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

539: The Strap Situation

15 Jun 2023

More on Apple Vision Pro and visionOS, writing SwiftUI at cruising altitude, new hopes for Mac gaming, and what John really thinks of the new Mac Pro.

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

Chapters

  1. SwiftUI from Mac to the sky
  2. Defeating “Siri” detection 🖼️
  3. Sponsor: Eagle Nine: Locked
  4. Vision Pro, visionOS
  5. Sponsor: Notion
  6. 15” MacBook Air
  7. Mac Studio
  8. Mac Pro
  9. Sponsor: Backblaze
  10. Gaming
  11. macOS Sonoma
  12. Ending theme
  13. John’s special treat

SwiftUI from Mac to the sky

⏹️ ▶️ John I spent all day fighting with this stupid Monterey bug. I forget now that I’m running Ventura that

⏹️ ▶️ John how much SwiftUI stuff is broken in Monterey. It’s so bad. I write this code. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John like, why is this in here? And I just change it and make it more sane or whatever. And then I send it on a test flight, and the Monterey people

⏹️ ▶️ John are like, oh, nothing works anymore. I’m like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. No, I mean, because you have a SwiftUI app, you have absolutely no chance of supporting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco older operating systems. Because SwiftUI, especially on the Mac, no chance there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Monterey was my thing. I had to boost the minimum version to Monterey so I could get anything

⏹️ ▶️ John to work. But now Monterey, the one I boosted it to, is the version where nothing works. So bad. So

⏹️ ▶️ John bad. I’m not gonna cut off support for it, but next year, man, definitely.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, SwiftUI means the most recent OS and maybe one back, and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. Like, I personally would cut off Monterey soon, if not already,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s just me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you one thing. I tried programming my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on the plane to and from California. Now in past years, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been a very productive time. This year, I was writing SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I couldn’t get the Wi-Fi to work. Try to write SwiftUI without being able to Google

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. I challenge you. It’s impossible. Like today, I was writing SwiftUI. I’ll do it today.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have so many browser tabs. I’m probably competing with John for browser tabs. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re every, my computer is littered with browser tabs. Like, thank God I’m not doing this in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision OS, because they would just be like filling the sky. Like, they’re everywhere. Every single

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I have to do. How

⏹️ ▶️ John do you do this? What are you looking up in SwiftUI? I don’t find that to be the case at all. I find that

⏹️ ▶️ John I can quickly look at the autocomplete and realize I can’t do what I want. I don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ John Google for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually it’s more like technique stuff. It’s like, all right, I have, Like I’m using the list thing to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a table view and I want certain cells to not show their separators or whatever, it’s like, it’s stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. Or like, how do I make the cell not, you know, how do I change the highlight color? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, you’re talking about, yeah, SwiftUI on the phone where you actually have features. Yeah, I don’t have that problem

⏹️ ▶️ John over here. The things that I would be looking for in SwiftUI, I don’t even have a chance of Googling,

⏹️ ▶️ John the AI agents can’t help me because it’s like, what I want, the interactions that I want are spread

⏹️ ▶️ John over so many different modifiers. Like there’s the modifier for drag, there’s the modifier for drop, there’s the modifier

⏹️ ▶️ John for hover, and they conflict with each other, and sometimes one works and the other doesn’t, and

⏹️ ▶️ John all of them don’t have any idea that the other ones exist, so you have to have all these state variables that you’re setting,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, hey, when we’re hovering, set this thing, but if you’re in the middle of the drag, the hover thing won’t be called, set this thing, but then there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John gesture recognizer for a zero-length drag, which is a tap thing, and when that gets set, set this thing, and they have

⏹️ ▶️ John no idea about each other, it’s like 8,000 state variables, and there’s this conditional logic with a custom

⏹️ ▶️ John binding to say, okay, when the hover thing says you’re on it, but the frame thing doesn’t know you’re in it because it stops

⏹️ ▶️ John tracking that as soon as you start to drag. But if you’re in the middle of the drag and the drag thing says you’re in the middle of the drag, but you haven’t yet dropped,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re holding down the button, it’s like, oh my God. It’s just, please, it just coalesces into

⏹️ ▶️ John one thing that lets me know, is the mouse over it? Are there any buttons down? Is it holding something? Is it,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you know, so that giant mess of global variable, what am I gonna Google for? Oh, hey, is there a way

⏹️ ▶️ John I can use, because you can Google for, how do I tell when the cursor’s over it? How do I tell when the mouse is down? How do I tell when I’m dragging?

⏹️ ▶️ John How do I tell when I’m dropping? But those are all separate things. What if I want to do them all at the same time? And it’s like, ah,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, just have 75 modifiers and use 20 different state variables. And by the way, from OS to OS,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll never know which modifiers are active and which aren’t. Sometimes one completely cancels out the other and it

⏹️ ▶️ John stops getting called or vice versa. So you have to manually call it, but don’t try to modify a state variable inside the redraw in SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ John because you get a scary warning. So that’s what I spent all day

⏹️ ▶️ John doing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say I am so glad I’m not doing SwiftUI on the Mac because I tried.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I very much tried and as I’ve been rebuilding all of Overcast and all my frameworks below

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, I’ve had all the if-def’s, you know, all the if-OS or, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if-can-import-UI-kit, then use UI color, UI image, else if-can-import,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, NS or AppKit, use NS color, doing all that crap. and it’s been taken

⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever and because the APIs are needlessly different and in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird, subtle little ways that like require all this glue code. The reason I was doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was first I thought, all right, well, if it’s easy to do this, I’ll do it. Because I’m using SwiftUI, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured I can make, I can actually eventually build like a native Mac UI for my app if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to. And I figured it’d be a little bit of work to tweak it, but I figured it wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be that much work. But I was also thinking, if the headset doesn’t use UIKit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco primitives as its API layer, like UI image, UI color, UI font, all that stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it doesn’t use that, I want this stuff to all be modular, so I can actually easily plug

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in whatever it is, you know, VR image, VR font, whatever they would have named that API layer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when it was unveiled, and when we learned that it just uses UIKit primitives for everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that means the only Apple platform that doesn’t is the Mac. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ripped out all of that code. Now I am UIKit everywhere, baby. It feels fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is so much glue that I could, because it was getting increasingly difficult to maintain it honestly, and I haven’t even made the app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. And then I tried building the app in SwiftUI, like while I still could just natively on the Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see like, what is the Mac version of these controls look like? And I got it so nice on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad layout, so nice on the phone layout. I build the Mac layout. It looks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like somebody vomited on my screen with random app kit controls doing random things in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco random places, none of which were right. Everything about it was wrong and broken.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, okay, clearly if I’m going to make a Mac app with my Swift UI code

⏹️ ▶️ Marco base here, it’s going to need its own UI code from scratch almost.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not worth it. So I’m just going to keep using the UI kit stuff on the Mac, whether it’s Catalyst or the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS Mac environment for M1s. I’m just gonna keep doing that. And then I can make everything UI kit everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, which I promptly did, and everything is so much cleaner and easier, and there’s so many little luxuries

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m able to use now. And like, oh man, it’s so nice, I’m so glad. So that’s point number one. Point

⏹️ ▶️ Marco number two, going back to the plane for one minute, because I wanted to remark on something that I, that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, every so often, something in tech blows your mind. And last year we had, or last week,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had one of those things, which is great. You know, certain, usually it’s not that exciting. Usually,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the very first time I sent a print job to a printer over Wi-Fi, when I was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hit print on my laptop on the couch, and then over there across the room, a piece of paper came out of a machine,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that felt so magical to me. It was like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like when you’re pooping and you can use your laptop and still browse the internet. That was earth shattering for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I tell you what. You know, when Wi-Fi was in the house and you could bring your computer in and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey occupy your time. That was my bag right there. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would love to make fun of you for that, but now we all do it with our phones, so what’s the difference? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, okay, so secondly, so I was on the plane with my broken WiFi, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one of the directions, the quote messaging only free WiFi from the airline worked.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d never used the messaging only before. I figured like, what do I have to do? I’m not gonna message people. I wanna look up stuff on Google while I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco programming. But what did work, I opened up Flydy on my phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to check, you know, halfway through the flight, I take in a nap, I woke up, I’m like, how far am I in this flight right now?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, oh crap, I don’t have data, I can’t check. I open up Flighty to give an estimate, and it says it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco works on the free, messaging-only Wi-Fi on most airlines.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What? And I tried it, and sure enough, it worked. Now, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they negotiated this. I assume you have to like work with, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco GoGo InFlight and whatever the airline things are to like approve your domain name or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is not my understanding of how it works.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, however it works. Hey, do you know how it works?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do, but I’m not sure if it’s appropriate for me to share. So maybe we can do a follow

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. Okay. Cause Ryan will presumably hear this and then tell me, you know, you idiot, you should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have said something, but just in case,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco just in case I’d rather not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that feature, um, like, and it worked. It just like all of a sudden I I’m offline and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every other way, except. Oh, my flight status just got updated. Now I can see where I am and everything. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God, it blew my mind. I was so happy. So anyway, first of all, congratulations to Ryan and the rest of the Flighty team

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they won an ADA and it’s so well-deserved. The Apple Design Award, so well-deserved for that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. But it was just such a pleasure to use that app for my whole trip. So anyway, thanks to Flighty. That’s a really cool feature.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And next, I request from Flighty to please be able to deliver me SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google results so I can,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey on my next flight,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can actually get some work done.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, real-time update. Ryan is listening live, since I haven’t quite left the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey topic. So my understanding from Ryan, having briefly spoken to him about this a few weeks ago, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple months ago. So what Flighty is doing is you can’t use the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey full Flighty app. I don’t believe you can just go looking up willy-nilly like a random flight or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but yeah, you get updates on your flight.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. How do you think those updates are coming to the phone, irrespective of where the phone is? let’s say you were watching

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my flight for some reason, you’re gonna come pick me up at JFK LaGuardia, you’re watching my flight, how does that flight

⏹️ ▶️ Casey update get to your phone while you’re on the ground?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so I was assuming that they were pulling a web service every so often, but people in the chat I think have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better idea. They’re saying, is it just using push notifications?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and so for the purposes, for iMessage, or for the airlines, iMessages

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and APNs, the Apple Push Notification Service or whatever, they look basically the same. So what Flighty

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is doing, And I’m not trying to dismiss, isn’t the word I’m looking for, but I’m not trying to minimize. There

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we go. I’m not trying to minimize what Flighty does. But what they’re effectively doing is just periodically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sending push notifications to your phone saying, this is where you are, this is where you are, this is where you are, this is where you are. And because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that rides in a similar way to iMessage, if not, I mean, maybe iMessage literally uses

⏹️ ▶️ Casey APNS. I’m not sure. But that all rides in the same channels

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that iMessages do. so you can continue to get updates on your flight as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re airborne, because again, that’s just, it looks like iMessages for the purposes of the airline Wi-Fi.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s extremely clever. It’s very, very clever. That’s awesome.

