in the bottom of this thing and it vents out, that’s why it looks like a

⏹️ ▶️ John trash can. Right? And so it was, and the Cube embraced it in a different way by

⏹️ ▶️ John not having any fans and using convection, which maybe wasn’t the best idea, but still it made

⏹️ ▶️ John sense. And this one makes like the weird fan designs that are in there are because they do want

⏹️ ▶️ John to do sort of the right angle thing. I’m going to, you know, cool. And they could have done what the Mac Pro does. Cool air in the front, hot

⏹️ ▶️ John air out the back. Also very common, used in server racks all the time. You get the hot aisle and the cool aisle, just like the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John DLT, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they didn’t do that either. So it’s cool. Well done. I love the Mac DLT. I know it’s lots of styrofoam.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was a very wasteful product. I really liked it when I was a kid. Oh my God. Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Cool air in the bottom, hot air out the back. And that seems like it’s kind of to serve, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s practicality because then you can put things on top of this, although don’t put any chocolate on top. I think it might melt.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, you know, just harder to block the vents because the back’s going to have the cable

⏹️ ▶️ John so you can’t push anything up against it and you can’t really block the bottom unless it’s on a shag carpet or something. But if they had

⏹️ ▶️ John done cool air in the front, hot air out the back, it could have been more efficient cooling. If they had done cool air in the bottom,

⏹️ ▶️ John hot air out the top, it would be more efficient in cooling. But for whatever reason, this is what they went with. And again, if it

⏹️ ▶️ John was aesthetically beautiful to my eyes, I’d be more willing to forgive it. But now I think it’s homely and also it has a slightly awkward

⏹️ ▶️ John cooling thing that, you know, it’s probably not, probably not gonna make difference. again, especially with just an M1 Max in there, it’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ John so silent. And to Marco’s point, if you provision it with twice the cooling for the M1 Ultra, but then you don’t stress

⏹️ ▶️ John the Ultra, that might even be quieter. So I don’t fear that these are going to be noisy machines,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it is interesting to note what they’ve done. And also the stylistic choice to make very, very tiny holes,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s kind of going, it’s the opposite of the Mac Pro, instead of this huge, giant 3D holes. It’s very,

⏹️ ▶️ John very tiny holes. Lots and lots of it. They think it’s like 2000 of them or something, which is interesting, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, cat hair, dander, dust, like the smaller the holes, the more it could potentially clog.

⏹️ ▶️ John So fingers crossed that this cooling setup, this slightly unorthodox cooling

⏹️ ▶️ John setup doesn’t cause any problems.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was actually a little bit concerned that like because the intake is right up against the desk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco surface and it has all these little tiny holes, like I do think dust down there is gonna be a little bit of a thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but probably not enough to matter. Don’t put it on a carpet, please.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, obviously, or a cat. Yeah, and so then they did the M1 Ultra benchmarks And

⏹️ ▶️ John of course, in the M1 Ultra benchmarks in the GPU, it scales essentially linearly because it’s an embarrassingly parallel

⏹️ ▶️ John problem. So you just take M1 max numbers and you multiply them by two and that is real, that’s not like a fake thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And CPUs, it’ll scale with your load. You’ve got twice as many of each kind of core. And if you have a

⏹️ ▶️ John workload that can actually parallelize across them, it will take advantage of them. If you don’t, it absolutely will not. So be aware

⏹️ ▶️ John of what your workloads are and whether you can actually take advantage of that number of cores. And of course,

⏹️ ▶️ John because they’ve got the two of them there, the bandwidth doubles is like what, 800 gigs a second

⏹️ ▶️ John or something on the M1 Ultra instead of 400 on the Max because it’s two of them. Hey, makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ John They brag about their 8K ProRes because they have like dedicated hardware for ProRes

⏹️ ▶️ John video on the M1 Max and now they’ve got twice as much. So this thing can do 18 streams of

⏹️ ▶️ John 8K ProRes 422 video, which no other machine can do. That’s, but what the M,

⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about this with the MacBook Pros, like that Apple designs its chips to do the jobs that thinks people want to do with its computers,

⏹️ ▶️ John which unfortunately for some of us is not play games or many of the other applications

⏹️ ▶️ John we might want to use GPU for, but for Apple’s customers, it’s doing video work, it’s doing machine learning with a neural

⏹️ ▶️ John engine and all that stuff, and that’s where these things excel. And the M1 Ultra is 2x that. In some respects, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like boring to talk about because what’s new? You just

⏹️ ▶️ John double the thing that we already knew about. But if you can use double the thing we already knew about, this is like having two computers

⏹️ ▶️ John in one. You know you can get your job done twice as fast because now you’ve got to access much stuff. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John great Marco touched on this before but let’s just put a pin in this the X Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John angle What the heck is the X Mac way back in the day and back in? 2005 ish I wrote an article and when I wrote this article

⏹️ ▶️ John in 2005 at Ars Technica It was already an old thing so the X Mac as far as I was able

⏹️ ▶️ John to determine in 2005 And I’m certainly not gonna do any better today Was a term

⏹️ ▶️ John that we came up with and I say we because I was there too in the Ars Technica forums, they used to have

⏹️ ▶️ John like web forums on their website, I think they still do in the Mac section, and we would just argue

⏹️ ▶️ John with each other about Mac stuff and yell at PC people and stuff. And we would talk about the

⏹️ ▶️ John idea of an X Mac. For this article, I tried to find out where this term came from, I found the oldest post

⏹️ ▶️ John in the forum that referenced X Mac, but it was already using the term like we all knew what it was. So I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John help. But I think I am as well positioned as anybody on the entire planet

⏹️ ▶️ John to tell you what the definition of X Mac is at this point, because we’re all old and none of us really remember and

⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t figure out back then. And by the way, no one corrected me and gave feedback and said, oh, I know where it came from. None of us remember,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s lost to the mists of time. Or as they would say in the Lord of the Rings movie only, I believe,

⏹️ ▶️ John none now live who remember it. The X Mac is a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John that people who hang out at Ars Technica would like to buy because it lets them

⏹️ ▶️ John configure and upgrade the parts that they care about, right? And it’s, you know, so it’s like, it’s not a Mac Pro because

⏹️ ▶️ John that would let everyone do that. But you know, who has Mac Pro money, right? All right, it’s not a Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s also not something that’s completely un-upgradable or consumer thing or whatever. It’s something

⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle. And what do people back then care about? I wanna get a Mac where I can, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John change the RAM, upgrade the storage, maybe even change the CPU,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the Apple would say, we’ve got one of those. Look, here it is. It’s a Power Mac, it’s a Mac Pro, it’s a whatever. we have this like no,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t want to pay a bazillion dollars and I don’t need it to be gigantic. I just want a desktop

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac no screen built in and I want to be able to do those things with it. Like just basically a

⏹️ ▶️ John tech enthusiast computer, right? Not a professional giant workstation thing. Not an

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac where everything’s all built in not an X serve and a server rack. Just make me an X Mac. That’s what the

⏹️ ▶️ John X Mac was. That’s what everybody wanted. It was a product like that. When the Mac Mini came out, there was much debate

⏹️ ▶️ John is the Mac mini the X Mac. And based on that definition, I gave you I think you can say that not

⏹️ ▶️ John really like it was a Mac without a screen that was lower priced. And you could

⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade back in the day, the RAM on it and the storage. But that’s about it. There

⏹️ ▶️ John was no GPU to speak of at all, especially back in the early days of the Mac mini with the you know, Intel integrated graphics

⏹️ ▶️ John and crap like that you couldn’t add a better GPU before the days of e GPU. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it was just it was just a little bit too small, right? It was like, Well, it’s not really the X-Maxx, but it’s better than nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it certainly is inexpensive. The first one was like 500 bucks or something. Those days are long gone, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So there was always the need for the X-Maxx was still there. Is the Mac Studio the

⏹️ ▶️ John X-Maxx? Well, here’s the funny thing. If you have this thing like the X-Maxx that has been

⏹️ ▶️ John circulating in a community for 10, 15 years as an as an object of obsession, Apple never seems

⏹️ ▶️ John to make the computer that me, the weird tech nerd wants. They won’t. They just won’t make a product for me. And you’d say,

⏹️ ▶️ John I know I’m not a big market, but like tech nerds want what they want. They were just so excited for

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to make that. If you have that in your mind for so long, eventually the world moves on.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is getting to what Marco was saying before. At this point, it’s not that

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, Apple’s never gonna make this for us, or they keep cruelly keeping it from us. At this point,

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that we can’t have upgradable RAM, for example, in any of the Macs

⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re talking about, the arm backs, right? We get

⏹️ ▶️ John huge benefit for that. Apple’s not doing it just to be mean. Not being able to upgrade the RAM is

⏹️ ▶️ John bad. That’s the con. On the pro side, the memory is really, really

⏹️ ▶️ John fast and makes

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco everything faster, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And huge memory bandwidth, low memory latency, it makes the computers better. It’s lower

⏹️ ▶️ John power in the laptops, right? It is less configurable, it is less flexible. And we’ll talk more about

⏹️ ▶️ John that we talk about configuring the Mac Studio. It has cons, but it also has pros.

⏹️ ▶️ John What about the GPU? Oh, certainly in this Mac Studio size box, they could probably fit a half-size GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John in there or have an upgradable card. No, the GPU is integrated into the system on a chip. Well, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John terrible. Integrated graphics suck, right? I want an X Mac. I want to be able to buy an Nvidia GPU and stick it in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying the world has totally moved on from that, but in many ways, Apple, you know, didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John give that to us. Con, you can’t change your GPU, upgrade your GPU. Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John the GPUs are really fast and low power. Amazing performance without huge

⏹️ ▶️ John amounts of fan noise. And that doesn’t just benefit laptops because it lets you put tons

⏹️ ▶️ John and tons of cores into small desktops like this without having them sound like hair dryers, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John It may be that the time of the X Mac is moving, we’ve moved past the time of the X Mac, that it

⏹️ ▶️ John should no longer be an object of desire as I’ve defined it because the ability to

⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade your CPU, GPU, storage and stuff like that, you’re basically describing a tower computer and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John makes one of those. And yes, it’s a whole jillion dollars, right? And we’re back to the whole thing of like, but that’s what Apple makes. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is never going to make you a cheap PC, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John There was a window of time where Apple could have made a small computer with one PCI slot or one AGP slot or

⏹️ ▶️ John one whatever slot with a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco video card and a good CPU. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John there was a time when Apple could have made that computer. It would have had upgradable storage, it would have had upgradable RAM, it

⏹️ ▶️ John could have even had upgradable CPU, and you could put the GPU that you wanted into it, and it would be half the size

⏹️ ▶️ John of a Mac Pro, and it would have cost less than a Mac Pro. But I feel like the window is rapidly closing on

⏹️ ▶️ John that machine even making sense for Apple, because the way Apple is building Macs precludes

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the things that we said we wanted to be able to upgrade. And it gets rid of them, not

⏹️ ▶️ John punitively, it gets rid of them in exchange for benefits that even tech nerds will appreciate.