Defeating “Siri” detection

Chapter Defeating "Siri" detection image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do John’s favorite episode. It is all follow-up. I mean, should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just like go read a book or something? Do you need me for this, John?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It

⏹️ ▶️ John is plenty of follow-up for you to get through.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see how it is. Do I need you then?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All right, we start. You do. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey team effort. Fair enough. We’re going to do it together. All right, let’s hold hands. Jackson Ames writes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I noticed that every time a presenter during the WWDC 23 keynote said the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey word S-I-R-I, it sounded off. It piqued my interest. And by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jackson spelled it correctly, so kudos to Jackson. It piqued my interest, so I extracted the audio from the keynote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and threw it into Adobe Audition. Lo and behold, every instance of the word S-I-R-I, which I’m now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey afraid to say, because it might trigger things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Come on, we’ll say Siri. If they mess it up, that’s their fault.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, every instance of the word Siri spoken during the keynote has certain frequencies practically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey muted. It looks like 400 hertz wide bands centered at the three, four,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey five, and six kilohertz frequencies, all of which have the amplitude reduced by about 30 decibels.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey An interesting note is that this audio modification does not occur in previous Apple events.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now that the Siri wake phrase has dropped the hay, I wonder if this is a measure to avoid viewer Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Casey activation, giving a potentially less robust wake phrase. So maybe Marco can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey make the image, the chapter art for this chapter. But to paint you a brief word picture,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey imagine a heat map-y sort of thing. Marco, jump in whenever you’re ready. Like a heat map sort of thing, where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like the vertical axis is the one that matters. And yet suddenly, you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got these like blank rectangles, four blank rectangles going horizontally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey through these waves. And that obviously is where the deadening

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these frequencies has occurred. It’s really quite striking to see. And a very interesting catch by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jackson. I did not notice this at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it’s actually, so my guess, the reason they would do something like this is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that whatever algorithms they’re using to recognize the word Siri,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing if you have a couple of gaps in the frequency range, which is what this is creating,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it will not detect it. Now, I don’t know, I think we talked about it when this happened, but a few years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, there was an Alexa event where they had the same thing, where,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey or maybe it was a TV commercial, it was a TV commercial.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there was some kind of TV commercial or something, I believe, where somebody in the commercial had to say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alexa. And to prevent that from being recognized by everyone’s Amazon Echoes all over their houses when this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV commercial played, they did a similar trick where they basically lopped off part of the frequencies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that speech. And so it sounded a little bit weird, but not too weird, but it defeated

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the algorithm enough. And I actually, the reason why I remember this is that I thought for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a brief time when that happened, I thought, can I reproduce this myself

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Overcast? And can I possibly either offer a filter that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would prevent recognition of these wake words in case somebody’s listening to a podcast that’s talking all about voice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco assistants and is tired of them responding? Or, even better, can I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco analyze the audio myself? If these wake words are really that easy to identify in processing, can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do the processing ahead of time? And anytime somebody says Alexa or Siri, just mute those frequencies so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that my podcast player never sets off people’s stuff. And at the time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was not able to reproduce this in a way that worked against my own Alexa devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I never tried it with Siri. So now that I have this kind of frequency map of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I do this, it presumably won’t be recognized. Now I have something else to experiment with. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a stupid feature. I probably won’t do it. But it’s a fun thing to play around with and it’s a fun

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to know like, if you need to somehow make Siri not be recognized with an audio recording,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a way that probably works to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John A couple things on this. First, what’s the name of this thing? It’s like there’s a name for this kind of diagram, Marco. Do you know it?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco frequency spectrograph or something? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. So the x-axis is time and the y-axis is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco logarithmic frequency display. So normally when you see a waveform in an audio editor,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see the up and down, the actual samples forming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John waves. The

⏹️ ▶️ John amplitude, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is showing you the different frequency breakdowns of each chunk of time as it goes. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is generally easier and more illustrative of how something actually sounds.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and so this is a great example of a visualization that like, you know, when you heard this in the keynote,

⏹️ ▶️ John I bet a lot of people didn’t think that Siri sounded weird at all. Didn’t sound weird to me, right? But when you see it

⏹️ ▶️ John in this type of diagram where, you know, like I said, time along the x-axis and frequency spectrum

⏹️ ▶️ John along the y, it’s clear as day. Like, A, it’s clear as day that something’s happened, and

⏹️ ▶️ John B, it’s clear that whatever happened was artificial. This is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not

⏹️ ▶️ John a natural phenomenon. It is rectangles just chunked out of the frequency spectrum. So it’s a great example

⏹️ ▶️ John of how visualization can help you find something that another view on the same day wouldn’t. And

⏹️ ▶️ John second thing is, I think we forgot to mention last week the feature that Apple touted in the keynote, of that you don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ John say, hey, dingus anymore. You can just say dingus. But I believe there’s also a setting.

⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t actually installed the iOS 17 betas, I leave this as a setting where you can say no, please make me say hey Does any one of you have

⏹️ ▶️ John the iOS 17 betas installed and can confirm that I will double-check that in a moment Hold on

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because I

⏹️ ▶️ John think if that option exists I think I’m gonna put the hey back on because I have enough problems with accidental Activations

⏹️ ▶️ John with the word hey in front of that. I don’t need any more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so under under Siri and search There’s now an option called listen for and your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco choices are off So it won’t listen for any wake phrase or you can say hey Siri or you can say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri or hey Siri So I can’t, I hopefully that didn’t send anybody stuff off.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have any problem saying Siri, but the actual wake phrase of the pre iOS 17 devices, I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what we’re going to do once iOS 17 comes out. Your devices better get ready.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, maybe they have made the recognition more sophisticated and that’s what has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enabled them to drop this. Cause like, I don’t know if you remember when, I believe when they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either a year after or something like sometime early on when Phil Schiller was on the talk show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He said, hey dingus, right during the show and no one’s phone in the audience went

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. Now, first of all, you know he thought about that first. Second of all, you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that he was confident nothing bad would happen. Because then later on he mentioned that. He

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like referred to it, he’s like, look, like, you know, I just said that and no one… Like, he somehow, I forget exactly, but he somehow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco referred back to it. So we all knew that he was in on what he just did. And that’s a pretty,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that was a pretty confident move, I think. move. I think maybe I would say maybe took courage.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for Apple to be doing this to have dropped the hay requirement and therefore

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having made the wake phrase even even simpler and less distinct

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from arbitrary sound. I would assume that comes with an improvement

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in sophistication and I think one one thing that kind of might lend credence to this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that not all devices have that and I have to double check I believe I saw something today that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco said that Airpods Max will not get the Siri only wake phrase but Airpods

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro the newest Airpods Pro will so it seems like you know it my guess is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s more advanced computation happening and like only on the most recent devices and and software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco versions.

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Vision Pro, visionOS

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s plenty to talk about with regard to Vision Pro, and we start with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s 10-minute standalone promo video, which I watched earlier today. It’s pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I enjoyed it. I mean, it’s a lot of what we saw in the keynote, to be honest with you, almost entirely, I think, but it’s pretty,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John good. Yeah, if you just want to watch one thing, you don’t want to watch the whole keynote, it’s a good thing to check out. We’ll put a link in the notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also Steve Trout and Smith amongst others have noticed that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are plenty of references to XROS in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple developer app, which is where you watch like WWDC sessions and stuff like that. Lots of occurrences

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of XROS. Also it might’ve been one of you two, probably John, but somebody pointed out that you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can tell that they filmed a lot of the sessions a while ago because there are many references

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to quote Apple’s spatial computing platform quote rather

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro, which I noticed, but I think I thought about it at the time and then promptly didn’t think much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it after that, but that is pretty funny to me that they didn’t even have the marketing name locked down when they were recording these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dub dub videos.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I think it was locked down. It was not disclosed. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think that’s the real answer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so the people who are making the apps like Xcode, you know, they showed in the demos, you just select this as your target or this is

⏹️ ▶️ John your OS and the UI in Xcode had to have a name, but it didn’t have Vision OS. It had XROS everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ John So there was buttons with XROS on them, tabs with XROS on them, it was just everywhere. This is setting aside, as we know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the symbols in the code, which are called RealityOS and XROS. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this is the, this big symbol cleanup, which I assume they’re gonna do. I assume they’re gonna go through and clean up all,

⏹️ ▶️ John obviously they’ll clean them up in the UI. I do wonder if they’re gonna clean them up in the source, but I imagine they would, because you don’t want to be stuck

⏹️ ▶️ John with like the, you know, some kind of enum being RealityOS for the next 20 years.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco change it now to VisionOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, especially now that everything’s still in beta, like it’s super easy to change it now. But I mean, I think, so first of all, the reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why is very clear. Like, we heard, I believe they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even said during Talk Show Live, like the marketing department

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not tell the name of the product and the OS to almost anybody until

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost the last minute. Like it was so secret, even from within the company, that many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco departments of the company didn’t even know the final marketing name of the product or the OS.

⏹️ ▶️ John including the guy in charge of the headset, Mike Rockwell said he found that on Monday when we did watching the video.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s when

⏹️ ▶️ John we talk about compartmentalization at Apple. Why would the guy in charge of the headset not know

⏹️ ▶️ John what it’s called? Because he doesn’t have to. That’s the answer. That’s what compartmental, does he need to know

⏹️ ▶️ John the marketing name to get his job done? No, he does not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this product by, I’ve been trying to figure out like, when did they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco start this product? Like when did they start this project? As far as I’ve been able to pick up bits and pieces here I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people probably have better information than I do on this, but my best guess right now is at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco least six to seven years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, there was a Mastodon thread that flew by and somebody who formerly worked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it, I’ll see if I can find a link for the show notes, no

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John promises. I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John already in there. Is it? Okay. Yeah, I think I might have put it in the notes, but it was the guy who was at it, he like worked

⏹️ ▶️ John on it five years ago and he spilled a bunch of beans. We do have something in the notes from somebody who was involved in what would

⏹️ ▶️ John seem like kind of like a, you know, in the home stretch development of it that was before COVID-19

⏹️ ▶️ John or just when, you know, in 2019, just when that started happening. This project, we’ve been hearing about this project for years and years and years. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John sure six or seven years is conservative.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And, and all that time they were writing probably a ton of software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this. And so all that time they had to refer to it as something in the code.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so all over the code, I’m sure there’s XROS all over the place in internally.

⏹️ ▶️ John And RealityOS, which is, which is another name that’s floating around in the code.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t see reality OS, but there was there was like a UI interface idiom dot reality as a new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco value. So yeah, so but either way, you know, obviously they had to call it something and and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s an it’s an amazing feat of marketing that they didn’t that the name didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco leak that we had all these other leaks. There were not a ton of surprises about this device when it came out, but the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco name did not leak at all and that that obviously took a lot of a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco secrecy with the name only being known to a very small number of people before we all learned it, but that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty impressive.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep, very much so. All right, John, tell me about the fit of the Vision Pro, please.

⏹️ ▶️ John Despite the fact that none of us actually got to try this, which is very disappointing. Only one of us got

⏹️ ▶️ John to go to WWC, which is Marco, and Marco didn’t get to try it, despite his best efforts. He really, really

⏹️ ▶️ John tried, but there’s limited number of slots and, you know, what can you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco do?

⏹️ ▶️ John But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I even offered to move my flight back. I’m like, look, I’ll change my flight, like if I can get a later appointment,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it takes. but it was not enough.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, limited slots, so very difficult. But anyway, lots of other people have tried it and they’ve reported back. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s some of the, sort of an amalgam of the reports. So the first is that there is, the people who did the

⏹️ ▶️ John demo, there was a fitting thing where you scanned your face with an IR type

⏹️ ▶️ John scanner or whatever, kind of like you do for FaceTime, where it gets a depth map of your face. And I think, I believe they use an iPhone to do it. You also scan your

⏹️ ▶️ John ear, which is a thing you can do now with your iPhone and iOS 16. I forget when they rolled that out, but it wants you to

⏹️ ▶️ John scan your ear shape to get your head-related transfer function. see previous episodes of this program where

⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about that. So you do those things. You scan your ear and you scan your face. In response to the

⏹️ ▶️ John face scan, they’re picking from one of the light shield things that smushes against your

⏹️ ▶️ John face that they have available to find the one that fits you. They also took glasses

⏹️ ▶️ John from people who had glasses and measured them to see what people’s prescription was and then came out with these little prescription

⏹️ ▶️ John things. Which, by the way, we all just assume that these prescription lenses are going to cost like $500 to put in your

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So, hey, this headset is $3,500, but if you wear glasses, it might be 4,000, we’ll see. I

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t even think about that. Obviously, they didn’t say anything about pricing and they don’t even have them decide the stuff yet, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John just FYI, this is the thing they did. So people could see the headset. So then, you know, they put the face

⏹️ ▶️ John thing on based on your face scan. The ear scan determines how they’re gonna do the spatial audio, so they put that in somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ John and they snap in the prescription lenses based on them scanning your eyeglasses for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John I imagine the experience will be similar for buying this thing. Either you go into an Apple store and

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll do all the same stuff to you in person. I’m not sure if they’ll have the eye glasses scanning machine, we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you do it online, you’d probably have to have an iPhone so you could scan your own face. And if you didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John an iPhone, you’d probably have to go to an Apple store. And maybe they’ll let you enter your prescription somewhere because you don’t have an

⏹️ ▶️ John eye glasses scanning machine. But anyway, just to get an idea of what’s involved in getting one of these, the purchase process

⏹️ ▶️ John is going to somehow involve all of these things, except for the ear thing. You can do that once you get it. But the things that affect

⏹️ ▶️ John the physical device, What lenses do you need to get to snap into them? And what kind of face thing do you get?