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco is appreciating the fact that his computer is fast and silent. It’s not just silent, but dog

⏹️ ▶️ John slow, right? It’s it’s silent and also very fast. It’s faster than his old, noisier computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, he can’t upgrade these things in it. He can’t do technology things or whatever. But I think the window is rapidly closing

⏹️ ▶️ John on the X Mac. I’m not going to have a funeral for the X Mac. Like, in theory, Apple could have still made one. But I

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like the way Apple has decided to build future Macs really closes

⏹️ ▶️ John the door on the X Mac. And I’m not, I’m not really sad to

⏹️ ▶️ John see it go there again. Caveats will give me to get to the configuration part of it, because I think the benefits we’re getting from

⏹️ ▶️ John it are worth it. And like, you don’t want to get stuck in the idea of like, well, you know, if a car doesn’t have a carburetor, it’s not a real

⏹️ ▶️ John car. Like you have to embrace the march of technology. And the march of technology is that

⏹️ ▶️ John the advantages offered by a system on a chip are so huge for almost everything

⏹️ ▶️ John that anybody does with a Mac computer that there’s no reason to hold on to the past. You

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t say a computer has to have a separate CPU, a separate North Bridge and a South Bridge,

⏹️ ▶️ John and separate PCI slots and Thunderbolt controllers. And like, that was the way we used to build computers,

⏹️ ▶️ John but things get consolidated. And I think the way Macs are built now and the way modern

⏹️ ▶️ John PCs are built is better than the old ways, in enough ways for it to be worthwhile, at least

⏹️ ▶️ John for me. So is the Mac Studio an X Mac? No, it is not. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s the way things are going. and I think it

⏹️ ▶️ John is better for most people who want an X-Mac, it is mostly better. But now we have

⏹️ ▶️ John to start talking about the bad news and start talking about pricing. I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know Marco was just- Honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s that bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John so you went through the pricing before and how it seems reasonable, right? But Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John is really embracing its role as the Porsche of computers, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because the base models are all pretty reasonable, right? But when you

⏹️ ▶️ John start doing options, and we moan about this all the time, but it’s really hammering it home with the Mac Studio,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, especially as it relates to the 27-inch iMac, which we’ll talk more about in a bit, the options

⏹️ ▶️ John really, really do hurt on this thing. So let’s look at the CPU options. The base one is 24-core,

⏹️ ▶️ John so you get an M1 Max with a bunch of stuff broken in it. What’s the M1 Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s same. 16. Is it the same CPU cores,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or is it you actually lose

⏹️ ▶️ John that as well? I can’t keep it straight. We can’t keep, there’s too many numbers because they list like the neural engine cores and like you’d have to look,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just always 16 per, right? 16, anyway. The base of one is 10

⏹️ ▶️ John core CPU, 24 core GPU. So stuff is broken in the GPU, but I think that’s all the CPU core is working.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Right? Eight and two,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Yeah, it’s always the same CPU cores, but the GPU cores are variable.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and so if you want to bump that up to an M1 Max with nothing broken in it, you know, 10 core

⏹️ ▶️ John CPU, 32 core GPU is 200 bucks. You’re like, all right, that’s not bad or whatever. You wanna go to the ultra, it’s plus 1400 bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now you’re granted, you’re getting two of them, right? So it makes some sense, right? But still that

⏹️ ▶️ John one really hurts, right? Because we know, like we talked about, it’s like the system on a chip, they’re expensive,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re not 1400, you know, $1400 each. They’re just not. Like they don’t cost Apple $800 to build either. They absolutely don’t, right? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just, that’s a lot of money. And then, and that’s the one-

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to be fair, there is going to be additional cost in all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other stuff around it. You know, you have all the different other parts that are required to have two dies.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have the interconnect, you have to have two dies that both have the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco interconnect part of their silicon working. There is a lot of other stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes it probably not $1400 expensive. I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big margins that maybe maybe 50% you know, but at this point, I think that’s given

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is and how specialized it is. I think that’s fair.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the one with the 48 core GPU. So so you got a bunch of GPU cores broken. And then when you upgrade to the one without

⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU cores, this really hurts an extra 1000 to go from 48 to 64 GPU cores. That’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John really gouging the people who want the best of the best, right? Because that’s the same.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s fair. Now all the parts work

⏹️ ▶️ John extra 1000. So that hurt. But Whatever, that’s the top end. All right, RAM. This is where, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the big cons of the system on a chip thing. You get massive, super fast RAM that’s shared between CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John and GPU, which again has pros and cons. You know, con, you don’t get your separate pools, you have to have less of it. Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s way faster for the CPU and GPU to interoperate, which is important for a lot of Apple’s applications, right? But the other

⏹️ ▶️ John bad thing about this is that, obviously the RAM is unchangeable, it’s also tied

⏹️ ▶️ John to your CPU choice. So you can’t get a Mac Studio with the cheap CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John and max RAM. You just can’t because the base is 32. If you want to go to 64, it’s plus 400 bucks,

⏹️ ▶️ John which seems a little bit obscene, but whatever. If you want to go to 128, it’s plus 1200 bucks, which really hurts, but by the way, you have to

⏹️ ▶️ John get one of the ultras because if you look at where the RAM is, it’s around basically the

⏹️ ▶️ John Jade C dies. And the only way to get 128 is to get two Jade C dies,

⏹️ ▶️ John each of which has 64 around it for a total of 128. So you lose flexibility due to their system design.

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t get. I just want lots of RAM for applications, but I don’t need tons

⏹️ ▶️ John of course. It’s just not possible anymore. And that RAM costs a lot because like in what universe is

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, going from 32 gigs of RAM to 128 adding 1200 bucks granted. This is fancy RAM

⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s not regular RAM. It’s fancy RAM is used to the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John but all that it just really starts to hurt you on the price and in storage. This I think is the

⏹️ ▶️ John is the most objectionable because it has nothing to do with any particular advantage that Apple has like this is not all the system on

⏹️ ▶️ John chip stuff. That’s all Apple magic. We love it. It’s awesome, it’s great, it makes fast stuff, it’s low power, right? Their storage

⏹️ ▶️ John is just storage. They’re just buying it from a third party. Their storage controllers are probably great, but this is just flash

⏹️ ▶️ John storage. The base is 512, which is, yeah, all right, fine. Terabyte is plus 200,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you could probably get a terabyte flash drive straight out for 200 bucks, not going from 512 to a terabyte. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John in all fairness, that’s worse

⏹️ ▶️ Marco flash when you do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John It depends, like, we’ll have to see what the speeds are. Anyway, going up to two terabytes, plus 600 bucks. Like it goes the

⏹️ ▶️ John opposite of the way you would think, like you get economies of scale. No, it’s, you know, four terabyte plus 1200 still, still plus 1200

⏹️ ▶️ John for the four terabyte. You’re just talking about how much it used to be. It used to be more than that, but that really hurts.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then eight terabyte, obviously plus 2400. Like those prices are not connected

⏹️ ▶️ John with reality. Like you could look at the vendor that Apple is using for their flash and see what the real prices are.

⏹️ ▶️ John And just the margins as you go up and the options things really kick. At least the storage is not tied to

⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU because it doesn’t have to be. So again, Apple’s not doing this to be punitive. It’s part of the system design,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it is a downside of this. So, and I would say most of this doesn’t matter that

⏹️ ▶️ John much because like, well, that’s how they’re all priced. Look at the Mac Pro prices. It’s the same way, right? These are the high-end computers.

⏹️ ▶️ John But where I think it hurts is because of the 27-inch iMac going away. I spent the whole last show saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, when the new big iMac comes out, I’m gonna get that for my wife, right? Hey, no new big iMac, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Surprise, at least not yet. But now given these prices, what Casey was just talking

⏹️ ▶️ John about, of like, if I buy a Mac Studio plus the display, here’s what the price is, and that’s less than what my iMac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro was, but it is not less than what a 27-inch iMac is. So Dan Morin

⏹️ ▶️ John beat me to the punch with this, and he’s a fast writer. Got an article on Six Colors about the missing rear-range

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac desktop. If you do the price range of Apple’s desktop line, there is a hole in the middle

⏹️ ▶️ John between essentially the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio, because the cheapest Mac Studio

⏹️ ▶️ John is, Like there’s a gap where basically a 27 inch iMac should be. Just in

⏹️ ▶️ John terms of pricing, forget about like built-in screen, not built-in screen or whatever. It’s not a

⏹️ ▶️ John big gap and you could argue Apple doesn’t need to fill that gap, but I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s an obvious 27 inch iMac can go there. And the good thing that the Mac Studio does is it makes it so that 27

⏹️ ▶️ John inch iMac can go there. It can be straight up a 24 inch iMac with a 27 inch screen. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even change the internals, right? because if you want it all on one computer, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you want it at the price that’s gonna fit between those two items, like the Mac Studio lets

⏹️ ▶️ John you say, oh, but I want something faster. Well, great, Apple makes that for you, but I don’t want a big Mac Pro. Well, great, Apple makes that for you. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio, it’s right there. Like, I don’t even think they need to make like an iMac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John or a thicker, faster, or a 27-inch iMac with a M1 Ultra in it.

⏹️ ▶️ John You could just straight up take the 24-inch iMac, colors and all, everything about it, scale that sucker up to 27 inch,

⏹️ ▶️ John slide it right into there. You could also do many variations of having, you know, an M1

⏹️ ▶️ John Max inside it or not having it be in colors and calling it the iMac Pro and Apple may still do that. A lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of people were getting hung up on the idea of like at the end of the thing where they said, what did they say?

⏹️ ▶️ John I got the quote in here. Making our transition nearly complete with just one

⏹️ ▶️ John more product to go, Mac Pro, but that’s for another day, right? But that doesn’t preclude 27 inch

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac at all because they’ve already transitioned the iMac to ARM. I think it does. They just didn’t make a 27 inch version. So

⏹️ ▶️ John the door is absolutely open for a 27 inch computer. And the reason I think they need something to go in there

⏹️ ▶️ John is because as you start specking out the Mac Studio to be kind of the way you want it, it’s clear that this is

⏹️ ▶️ John a product for people who really do need the extra power offered by it. Whereas if all you want

⏹️ ▶️ John is a 27 inch, you know, a 5K display, but you need a little bit more than the Mac mini,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re kind of stuck. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just make a beefier Mac mini, problem solved.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they could, but they didn’t do that either.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean, this is not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey beefier Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mini. Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, so I think we, you know, there is, there was already a rumor today from German

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how like they are apparently working on a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac mini update using, I think the M2 was the current rumor now. It seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the rumors are now kind of converging on there being a collection of M2 Macs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming out like between June and fall, like something in

⏹️ ▶️ John that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco range.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s true. I mean, the M2 MacBook Air is in there, and once you’ve got that M2 chip, that should spread to all the places

⏹️ ▶️ John the M1

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, right? Right, and if you look, you know, performance-wise, the M1 is totally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine for both low-end and for mid-range needs. I mean, again, I used M1s full-time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of this past, you know, time. The RAM limits

⏹️ ▶️ John on the M1, though, that’s where it really hurts you. And to some degree, it’s tied to the system on a chip,

⏹️ ▶️ John but in other ways, it’s not, Like there’s no reason you couldn’t make an M1 with more RAM, they just haven’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, well, I mean, maybe it’s just, you know, however they spec the M1, however

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they pair it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, like M2-wise, it’s not like there’s not enough circuitry on the chip to address more memory or something

⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Like when they make the M2, they could make a different choice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, you know, M1’s limited to 16 gigs, and I don’t think you need to go to like 64 or 128, I think 32 would be fine. Like for all these mid-range needs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 32 would be a totally fine RAM ceiling. But I honestly, I think the 27-inch iMac is dead,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think it’s coming back.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s why.

⏹️ ▶️ John So. I would almost put money on this thing coming back.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Great, how much? Maybe like probably a dollar. Okay, you got it. Maybe not this

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco year,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like it’s untenable for, put it this way, it’s untenable for Apple to keep the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ John at 24 inch for much longer. Like I understand why they made it this way because 24 inches actually,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve said this before about my sister, how we were trying to get a new computer and she was viscerally repelled

⏹️ ▶️ John by the idea of a screen as big as 27 inches, because people don’t want something dominating their household

⏹️ ▶️ John in that way, which is why I think the 24 inch iMac is so great, because it’s a nice big screen, but also it does not

⏹️ ▶️ John dominate your desk. Like it tries to be unobtrusive, but technology

⏹️ ▶️ John marches on. I mean, the original iMac had a 15 inch screen and it didn’t stay that way forever. Eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac screen is going to be larger than 24 inches, and when it does, the 27 inch iMac will come back. That’s all I’m saying.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying that tomorrow there’s gonna be a 27 inch iMac despite this hole in the lineup or whatever. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just the 24, like it went up from 21. The low end IMAC used to be 21, so they made 24, which is a nice in between size

⏹️ ▶️ John and keep it. But eventually, two or three years from now, they’re gonna be like, 24, really? Everyone else is

⏹️ ▶️ John so much bigger, and they’ll work their way back up to 27, and 5K.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You really just infinite time scaled us on this?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s not infinite, I’m gonna say it. It’s totally infinite

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey time scaled us. I’m gonna say

⏹️ ▶️ John within like, within three years, there’ll be a 27 inch IMAC.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You really just finite time scaled us on this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, that’s the bet. Three years from now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we’ll bet it’s up a dollar. my $1 bet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, see, I don’t think it’s coming back because, so first of all,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hole in the lineup, it is there, but it’s largely only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there because a 24-inch iMac starts out so low-specced. Again, if you spec things up, you actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t spec up a 24-inch iMac to be anywhere near the base model Mac Studio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the display. Like, it’s pretty far from the RAM. Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mean, CPU,

⏹️ ▶️ John RAM, GPU, everything about it can’t get close to the base Mac studio.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you get as close as you can, which you still only have half the RAM and, of course, the very different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco processor, it’s $2,000 almost, like for the 24-inch iMac. So that’s what I say with the space in line.

⏹️ ▶️ John Whenever you do space in line, you can’t look at the options. Because options destroy, again, like Porsche,

⏹️ ▶️ John options destroy any semblance of market segmentation. Because you can take the lowliest thing and then add all the options. You’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what the hell happened? I’m going to buy a 24-inch iMac for how

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco much money? I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John in some ways it’s a blessing you can’t add RAM to them because it keeps the price down.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t know how big the market for the 27-inch iMac in 2022 really is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure Apple has lots of sales data to suggest what they should do with this, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what Apple has done here, which probably reflects the market,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the market for large desktops with high-performance stuff in them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably very small. and that market probably tends towards

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who can afford and who want higher end gear. Now that isn’t everyone, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole X-Mac crowd, which as you mentioned, the X-Mac crowd is largely like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer nerds like us who know how to build our own computers and maybe have done that in the past or currently,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe it’s gamers who wanna put in gaming hardware and stuff like that. These markets exist,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think the market for people are buying Macs to do that, first of all,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then secondly, people who want to buy a large desktop display and a large

⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop computer in 2022, I think that’s mostly a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco – first of all, I think it’s a very small market, and I think it’s mostly a pro market, or it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the PC people who Apple’s never going to win over anyway and who wouldn’t want modern Macs to begin with because they can’t play any of these games anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the problem Apple has is that they sold a lot of 27 inch iMacs. Now, I don’t know how many they sold. Only Apple knows.

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s their biggest problem is that this was a product in their lineup. They sold it to a lot of people. And those

⏹️ ▶️ John people forget about anyone else that you’re ever attracting to the market. Those people have a difficult choice

⏹️ ▶️ John ahead of them because their choices go go up market and spend a lot more money or go

⏹️ ▶️ John down in screen size to the 24. Now, maybe Apple is correctly calculating. Like I said, that more people are like my sister and

⏹️ ▶️ John really don’t want that 27 inch thing dominating their space. and a 24 that’s like very thin

⏹️ ▶️ John and it comes in pretty colors. They’ll take that and they won’t even notice the screen is smaller. But I’m I have

⏹️ ▶️ John a hard time believing that I know a lot of people who really love their 27 inch iMacs. Those are existing customers. Someday

⏹️ ▶️ John their computers will get old. They’ll want to replace them. And that’s the that’s I feel like that’s the part where the whole new lineup will

⏹️ ▶️ John will hurt Apple the most existing 27 inch iMac customers. I mean, we’re replacing

⏹️ ▶️ John potentially no spoilers. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in 2015, 27 inch iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s not just like how many they sold last year. These things last for a really long time

⏹️ ▶️ John because your needs aren’t demanding. And it’s just the screen size, right? That’s all it comes down to. It’s not as if people

⏹️ ▶️ John are saying, oh, I need something faster or whatever. They just say, really? The only

⏹️ ▶️ John way I can get a screen that’s even just, people expect technology to march on that the screens get bigger

⏹️ ▶️ John or have better color or have HDR or have high refresh. Say, really? Just to match the

⏹️ ▶️ John screen that I’ve had since 2015, I have to spend how much more money for this Mac Studio thing that I don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ John want I think is ugly, right? That’s their problem is they just they sold a lot of 27 inch

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac. So I think they will address that problem eventually, hopefully within the next three years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The new 27 inch iMac is a studio display,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and either a Mac Mini or Mac Studio, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s what they want people to do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and I can tell you as somebody who has owned many 27 inch iMacs, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the way to go, you know, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John better for us, but It’s not better for people who don’t care about computers. They just want a big screen and they want it to be an all-in-one. They do

⏹️ ▶️ John not want more boxes and wires.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not so convinced you’re right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a lot of those people would go with either first of all, a laptop, which is the real answer for most people,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re gonna go for the 24-inch iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ John But they have an existing 27-inch thing. It’s an all-in-one computer with very few cables with a 27-inch

⏹️ ▶️ John screen. And they don’t wanna get a smaller screen, but they don’t want a separate box with a bunch of wires because they don’t care about

⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff. Like it is a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So wait, these people don’t care about computers, except they really care about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the size of their screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You know what it’s like when you get,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is the reason why we don’t wanna go, it’s the reason why Marco and I are spoiled now with our 6K, it’s the reason why

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t wanna go back to 4K screens, because once you get used to a bigger screen, you get used to it, and it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ John technology with everything, our televisions, our displays inside our cars, and yes, our computer monitors,

⏹️ ▶️ John they just get bigger over time, and we consider that the mark of progress, because we use the space up to a limit, obviously,

⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like 27 is not over that line. So many people have been used to that space. And if you get

⏹️ ▶️ John a computer where the screen is smaller, it’s gonna feel like somewhat of a downgrade. Now, again,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple may be right that it’ll feel like a downgrade, but people will get over it because they come in colors. That’s powerful. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not discounting that. I’m not saying that as a joke. That is a real thing. And those computers are even slimmer,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I think is something that people look for. The same reason they don’t want a Mac mini with a monitor is because

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want more crap on their desk. They like the fact that the iMac is just one thing. and the new iMac is even

⏹️ ▶️ John less of a thing. It’s so thin and it comes in colors and it looks nice. And like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a big miscalculation, it’s not a big miss, but I feel like it’s something that Apple should

⏹️ ▶️ John address either by just taking the iMac 24 inch and replacing it with a 27 inch of the

⏹️ ▶️ John exact same computer. Like not adding it, not having a 24 and a 27, because I agree, having a 24 and 27 seems weird, but I feel like people who are used

⏹️ ▶️ John to 27 inches aren’t going to want to downgrade and they shouldn’t have to. and they shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John also have to suddenly become a computer nerd and have a bunch of boxes with wires. As someone who has owned many 2017 Gimacs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem I always had, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even, I got the opportunity, I ran into Craig Federighi at an event at WDC a few years back,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was right around the time I was complaining a lot about the display and Mac Pro situation,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knew? Did he tell you to drive it over to his house? And we got to talking, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, He knew that I was very vocal about my opinions on such things. I forget the full context

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, but the one thing I told him was, the one thing I don’t like about this setup is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the monitor and the computer are glued together. And so, when I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a problem with either the computer or the monitor, I have to lose them both.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether that’s sending them in for service or eventually replacing them, you have these things that are bonded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco together. Now, the iMac display panel, that 27-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco panel that it seems to be very similar or the same as the studio display panel that they’re releasing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that monitor can last through many computer generations worth of hardware for a person. As

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long as the monitor doesn’t break, and they tend to last a pretty long time with no moving parts and stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they tend to be pretty long-lasting. And so, to be able to just have a monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you buy once, and then you have different computer guts that you can have on a totally separate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco schedule and then you have redundancy or easier service mechanics like that to me is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great I I have had to sell or decommission so many perfectly good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitors because the computer in them had broken or vice versa many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many monitors that there’s not many some monitors had problems that I had to get rid of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac because the monitor had problems and whereas this if you if you configure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the base model Mac Mini, the M1 base model Mac Mini. That’s 8 gigs, 512 gigs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1. That’s a great computer for so many needs. That, plus the new studio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco display, is $2,500. That’s your new 27-inch iMac. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John still more than the 27-inch iMac, and it’s a separate box. What you’re arguing for is obviously, we computer

⏹️ ▶️ John nerds, no, of course don’t put the monitor with the computer, because you need to be able to service them and upgrade them separately,

⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s totally a computer The way regular people deal with the fact that you’ve got this monitor and the computer becomes obsolete

⏹️ ▶️ John is they don’t care like I have A seven-year-old iMac back there and that it’s like oh, but then

⏹️ ▶️ John I this monitor should be able to use across multiple generations They do use them across multiple generations. They never upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ John they take a 2017 2015 5k iMac and they just use it they’re gonna use it for 12 years Because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine for them because that what they want that’s why Apple still sells the iMac that some people don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John care about about upgrading components separately, don’t care about servicing them, they don’t care about wedging them together for reliability,

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t care about e-waste, they don’t care. Most people just want like if they want a desktop computer

⏹️ ▶️ John at all, which is rare to begin with, but if they want that, they probably want a big screen and they just sit

⏹️ ▶️ John there and they use it until something goes wrong with it that makes them have to get another one. They’re not listening to this podcast and they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John care about the separate stuff. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re you’re you’re you’re showing off your history with Apple computers because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t think of anyone who has an all-in-one PC. That’s all one PC

⏹️ ▶️ Casey suck. No, but John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all people want,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all people want is a one piece solution with one cable and nothing else. Like if that were the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey case, then even if all one PCs were utter pieces of trash, which they were, then there would be more of

⏹️ ▶️ John them. And I can’t. People bought tons of all-in-one PCs back when the iMac was popular. You remember when everyone was copying the iMac and making all

⏹️ ▶️ John on computers, it’s just that they were

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco terrible. No, the PC

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones never

⏹️ ▶️ John sold. Nobody ever bought those. But they made tons of them because they were trying to cash

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in. They made them. No one bought them. I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John look to the PC market as a reflection of what people who buy Macs want. Like I said, the Apple sells a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John all in one iMacs. They sold a lot of 27 inch ones as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think they did sell a lot of 27 inch iMacs. Like I’m thinking of all the people that I know that have 27

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch iMacs. And I can’t think of anyone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that had or has a 27 inch iMac That wasn’t some sort of like creative

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or like a software professional. Yeah. I know, I know like my friend, Steve, who did the icon for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey masquerade, he has an iMac pro he does design for a living.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And keep in mind, keep in mind too, like a huge reason to buy the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco since like 2015 was that it was, well, when was the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco retina iMac was it 2014?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Somewhere around there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah. 2014.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the last eight years when the retina is that that was the only way to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get retina on the desktop for a very long time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, more importantly, to get a bigger screen than a laptop screen, because again, people who are

⏹️ ▶️ John buying a desktop computer probably want a screen that’s bigger. And, you know, the third party

⏹️ ▶️ John monitor market was terrible. But if you bought an iMac, you got a really nice screen. And by the way, a computer stuck to it as well. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it was just one thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and now, like, I bet a lot of those 27-inch iMacs that were sold over the last eight years,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself included, a lot of those people would have gone the separate route

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the studio display or equivalent existed. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, the computer nerds would have, but I think a lot of Photoshop people, for example, who just do art, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you think, oh, Photoshop, that needs a high-end computer. Not these days. If you’re doing 2D illustration work, a 5K iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ John you could still be using a 2015 5K iMac and using Photoshop every single day on it and you’d be perfectly fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the key feature that you want for it is I need a big screen for all my palettes and stuff, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need a pro computer. You don’t need to upgrade them separately. Like, you know, again,

⏹️ ▶️ John the 24 inch iMac exists because Apple still thinks there’s a market for people who want an all-in-one desktop computer with a larger screen. And all