⏹️ ▶️ John In terms of the weight with this thing on people’s faces, I was mentioning in the past show how

⏹️ ▶️ John the battery being external is a big deal because it keeps the weight off of the headset. But

⏹️ ▶️ John people have reported that this thing feels heavier than they thought it would. And most of them are blaming, most people who have tried it are blaming

⏹️ ▶️ John it on the fact that they use metal instead of plastic because Apple loves to

⏹️ ▶️ John use metal because it’s high quality and it’s nice and it’s durable. It’s also heavier than plastic, right? They

⏹️ ▶️ John did it on the AirPods Max. Those ear cups are made of metal. They look real nice. They’re very durable, but they’re heavier than if

⏹️ ▶️ John they were made of plastic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Glass too. The whole front thing, I believe, is glass.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, although I would, I mean, glass they kind of have to do for optical qualities. If they made that plastic, it would be like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the iPod Nano all scuffed up and everything, right? So I kind of don’t blame them for that, but yeah, it’s metal.

⏹️ ▶️ John Mike Hurley on Cortex called it the AirPods Max of VR devices, referencing

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that the AirPods Max have the metal ear cups and it makes them heavy. And Mike said the Vision

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro felt heavier on the front of his face than a MetaQuest Pro, which is plastic. So I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it is in general lightweight, especially considering all the stuff that’s in it, but Apple can’t stay away from that

⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum. They love it. And I understand why they’d want to go with the metal frame.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are so many advantages, but weight is an issue. They didn’t say it was super duper heavy. It’s just that

⏹️ ▶️ John it was heavier than they thought it would be. And it was heavier than, Mike said it was heavier than the MetaQuest Pro, which is a headset that

⏹️ ▶️ John he has experience with, that obviously is not as good, it doesn’t have good specs, but whatever. So there’s that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, weight by the way, like in terms of comfort with comparing it to headphones,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way that headphones distribute weight on your head is extremely different from where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the weight and how the weight is distributed with a VR headset. So it’s not a good, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it doesn’t matter as much if the weight is spread correctly. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you think about like with headphones, the only, all the weight is being held either by like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle of the top of your head where the strap touches where the big headband

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing touches the top of your head and then the rest of the force is the ear cups pushing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco against your ears like sideways plus a bit of gravity pushing down

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that hits the ear pads and that’s a little bit different with those too because that’s also how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they stay on your head so headphones have to kinda clamp a little bit from the sides

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just so they don’t fall off or move around. So if you look at the way a VR headset’s mounted on your head,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that entire strap that goes around and we’ll get to this in a second, there’s also apparently an optional

⏹️ ▶️ Marco top strap. But isn’t that when you look at how like where the weights resting on your head,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s spread over a much larger area than headphones spread it. So it might be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, like I have a pair of headphones here, my beloved HiFiMan 8G6 headphones. These

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are my sole headphones. Those weigh significantly more, I think. I’ll have to double check. I think they weigh much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than the AirPods Max, because they have, you know, this giant, like, you know, magnet assembly inside each earcup.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a huge thing. Anyway, they’re fairly heavy as headphones go, but they’re designed to spread that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weight around in a much larger area and with much better padding than the AirPods Max. And so,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can wear those for hours. In fact, I wore them most of today, and it’s fine. Whereas the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPods Max just kind of don’t, I find them very uncomfortable after a pretty short time just because you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, they’re designed to apply pressure differently and spread the weight differently. So weight

⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself, like you can have a heavy headset and also have it be comfortable over a multi-hour

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. It just depends on the other factors of its design. How the headbands are shaped, how the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye seal is shaped, like all that stuff. Where is the weight? How is the weight distributed? How does it move

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around? around, does it have to like clamp down very hard or is it more just kind of resting there? And I fully

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect that almost everybody will get that top head strap because it that should improve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of that substantially.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Mike, Mike mentioned that it was felt heavier on the front of his face. And I think that’s for two reasons. First, where

⏹️ ▶️ John the weight is depends on a lot headphone weight is on the side by your ears. There’s no headphone weight that’s hanging out past

⏹️ ▶️ John your nose. This thing is obviously hanging out past your nose, right? And second is you’re moving your head around.

⏹️ ▶️ John I imagine unless that’s when you’re bopping with the music, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco when you’re using this thing, you’re looking

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey around.

⏹️ ▶️ John And as you look around, the heaviest part of this is extending out from your head. So it’s swinging

⏹️ ▶️ John at the end of a lever as you move your head around. So whatever weight they put that is extended out

⏹️ ▶️ John past the front of your eyeballs, that weight is multiplied by its distance from like sort of the

⏹️ ▶️ John the pivot point of your head moving around. So that’s why he said it felt heavier on the front of his face.

⏹️ ▶️ John And plus, maybe resting your nose. And yeah, there is a top strap. You can see it in the WWDC keynote

⏹️ ▶️ John briefly in that scene where the guy’s taking the dad’s taking a video 3d video over the birthday

⏹️ ▶️ John party He’s got the hot top strap on I mentioned I didn’t notice that when we talked about it on Monday

⏹️ ▶️ John after the keynote and I was saying how they they had managed to do It without a top strap It was just a

⏹️ ▶️ John straight back strap with that big sort of like cup thing That’s cupping the back of your head Which I would imagine would also help carry

⏹️ ▶️ John the weight because it doesn’t just like press in one spot It kind of wraps around then it goes up and down but

⏹️ ▶️ John apparently the top strap is there as a, it was used during the press demos. I think everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John who did a press demo had the top strap and people were told during the press demos that the strap

⏹️ ▶️ John situation is not yet finalized. That’s a paraphrase of what the Apple people said. So there, Apple’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John committing one way or the other about what the deal is going to be with straps. Apple did say that they expect

⏹️ ▶️ John third party straps to exist because if you’ve seen the little exploded diagram, this, the Vision

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro is modular. So there’s the actual thing with the computer stuff in it. Then there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the light shield thing, which shoves against your face. Then out of the light shield, out of the headset and the

⏹️ ▶️ John light shield, there are these two little stiff little sticks. And then the straps attached to that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so Apple’s own straps, the one that goes in the back of your head, attaches to that. And Apple’s own top strap attaches to

⏹️ ▶️ John that, right? And third-party straps will also attach to that. And Apple expects there to be third-party straps.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s important in terms of like getting something that fits your head right. Kind of like even just like the tips on AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, right? If you don’t like the Apple tips, you can buy third party tips, see if you find something that works for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s all I think mostly good news. But it is interesting that Apple hasn’t quite yet figured out what the

⏹️ ▶️ John deal is gonna be with straps. And if you look at the top strap, it does not look as well integrated as the

⏹️ ▶️ John main strap. It looks kind of like an afterthought and it doesn’t, you know, but anyway, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John again, the strap situation is not finalized. So more to come on that. Oh, and speaking of the

⏹️ ▶️ John physical reality of the headset, We talked about the power cable and like what happens if the power cable comes out, your

⏹️ ▶️ John thing just shuts down. Well, the people who used it in real life have told us that the power cable does not easily

⏹️ ▶️ John detach. It is not like a magsafe where it’s just like, oh, it snicks on there with a magnet. It actually kind of like mechanically

⏹️ ▶️ John locks into place. So you’d have to do something to get it out. So that’s good to hear.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was concerned about accidental removal of it. I was concerned about like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, if you were using the battery pack and for some reason it like if you wanted a second battery pack so you can run for four hours like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, You

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco swap it. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t really like

⏹️ ▶️ John hot swap it. Yeah, although now that I know that it doesn’t pop off like MagSafe, now I’m concerned about cord yanking

⏹️ ▶️ John situations. You know what I mean? Like a kid runs by or you get overexcited or you’re walking

⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere and don’t notice that it snags on something. I guess the battery would just come out of your pocket then, but we’ll see how that gets

⏹️ ▶️ John worked out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we know about the power cable, but how much electricity is the cable providing, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s still some debate about this, but we had one listener, Hughes84, offer this. it’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John simple to estimate the power draw from the battery size. It looks to be about 10,000 to 15,000 milliamp hour battery,

⏹️ ▶️ John which are 3.7 volt cells. So it’s 37 to 55 watt hours with a 2.5 hour runtime that’s 15 to 22 watt average power draw,

⏹️ ▶️ John quite low for the hardware and processing. And we have heard

⏹️ ▶️ John some people discussing the Vision Pro may come with a 30 watt power brick. So

⏹️ ▶️ John the watt range is like, you know, under 50 watts for sure, maybe 15

⏹️ ▶️ John to 20. If it comes with a 30 watt brick, that should be enough. If you’re wondering how much power the sucker draw

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what it does and it kind of makes sense If you know what’s in it, I mean, we know there’s an m2 in it And we can have an idea what

⏹️ ▶️ John that draws We know that the r1 if you just assume that draws the same power as the m2 now You’ve got double the m2

⏹️ ▶️ John plus the screens 30 watt somewhere in that range Sounds reasonable but not like 90

⏹️ ▶️ John or 100 watts. Oh, you know, of course it does have one or more fans inside it to cool it It would be nice

⏹️ ▶️ John if there were some fans Blowing cool air into the possibly sweaty area where your

⏹️ ▶️ John eyeballs are But as far as I know the fan the fan the singular or plural fans

⏹️ ▶️ John I imagine there’s two one for each side are there to cool the electronics not your face

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it does seem like I forget where I heard this or how authoritative it was but I got a pretty solid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Response from somebody saying yeah, it’s 30 watts like that’s it It’s just it’s a 30 watt cap a 30

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watt power supply will power continuously So that’s that’s the answer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right, so there’s more good news news there is apparently going to be a guest mode

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not entirely sure how that’s going to work but I’m happy to hear it because my word it’s not like I’m going to buy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of these per person in the house or anything like that so tell me more about this John.

⏹️ ▶️ John This was a official statement from Apple to iMore this is from the article that we’ll link it says Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John plans to share more information about guest mode closer to the launch of the headset while details are scant

⏹️ ▶️ John about what guest mode for version pro will entail it seems likely this will let users share the headset among friends family and other users And

⏹️ ▶️ John they did talk about the retina scanning thing where it determines who you are by scanning your eyeball or whatever I don’t think it’s retina

⏹️ ▶️ John scanning, whatever it does Here’s the question though I just got done explaining all the stuff of like how it scans

⏹️ ▶️ John your face and your ear and you pick the thing and You get the prescription lenses What are the odds

⏹️ ▶️ John that someone else is going to be able to fit into your face thing with your prescription lenses? And

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, are they gonna have to scan their ear? They’re gonna bring their own little lenses with them You know for a two-second

⏹️ ▶️ John thing yeah, the face thing won’t fit on quite right and it’ll have light leakage and it’ll be a little bit uncomfortable. And incidentally,

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the people who did the press demo said of the choices of sort of face

⏹️ ▶️ John squishy thingies they had there, light shield things, they didn’t have that many choices and the sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of best fit one wasn’t that great of a fit on them. Presumably there will be more choices as the product

⏹️ ▶️ John gets closer to launch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There will be many more according to people I spoke with. Yeah. That what they had here was a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very small subset of the total number that will be available at retail.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so it’ll be unlike the watch straps which come in what, two sizes? Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’ll be many more sizes than that because it’s just much more variability in people’s faces. So there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John that and guest mode flies in the face of that because guest mode presumes that anyone will be actually be able to use your

⏹️ ▶️ John headset. I would do wonder if you get it with prescription lenses does it come with the non prescription ones or

⏹️ ▶️ John do you just get the prescription ones in which case no one will be able to use it unless they have the same prescription

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought the I thought the lenses were like snap in magnetically attached additive things I didn’t think it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I yeah I don’t I don’t know if there’s some like you know the non prescription lenses are also lenses or is

⏹️ ▶️ John just the lack of lenses Is it adding an element to the thing or is it like replacing an element that was there? I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought the prescription stuff was additive I don’t know that for certainty of course, but I thought it was additive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I wouldn’t rely too much on this guest mode being like a practical thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m guessing this is, it’s not going to be like someone else in your house can have their own apps installed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably going to be more like, let me show you something and you can show you can show someone else

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re looking at briefly. You know, oh, here, check this out. And you pass the headset to them. They stick

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on for a minute and look at the thing you’re seeing and then give it back to you. Like, I don’t think it’s going to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a anything approaching a multi user environment.