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying is that does still exist and the extra three inches don’t invalidate that entire product.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand the words that are coming out of your mouth,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m team Marco on this. I really don’t think that the 27 will be coming back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in as an additional computer here to the 24. That

⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t the thing I was saying it could replace the 24 just because the screens need to get bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see that happening. It’s too big for a lot of the a lot of the cases where you want a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cute little desktop 27 would be too large. Imagine that like on a reception desk in an office. Like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of these are sold for places like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Look at the measurement, though, with a thin bezel, 27 inch iMac and the 20 in the current 24 inch design would probably be

⏹️ ▶️ John like half an inch bigger, half an inch wider and half an inch tall. Like we have to do the measurements because there are huge borders

⏹️ ▶️ John on the five K iMac size. You forget how big they are. I was just doing the measurements for the thing we’re going to get to in a second studio display.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s those those borders, the big black borders around the five K iMac. They make that

⏹️ ▶️ John machine much bigger than it is, which is, again, why I think that a 24-inch iMac design with a

⏹️ ▶️ John slightly larger screen, I think will inevitably happen. And if it happens within three years, I get a dollar from Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Either way, I really think that you are dramatically over-inflating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the market for a 27-inch iMac. Now, in the same way that I’m pooping on you for having

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no facts to back up your suppositions and your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John theories-

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, Apple won’t give us the sales numbers. If they tell us, we could just look it up. But we

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t know. I know, I know, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. No, it’s not your fault. for so many people, like people who genuinely don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey give a crap, they’ll buy the 24 inch iMac. For people that want a really nice monitor, they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be getting something that I’m so excited to talk about. And for people who want like their own spin

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on things, like I know a lot of people that a lot of, you know, nerds and PC

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people that don’t want to talk about anything that is less than like 30 inches and about 17 feet wide.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like three inches high and it looks like you’re looking at a gunslit of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, right. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand why people like this, but you do you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra wide

⏹️ ▶️ Casey curved. Seriously. No, I, that’s exactly it. And so I really, really am 150%

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the same boat as Marco here. Well, the boat that’s stuck in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sound or whatever it is. But, but no, I, I, I really think that Marco is right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I strongly agree that I think that there could be a place

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a 27 inch iMac. I’m not saying that that place is gone now, But I really think that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s already mostly filled by what we’ve got today. And I think that once we get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a slightly better equipped Mac mini, something that can perhaps have at least 32

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs of RAM or something along those lines, maybe with an M2, maybe just an M1 Max

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or an M1 Pro, whatever the permutation may be. Once the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mini can scale itself up just a touch, and then you’ve got the studio display,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really truly think that that is Apple’s intended solution for the former 27-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac buyer, or the former casual 27-inch iMac buyer.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, the casual 27-inch iMac buyer wants all-in-one more than they want a big screen. That’s why they’re gonna get the 24. The strongest argument

⏹️ ▶️ John you have is that anybody who wants a 27-inch all-in-one, wants an all-in-one more than they want the power, and

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just gonna go to the 24, and they’ll be happy because it’s colors. Like that’s insane. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, who are you talking to that insists on an all-in-one? Where are these

⏹️ ▶️ John three

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey people?

⏹️ ▶️ John People like all-in-ones. Talking to people, the people who buy an iMac

⏹️ ▶️ John are attracted to the idea that there’s less crap. And you’re like, how much crap is it? The Mac mini’s tiny, it’s like three

⏹️ ▶️ John cables, it’s not a big deal. They want it to just be a thing, you plop in your desk, that’s the whole computer. They

⏹️ ▶️ John want it to be like on TV and movies where people think the screen is the computer. When you shoot the screen, you’ve killed the computer. You know that’s a trope?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s a trope because

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how people think about it. They think the screen is the computer. With the iMac, that’s actually true. They don’t need a little

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac mini saucer puck thing that they don’t understand attached.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, but if people want an all-in-one computer, you know what they buy? A laptop, that’s what they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what they buy, John.

⏹️ ▶️ John People who are in the market for an iMac are already saying, I need something with a bigger screen than a laptop, right? They’re already

⏹️ ▶️ John moving themselves out of that market. They’re choosing to not buy a laptop. Obviously, most people buy laptops, we know that. But

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, someone in the chat room, Mike484, I don’t know if Mike484 worked at an Apple store, but says, I’m telling you guys, 2007, 2014

⏹️ ▶️ John in the Apple store, 27 inch iMac outsold all desktops. I don’t know if that’s true. We actually don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know the numbers. It would help if we did, but we’ll see. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you really want me to spend time on you, I’ll just go back to what I said before. It’s like screen sizes tend to go up over time. So the idea

⏹️ ▶️ John that the iMac is gonna stay at 24 is just as absurd as the idea that it was gonna stay at 21.5. It stayed at 21.5 for a long time,

⏹️ ▶️ John much longer than my three year window for the bet. Granted, but it didn’t stay at 21.5 forever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, the cheapest iMac became 24. And why? Because if you’re gonna buy an iMac, it probably means

⏹️ ▶️ John you want a bigger screen and screen sizes go up over time and no one’s gonna argue with a little bit more screen space

⏹️ ▶️ John up to a certain limit. Obviously, when we get into the 65 inch iMac, we’re getting a little bit silly,

⏹️ ▶️ John but people are buying 42 and 48 inch OLED televisions to game on, so strange are things that happen.

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Studio Display

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we please?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Can I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can it be my turn now,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John please?

⏹️ ▶️ John Can we stop talking about displays and talk about a display?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. So after much whining and moaning

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and complaining and fussing, I am happy to report that on behalf of everyone,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I alone have manifested The studio display.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are welcome. What WWDC thing did we do where you two idiots made

⏹️ ▶️ Casey us walk out to we are the champions? The Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s not we.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s not we.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m the champion, my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John friends. I am the champion. You’d be the champion if you had

⏹️ ▶️ John a studio display, but you don’t. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would have caused this to happen if you would have bought an XDR. Then it would have been your fault that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey happened. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey please. After all the whining I’ve been doing, I’m claiming this is a personal victory. So what do we got? We got a studio.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You’re still not gonna buy it. We’ll see. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy it. We’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All right We’ve got a studio

⏹️ ▶️ John display. If that LG 5k stops working again, I’m not sure he can bear to send it to City of Industry

⏹️ ▶️ John for one more.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we saw a view of City of Industry during this presentation. We saw so many cities

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and cities of chips. It was ridiculous. But anyway, So yeah, so we got a studio display. This is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey presented by Nicole Cordes. This is a 27 inch LG 5k that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t suck balls. That’s basically the summary.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few things that are important about what it’s not. Yeah, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the most interesting thing about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Yeah, it doesn’t support HDR, XDR, whatever. It doesn’t have micro LED. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high

⏹️ ▶️ John refresh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate either. Yeah, not high refresh. It’s just a 60 Hertz, 27 inch, 5k good screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not as good as the XDR or as big, but it also costs like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John fourth as much.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this is kind of interesting because we were talking about this before of like, well, the laptops, they have these amazing screens,

⏹️ ▶️ John 1600 nits or whatever, but of course they’re laptop size. But then we were going through the whole thing of like, well, let’s look at 27 inch screens

⏹️ ▶️ John that have like modern specs. And it was like, but they cost so much money. It’s like, well, but maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re cheaper now because the laptop screens are, you know, obviously not that expensive because the whole laptop isn’t that expensive, but

⏹️ ▶️ John also they’re smaller. So maybe, you know, panel tech has caught up and will be able to put out a 27 inch monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John that has good modern specs, but also is less than an XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I still don’t know whether that’s a thing that’s possible, but it’s not a thing that Apple did. And I think when we were talking about it, we were like, but would they

⏹️ ▶️ John make a 27 inch monitor that’s just the same as the 5K? Like, wouldn’t they try to make it better in some

⏹️ ▶️ John way? And as far as I can tell, the answer is no. It’s not better in any way that I can tell. It’s P3,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 60 Hertz, it’s 5K. Not that this is bad, it’s a good monitor, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John do they pass those savings on to you? Kind of.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what’s great about this, this is, again, like yeah, it doesn’t have all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that latest, greatest tech. It doesn’t need to. What this monitor needed to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty much exactly what it is. Like they nailed exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they needed to ship. Because people who want this monitor and who have wanted this monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for eight years. Hi. Yeah, hi. People who want this monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it to be significantly less expensive than the XDR. They want it to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be as similar as possible to what we’ve had in the aforementioned 27-inch iMac for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last 8 years. And they want it to be, you know, good Apple stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all integrated, not made by stupid LG, you know, good quality, looks nice, all that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they wanted it to be a reasonable price for what it is from Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, once the rumors started up, and we talked about this, you know, recently enough,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my guess for what the pricing on an Apple 27 inch standalone monitor in 2022 would be,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was, I was saying the, the least I expected it to be was like $1,800.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the highest plausible price that I think it might have been was $3,000. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come in at 1600, asterisk.

⏹️ ▶️ John But you were saying that it would have some modern specs either it would be high refresh or it’d be HDR or be mini

⏹️ ▶️ John LED or some some mixture of those. Still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for for today’s Apple to release a standalone 5k

⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor that’s good, again not super cutting-edge on those fronts, but good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for $1,600 is exactly what they needed to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m so happy they did it. This I mean look at Like, we thought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this event was gonna be fairly low key. We thought it was gonna, you know, until the rumors came out right after

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we published our show last week, we thought this event was gonna be like, yeah, a couple of new iPads,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new iPhone SE, you know, maybe some new watch bands. And then the big iMac would be the star. Even that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a maybe. And it turns out this event, like, settled so much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old business. To have this display in the lineup and for it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be what it is and what it costs, solves so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many problems for so many people. Yep. It’s such, this is so great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to even then get the quote mini Mac Pro that we’ve been expecting for a while,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we didn’t think that was ready yet. We didn’t think the mini Mac Pro or Jade 2C or 4C stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was coming out until later this year. So to have this all come out today,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just said last week that we heard the display rumors, but they didn’t seem like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was gonna be ready for any time soon. I was saying like six months to a year. And then after

⏹️ ▶️ John we recorded, everybody said, oh, actually the monitor’s ready. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we missed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that one again. But like- Excuse me, I said I thought it was gonna happen, thank you very much, and you two jerks said no way.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, because we had just been hearing the same rumors, but none of them ever had dates. It was like, they’re making a monitor, they’re making a monitor, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John got a A series chip in it, they’re making a monitor. It’s like, yeah, but when? And it’s like, oh, I don’t know, it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John come eventually probably.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but here it is. So it is here. And again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this fills an eight year hole in the lineup.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well put.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so great. And the fact, I mean, I’m still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of blown away. I still almost can’t believe, you know, it’s like we’ve been missing this for so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long. Like I almost can’t believe that it’s here finally, that people who want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 27 inch 5K Retina display for a Mac, Retina display

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a Mac, we actually finally have that. We actually have an external Retina display

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Macs that is the right DPI, that is anywhere close to the right DPI,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is less than $6,000 with its stand. Like that’s, that’s incredible. We’ve been missing this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for so long. It’s such a huge hole and it’s now filled. What was the first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Retina Mac? The 15 inch 2012 MacBook Pro. So it’s been 10 years, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because we didn’t have an Apple retina, external retina display until

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. We had an LG external retina display. There was a brief

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John window of time, and there was a Dell one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That doesn’t count because only weirdos buy that. It doesn’t count because only weirdos have too much money buy that. Hey, fellas.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, this is the first time in 10 years that we’ve had an external retina display

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by anyone other than LG, really. And this is extremely exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is a little disappointing in the sense that, yes, like HDR would have been nice from any LED or so on and so forth.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the, the LG 5k, when it was brand, brand new, I believe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was $1,500. Wasn’t it? Or thereabouts. It was something that ballpark. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have, I am, I waffle back and forth between an LG hater and an LG apologist,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey depending on the moment in which you catch me and whether or not my monitor happens to be working at that particular moment, but right now I’m on a happy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey swing. The LG ultra fine 5k is a sufficient monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco ripoff