⏹️ ▶️ John It should be, though, like, honestly, at this point, they’re making a new platform that’s not multi user. and saying this is like the hardest

⏹️ ▶️ John platform to make multi-user in terms of the hardware, because it has to literally fit on people’s faces. But software wise

⏹️ ▶️ John and like CPU power wise in memory, the rumor is this has 16 gigs of RAM or something and it’s got like,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s room for multiple accounts, man. Like just make it happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know it’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ John weird because it’s, you know, like shouldn’t they come to the iPad first? Like I hear that, but this is

⏹️ ▶️ John a brand new platform. Is it because it’s derived from, you know, iOS and iPadOS

⏹️ ▶️ John that adding multi-user is a pain in people’s butt? But yeah, guest mode is probably just like a little playpen where they can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John screw with your stuff, but they can try out your cool headset, even though it won’t exactly fit them that well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe to like stay locked in whatever app you’re currently in.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or, you know, to go to like a, you know, like a guest mode where it’s just like, you know, they reboot the user

⏹️ ▶️ John space into a thing that is not signed into any Apple IDs and just has access to like Safari and some apps or something, who knows,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I’m guessing it’s more like, it’s like a toggle and control center that you like, you flip to temporarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lock yourself, you know, kind of like guided access, like lock yourself into one app so you can show someone, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at this, and then it won’t scan their iris when you take it off and give it to them. You know, it’s probably that kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing. I don’t think there’s any chance of this becoming a multi-user device because of all the physical challenges of that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, because it so relies on scanning your face, scanning

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your ears, getting the right light shield piece.

⏹️ ▶️ John And presumably you only get one. It’s not like you get the whole set of light shields. You get the one that fits you. You don’t get 17 of them. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, you could buy extras, I imagine, and buy extra straps, you have to adjust the straps like it’s a real it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John real barrier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sharing for sure. Oh yeah like already today like you know whenever whenever my son wants to buy some new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco content in the Facebook quest whatever he has to pass me the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco headset so I can like enter the pin inside the headset and this just destroys

⏹️ ▶️ Marco his setup like just having just taking it off and having it go onto my head like the straps get all messed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and I try to leave it as much as I can but like you know You know, still the straps get stretched out and everything’s all wrong and then it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it’s terrible. These devices, you know, one of the big challenges to their adoption

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their spread in the world is you can’t just pass it to someone else and have them experience things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way you are. You know, there’s like video pass-through modes where you can like, you know, show what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re seeing on a nearby computer screen or something. There’s that kind of thing. But to actually show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone else what it’s like in 3D space is just a very difficult physical problem to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve. I don’t expect any kind of multi-user support to really ever be a thing on these headsets. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlike John, I totally see why they didn’t do it because there’s basically no way to do it well.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, well, that’s, see, here’s the thing. This is the legacy of tech debt from the original iPhone. This tech debt had to

⏹️ ▶️ John be incurred in the original iPhone because it was on the ragged edge of what was possible with the hardware at the time. So everything they

⏹️ ▶️ John did, things running as root, single user, no swap, like all that

⏹️ ▶️ John makes perfect sense in 2007. But that time is March on, that tech debt has just been accruing and accruing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And now they’re making a brand new platform, which by all rights should have multiple users

⏹️ ▶️ John support at the OS level in case they ever wanna do it. But that same tech debt is carried over

⏹️ ▶️ John from iOS, the iPad OS, all the way up to, you know, like Unix is a multi-user operating system. And

⏹️ ▶️ John granted, I know why they did it for the iPhone. They just never dug back out of that tech debt. For the phone, it probably is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John the phone I think makes the least amount of sense. It’s not like you’re gonna share your phone with people, right? For the iPad, it makes way more sense because iPads

⏹️ ▶️ John are shared among families. For this, we just described all the reasons it doesn’t make sense, but it’s a brand new platform.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, you gotta get out of that tech debt someday. Even if you don’t roll out that feature until version

⏹️ ▶️ John seven of this product, like dig out of it eventually, please. I just, I feel bad about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I feel like these devices will not be true to form multi-user, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would not be at all surprised if when you put one of these on, if it doesn’t, if you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pass the retina scan, and I know it’s not literally a retina scan, but for, you know, the purposes of discussion,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco If you don’t pass the retina scan.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They said an iris scan. I assume, I suppose that’s slightly different, but. It’s a different part of your eye. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still an eye scan. The front

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey instead of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey back. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. I mean, it ultimately doesn’t matter. Once you fail an eye scan, and it’s clear that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not the primary user of the device, I would assume that they would drop you into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of a vanilla, like, oh, this device has never been used before

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of setup, where you don’t have any custom apps installed. You just get the out of the box apps. I thought there was something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this in the context of, um, of school or education for iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought they had something similar to this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, they have a terrible hack for it. That’s where they like reboot the user space and do all sorts of other things. It used to be worse where they would

⏹️ ▶️ John like re-image the thing, but now they just reboot the user space. But like, again, the, the straightforward way to do multiple

⏹️ ▶️ John users is how Mac OS is like literal, actual multiple users. Like they can be logged in at the same time. They’d

⏹️ ▶️ John be on separate Apple ideas. They’re their own completely separate thing. It’s that just, it came with the operating system they

⏹️ ▶️ John bought from next and they They had to set it aside for the iPhone due to the constraints of 2007 phone hardware, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ve just never dug back out from it. It’s just, it is rippling through their platforms. The

⏹️ ▶️ John only, in one case, the Mac platform is the only one not burdened by this particular

⏹️ ▶️ John technical debt. Mac has tons of other technical debt, but this particular one, the Mac does not have.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in all fairness, Mac multi-user stuff does occasionally cause some bugs, John.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not the fault of the multi-user thing. It’s the fault of the Windows server.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, what I’m trying to say is if you fail your eye test when you put on the headset,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t be surprised if it says, hey, do you want to use this as a guest? And it might even go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far as to say, all right, you need to do the whole scan thing, which I understand takes a few minutes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from everything I’ve heard from Mike and others, but I think it would be such a powerful

⏹️ ▶️ Casey marketing tool for me to go to Marco’s house and say, all right, let me try this stupid

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro thing. you know, yes, I have to spend like four or five minutes, whatever it is doing my scans and this and that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then if you’re to believe literally everyone who’s tried it within 30 seconds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of putting it on, I’m going to be asking Marco if he can look the other way while I run away with his Vision Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s more robust than I think Marco you’re giving them credit for. We’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see, I mean, who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John be surprised if it doesn’t make it to the release because when Apple says they have more information to share as we get closer

⏹️ ▶️ John to launch, this totally looks like a feature that gets booted to a later revision.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Coming later next year. Later, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s, you know, we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, when you try to do a semi-complicated math off the top of your head extemporaneously, turns out you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can occasionally make a whoops. So what’s going

⏹️ ▶️ John on? I didn’t make a whoops. I knew I didn’t know the math off the top of my head, so I just said, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is not really how it is, but, and I tried to give the optimistic scenario of how things are. But the real scenario

⏹️ ▶️ John is much worse than the optimistic, which I knew, I just didn’t know the exact math, so I tried to hand wave it. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the exact math. Talking about pixels and eyeballs, right? So 4K

⏹️ ▶️ John television resolution is roughly 8.3 million pixels. 8K is not twice as many pixels as 4K.

⏹️ ▶️ John 8K is four times as many pixels as 4K, so it’s like four 4K monos.

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know if it was exactly four times because these TV standards of resolutions, they’re not like,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re wondering what the 4K resolution is, you’d really think one of the numbers would be 4,000 something, but it’s not. it’s 2,160

⏹️ ▶️ John by 3,840. That’s 4K.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t actually know if 8K was exactly 4X, but it’s pretty much exactly 4X. So here’s Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro. It has 23 million pixels, which is 11.5 million per eyeball. So 11.5 million per eyeball is higher than

⏹️ ▶️ John the 8.3 million, which would be a 4K. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it has more than 4K per eyeball, but the total number of 23 million is less than 8K across

⏹️ ▶️ John the two eyeballs. So there you have it. There’s been a lot of people doing math on the more

⏹️ ▶️ John interesting thing than number of pixels, which is number of pixels per degree.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you think of like your degrees, how many degrees of vision if you had 180 degree field of view, like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s how many pixels fit into like one degree of your field of view. And that’s what kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John determines whether you can see the pixels and whether it’s retina and so on and so forth. But the upshot from all

⏹️ ▶️ John the people who have seen this thing is that it’s basically retina. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John nobody had any problems looking at text. Nobody said the text looked jaggy. Nobody said there was a screen door effect.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it passes muster as you can look at text on little rectangles

⏹️ ▶️ John floating in front of you and it looks crisp. So that’s what’s important.

⏹️ ▶️ John The thing about, can I use this to get a bigger screen than I have in real life? It depends

⏹️ ▶️ John on how close you pull it to yourself, which is another aspect of this. Like in your real life screen, you can actually move it

⏹️ ▶️ John across the desk real close to your eyeballs. But if you wanna get more pixels of sort of resolution out of your virtual screens,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can literally move your head closer to them or pull the big floating rectangles closer to you. And now

⏹️ ▶️ John you are spending more pixels on the little micro OLEDs that are inside there

⏹️ ▶️ John per unit of virtual screen area. So you could have a very, very large screen, you just

⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t be able to see it all at the same time. So that’s the flexibility this offers you. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t wanna get too bogged down into the details of this, except to say that like, is this a way

⏹️ ▶️ John for you to get a bigger monitor than you have now? Depends on how big your monitor is. It’s for

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a

⏹️ ▶️ John 6K monitor, it’s not quite there, but it doesn’t really matter

⏹️ ▶️ John if you can’t see the pixels. Like I know Mac OS and iOS and whatever don’t do non-integer scaling

⏹️ ▶️ John modes, although iOS does do 2X and 3X. But because of the way this works

⏹️ ▶️ John and because of the interaction between the pixels on the virtual screens and the distance from you,

⏹️ ▶️ John you are effectively changing the multiplier as you pull the virtual screen closer and farther from you. That’s not true

⏹️ ▶️ John of a phone or an iPad or a Mac. You are not changing the multiplier that the OS draws

⏹️ ▶️ John at or the number of pixels you use to draw like a window control. You’re not changing that by moving the screen closer and farther

⏹️ ▶️ John from you. You’re not changing that by moving your face closer. When you move your face closer to your phone, your iPad or your Mac screen, the

⏹️ ▶️ John pixels get bigger. When you move the virtual rectangle closer to you in Apple Vision Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John pixels do not get bigger because the pixels are always exactly the same distance from your eyeball because they’re inside a headset.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it is very different. And speaking of the screens, the refresh rate according to

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s WWDC sessions is 90 Hertz, but switching to 96 Hertz

⏹️ ▶️ John for movies, because 96 is equally, evenly divisible by 24 frames per second, which most movies

⏹️ ▶️ John are shot at. I don’t know, we don’t know, are those screens capable of 120? Are

⏹️ ▶️ John they capable of any arbitrary resolution? But Apple has at least confirmed it will do 90 Hertz and 96 Hertz.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, to answer your earlier comment about, you know, depending on how big your monitor is, when I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco came home to my glorious 6K Apple Pro Display XDR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after this trip, it has never looked small until now. And now that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like imagining like, wow, I have this whole wall in front of me, like that could all be screen space.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now my giant monitor looks like, why am I looking in this tiny little window when I have this huge

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wall not doing anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s the other aspect of it. By making the screens inside the headset bigger, like having it be 20 feet,

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t get more pixels. It’s always the same amount of pixels, but in the end, all that matters

⏹️ ▶️ John is, can you resolve those pixels? Like the number of pixels per degree, I think, was it like 70

⏹️ ▶️ John or something? Most popular headsets are like 20. The really good gaming headsets

⏹️ ▶️ John are in the same range as Apple Vision Pro. They’re 60, 70 pixels per degree. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John but once you can’t resolve them, it’s fine, right? That’s all you’re looking for is like, you know, I can’t resolve them anymore. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John actually care how many more pixels per degree it is. So we’re maybe within one doubling

⏹️ ▶️ John of it being just like a non-issue from everybody. This is the version one product. Maybe people did say

⏹️ ▶️ John when they’re looking around the room that people described it as looking at kind of grainy. Like, why does this not look like reality?

⏹️ ▶️ John Pretty much everybody who did the press thing said, it’s amazing, transparency is amazing. It looks like you’re just looking through the clear

⏹️ ▶️ John lenses, but they all said it’s like you’re looking through like a pair of goggles, right? And that the world looks like

⏹️ ▶️ John not real real, but like you’re looking through something that’s like maybe a dirty

⏹️ ▶️ John pair of goggles or that it looked grainy or whatever. And I think what they’re seeing is not a lack of resolution,

⏹️ ▶️ John but mostly what we discussed before about HDR. Those screens can’t match the dynamic range of the real world.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s always going to look slightly different. You’re gonna be able to tell, am I looking at a screen or am I looking at the real world? In situations

⏹️ ▶️ John where the real world has not a lot of dynamic range because of the lighting, it’ll be harder to tell.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re in any situation with a reasonable amount of dynamic range because of light or sunlight or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna be able to tell the difference because the screens can’t do that dynamic range, which is why we need to keep chasing that dynamic

⏹️ ▶️ John range stuff. Because if you want the Apple Vision Pro version eight to be indistinguishable from looking

⏹️ ▶️ John at the world, you’re gonna need a more dynamic range from your little tiny HDR screens.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Neil Romero was one of many, many people to point out the following. Neil writes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t it odd that at the exact same time Apple launches an iPad or iOS warning that people are too near

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their screens to ward off myopia, that they launch a device that straps two HDR screens fractions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of an inch away from your eyes. It’s a good illustration that they are successful and big enough such that one arm of the company

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t have a clue what the other is doing, but it’s surprising it got through their keynote quality check. Hey, who needs consistent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey messaging anyhow?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s actually inconsistent. Here’s why. The whole myopia thing and sitting too close to things.