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at $1,300 when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey working. It’s a ripoff at $1,300, whatever it is new. It was a hilarious ripoff at 16, $1,500,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever we just said it was. I thought it was $1,200 new, but I could be wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now it is. It’s in shouting,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s today,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in shouting distance of the price of this monitor. And that’s the thing that really makes this

⏹️ ▶️ John monitor look good is it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey complete lack of competition. Because if you compare

⏹️ ▶️ John it to the LG, like the two things that Mark didn’t mention, I really think put this monitor over the top. decent speakers

⏹️ ▶️ John by all accounts, which LG does not have.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, I can attest to this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Decent speakers and a camera. That makes it a system completer for people because who wants

⏹️ ▶️ John a monitor, I mean, oh, but I got to buy a webcam and I got to stick it on the top, but I got to do a thing. I just, it’s like when I have a laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ John because remember, this is not like, oh, this is the computer for the Mac studio. This is a monitor for all

⏹️ ▶️ John the laptops. Like, it’s like Mark was saying, this is not just a one single hole in the lineup. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John huge number of holes in the lineup filled by this thing. and it lets you have like the complete experience.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to add a camera, I don’t have to buy external speakers, I just plug whatever my Mac is

⏹️ ▶️ John with one cable into this thing and by the way, it’s 96 watts of charging, so it will charge everything. This is a system

⏹️ ▶️ John completer. That’s what this product is. And that’s why I think the most important things it has in it are actually the

⏹️ ▶️ John speakers and the camera, because that lets you not worry about, like it does all the things you

⏹️ ▶️ John need it to do. Like, because if you don’t care about HDR, don’t care about mini LED, you’re probably

⏹️ ▶️ John on Zoom calls and it’s nice to have a bit. And by the way, it’s a decent built-in camera. It’s not like, oh, it’s a, you know, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John the old one was, like the 1080P camera. It’s not bad. Like it’s a decent camera.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey With center stage. And good

⏹️ ▶️ John speakers. Yeah, and center stage. Like, so I really think they nailed this product

⏹️ ▶️ John with the obvious succession of the stand, which is some weird Johnny Ive hangover that I don’t quite understand. And we’ll talk about in a second,

⏹️ ▶️ John but forget about that. No one’s going to buy that except for dumb people like me. Maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, this product definitely fills the role and it does it, like it embarrasses the LG because like,

⏹️ ▶️ John would you pay an extra couple hundred bucks for Apple quality, better speakers,

⏹️ ▶️ John and a monitor, and by the way, it charges your laptop, and it’s got like, it’s like, stop, yes, I’ll totally pay that for this product.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, the value. Reliably. Right. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it doesn’t work, where do you go with it? Do you have to ship it to the city

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of frigging industry? No.

⏹️ ▶️ John Poor city of industry. It’s not their fault that LG, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their center there. Still, you don’t have to ship it to the city of industry. Like, they didn’t even have the common courtesy to be somewhere in the Midwest,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like other grown-up companies. Anyway, you don’t have to ship it anywhere, generally speaking. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just take it to the local Apple store. I know some of you don’t live near an Apple store, just bear with me here.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You take it to the local Apple store. For me, it’s like 10 minutes down the road, don’t be creepy. And then I can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get it repaired if I were to buy one, which I mean, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know. I forgot to mention the three mic thing, the noise, again, it’s just like, oh, who needs the mics or whatever? Because the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio doesn’t have a mic and the laptop mic is over there and maybe it’s clamshell. Wouldn’t it be great if the monitor had a mic? Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John it does, it does all the things. Like you just, you plug your computer in and now you have a system with a monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John that does all the monitor things that you expect a Mac monitor to do and you don’t have to worry about any of the crap. So

⏹️ ▶️ John this is great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for anybody for whom the price of this monitor seems absurd,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet most of those people would not be in the market for an Apple monitor at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, what are you cross shopping with? Oh, this is expensive. So show me the other Retina 5K monitor that you can use. Is

⏹️ ▶️ John it the LG? Well, we’ve talked about that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like if you want an inexpensive PC monitor that is totally, you know, not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right DPI range for either retina or non-retina use on a Mac, there’s lots of options

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that for like, you know, a few hundred bucks. Great, do that. This monitor is filling a hole in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lineup that many people have demanded, and it fills it exactly right at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly the right price for what we expected it to be. And that is, I’m so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy about that. Even with, like, and you know, if I were to get this, I would be the sucker who spent the extra

⏹️ ▶️ Marco few hundred bucks on the high adjustable stand because every Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor and iMac that I ever bought before, the stand was too low. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this continues that trend. And so I would always have some kind of like book or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of big metal something or other that I would stick it on top of. I had multiple

⏹️ ▶️ John books. I had like college textbooks that I carried with me from job to job whose sole role was to be beneath

⏹️ ▶️ John my Apple monitor to get it into the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right. Right, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so like, yeah, I would pay just a few hundred bucks for the tilt stand, even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, that makes it a $2,000 monitor, which is still roughly what I expected this monitor to cost.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I’m so happy, this finally, even though I’m not gonna buy one because I have the XDR now, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and which has ruined me forever, as John mentioned earlier, because now I want 6K forever, but still, this is so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great for so many people. This answers so many questions of like, okay, well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want a good Mac desktop situation, but I also want a laptop. Bingo, buy this, you’re done. Most of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are probably gonna be sold to people who have laptops. Like that’s great. Oh man, so, so happy.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like the kind of the realization of like the Thunderbolt display with the weird cat tail where you can charge your laptop or whatever. Like technology

⏹️ ▶️ John has gotten to the point where that is all solved as well. So this is, you know, this is totally solving now.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is Apple’s first non-ridiculous monitor. I was gonna say, it’s their first monitor. Again, we’re ignoring the XDR

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s ridiculous. There is room for more monitors if Apple ever

⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to make them. They can make a 4K version of this for people who wanna spend less money and don’t want as much space.

⏹️ ▶️ John Same features, slightly lower price, make it 4K. Like you were saying like, oh, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is too expensive or whatever. Well, get a PC 4K monitor. The problem with the PC 4K monitor is it won’t have a camera, won’t have decent

⏹️ ▶️ John speakers and won’t have microphones. You’re like, well, I can buy things and stick them on and now you’re screwing everything up, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So there is a market for a 4K. And there’s also a market for a more expensive version of this that has

⏹️ ▶️ John some of the modern stuff. Maybe it has HDR, maybe it has mini LED, maybe it has iRefresh. Pick whichever of those

⏹️ ▶️ John you think are important. It would obviously be more expensive, but there’s a lot of room between this sucker and the XDR for

⏹️ ▶️ John you to slot in a higher end one. So Apple could, in theory, have three external displays. Not

⏹️ ▶️ John today, baby steps. One is good, and they picked the right one to make. This is the one to make, 5K, right? Because

⏹️ ▶️ John if people wanted 4K, they could get that. You can get 4K, decent 4K monitors, and deal with the old

⏹️ ▶️ John peripherals. But if you wanted 5K, you were screwed and you were casey. You just had to be dealing

⏹️ ▶️ John with the LG. So this was absolutely the one to make. I really do hope that they start expanding this. The one thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John gives me a little bit of pause, again, not complaining about this product, it’s spec’d and priced and everything about it is right,

⏹️ ▶️ John but now that all the laptops have HDR, it kinda makes the desktop people feel like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, so if I wanna look at HDR stuff, my only choice is I gotta open up my laptop

⏹️ ▶️ John screen, which is amazing, or I have to get an XDR, which I’m never gonna get. HDR,

⏹️ ▶️ John the more I’ve dealt with the XDR, the more I think, I thought it was like, when I first got it, I’m like, I don’t even care

⏹️ ▶️ John what the HDR, I just want a 6K screen. But at this point, like every movie I take on my phone

⏹️ ▶️ John is HDR, the photos I take on my phones are HDR. It’s nice, that’s why, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I sit in front of my computer and I go through photos and videos, I see them in HDR, why? Because I have this stupid

⏹️ ▶️ John monitor that shows them that way. And if you have a Mac laptop, you get to see all that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if you have this thing, you won’t. And I know HDR doesn’t seem like a big deal, but Apple’s devices are

⏹️ ▶️ John producing HDR and most photos that most people make are gonna be produced by their phones and

⏹️ ▶️ John not by some weird camera thing. So I think HDR, if I had to pick one

⏹️ ▶️ John feature that like what is the version of this two years from now have or what is the higher end version of this have,

⏹️ ▶️ John HDR is what I pick, not high refresh and not mini LED because I feel like mini LED to get better blacks,

⏹️ ▶️ John blooming is a problem anyway, don’t worry about it. And high refresh, not a big deal, but we’re all

⏹️ ▶️ John producing HDR content, a laptop have HDR, that is the next obvious upgrade to this monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t want it to come with HDR now and be an extra thousand bucks. Absolutely not, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John This is the right product for, it’s overdue. This is an overdue product. It’s not the right time. The right time was three years ago,

⏹️ ▶️ John right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it was overdue

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco six years

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ago. I think 10, but okay, fine. It should be what

⏹️ ▶️ John it is, but I am now counting the years. I’m not gonna say counting the days. I’m counting the

⏹️ ▶️ John years for this product to get HDR because it really deserves it. And part of it is Apple’s fault for

⏹️ ▶️ John having such phenomenal laptop screens, because this really kind of like pins it in on both sides. And also, by

⏹️ ▶️ John the way, this makes me, this is, you know, always looking for reasons to make myself feel better about buying this stupid

⏹️ ▶️ John monitor. This makes me feel slightly better about the XDR because now I’m like, you know what?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to worry about the fact that it doesn’t have HDR because my stupid monitor has HDR and it only costs five times as much.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or whatever the hell it is. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I co-sign on all of that. Like I too, when I, you heard me say it here, when I bought the XDR,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t care about HDR. I was only buying it because it was a good retina large

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. That’s what I wanted. And I have since come to very much appreciate the HDR display and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly for the same reason. I’m not watching HDR movies like from studios and stuff on my, or producing them for that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter, on my computer. I’m viewing photos in photos that I take on my phone and viewing videos that I shoot on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone and their HDR. And it looks really cool. And it looks like I was there, which I was,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know. Anyway, so. This is why I talk unscripted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a living. But yeah, it is really nice. However, again, yeah, totally agree.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They shouldn’t have added it in the 27-inch if they couldn’t do it for this price yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they didn’t and so I assume they couldn’t and that’s great. And down the road, if they get to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco add that at some point, that’s great too. But getting this to be like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the, you know, 1600 range, that was of really, really what was what was needed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you know how Apple can actually do this, like obviously not this year or whatever, but like the way that

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to sort of solve this conundrum of, oh, if you want a really big monitor with HDR across $5000, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John The other choices HDR, but on a smaller monitor. Who is it? Dell has a QD.

⏹️ ▶️ John And we talked about in the past quantum dot OLED, they have a QD OLED screen. It’s not retina resolution,

⏹️ ▶️ John I believe, but it is small ish. I forget how big is the QD OLED Dell thing chat room, they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John look at it for us and it’s like maybe 30 something inches, like wide form factor or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is it the 8K one

⏹️ ▶️ John or that’s something else? No, no, but anyway, it is a computer monitor. It’s made for gaming, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s OLED, so true blacks, better than mini LED, you know, per pixel blacks, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Really great color, HDR, not 1600 nits, but still HDR, more than 500 nits. And it’s reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ John priced. It is, I think it’s like, the number starts

⏹️ ▶️ John with a one. It’s a four digit number starts with a one. It’s like 1300 1500 or something or whatever That shows

⏹️ ▶️ John that we are within shouting distance in a few years of grinding on QD OLED to be able to have

⏹️ ▶️ John a 5k QD OLED screen for not a huge amount of money because if they can do

⏹️ ▶️ John Like whatever this resolution is now, it’s is it $1300 whatever. It’s a 34 inch widescreen.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s non retina, right for 1300 bucks. This is a generation 1 QD OLED thing It makes

⏹️ ▶️ John me think that the the potential of a reasonably priced QD OLED like

⏹️ ▶️ John QD OLED everywhere across all of Apple’s products But especially on the desktop will solve this problem probably

⏹️ ▶️ John before we get to the point where Mini LED HDR is affordable that you can

⏹️ ▶️ John put it in a 5k retina res 1600 dollar display I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just so happy that this thing exists. I’m so incredibly happy The unfortunate thing about it though

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I already have a 5k monitor. That is really not that different from this one Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it depends on the day.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can sell that. You can say it’s brand, it’s refurbished. That

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is freshly refurbished. The

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco USB

⏹️ ▶️ John ports are as good as they’re ever going to be.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That is true. You could use both. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have like, you know, the dual display lifestyle, which I know you love.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, you know, it’s funny you bring that up because I do love the dual display lifestyle.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I like having my two displays, my 5K and my 4K. Marco, you said that there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was no chance I paid the money for this because I’m cheap. And John, do you have a vote?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, whether you already bought it? I so much hope that you did that I’m going to say yes, you did.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I hemmed and hawed because why would I pay $1,600, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as $2,000 for a monitor that is really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that different than what I have? However, I’ve paid the price

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this LG.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You pay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey day

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you use it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And I pay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey every day I use it, and I deserve a treat. So a friend was kind enough

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to offer me his Apple discount, which was very cool. And so I was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to acquire one at a slightly discounted number, and it will be here in a month.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nice. Which standard you get?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here’s the thing with the studio display.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You didn’t face

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount it, did you?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here’s the thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the studio display. I didn’t know what I wanted to do because I really do like the dual

⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitor lifestyle. I know it’s not for everyone, that’s fine, but I really do like the dual monitor lifestyle. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could swallow the 400 bucks for the height adjustable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stand. But right now I have a two up visa

⏹️ ▶️ Casey situation on my desk that’s actually working out pretty well. So I have my 4k to the right,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 5k ultra fine in front of me. And I actually really like this. And since I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to choose a purchase time, you cannot swap back and forth, I went with the VESA mount. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’m going to be happy with that. I sure hope I am, because this ship has sailed, but that’s what I did.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’ll be here sometime mid-April. And what I plan to do is put

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the LG 4K, which by the way, we were talking about this earlier, what are your options for a retina

⏹️ ▶️ Casey display? As I’ve said many times, this LG 4K is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a perfectly serviceable monitor if you’re not snooty. And I am not terribly snooty.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And if you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need it to be reliable or…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No, no, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. The 4K, the SLG 4K is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco very reliable. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 4K. Yeah. The 4K is very reliable. The 4K also shakes when you type though, doesn’t it? Ah, no, that stand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was better. Not stellar, but it was better. But nevertheless, it doesn’t have a camera. It does have speakers,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they’re utter trash. They make the ultra-fine speakers, which are truly garbage, sound

⏹️ ▶️ Casey excellent. And so it’s not an all-in-one solution, but as an accessory monitor, it’s not bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyways, this LG 4K will be put to the side and maybe used as like a, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to work on the porch monitor because I’m turning into that guy. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I think what I’m going to do is I’m going to shimmy the 5K over to its spot, and it will be my access to the existing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K to that spot. And it will be my accessory monitor, and the new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey studio display will be my primary monitor. And that’s what I plan to do. And I am So excited and I can’t wait till mid-April.

⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s just talk about the Apple stand problem a little bit. I mean, if you look at it, it looks like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John similar to the XDR stand in terms of the mechanism, at least aesthetically speaking, similar kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ John rounded thing that comes out and whatever they have inside there for counterweighting and

⏹️ ▶️ John all this other stuff. And that stand, I mean, plus 400 for a stand,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not appropriate, Apple, go to your corner.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, in all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairness, that’s very similar to the pro stand that cost $1,000 by itself.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but like for the pro one, everything’s absurd up there. It’s ridiculous, it doesn’t make any sense. But when you, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is a $1,600 monitor, an adjustable stand, like if you

⏹️ ▶️ John wanna make it an optional extra, it shouldn’t be $400 extra. And the way you do that is don’t use the over-engineered one you made for the XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know that probably saves you some time. Hey, we don’t need to engineer it again, we’ve got one. But the problem is the one you engineered costs a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John money to make, and then you need to make your margins, and then you need to make margins on top of the margins, because every time you have

⏹️ ▶️ John options, That’s where you get all your margins from. And the final thing is what Marco said. This thing is too damn

⏹️ ▶️ John low. Apple’s monitors are just too low. When I was looking at this, cause again, I haven’t talked about what I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John buying, if anything yet, I was waiting for big iMac. I didn’t get a big iMac, but my wife

⏹️ ▶️ John does need a new computer. And I was like, oh, what about this stand? Let me look at what the, like the heights

⏹️ ▶️ John are on, you know, how big is the, how big is her, how high is her

⏹️ ▶️ John current iMac? And if I got the one that didn’t have the adjustable stand, If it’s just the height of her current iMac, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s fine. Well, there’s two problems. One, when I asked her about this, she said, her

⏹️ ▶️ John current iMac, she always felt it was a little bit low. So right away I have to say, okay, well, I don’t wanna match

⏹️ ▶️ John the height of our iMac because she feels like that’s low, I should get it higher. The problem is, if you get it with the regular

⏹️ ▶️ John stand, it is even lower than the current, than basically a 5K iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the non-adjustable stand is very low, kind of like it is in 24-inch iMac. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John the height my wife prefers it, and ergonomically speaking, where they say where your eye line should be on the monitor, all those things

⏹️ ▶️ John are very low. I kind of understand why Apple errs on the side of being lower, because higher feels more awkward than

⏹️ ▶️ John lower, because looking slightly down at something is much better, Casey, than looking slightly up at them, which is why you shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John put your TV over at the fireplace but that’s what they do. And then your only option is, well, adjustable

⏹️ ▶️ John stand or you can just put books under it, because books are way cheaper than $400. Well, maybe not. That actually, maybe not the textbooks

⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve been putting under it because there’s another whole other issue there, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So here are the things. The regular stand height, I think this is the top of the monitor, is 18.8 inches.

⏹️ ▶️ John For $400, you get adjustable height. And the adjustable height, the minimum adjustable

⏹️ ▶️ John height is 18.8 inches. So with the

⏹️ ▶️ John adjustable stand at its lowest position, that’s how high the non-adjustable stand is. The non-adjustable one is not

⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle of the range, it’s the bottom of the range, right? And the max height is 23 inches. And an iMac 27

⏹️ ▶️ John inch is 20.5 inches, but there’s that huge bezel on top of the thing. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John really like 19.5 inches to the pixels, right? So yeah, the non-adjustable one is

⏹️ ▶️ John low, be prepared for that. I haven’t seen anyone

⏹️ ▶️ John look this up, but could you stick the monitor on top of the Mac Studio or is the stand too big?

⏹️ ▶️ John Would it hang off the edges?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know the answer to that question. That might be awkward, but you can only just put books under it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also I think that would be too high then.

⏹️ ▶️ John Probably, but you never know. Like, anyway, I’m sure people will work something out. Apple never showed it in that arrangement.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it would be awkward and potentially dangerous and tippy in that arrangement. It might not fit at all, but just keep that in mind. The other

⏹️ ▶️ John thing to keep in mind is the stands are not interchangeable according to Apple. Apple’s little thing here

⏹️ ▶️ John says, note, each stand or mount adapter is built in. They are not interchangeable, so it’s important to consider

⏹️ ▶️ John your workspace needs at the time of purchase. So if you buy the adjustable one and you want the regular

⏹️ ▶️ John one, or you buy the regular one, the adjustable one or you want to switch to VESA, no go. Now that’s what Apple says.

⏹️ ▶️ John It could be when MacFixit gets this, they realize it’s something you can swap out and do or whatever, but

⏹️ ▶️ John just keep that in mind. And that’s, that’s, that’s part of the unfortunate thing of Apple’s weird stand problem

⏹️ ▶️ John is it makes you think about something you shouldn’t have to think about. If we just took it for granted that of course all Apple large

⏹️ ▶️ John display things for the desktop come with an adjustable stand because that’s ergonomically appropriate

⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple cares about about ergonomics, we should just take it for granted. And we shouldn’t have to worry about how Apple figures

⏹️ ▶️ John out how to engineer it or whatever. They would engineer the over-engineered one for the 6K and they would engineer

⏹️ ▶️ John a cheaper one for the other things. Keep in mind, they produced the, you know, the, what is it, the iMac G4

⏹️ ▶️ John with that amazing spring-loaded arm thing. That was in like a $1,700 computer and the thing was

⏹️ ▶️ John freaking amazing. It had like a million degrees of motion. You can move it with your fingertip. If they can do that, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no reason it should be at $400 to get a slightly height adjustable display on an

⏹️ ▶️ John otherwise well-priced monitor. So I hope Apple works that out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m just so excited this exists. I’m so excited to get mine. I am overjoyed that this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tremendous gaping hole in Apple’s product lineup has finally been plugged.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s not-

⏹️ ▶️ John One more thing to talk about with this product. The rumors were that it would have an A-series system on a chip

⏹️ ▶️ John inside it. We’re trying to figure out what the hell they would do with that. If it was a weird made up rumor, would

⏹️ ▶️ John they use the GPU to augment your GPU? things I threw in one of our slacks the previous day is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John when you don’t have a computer attached to it, it doubles an Apple TV, because why

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not?

⏹️ ▶️ John And it turns out they put an A13 in it, right? So the Apple TV 4K, Apple’s top end Apple TV,

⏹️ ▶️ John has an A12 in it. So this has a better system on a chip than the Apple TV. And it has a gorgeous screen attached to it.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no reason, technically speaking, why they couldn’t have just made this an Apple TV. Would that be dumb? I don’t know, but it’s there.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the question is, all right, so it’s got an A13 in it, what the hell is the A13 doing? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John like I was saying, whenever I was spinning out the rumors of this, like the simplest answer is probably that it

⏹️ ▶️ John runs the display. And why do they use an A-series chip for that? Because Apple’s got a lot of A-series chips. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, they can probably make A13s pretty cheaply these days. Maybe they got a bunch of them hanging around.

⏹️ ▶️ John Rather than custom designing a chip for, just for this display, the A13 is a fully,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Turing complete tiny computer that you can make do whatever the hell you want it to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so I think what is the A13 doing inside there? Well, probably mostly twiddling its thumbs, honestly.