⏹️ ▶️ John It has to do with, you know, when you hold something close to you, it doesn’t hurt your eyes if you’re not looking

⏹️ ▶️ John at it, which sounds silly, but like that gets to the point of like, what is it about looking at screens too close to your eyes that it’s bad?

⏹️ ▶️ John The screen close to your eyeballs doesn’t shoot out rays that, you know, destroy your eyes. They’re not shooting

⏹️ ▶️ John UV light out of these screens that are killing your eyes. The sun does that. Exactly. The reason

⏹️ ▶️ John looking at a device close to your face is because you’re looking at it and by looking at it, you must force your eyes to

⏹️ ▶️ John focus on something that is inches from your face. It is the focusing of your eyes

⏹️ ▶️ John on something that is close to your eyes that is, you know, presumably causing the

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the myopia that they said comes from this or whatever, right? Again, if your eyes are closed and you hold a phone close

⏹️ ▶️ John to your face, it does not cause myopia because you’re not looking at it. Now, when you have the headset, yes, the screens

⏹️ ▶️ John are really close to your eyes, but what are your eyes focusing on? Your eyes are not trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to hopefully focus on something that is inches from their face. What they’re focusing on is a screen that appears

⏹️ ▶️ John to be four feet in front of them. And your eyes don’t care that the screens are right there. They just care

⏹️ ▶️ John where are we focusing like how in focusing the eyes. I’m not an eye doctor, but you know, my

⏹️ ▶️ John understanding of focus is first you’ve got the convergence point of like where your eyes pointing, they have to be pointing at the thing. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if the thing is close to you, they’re pointing, you know, you can go cross side if you take something and push it right up to your nose, right? And if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John really far in the distance, your eyes could be, you know, straight ahead and parallel if you’re focusing on infinity, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And the second thing is the muscles that that squish your eye and squish the little parts of your eye. I think they squish the lens. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s muscles that are attached to your eye that squish squishy stuff, which is why when you get old, they can’t squish it anymore because everything gets hard

⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re old. Anyway, they’re squishing parts of your eyes and those muscles are working. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the closer you’re focusing, the more they have to do squishy stuff. And that causes eye strain

⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. So it’s not the fact that the screens that are fractions of an inch from your eye inside the

⏹️ ▶️ John headset, that only matters if you’re asking your eyes to focus on something inches

⏹️ ▶️ John from you in the virtual world. You’re not looking at the pixels on the screen, you’re looking at images on the

⏹️ ▶️ John screen. And I would imagine, I don’t know this for sure, but I’m gonna say I would imagine that because your eyes think they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John focusing five feet away it’s the same as if they were focusing on something five feet away. So

⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re gonna put on my opioid warning in Apple Vision Pro, it should be when you drag one of the app rectangles

⏹️ ▶️ John to be two inches from your face. Exactly the same way it would be if you take your phone and put it two inches from your face. But if those rectangles

⏹️ ▶️ John are out at the end of the coffee table, like they are in the demos, No myopia warning, totally consistent messaging.

⏹️ ▶️ John What about using it on a plane? That’s the situation we talked about where if you’ve traveled on a plane recently and

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve been in coach, the seat back in front of you is inches from your face it feels like.

⏹️ ▶️ John Especially if the jerk leans back. Not a lot of room. We were like, how is it gonna draw the screen,

⏹️ ▶️ John like a virtual screen in sort of transparency mode or whatever the core, where you can see the rest of the plane

⏹️ ▶️ John around you but there’s just a floating screen in midair where you’re watching your TV show. but wouldn’t that screen like clip through

⏹️ ▶️ John the seat? Wouldn’t it be weird that the screen looks like it’s three feet in front of you, but the seat back is a foot and a half in front of you?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, in the keynote, they had a video of this of someone watching a movie

⏹️ ▶️ John on a plane. And as Sage points out, it looks suspiciously roomy. So maybe it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John business class. So we still don’t know the answer of how this is going to look. You know, how far

⏹️ ▶️ John away can you get the screen from you? What does it do when you want the screen to be farther away from you than the seat back? but

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has put out a video of showing someone watching it on a plane, so they seem to think it’s possible. So,

⏹️ ▶️ John first person to get this, please board a plane and try it out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s kind of interesting, like their focus on AR first, like this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an AR first experience, will kind of require you to have more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco space to make use of all the virtual real estate, even though that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco physically necessary. Like if you want to have like a large computing space,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like, you know, unless there’s other features or other implementation modes that we don’t really know about yet, it seems like you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to also be in a large physical space to get a large virtual space.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, unless you do that whole put me on Mount Hood, I forget what they called it, but you know, transport me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere else. I’ve cranked the digital crown all the way in the one direction. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t get to see anything of my actual space. I’m living in virtual reality. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that case, you have infinite space to play with. But yeah, if you’re doing the like, I want to be present

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the room thing, I think you’re exactly right.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you could turn it halfway. So it’s just got the Mount Hood around like the front of you. But like

⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, it’s not going to stop you from putting a screen where it couldn’t physically be.

⏹️ ▶️ John It just will take away from the reality of the situation a little bit. Because you’ll know there

⏹️ ▶️ John could not be a plane floating in that place. Cause it’s, it would be in the middle of that piece of furniture, but tough luck. It’s there, I can

⏹️ ▶️ John see it. Like I don’t think it’s going to like say, oh, sorry, you can’t put it there. I’m gonna show you the seat back, right? I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna show the movie in a quote unquote impossible sort of MC Escher type space, just because

⏹️ ▶️ John it can and that’s what you want. And the transparency is just so you don’t feel like, oh, someone’s gonna sneak up on me or like I

⏹️ ▶️ John wanna be able to see what’s going on around me. The same way when you look at a movie on your seat back, you can see in your peripheral

⏹️ ▶️ John vision what’s going on, right? That’s what they want to reproduce. So you don’t feel isolated. You feel like you’re still on the plane

⏹️ ▶️ John with the other people who were there, but you’re also watching a movie. The movie is just a little bit bigger. Like that’s one of the things

⏹️ ▶️ John they were very careful a not to show and be not to allow anyone in the press demos To do because it was a very

⏹️ ▶️ John controlled environment in the press demo Like people pointed out like, you know at no time did any of the Apple employees

⏹️ ▶️ John like go into a place where they weren’t expected Like they did the thing where they pop in and break through

⏹️ ▶️ John like they demonstrated that but it’s not like those people walking back and forth And like a bunch of crap in the room. It’s a very controlled environment

⏹️ ▶️ John If you put one of these things on and went outside and walked onto New York City Street

⏹️ ▶️ John The AR experience is not going to be able to keep up because we know what’s in the front of this thing. It’s like a LiDAR scanner,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s IR blasters, right? But they can’t handle an outdoor city environment with people everywhere and cars and

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. So it won’t know what the surroundings are like. It will just do its best. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what the first people to get this are gonna have to try. Like some YouTuber is gonna strap this thing on and go out for a walk and see like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what does it make of a walk in the woods? Like, how does it handle it? You know, how does it feel?

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, does it take away from the experience the floating rectangles are impossible places or is it just fine? And you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, as long as the rectangle looks clear, I don’t care.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the guy in front of you leans the seat back on the plane, do all the windows like hit you in the nose? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like push all the windows forward? Like, there’s so many questions.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. All right. And Lars would like to know, hey, why did they call it Vision Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Vision would have been so much more elegant. Do you think they already plan to release a low cost

⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-pro version of the headset? And if so, how would you build that without ruining the entire experience?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, it is called Vision Pro for a reason, but that reason is

⏹️ ▶️ John the non-pro version that they could make now would be unacceptable by Apple standards, right? What they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John releasing, I feel like, is the minimum spec of one of these things they will ever release, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John is expensive right now. They will come out with a non-pro one, but only when the non-pro

⏹️ ▶️ John one can be way cheaper than this one and equal or better specs. Maybe it Maybe it will be literally this one and

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll just repackage it kind of like iPhone style where they take old iPhones and they repackage them or whatever, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John putting Pro on the name, it’s a signifier of the price. It shows that this is the high-end one, but this is the

⏹️ ▶️ John minimum they would put out. Like there, I don’t think you will ever see a headset that has

⏹️ ▶️ John appreciably lower specs than this ever from Apple because I don’t, like I feel like this is like the original

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone on the ragged edge of what’s possible and acceptable and it will only get better from here and there will have

⏹️ ▶️ John to be one or two more generations of this before we get a non pro I feel like.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also it’s it’s part of it’s part of the marketing expectation setting that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look this is an expensive device we not not only is this a high

⏹️ ▶️ Marco price device but we are acknowledging that it is high priced and we are acknowledging this is high

⏹️ ▶️ Marco end and it kind of gives them like a it kind of disclaims to the world this is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not our answer on pricing for this category This is not like the final word here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This, this is going to be our first thing. It’s a big thing. We know it’s expensive and it’s aimed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a high end market. And then that kind of gives them room later to say, to come in with something, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lesser and it sets expectations. So the world, they don’t think $3,500

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a mass market consumer level price for this device longterm. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just what they have now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Tell me about Vision Pro in gaming.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a point that we didn’t talk about last time and we should have. Gaming, we’ll talk more about gaming

⏹️ ▶️ John on the Apple platforms in a little bit. But you know, Apple didn’t lean very heavily

⏹️ ▶️ John into gaming on this, but I think a lot of people who are into VR gaming, you know, the PC, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, playing Windows games in VR, would see this product and they would want it

⏹️ ▶️ John because the screens are amazing, right? It looks cool, the screens are amazing, the transparency effect is something a lot of gaming headsets

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have either at all or anything close to this quality, right? So people would want

⏹️ ▶️ John this hardware. But this product, and I imagine all future headset products that Apple makes,

⏹️ ▶️ John will never be high-end gaming VR headsets for one

⏹️ ▶️ John simple reason, and that is Apple seems to think this should be a standalone device. It does not connect

⏹️ ▶️ John to anything. It doesn’t even tether to your phone. High-end gaming headsets

⏹️ ▶️ John connect to a gigantic 500-watt, multi-fan blowing water-cooled PC and the tower

⏹️ ▶️ John thing under your desk. And as technology marches on, the gigantic tower that draws 500

⏹️ ▶️ John watts and is water-cooled will always have more computing power than the battery-powered thing that you

⏹️ ▶️ John put on your face. So that means the high-end, those people who like high-end VR gaming, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John like, I can’t wait I’m gonna get one of these Vision Pro things. Yeah, eventually the Vision Pro will have the power of today’s tower

⏹️ ▶️ John computer, but then the tower computers will have gotten faster too. And so Apple has essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John taking itself out of the highest of the high end of VR gaming with their design of

⏹️ ▶️ John this product by saying it must be standalone. And based on what they’ve shown and what you’re using it for, that’s the right choice.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s not what this device is about. It’s not like you’re gonna be able to play the most

⏹️ ▶️ John advanced 3D games. If they were doing that, they would have to have the hand controls and everything, right? They’re not interested

⏹️ ▶️ John in that market. And standalone is way more important for them to do that, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John that is important to point out and if you’re wondering well this thing seems pretty powerful You can run pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John good games on it. Remember that the r1 chip has its own job It’s basically doing all the

⏹️ ▶️ John sensor fusion and all like it it is busy So that leaves the m2 to

⏹️ ▶️ John do everything else What kind of high-end games can you run on an m2 not an m2 pro

⏹️ ▶️ John not an m2 max not an m2 ultra a plain m2 that is the sort of power

⏹️ ▶️ John class of of, uh, you know, CPU-GPU combo that is going to be in a standalone

⏹️ ▶️ John headset. And yes, it will advance with time, but just think of, you know, think of your favorite game and think of how well

⏹️ ▶️ John it runs on an M2 MacBook Air. Uh, yeah, you can play lots of cool games and they look really good, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the highest of the high-end game, these PC gamers who, like, have the overclocking, their giant water-cooled things to get

⏹️ ▶️ John the most frame rates out of the most demanding games, they want this device because the screens are amazing,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they don’t want this device because it does not have the GPU power. And there is no, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the HomePod, there is no input where you can say, all right, Apple Vision Pro, just forget about what you’re doing,

⏹️ ▶️ John but can you just be an awesome screen for my gaming PC? And the answer to that is no.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, just look at your PlayStation and it will project the screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John into Vision OS.

⏹️ ▶️ John When Apple buys Sony, maybe that’ll happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word. And then allegedly there are some options with regard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to writing code for the Vision Pro. There’s a work with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple page, forget where it is, but we’ll link it in the show notes. And it has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey three options. Apple Vision Pro compatibility evaluations. If you currently have an iPad or iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app in the App Store, we can help you test it on Apple Vision Pro. Request a compatibility evaluation from App Review

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get a report on your app or game’s appearance and how it behaves in Vision OS. Apple Vision

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro developer labs. Apply for the opportunity to attend an Apple Vision Pro developer lab where you can experience

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your Vision OS, iPad OS, and iOS games running on Apple Vision Pro. With direct support from Apple, you’ll be able to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey test and optimize your apps and games, so they’ll be ready when Apple Vision Pro is available to customers. Labs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be available in six locations worldwide, Cupertino, London, Munich, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, and this is what we were all wondering about, Apple Vision Pro Developer Kit.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey To support great ideas for apps and games for Vision OS, developer kits will be available to help bring your creations to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey life on Apple Vision Pro. These kits will provide the ability to quickly build, iterate, and test on Apple Vision Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so your app or game will be ready to deliver amazing experiences. Stay tuned for how to apply.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this sounds really cool and theoretically great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t know a lot of the details yet. This is probably an order in which you have to do the operations.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I’m guessing it’s like, use the SDK to build something in the simulator first. Then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco submit this ticket to Apple saying, hey, can you see if my app works okay on the real hardware?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then maybe they’ll say, hey, you know what, this app looks pretty cool. You know, let’s offer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more stuff. software lab or maybe a developer kit. That’s how I’m guessing this is going to go. Given

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the level of excitement and hopefully secrecy around this platform and given how incomplete

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the software still is, I’m guessing they’re going to be very careful giving those out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I’m guessing that it will not have any other software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run and might lack many of the capabilities of the final shipping device. Maybe it won’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any of the eye stuff, like where it shows the eyes on the outside. it won’t be able to like make FaceTime calls

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. Like I’m guessing those dev kits are going to be very limited. And of course, they’re going to be NDA

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like crazy because I can’t imagine Apple being very willing to risk like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some YouTuber getting a dev kit and doing a review, you know, in, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco November or whatever, you know, months before this thing is going to ship. So I’m guessing they are going to be hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get and limited and, and certainly, um, you know, NDA like crazy.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the only place where you got that order of operations wrong is that if you are a company that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John really wants to make Vision Pro apps and you haven’t done the compatibility evaluation and you

⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t gone to the developer labs, Apple’s still going to come knocking on your door and say, hey, you should take one of these. Do you

⏹️ ▶️ John want one? I know you haven’t come to our labs and you haven’t asked us to evaluate anything, but we really love to see what you can do with it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s, you know, the big important companies that Apple wants to be on the platform, they will proactively offer. But everybody else,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’s going to be difficult to get one of these,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I imagine. And again, if you were hoping to get a dev kit to have the early experience

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what this thing is like just in usage, it would not surprise me if you can’t do much with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dev kit except run your own app. So I wouldn’t hold your breath on that.

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15” MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, this is your favorite part of your favorite episode. Let’s talk

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about follow up for Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ve got the MacBook Air 15 inch, a couple of more details have come out about that. So

⏹️ ▶️ John first is the base model 15 inch. I mean, we could have looked this up on Monday, but we didn’t. The base model 15 inch

⏹️ ▶️ John has all the GPU cores enabled, which is different than the base model 13 inch because you can get

⏹️ ▶️ John a bend one that only has eight working GPU or cores out of the ten and so that means that all cores

⏹️ ▶️ John working 13 inch is within $100 of the 15 inch this is all just making the 15 inch look like an even better

⏹️ ▶️ John deal right you know the two quote-unquote $200 price difference from you know 1099

⏹️ ▶️ John to 1299 it’s actually really just a $100 price difference because all the 15 engines have all working parts and their

⏹️ ▶️ John SOCs that’s great the base model 15 inch comes with the 35 watt

⏹️ ▶️ John dual port charger as a no cost option, oh no, with a no cost option to get the 70

⏹️ ▶️ John watt charger, whereas the base 13 inch comes with the cruddy 30 watt single port charger and you have

⏹️ ▶️ John to like pay to upgrade to the better chargers. So that’s another plus the 15 inch for merely $100 more

⏹️ ▶️ John than an equivalent 13 inch comes with your choice of two better chargers

⏹️ ▶️ John at no additional cost. So loving the 15 inch and also I just recently saw a teardown of the 15 inch

⏹️ ▶️ John and the insides of it look like Apple has done a little bit, put a little bit more effort into

⏹️ ▶️ John cooling. I know it’s weird because it’s fanless just like the 13 inch, but like the 13 inch had the barest

⏹️ ▶️ John of amount of material slapped onto the top of the SOC and now it looks like a little bit thicker kind of, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John metally tapey parts are on there. We’ll see when people start testing these for temperature or whatever, but I’m loving the 15 inch.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I actually went to the local Apple Apple store today just to very briefly hold

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 13 inch air and the 15 inch air. And when I first picked it up, I was like, wow, this is heavier than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I expected. But actually I think that was not the correct reaction to truth be told.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It actually is not very much heavier than the 13. It does look ever so slightly wonky, not having

⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaker grills on either side of the keyboard, but I don’t find it nearly as bothersome as most people seem to,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it looks really nice. Like, I mean, I only played with it for literally two or three minutes, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I am not in the market for a large laptop, certainly I would get a MacBook pro for several different

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasons. But yeah, if you’re interested in a big screened,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but otherwise not bananas laptop, you know, something that’s aimed more for a regular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey human and not, you know, somebody like the three of us, uh, then I, yeah, it’s a really good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal. And it seems like a really nice computer. Everyone who’s had a, had a press model

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever, a test model says that it’s basically exactly like 13, but bigger. and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much anyone who has a 13-inch MacBook Air says it’s the best computer Apple’s made in years. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is two thumbs up for me, I mean, based on my very limited usage.

⏹️ ▶️ John And as Marco would say, they didn’t half-butt this. Like in the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Teardown,

⏹️ ▶️ John the motherboard, it’s not the 13-inch motherboard just shoved into a 15-inch case. It’s a different motherboard. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John smaller than the 13-inch motherboard because they had to have room for the speakers or whatever. And if you look at like

⏹️ ▶️ John the differences between the 13 and the 15, there’s like more bracing and more metal and more screws in the 15

⏹️ ▶️ John to keep it from flexing because it’s bigger. Like they, it’s a typical Apple laptop where they thought it out. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John just like, oh, we’ll take the guts of the 13 inch, shove it into a 15 inch thing and put it in some bigger batteries. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a fully designed computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah.

Mac Studio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about the Mac Studio and apparently there’s good news in the noise department.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes the the M1 Mac Studio had a bad reputation for

⏹️ ▶️ John making more fan noise than we all thought it should not that it was super loud But because it

⏹️ ▶️ John was using in all cases except one the exact same Socs that Apple had in laptops

⏹️ ▶️ John and the laptops were silent We felt like the Mac Studio should be sound as well and it wasn’t so

⏹️ ▶️ John here are some measurements straight from Apple we put links in the show notes to Apple’s own specs for both idle

⏹️ ▶️ John and quote, wireless web usage. The 2022 MacStudio with an M1 in it, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John measures it at 15 decibels for both of those things. The 2023 MacStudio,

⏹️ ▶️ John six decibels, which because of the way decibels work, a nine dB difference equals eight times

⏹️ ▶️ John quieter because it’s a logarithmic scale. So that is a big improvement. And Jason Snell says, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John happy to report that Apple has rejiggered the cooling system in the MacStudio. I could only hear the fan blowing when I turned

⏹️ ▶️ John MacStudio around so that’s vents reporting right at me. Even then it was pretty quiet. When properly oriented

⏹️ ▶️ John the computer on my, when I properly oriented the computer on my desk, I couldn’t hear the fan. I placed my M1 MacStudio

⏹️ ▶️ John on a nearby table and I could still hear it blowing. I wouldn’t call the M2 MacStudio silent,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s noticeably quieter than the M1 model. And if you were to keep it on top of your desk, you probably wouldn’t hear it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Good news, Apple should have touted this, but then again, if they touted this, it would have been like admitting the M1 had a cooling problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John Love to hear it. Love to hear they fix this. This is not a small change. Good job, Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is, because again, that was always such a baffling flaw in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first one, because it seemed like the first Mac Studio was such a great computer in so many other ways,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like every other way, and then it had this weird, unnecessary flaw. So now this is great, because now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can just, you know, there’s no more like gotcha about the Mac Studio. Now it’s just like, yeah, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this product works for you, buy it. No questions asked.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the only remaining, it’s not a gotcha, but the only remaining thing holding back the Mac Studio is the

⏹️ ▶️ John fact that the fans are low diameter. So while that doesn’t affect the number of decibels, it affects

⏹️ ▶️ John the frequency, right? And sometimes the higher frequency, smaller fans, higher frequency

⏹️ ▶️ John noise can be more annoying at exactly the same level than lower frequency, which is why if you want a silent PC, you

⏹️ ▶️ John get gigantic fans like they’re in my Mac Pro. But huge improvement.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like the size of the fans, it’s a small case, right? The fans kind of have to be small. They could do

⏹️ ▶️ John way better cooling, as I said, the, when we looked at the M1, went way better cooling if they did front to back airflow.

⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t, they do bottom to back airflow. The air on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Studio comes in the bottom and goes out the top of the back. So we’ll see if they ever redesign that case,

⏹️ ▶️ John but a big improvement year over year. And it’s not just Jason got like a blessed perfect

⏹️ ▶️ John press model because like I said, these are links from Apple’s own spec pages saying what they measure the sound to be.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like Apple’s probably being honest with themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One and would hope. Alrighty, there’s good news in the fan department,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but some very questionable news with regard to pricing. The pricing seems a little wonky. What’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going on there?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, we talk about this all the time with Apple’s upgrade prices being disconnected from reality, but even within

⏹️ ▶️ John the weird anti-reality of Apple’s pricing scheme, their own,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, options prices in the Porsche style have bumped up against each other. So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Sloan Studio

⏹️ ▶️ John pointed this out. A Mac mini with an M2 Pro and a 19 core GPU, 32 gigs of RAM, one terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ John SSD, is the same price as a Mac Studio with M2 Max, a 30 core

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU and the same RAM and SSD. With the Studio, you get 10 gigabit ethernet, two more USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ John ports, an SD card reader, and 11 more GPU cores with exactly the same price.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a problem. When things are literally exactly the same price, one should not be that much better.

⏹️ ▶️ John Remember, this is a mini compared to a studio. It’s not two different classes of machine. It’s not laptop versus desktop. It’s literally a

⏹️ ▶️ John mini and a taller mini. And the taller mini with way more stuff in it is exactly the same price

⏹️ ▶️ John because of the ridiculous cost of add-ons.

Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me about John Ternes on the talk show in discrete GPUs. So I’ll put a link

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the

⏹️ ▶️ John show notes to a YouTube clip. This is a feature that YouTube’s added recently where you can take any YouTube video that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John watching and save a clip, which just saves two offsets on it. You know, start this time, end at this time,

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the overcast clip thing. And I love it because YouTube has always supported time offsets in the URL.