⏹️ ▶️ John But when it’s not twiddling its thumbs, it runs the camera, runs the speakers, does spatial audio stuff, like

⏹️ ▶️ John handles like the USB, like who knows? Like it does all the things. It’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John again, would Apple have created the A13 for this monitor? Hell no. But if you’ve got the

⏹️ ▶️ John A13 already and it fits in the pricing thing, it’s probably a reasonable thing to chuck in there. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ John Philippe Esposito on Twitter had this tweet, which is potentially the grim

⏹️ ▶️ John future of this product, which says, I guess this is what happens when you put an A13 chip in a display

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s using PLUtil to dump a plist file from, I guess, a beta version of macOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in the plist file, it is a name value pair and the name is title

⏹️ ▶️ John panic display, and the value is, your display was restarted because of a problem. Oh no.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, when you’ve got a system on a chip in your display, like kind of like Marco’s car, You might have to

⏹️ ▶️ John reboot your display after it crashes. We hope not. And obviously there’s processors inside

⏹️ ▶️ John the XDR. There’s processors inside all these things. Apple didn’t make a big deal of it, but

⏹️ ▶️ John this is like the most overpowered display ever shipped. Because the A13, don’t forget, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs in the A13. There’s like the motion processor. It’s not like they can make a special custom version

⏹️ ▶️ John of the A13, it’s an A13. It’s got an image processor. Maybe they’re using that for the camera.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is the most overpowered display probably Apple has ever made and I

⏹️ ▶️ John hope that it opens the door for them because they fit into the price envelope of this thing right so the A13s are probably pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John cheap you know and it’s not a big chip to begin with it’s a phone chip not a Mac chip and all other stuff and it’s old all right

⏹️ ▶️ John there is the potential to do way more interesting stuff with this hey maybe face ID

⏹️ ▶️ John again we didn’t get face ID it’s not we understand face ID is not a thing on a Mac for reasons

⏹️ ▶️ John that are frustrating to me but you know again people who can really explain

⏹️ ▶️ John to me how expensive and annoying it is to deal with Face ID. I say it’s on iPads. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just… Anyway, if we get it eventually it’ll be great to be in the monitor. If we do, the A-series chip will

⏹️ ▶️ John already be in there. If they just do it as the status quo, like, it makes me wonder if the XDR replacement will also have

⏹️ ▶️ John an A-series chip in it just because, like, that’s how they’re building monitors now. Fine. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John okay with it. I just feel like there is a lot of wasted… not wasted. There’s a lot of potential that is not being

⏹️ ▶️ John used. It’s not wasted because they didn’t… it’s not like the price is jacked up because of the $30 A13 they had to stick inside the thing, or $15 or whatever it costs

⏹️ ▶️ John them now to make. I think it’s fine, but I am excited about

⏹️ ▶️ John the possibility of doing more interesting things with that. Primarily Face ID, but making

⏹️ ▶️ John it doubles in Apple TV. That sounds dumb, but you basically get it, I guess you need storage. You get

⏹️ ▶️ John it almost for free, right? Just a streaming Apple TV. It’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ John guess you need wifi at that point. I don’t know, I haven’t really thought it through, But anyway, there’s a lot of compute in this monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully they’ll figure out how to do something with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Real time followup from Jelly. The foot on the non-adjustable stand would fit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on top of the Mac Studio. So the Mac Studio is 7.7 inches square. The foot on the non-adjustable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stand is 6.6 inches. However, the adjustable stand is 8.1 inches. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey womp, womp.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the other thing about the adjustable thing, because I’m assuming it is straight up the thing from the same

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of hinge part from the XDR’s $1,000 stand, it’s kind of awkwardly

⏹️ ▶️ John proportioned because that little hinge was proportioned for this giant monitor. When you

⏹️ ▶️ John put it on a smaller monitor with a smaller foot, it kind of makes the monitor jut out more a little bit. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little bit weird.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, the XDR can rotate, can it? And I presume this cannot. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the VESA mount allows or is able to be rotated or you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mount it vertically in portrait or whatever. But I I would assume that the height adjustable stand, it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not let you rotate the monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And

⏹️ ▶️ John the weird thing is like, you know, the over-engineered hinge, like one of the things I complained about when I got

⏹️ ▶️ John my XDR is that the hinge actually doesn’t feel that sort of precise or smooth or expensive. It’s kind of scrapey

⏹️ ▶️ John and not great. Like it’s very solid. It’s not like a shaking or anything, but it’s not the premium

⏹️ ▶️ John experience you would expect from a thousand dollars. Then I feel like most of the thousand dollars is the fact that I’m assuming the foot for

⏹️ ▶️ John the XDR, the stand is like machined out of a single giant block of aluminum and that’s like half the cost right there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, probably. And you know, and I think it’s also true to be fair of these ones, like the iMac foot

⏹️ ▶️ John and the non-adjustable foot, I think those are also from a solid piece of aluminum, it’s just smaller. As far as I can tell, I don’t know, it

⏹️ ▶️ John might be friction welded or some other crap. But this is what we miss with not having the Johnny I videos where he tells us in intimate detail how

⏹️ ▶️ John he’d manufacture every single part of these products.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then one final thing that Apple released is a new silver and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey black keyboard slash mouse trackpad which uh which I’m really I think if I didn’t just drop

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like four hundred dollars on a trackpad and and keyboard I would definitely be buying a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pair of these as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Now are these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same ones that came with the Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ John No

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because they have

⏹️ ▶️ John Touch ID. I was confused by this

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco too when I was going

⏹️ ▶️ John through the store and I’m like I’m like wait aren’t they always black? I’m like I guess not because someone posted a picture of I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it was Merlin sent me a picture of his like Touch ID keyboard I’m like white keys what is that and they have the black ones in it so So I have,

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro one does indeed have black keys, but of course no touch ID.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but what about the other, like the pointy devices, are those the same as the Mac Pro, I assume?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t think I even unwrap that mouse. I don’t deal

⏹️ ▶️ John with the, if I can leave it minted package, never having been done, I will do so. I’m pretty sure that’s still

⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac Pro box in the attic, I didn’t touch that crap. That’s not crap, it’s not the mouse that I prefer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ve been going two hours in almost a half, nearly a half, And you just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey brought up the Mac Pro, and this is when we heard the quote, which you had quoted earlier, making our transition nearly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey complete with just one more product to go, Mac Pro, but that is for another day. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they spent a lot of time during the Mac Studio portion of the presentation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of crapping all over the Mac Pro, which made me laugh very, very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard and made me feel very bad for you and Stephen Hackett. But nevertheless,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you think? Oh, did you, you never told us if you bought anything. Is this the time to tell us if you bought anything, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. So, uh, again, the plan was, uh, my wife needs a new computer. She’s in 2015 iMac. Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little bit creaky. I wish I had more memory. I wish it was faster, especially because all the kids have accounts on there

⏹️ ▶️ John too. And if they’re going to log into a computer, it’s going to be that one. If you have all three people logged in at once, your RAM is starting to

⏹️ ▶️ John get, they’re starting to get fights over RAM. Sometimes switching users, you can see it swapping stuff and it makes noise sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. Um, but no big iMac, right. But I am the exact person that Marco talks about who appreciates

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that if I can get a separate monitor and computer I prefer that to having an all-in-one My wife on the other

⏹️ ▶️ John hand is not excited about having another box on her desk Even though I told her it’s gonna be a very small box. It’s not gonna be a big

⏹️ ▶️ John deal What do you think of that? Right? So my plan was okay. I’m not gonna wait around for a bigger

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac I like this better Anyway, even if my wife will grumble a little bit about having more cables and boxes

⏹️ ▶️ John and wires in the end It will be good because I will upgrade the computer part of it but more

⏹️ ▶️ John often than every seven years or whatever we’re doing with this iMac, right? I will do that just to sort of keep up

⏹️ ▶️ John with things. So I’m like, I should get a Mac Studio. So what I should get is obviously the cheapest CPU because I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, she doesn’t need any CPU. The M1 Max is more than enough. It’s gonna be so much faster than her computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, one of the things I want out of it is more RAM because again, three kids logged in at once and doing stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John and the kids are launching Photoshop now because they know how that works. And you know, I do need more RAM and now I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John got to like, I can only max out at 64 I’m not gonna get the ultra so I guess I gotta

⏹️ ▶️ John look at the M1 Macs with 64 I mean, that’s probably plenty but you know Grumble a little bit.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care about the GPU. We don’t do any gaming on it, but you get what you get, right? So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John how I can spec that out Disk space my problem before I was stopping myself from spending

⏹️ ▶️ John money as I’m filling up this external disk I need a bigger external SSD. Oh, don’t buy one You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John next your big iMac that you buy will have four terabytes So I have to go to four terabytes and now I gotta eat the stupid four

⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte price plus twelve hundred dollars I was like, oh, screw you, but all right, fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then I was like halfway through configuring this and I’m like, why am I doing this? Now that the display is out, why don’t I just get a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John mini? And then I was reminded why I don’t get a Mac mini, RAM. So back to go to the

⏹️ ▶️ John studio display page and I’m speccing it out again. And so what I ended up with, and

⏹️ ▶️ John we had the discussion about the adjustable height. That’s how I had the thing of like, do you care about the adjustable height standard? And she’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, how high is it? And then she said, it’s too low. And so we have to get the adjustable height because, or we have to put a book under it and

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna make her have books underneath her computer. So we’re gonna get the adjustable in. So it’s studio display,

⏹️ ▶️ John adjustable stand, Mac Studio with the cheapest CPU with 64 gigs of RAM, four

⏹️ ▶️ John terabytes, right? But kind of like Casey, and I assume Marco, I have friends

⏹️ ▶️ John and family who work for Apple and I wanted a friends and family discount. And my friends and family said, oh, we can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John order that yet because the Mac Studio is not available for purchase under the friends and family plan yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John So here I am, I have not ordered anything. I wanna order something, but I also don’t want to pay a lot for this muffler,

⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m waiting for it, for the employee, friends and family purchase, whatever, blah, blah, blah thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John to make it possible for people to buy the Mac Studio. As of, I think, last

⏹️ ▶️ John night, it is still not possible to do that. So I am just patiently waiting. And by the way, the shipping dates on these things

⏹️ ▶️ John are pushing out like weeks and weeks and weeks. So who knows when I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have it. Yeah, I was gonna say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you waiting for your discount to work is going to cost you like three months at least.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I mean, that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, this is a seven-year-old computer, And she’s not, she kept saying she doesn’t need a new one. So she’s not in a hurry to get

⏹️ ▶️ John it. So, you know, I’m, unfortunately it seems like ATP as a whole, Marco will probably beat me to

⏹️ ▶️ John buying this when he eventually caves and can. So.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco By the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, and I’ve actually never used one of those friends and family discounts for, you said that I, that you assumed I do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John no one’s ever offered.

⏹️ ▶️ John I assume you have friends or family at Apple and you definitely have friends at Apple who, you know you could get the discount

⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s the point of the friends and family discount. It’s not like we’re getting some inside deal. If you work for Apple, you have a certain amount of friends

⏹️ ▶️ John and family discounts that you can give to family, but also friends. So if you are friends with someone in Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John they might be able to get you a discount on your computer. And when I looked at what the friends and family discount was, cause you can see the

⏹️ ▶️ John prices, it’s substantial. Cause what they do is they cut down on the margins

⏹️ ▶️ John and I end up buying all the stupid options that kill the margins. You’re like, wow, that option for the four

⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte SSD is still obscene, but not as obscene. It ends up being like, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John on this particular computer, it’s like $900 savings, right? So it is not small beans. And

⏹️ ▶️ John especially since I’m kind of like, honestly for my wife, a Mac mini and the studio display,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would get that for her if I could get it with more RAM. Because she does not need the Mac studio.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t particularly.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t particularly, but you can, because it’s M1 and it’s only 32.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Today,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an infinite time scale, John, you’ll be able to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I bet the next Mac mini update, I think will close some of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that gap.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and anyway, and yes, this Mac, Just to be clear for all the making fun of my four Mac Pro. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John this Mac Studio, the low end Mac Studio I’m getting will probably stomp all over my Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, totally.

⏹️ ▶️ John But to that point, two things. One, I totally unrelated to this announcement

⏹️ ▶️ John because this is just the thing I was doing. I was noodling around a weekend or two ago

⏹️ ▶️ John playing with Microsoft Flight Simulator in Windows 10 in HDR and not

⏹️ ▶️ John 6K, cause that’s a beast of a game. That’s the thing I can’t do with the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Studio because I can’t play Intel games, right? So there’s still things that my clunky old computer can do that this one

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t. are.

Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ John on the front of the Mac, setting aside my personal stuff. One final note on the Mac Pro, like

⏹️ ▶️ John so that ending thing, this is another thing I love about the new Apple. Someone said, should we mention something about the Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ John And they did, they just said it. Because if we didn’t, we’d spend this whole freaking show going, oh my God, is the Mac Studio the new Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro? What about expandability? No, they said, and we’re gonna do the Mac Pro. Don’t worry about it, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John still gonna get to that. It was like, okay, good. Now we don’t have to waste any, you know, fretting over that.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re still gonna do a monster, horrendously expensive computer that’s huge and has tons of

⏹️ ▶️ John expansion and probably even bigger CPU somehow that we can’t figure out yet,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re still gonna do that. But just looking today at the Mac Studio, what if I get a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John spec Mac Studio? Isn’t that like the best computer Apple owns? When we talked about this before, the

⏹️ ▶️ John possibility of Apple doing the Jade 4C and counting up the GPU cores, what I said

⏹️ ▶️ John was that it is plausible that a Jade 4C type thing without a matter of GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John cores can match or exceed the performance of the best video card available on a Mac today. But what I

⏹️ ▶️ John also said back then was, but if you get a Mac Pro, you can put

⏹️ ▶️ John more than just one of the best GPU available today. In fact, you can put four of them in there. So if you

⏹️ ▶️ John look on Apple’s Mac Pro page, they will show you, hey, if you get two of the Radeon Pro W6800X DUOs,

⏹️ ▶️ John so two cards with two GPUs on it each, you get 60 teraflops of single precision

⏹️ ▶️ John computing power on it. An M1 Ultra max spec’d up is 21 teraflops,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So even if you double that for a double M1 Ultra or a Jade 4C, you’re still at 40 teraflops.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re not able to put as much GPU compute in the top

⏹️ ▶️ John of the line 2022 Mac Studio as you can in a 2019 Mac Pro because

⏹️ ▶️ John of the magic of expandability in third-party video cards. So it remains an open question. Well, first of all,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why people would still buy Mac Pros because if you really need maximum GPU for whatever the heck you’re doing, you can put

⏹️ ▶️ John more of it into a Mac Pro than you can in this thing, right? And the second thing is, why are they still making

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro? Why is it never gonna just use the Mac Studio? Seems like the answer still might

⏹️ ▶️ John be, well, the Mac Pro has card slots and things that can go into those card slots are third

⏹️ ▶️ John party video cards. Like again, it’s an open question, but the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ John line is the numbers just don’t add up to a world where there is a Mac Pro shipping

⏹️ ▶️ John that is less computationally capable than one from 2019. So I have to think that when the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John comes, obviously it’ll be CPU monster. Like there’s no, like the frigging Mac mini is faster than this thing in CPU, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Whenever it’s in, obviously it will be a CPU monster. But GPU wise, because

⏹️ ▶️ John the current 2019 Mac Pro, because it has all those card slots and because GPU vendors keep making new GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ John and because you keep sticking them in the card slots and there’s a lot of them, you just can’t match that with the GPU that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John built into the system on a chip. So I don’t know what Apple’s gonna do here. This is a real sort of decision

⏹️ ▶️ John point for them. Do they continue to pursue the Mac Pro strategy of you can have cards and stick them in there? Or

⏹️ ▶️ John do they say we’re giving up on that? And in exchange, you’re not going to the ceiling is going

⏹️ ▶️ John to be lowered on your GPU. But we think most of our customers don’t care about that anyway. So we shall see

⏹️ ▶️ John probably December or next year. It’s hard to predict. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going to be that’s going to be exciting and are incredibly disappointing if they just put the M1 Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it. I think, and I’m sure we’ll talk more about this in future episodes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I do not expect a Mac Pro with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Silicon and slots. And I think they were pretty clear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, like in all the comparisons they were doing to the Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco including GPU and CPU comparisons, there were a lot of qualifiers on those, like comparing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to particular GPU configuration, X, Y, Z on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Mac Pro. Or if they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing metal

⏹️ ▶️ John benchmarks instead

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, picking benchmarks that are tailored to their specific hardware that they know they put in the system on a chip.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like they obviously, you know, they obviously cherry pick benchmarks to make them look the best, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a lot of what they were showing us today, like the way they chose to present certain things,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of it was basically saying, look, you don’t need the old Mac Pro anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though you’re right that the ceilings are higher on it for the expandability.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The RAM ceiling is way higher, I believe it’s one and a half terabytes compared to 128 gigs, that’s way higher. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously has higher ceilings. But what Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is trying to push here, I think it’s pretty clear that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the new Mac Pro is going to be, it’s probably not gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco radically different than the Mac Studio. It’s probably gonna be, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re seeing how they’re scaling their architecture. They’re scaling it by just multiplying the chip.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what they’re doing. They’re taking the same system on a chip and they’re multiplying it. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 is very similar to the M1 Pro and Max and the M1 Pro and Max are very similar to each other.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Max is just, you know, a longer version of it or whatever. And then the, you know, the Ultra is just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two Maxes stuck together. And, you know, if the four die plans come

⏹️ ▶️ Marco together and that’s what forms the Mac Pro, which I think is the most likely outcome here, then I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think it’s going to be any different than just a bigger version of the Mac Studio that has four of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the big CPU of the year is glued together and no slots. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what I’ve been predicting for a long time and I think I’m sticking with this prediction. And when they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make that transition, there will probably be a bit of a regression in certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maximums that are available compared to the, you know, Intel slot based

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac pros. But I think everybody will take that. And not everybody, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think most people will take that in exchange for the other benefits

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it will provide. And I don’t see them ever having third party GPU support or slot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco support or any of that again. I think that’s all over.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is another area where it would help to know Apple sales numbers because, you know, I’m sure people who are, the five people who

⏹️ ▶️ John are listening are yelling like slots aren’t just for GPUs. What about audio interface cards? I have every one of the slots

⏹️ ▶️ John on my Mac Pro filled with audio interface cards and those things are not GPUs and you can’t put them in a Mac Studio

⏹️ ▶️ John size thing. So what are we going to do? And that’s to get back to the question we always get back to is like, does Apple care about that market? Do they want

⏹️ ▶️ John it? And the thing I still have trouble with is they made this big turn with the Mac Pro and said, we’re going

⏹️ ▶️ John back into that market. And I just feel like even just to recoup the cost on the investment of the tooling for the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro case, they’re just going to have to ship more computers in that case. And if you ship computers in that case, you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John fill that case without expansion slots. So I’m still in the camp that I think there’s going to be expanded slots if only

⏹️ ▶️ John because like if only as a consequence of the decision that they did make about the Mac Pro all those

⏹️ ▶️ John years ago, right? Just to sort of see that to its logical conclusion and reap all of the money that

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve already invested in this particular computer. It seems like they should at least make one more

⏹️ ▶️ John round of computers with it. But to your point, the way that Apple would pitch this is it’s not about specs like

⏹️ ▶️ John who cares how much RAM you It’s about capabilities. What are you trying to do with your computer? Oh, but I’m trying to render

⏹️ ▶️ John video in Final Cut. Well, guess what? This thing renders video in Final Cut twice as fast. But how do you do it twice as fast? You have

⏹️ ▶️ John half the GPU compute and you have a quarter of the RAM. It’s like, don’t worry about how we do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re just telling you the job that you wanna do. We can render it twice as fast. So now do you wanna buy this? And you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John like, but I want RAM. And it’s like, look, do you wanna render twice as fast or not? But that really depends

⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple precisely knowing what people wanna do. And unfortunately for Apple, if they want

⏹️ ▶️ John to say let’s say the market for audio professionals is important if they want to keep that market and if that market demands

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of physical interface cards and they’re not going to build those physical interfaces into the computer they’re just going to lose that market

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just a question of which market do you want and which market do you not want right I feel like it would be another

⏹️ ▶️ John flip-flop betrayal for this point to Apple say actually we changed our mind no slots right even though

⏹️ ▶️ John I agree that for lots of important use cases you don’t need that stuff you don’t need 1.5 terabytes

⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM you could you could get away with less GPU compute because Apple knows for those specific use cases, whether

⏹️ ▶️ John it be image editing, you know, or like machine learning or, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John obviously GPU video rendering, Apple can highly tune these computers to that case, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I still kind of feel like that’s the Mac Studio. That’s the computer that does that. And the Mac Pro is

⏹️ ▶️ John the outlet valve for letting the Mac Studio be awesome for the people who want it. And for everyone else has

⏹️ ▶️ John weird needs and is willing to pay a ridiculous amount of money, Tower Mac Pro expansion slots, ridiculous

⏹️ ▶️ John system on a chip conglomeration thing, and also third-party video cards on top of it. I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t understand how that works in my mind for all the reasons we discussed in the past. How do you do? Do you have even more non-uniform

⏹️ ▶️ John memory? You have 128 plus 128 plus another pool of extra RAM. Do you have the big built-in

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU, but then also the other GPU cards just use your computer? I don’t understand how it works. This is

⏹️ ▶️ John in many ways way more fascinating and confusing than the original Mac Pro for us because the original,

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro, the 2019 Mac Pro, they said they were gonna make a modular computer and it straight up made a cheese

⏹️ ▶️ John grater, like just a bigger, nastier one, right? Made perfect sense, works, everything

⏹️ ▶️ John worked out. It’s got a Xeon in it, it’s got a bunch of slots, like it is exactly what we hoped and

⏹️ ▶️ John thought it would be. But the ARM-based Mac Pro is just this cloud, just giant

⏹️ ▶️ John nebulous cloud of hopes and dreams and doubt and casey annoyance. So,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, we’ll wait. I guess we could probably get at least the end of the year to figure out what that’s going to be, but I’m super excited.

⏹️ ▶️ John Thanks to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our sponsors this week, Collide, Hover and New Relic. And thanks to our members who who support

⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly, you can join at atv.fm slash join. and we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcasts so long.

Post-show

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple snuck in one final one. Mac OS 12.3 is coming out next week. Apple said in a press release.

⏹️ ▶️ John They pre-announced the product. How do you know it’s coming next week? What if there’s a last minute bug? Oh no, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco brave of them. I still, I can’t believe like the way how they ended it with John Ternus basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying there’s only one more and it’s the Mac Pro and it’s coming.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Only one

⏹️ ▶️ John more makes sense because it’s one more product. What product needs to be transitioned from Intel?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but in that one sentence, he killed the 27 inch iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, because the iMac has already transitioned to ARM. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco going to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, we’ll talk about that some more some

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco other

⏹️ ▶️ John time. But here’s the real problem. Why are they still selling the Intel Mac Mini? That’s a really good

⏹️ ▶️ John question. I mean, that’s just weird. Like, it’s still, has the Mac Mini product transitioned to ARM? Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just name a product. The only product left that has not transitioned is the Mac Pro, so that

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t say anything. But I just love the fact that they said Mac Pro, because if it didn’t, I’d swear this whole show would have been

⏹️ ▶️ John wiped out with me tearing my hair out over like, is the Mac Studio the new Mac Pro? What does this mean? But they didn’t say

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, again, they didn’t say what the Mac Pro would be. If the Mac Pro was just a Mac Studio in space gray, then Marco was 100%

⏹️ ▶️ John right on his prediction. But still, there’s gonna be some product called Mac Pro and it’s gonna have an ARM chip

⏹️ ▶️ John in it and they’re gonna make it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re gonna keep selling the Mac Mini as Intel for a while longer, for the same reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re selling the Mac Pro as Intel. Because a lot of people still have weird specialized

⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs that require an Intel machine or some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John capability. Is the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Mini Colo the Mac Mini Colo

⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine? Probably. I’m guessing, because a lot of Mac minis are frequently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used in those kind of roles. That’s a critical part of what the Mac mini needs to address.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that actually does make sense that they would keep offering that for a while.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh wait, I think, doesn’t Amazon have, speaking of AWS, I think AWS has like an iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John server build farm thing that you can do, and I think they use Mac minis for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That wouldn’t surprise me, that would make sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the type of thing of like, it’s kind of like the, whatever, whatever it is, the 101, the MacBook with the CD

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that they kept around forever for

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco education. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MD101 LLA.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m wondering if the Intel Mac Mini is the equivalent of that. This is a

⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of big customers, maybe even just Amazon, that say, we’re still buying Intel Mac Mini, so could you keep making

⏹️ ▶️ John it for us? Whereas no one’s saying that about the 27-inch iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. You can put them in server

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco racks. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen that. Have you ever seen, remember, we used to have the trash cans in server racks

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on their

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey side,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So you could take anything and put it in a server rack if you try hard enough. 27-inch iMac, sure, just wedge it in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Thank you.