⏹️ ▶️ John You could just put t equals 3m 4s for three minutes and four seconds, but it wouldn’t tell it when to end.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the clip thing adds that. So anyway, we’ll have a YouTube clip linked in the show notes, which we’ll probably break in five years when YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John sunsets the clip feature. But for now, it will work. Here is the quote from John Ternes when

⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber was asking him about discrete GPUs and Macs. Ternes said, fundamentally,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve built our architecture around the shared memory model and that optimization. And so it’s not entirely clear

⏹️ ▶️ John to me how you’d bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is optimized for our systems. It just hasn’t been

⏹️ ▶️ John a direction we’ve wanted to pursue. Now, John Ternes is not part of the

⏹️ ▶️ John marketing department. But like all the opposite executives, he is press trained, media trained,

⏹️ ▶️ John as they call it. So it’s hard to say whether this answer tells you anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because if Phil Schiller said it, I would say, well, there’s no information in this statement because he’s so well trained

⏹️ ▶️ John that when he says something like this, he’s not making any statement about future products. But when I see someone closer to the engineering

⏹️ ▶️ John side say something like this, when he says, it hasn’t been a direction that we wanted

⏹️ ▶️ John to pursue, now that’s past tense, right? But when he says, it’s not entirely clear to me how

⏹️ ▶️ John you bring in another GPU and do it in a way that was optimized. If there was,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, systems in Apple’s labs that they had developed and decided not to ship or that they were planning on developing that

⏹️ ▶️ John brought that quote unquote brought in another GPU, I don’t think he would have phrased it that particular way. So,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, take it. These are his words. Take it as you will. It technically doesn’t say anything about future

⏹️ ▶️ John products. But when I heard him say that, it made me think they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John really interested in discrete GPUs at all, now,

⏹️ ▶️ John in the past, or in the near future. We’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I wouldn’t hold your breath on that. The way I interpreted that was basically, this does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not fit into the direction we’ve chosen to go. And they’re not gonna change their direction,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially just for this one, you know, edge case product. You know, it seems like the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was made for people in recording studios, basically. This is like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recording studio or video editing studio kind of product where people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of cards for audio or video I.O. And that’s it. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like that’s the main. Well, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John get to that in a little bit because even in that application, there’s some problems.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. But it seems like the Mac Pro, as we discussed last week,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a product that looks like it’s designed to kill the Mac Pro, but it at least is going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep it a marginalized product. It’s not going to expand its market, it’s going to lose some of its market.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we also don’t know, you know, as outsiders, how many people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have actually been buying the Mac Pro and using graphics card expansion? Like, besides

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, and I don’t think anyone else is doing what you do with it, like to basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy a Mac Pro to be a gaming PC.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, one thing to gauge it by is Apple has released a bunch of new video cards for this, and they

⏹️ ▶️ John almost never, like, you know, the Mac Pro way of doing things is you release a product and you don’t touch it for five years.

⏹️ ▶️ John But over the course of those five years, they’ve been steadily releasing new graphics cards. Someone’s gotta be

⏹️ ▶️ John buying them, otherwise why would they keep making them?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess that’s fair. But I would guess that they looked at the market and they’re like, all right, well, we sell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this many Mac Pros, you know, this percentage of them adds PCI cards

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, audio and video I.O. And then this other percentage of them adds GPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And given our new architecture, is it really worth serving that sub-market

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a sub-market that adds GPUs to their Mac Pro? And they clearly decided not to. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to say they never will, but I think that whatever factors led them to make that decision

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this product, those factors are gonna continue to be the case in the future

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even become more extreme. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see about that. That’s why this statement is weird because Apple makes all sorts of stuff internally that never sees the light

⏹️ ▶️ John of day. I know for a semi-fact firsthand all sorts of things that Apple has done internally

⏹️ ▶️ John that they decided not to ship for mostly good reasons. But like if you, you know, they experiment,

⏹️ ▶️ John like what about this? What about that? Right? And you know, not they make a fully formed product, but they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John like, if we made a product with this, does this make sense? Do we have the parts? Can we put it together? Can we prototype it? What do you think of it? Right?

⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that he said, it’s not entirely clear to me how you’d bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is

⏹️ ▶️ John optimized can be read multiple ways. You can say, well, we did make a thing with another GPU. and we couldn’t figure out how to integrate

⏹️ ▶️ John it into the system in a way that made sense. Like we got it to work, you know, there’s not people wondering, it’s not impossible

⏹️ ▶️ John to connect another GPU to these things. You could do it. It’s just like, well then, but then what about the GPU that’s on there and how do we integrate

⏹️ ▶️ John them? And is it useful? And does it work well? Right? He could be saying that, or he could

⏹️ ▶️ John be saying, we never tried that because we, that’s not the path that we’re pursuing. We didn’t even prototype it. We just set

⏹️ ▶️ John it aside. You know, I don’t know any of these things. I don’t have any inside info of what they tried with respect

⏹️ ▶️ John to this particular thing. But a statement like this doesn’t really close the door on, oh yeah, we tried it, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John was crappy. Like it wasn’t good, it wasn’t worth it. Nobody would want it, and

⏹️ ▶️ John we think we can do better without it, and we’ll see how it goes. But speaking of doing better without it, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ John assess how they’ve done here. If we look at, now we’ve got metal

⏹️ ▶️ John scores, you know, Geekbench scores, all that stuff. So look at the metal scores. This is like a benchmark of Apple’s graphics API. So you

⏹️ ▶️ John basically only see Apple stuff here because it’s Apple’s API. And

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re talking about the M2 Ultra here. And the M2 Ultra, remember, is in the Mac Studio,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s also the exact same thing in the Mac Pro. As far as you know, they’re not clocked differently. There’s no, it’s the same SoC

⏹️ ▶️ John in both places. So when I say M2 Ultra, you can think Mac Pro in your head, but you can also think Mac Studio.

⏹️ ▶️ John With the Metal Scores, the M1 Max SoC was around 108K. The M1 Ultra was around 150K.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s 1.3 times the M1 Max performance.

⏹️ ▶️ John but the M1 Ultra had two times the GPU cores of the M1 Max. The M1 Ultra is two M1 Maxes stuck

⏹️ ▶️ John together. So if it has twice the GPU cores, why is it only 1.3 times faster in a GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John benchmark? GPUs usually scale linearly. And the answer to that is something I think we touched on ages ago when we were talking about the M1

⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra, is that there’s, I forget what the, I forget the details now, but there’s some limitation in the M1 Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t let it scale its GPU cores linearly. I don’t know if it’s like some cache or translation buffer or something

⏹️ ▶️ John that wasn’t big enough. And that’s kind of a shame because you did get twice the GPU cores,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you didn’t get twice the performance. You only got 1.3 times the performance, and that was crappy. All right, so now we’ve got the M2 Max,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is 130K, which is 1.2 times as fast as the M1 Max, for 1.2 times the GPU cores. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John linear as well. Now the M2 Ultra. The M2 Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ John is twice as fast as the M2 Max for twice as many GPU scores. Yay for linear

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU scaling. And that means the M2 Ultra is 267K, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John a respectable metal score. The M2 Ultra is now the fifth fastest

⏹️ ▶️ John metal score overall on the Geekbench charts. The top three scores

⏹️ ▶️ John on the metal charts are the 2019 Mac Pro with graphics cards in it. So

⏹️ ▶️ John good showing for the M2 Ultra, linear scaling, awesome. And by the way, if you’re wondering like, oh, should I bother getting the

⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Ultra? The M1 Ultra was not as good a deal if you care about GPU cores. The

⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Ultra, it’s linear. It’s got twice as much as the M2 Max and it does twice the performance on GPU. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it is doing great. It’s doing exactly what we wanted. But here’s the thing, the M2 Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ John is two M2 Maxes. The M2 Ultra is not four M2 Maxes, which is what we were hoping for, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So two M2 Maxes, the M2 Ultra, that’s an amazing SoC for

⏹️ ▶️ John a tall Mac mini, right? You know, it’s the fifth fastest ever,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? It is not an amazing SoC for a gigantic tower computer, okay? So here is

⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 Ultra versus NVIDIA. And this is not like Metal performance scores or OpenCL or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is running a graphics benchmark. This is the gfxbenchmark.com, I’ll put a link in the show notes. This

⏹️ ▶️ John is running their Aztec Ruins high tier benchmark, right? We’re looking at frame rates because

⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, forget about what the Metal score is, forget about this, but like frame rates, right? An NVIDIA 4080

⏹️ ▶️ John has 16% higher frame rate than the M2 Ultra. Yeah, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Ultra is in spitting distance of the 4080, not bad. The 4090 has 37% higher frames per second. And the 4090, remember,

⏹️ ▶️ John is a card that launched eight months ago. So the 4090 is still kind of pooping all over the M2 Ultra,

⏹️ ▶️ John which you would expect, but it’s kind of a shame, right? And this is, you know, putting it in perspective,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does not have a computer with a competitive, with any GPU that’s competitive with a single

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the eight-month-old king of the PC GPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will, for whatever it’s worth, the 4090 also currently costs about $1,600. Still less,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, you know, how much does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the Mac Pro cost?

⏹️ ▶️ John Fair, but like, you know, also how much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco power does this thing draw? I mean. Yeah, well that, this is for, it was for the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, right? So, you know, the M2 Studio, the M2 Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio, great, awesome. No complaints, really good performance, scales linearly, it’s in a tiny little case,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s quiet, love it, thumbs up. The gigantic Mac Pro has the same exact,

⏹️ ▶️ John and this is what I, you know, what I’m always talking about is like Apple, with this generation of Macs, Apple is seeding

⏹️ ▶️ John the high end. We’re talking about GPU, seeding the high end of GPUs to the rest of the world. Apple does not have anything

⏹️ ▶️ John that is in the conversation with the best PC GPUs. And in the past, when they’ve had horrendously

⏹️ ▶️ John expensive Mac Pros, like the one I bought, you could buy them with a video card that would A, cost you

⏹️ ▶️ John way more than $1,600. Like I think the video card that I have in mind now was like $2,800 from Apple originally. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John way slower than a 4090, way slower, right? But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not in the conversation anymore with high-end GPU. Setting aside that you can put multiples into like the 2019 Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John if you need them for computer or whatever, setting that aside just for on a single GPU basis, the 4090

⏹️ ▶️ John crushes the M2 Ultra. As you would expect, that’s the reason when we discussed this on the back of the envelope years ago, we were like, the

⏹️ ▶️ John quad would be in the conversation. If it was basically, you know, four M2 Maxes or,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, two M2 Ultras, then you’d be in the conversation, but they didn’t ship that.

⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ve just got this. So just to be clear. What about non-game GPU performance?

⏹️ ▶️ John So this is an article of someone crapping on the Mac Pro from some PC company, whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, he points out that Apple in the keynote called out the performance of Octane, Redshift,

⏹️ ▶️ John and Blender in the keynote. So he was like, fine, let me look with what the Blender scores are. Blender is a 3D rendering thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU rendering on the M2 Ultra. So the M2 Ultra score is 3,400. The 4090 is 3.8 times faster.

⏹️ ▶️ John The score is 13,000. The 3080 is 1.8 times faster. The 3060, which is a $330 video card,

⏹️ ▶️ John is about the same speed as the M2 Ultra. That’s not a good look. Now here, here’s the killer. The 3070 has

⏹️ ▶️ John a score of 3,396 compared to the M2 Ultra’s 3,412. That’s a laptop GPU.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that hurts.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That hurts. That’s deep.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you think about it, that laptop is probably noisier than a Mac Studio, right? And I’m not saying the M2 Ultra

⏹️ ▶️ John is a laptop SoC. It’s an amazing SoC, but it is not a powerhouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John So GPU, Apple is sitting out this generation. They are not in

⏹️ ▶️ John the conversation on high-end GPU power, which Apple I think is fine with, and most of their customers are gonna be fine

⏹️ ▶️ John with, because most of their customers buy laptops, and these things are amazing laptop GPUs. Just fantastic, phenomenal,

⏹️ ▶️ John just amazing. But are they amazing GPUs to put in a gigantic tower computer that costs $7,000? No, they

⏹️ ▶️ John are not. Let’s look at the CPU. The M2

⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra has a CPU, single core score of 2217, multi-score score of 18735. Pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ John How does that stack up to Intel and AMD? Again, setting aside the M2 Studio and all the

⏹️ ▶️ John laptops where these chips stomp all over everybody. What about your $7,000 gigantic tower with three humongous

⏹️ ▶️ John fans in it? That, you know, they could have and have in the past put Intel Xeons on there.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got an Intel Xeon in there. If they were to build this tower today with a modern Intel Xeon, what kind of scores would it be getting?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the Intel Xeon W93595X, which is a 56-core Xeon, is 2.8 times faster in multi-core than the

⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Ultra.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Again, if they

⏹️ ▶️ John had made a quad, they would have beat that, but they didn’t. The Intel Core i9-13900KS is 39% faster

⏹️ ▶️ John in single-core and 15% faster in multi-core.

⏹️ ▶️ John And those chips, you cannot put those in a Mac Studio, to be clear. Like that chip is useless for Apple anywhere except

⏹️ ▶️ John for their gigantic tower computer with a huge power supply and tons of cooling. So with this

⏹️ ▶️ John generation of the Mac Pro, Apple is out of the conversation for high-end CPU and high-end

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU entirely. What about PCI Express lanes?

⏹️ ▶️ John In the Xeon generation of the Mac Pro, the 2019 Mac Pro, as far as I’ve been able

⏹️ ▶️ John to tell, they believe it had 64 Gen 3 PCI lanes. Now, Gen 3 lanes are half the speed of Gen 4 lanes, which

⏹️ ▶️ John was the new Mac Pro has. But even taking that into account,

⏹️ ▶️ John the new Mac Pro has more, the old Mac Pro has more PCI Express bandwidth

⏹️ ▶️ John than the new one because the new one only has 24 lanes, or not only has, yeah, 24 Gen 4 lanes. And the old one had 40 lanes

⏹️ ▶️ John connected to the CPU and 24 lanes connected to the IO controller. Hector

⏹️ ▶️ John Martin on Mastodon pointed out that the M2 Ultra basically just has two internal PCIe

⏹️ ▶️ John switches. with all these lanes hanging off of them. So even though they have all these slots,

⏹️ ▶️ John their shared bandwidth, because they go through these PCI Express switches. So the M2 Ultra also

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have the PCI lane capacity that the Xeon did. It was kind of a shame. Now finally,

⏹️ ▶️ John we go to Neil Parfit, who is a YouTuber who talks about his use of the Mac Pro in his audio application.

⏹️ ▶️ John And he stuffs it full of cards doing audio stuff. So he seems like the ideal audience of the new Mac Pro. And here’s what he had to

⏹️ ▶️ John say in the video we’ll link in the show notes. His current rig is 28 core Xeon 2019 Mac Pro with 768 gigs of RAM. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John all? And his problem with the new Mac Pro is,

⏹️ ▶️ John when he just launches all his apps and starts working on a project, he’s around 300 gigs of RAM usage.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the M2 Ultra Mac Pro, max RAM is 192 gigs. So him just starting up all his projects

⏹️ ▶️ John and launching into all his editors and editing his big composition with all the samples and everything, he’s already pushing

⏹️ ▶️ John into swap. That’s not great. and his old Mac Pro had

⏹️ ▶️ John four 16X PCI Express lines and then only has two, blah, blah, blah. Probably doesn’t matter for audio, but he did note it.

⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing he pointed out was that he kind of thinks that for his particular usage, having a tower version of this

⏹️ ▶️ John is useless because his is always gonna be in a rack mount because it’s just so noisy and it’s got all the cards and the

⏹️ ▶️ John cards have their own fans in them and he’s just stuffed to the gills and it’s a rack mount type of thing. Like it’s out

⏹️ ▶️ John of sight, out of mind, shoved off into the side somewhere. So this new Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably good for some people’s somewhere, but it is an extremely

⏹️ ▶️ John compromise. In every aspect, it is extremely compromised. It is not competitive with the high end

⏹️ ▶️ John of the PC world in any category, PCI Express lanes, GPU speed, CPU speed,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a gigantic tower computer. That’s, you know, like Marco said, if you wanted to kill

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro, this is the type of machine you might put out. It’s not the end of the story. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John they make a quad in the future, maybe they couldn’t pull it off now, maybe the M3 will change the equation because it’ll be on a different process size.

⏹️ ▶️ John But for right now, the takeaway is M2 Ultra is an amazing SoC that is not compromised like the M1

⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra was. The M2 Ultra Mac Studio is an amazing machine that’s quieter than it used to be. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Ultra Mac Pro is the machine for I don’t know who. And for me personally,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple sitting out and seeding the entire top end of the computing world feels very disappointing to me and I

⏹️ ▶️ John want them to claw that back sometime in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So did we get a Mac Pro? Like, I don’t mean that to be snarky. I’m genuinely asking,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, it seems to me, John, that you’re saying, maybe without saying, maybe you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally saying it, that this isn’t really a Mac Pro. Yes, it is a name, but in little else. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you consider this a successor to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco your- In

⏹️ ▶️ Casey price, it sure is. Well, yeah, fair, fair.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, it is, it’s just not a great one because it does have expansion slots. No other computer

⏹️ ▶️ John does. And it does have a really big case with tons of cooling, right? It is more

⏹️ ▶️ John capable, it has more Thunderbolt slots, like it has more of everything than any other Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John does. So yes, it is a Mac Pro, but that’s why I was comparing it against the PC world, like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s not in that conversation anymore. Like they’re not even contending. Setting aside the horrendous price difference

⏹️ ▶️ John that they’ve always had, they’re just not close to the high end of stuff that’s been out for months

⏹️ ▶️ John or even a year or more, right? And that usually doesn’t happen. Usually when Apple comes out with the new Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John on its day of release, it’s in the conversation with high-end PCs, you know, granted potentially

⏹️ ▶️ John at twice the price, and this one just isn’t. But it is a Mac Pro, like those slots are there, that case is there,

⏹️ ▶️ John those, you know, those ports are there. It’s just, you know, a little

⏹️ ▶️ John bit of a not so great Mac Pro. And we’ve had not so great Mac Pros before, and we’ll have them again. We had not

⏹️ ▶️ John so great Power Macs, let me tell you. Not every Power Mac was a winner. They were shipping Power Wax with a front side

⏹️ ▶️ John bus that was like, you know, seven times slower than the CPU speed and that was not a great time to be around.

⏹️ ▶️ John But then there were great ones like the original Power Mac G5, my beloved 2008 Mac Pro, I think the 2019 Mac Pro is an amazing

⏹️ ▶️ John machine that just kind of got blindsided by the ARM transition. But

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in many respects, my Mac will still be at the

⏹️ ▶️ John top of the benchmark charts because you can put graphics card in there that are modern and good. And you can’t do that with

⏹️ ▶️ John any other Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Apple Silicon transition has been wonderful for all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other Macs. But what they’ve done with this strategy of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these chips is basically they just make two chips that are actually kind of similar to each

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other. You know, they make the M1, M2, and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they make the Pro version of that and the Macs version, which is kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an extension of the Pro version. And they’re just applying those chips and those design

⏹️ ▶️ Marco decisions and those trade-offs to the entire product line. The Mac Pro is just,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, two MacBook Pro chips glued together, and the MacBook Pro chip is not that different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the MacBook Air chip, and the MacBook Air chip is the same as the iPad chip. And so,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re using designs that are made for much smaller and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower power products, and just kind of, you know, copy and pasting them, scaling them up to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to higher end products. And that works great for all the other Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else in the lineup, that works fantastically. But that strategy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just doesn’t scale to the needs of the Mac Pro very well.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it would if they made the quad one, right? And that’s not just like a fantasy, that’s not a thing that happened. That

⏹️ ▶️ John was part of a plan inside Apple, as a plan that they didn’t follow through on, but I feel like it got

⏹️ ▶️ John farther than just them noodling on it, like that it didn’t come to fruition, you know, again, for

⏹️ ▶️ John reasons that probably have to do with costs because, you know, like when they were buying Yeah, Xeons cost a lot of money and they had to pay Intel’s

⏹️ ▶️ John profit margins, but Xeon sells a ton more Xeons, or Intel sells a ton more

⏹️ ▶️ John Xeons, so they get economies of scale. Apple has to pay for every single one

⏹️ ▶️ John of these quad SOCs and they’re the only person who will ever buy them, and the only person they will let buy them.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that wasn’t viable for them, but that’s a problem. I feel like that’s a problem for Apple. They have

⏹️ ▶️ John to figure out the high-end thing. Their solution of doing four of them glued together, I think would be

⏹️ ▶️ John great. If that could work and scale linearly, it would be amazing, right? That’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John we all wanted. They just couldn’t do it with the M1 or the M2. We’ll see if that

⏹️ ▶️ John changes. But like, I, you know, this, this strategy, like, oh, this is great for everything except for the high end. The high end was always going to be the hardest,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they had a plan and the plan seems viable. They just haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ John executed yet. Like it’s not like they’re like, oh, they’re stuck. They’re in another thermal corner. They have no solution. No, the solution

⏹️ ▶️ John is the quad. the quad to work at some kind of reasonable price, boom,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re back in the conversation. You got all the PCI Express lanes, you got the GPU power to be in the conversation

⏹️ ▶️ John with single GPU things. And yes, you can put other GPUs connected to it. You could put extra

⏹️ ▶️ John RAM on like those are all technical possibilities. Apple has not precluded that or painted themselves into the corner

⏹️ ▶️ John where they can never ever do it. But I don’t think they need to do it. But B,

⏹️ ▶️ John they do need to do the quad at some point. I really hope they eventually pull it off. The other option is they just abandon this entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John phase out the tower and they’ll never be a quad. But I’m really rooting for that. And I hate calling it the quad. It

⏹️ ▶️ John should have a better name. I’m really rooting for that. But that that’s that’s a solution they just haven’t done yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, even with the quad, you know, it would. So first of all, that would solve some problems,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that would that would get them in, you know, in the right performance category for the GPU.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would certainly it’s certainly great for the CPU, but it still has the tradeoffs that Apple Silicon

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has brought in terms of, first of all, your RAM ceiling will be lower significantly compared

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Intel layout for this product, but it would be double what it is now. Yeah, but you’d be going, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from, you know, a tenth to a fifth of what it was before basically.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know, that’s not great or maybe, you know, an eighth to a fourth, whatever. But also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are then you’re you’re not expandable anymore. Assuming the RAM would still be soldered on like just like this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have no RAM expansion in the future. You would still probably have some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco PCI bandwidth issues or hacks needed.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think you’d have doubled the bandwidth and you’d be right back to where the 2019 was. Like you’d again,

⏹️ ▶️ John be in the conversation.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like five

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years later, like it’s not, you know, so

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. I know, but it would be competitive. Like as the new quads come out, they would have more PCI express lanes, just

⏹️ ▶️ John like the M2 has more PCI express lanes than the M1. Like, I think it would solve their PCI express lane problem

⏹️ ▶️ John if they committed to the quad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would, but you know, part of the reason why you have this PCI Express lane problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the way they scale this chip up is by multiplying a bunch of stuff that you actually don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need copies of. You know, like, when you look at the M2 Ultra, you have a whole lot of that chip

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you actually didn’t need to be doubled. And if they have a quad, you’re gonna have a whole lot of silicon space wasted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on even more stuff that they don’t need to be quadrupled. You know, different, certain parts of the chip just aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used in this configuration. You know, the Xeons worked well in this product because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were designed from the start to have massive amounts of PCI bandwidth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to the chip, massive RAM support, like all the stuff that high-end workstations need,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Xeons are designed for that. The M-series chips are never gonna really be designed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. They’re always going to be, like, you know, unless they would make custom chips for the Mac Pro, which I don’t see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, if they made bigger to be instead of doing quad of the like the size

⏹️ ▶️ John that goes in the Mac Studio, if they instead made double of a chip that is bigger than will fit in the Mac Studio, that

⏹️ ▶️ John would also work. But I feel like that’s even more cost. Like here’s the question. Where is the cost? Is the cost in designing the

⏹️ ▶️ John chip or is the cost in fabbing the chip? And I feel like for this generation, they bailed on it due to the cost of

⏹️ ▶️ John actually fabbing it because they had it designed. So maybe they’ll go back to a drawing board and say, we thought it would

⏹️ ▶️ John be too expensive to build a custom chip for the Mac Pro that we only use on one computer. But it turns out, even

⏹️ ▶️ John if we reuse the things, the problem is doing the interposer for four things, you know, like whatever the problem

⏹️ ▶️ John was, but like there’s some part of the process of building it ended up being more expensive than they thought. So maybe it actually is

⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper to do a single interposer of just having the things end to end, just like the Maxes,

⏹️ ▶️ John only instead of two Maxes end to end, it’s two extremes end to end. And the extremes

⏹️ ▶️ John are like you said, let’s not waste time duplicating things that we don’t need more of, and let’s make two bigger

⏹️ ▶️ John chips that when combined, when either in a single and a double configuration makes sense for the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is also a viable path forward, I feel like.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other thing too is like the cost of, like if we actually got this thing to a quad,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, right now, if you have a Mac Studio to go from the Max

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Ultra, so basically the single to the double, is a $1,400 to $2,000 option.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the Mac Pro with the, you know, quote, double the ultra,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro with a double right now is an $8,000 machine. You know, would it be $12,000 to start with a quad? Maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, someone did do that article of saying

⏹️ ▶️ John the new 2023 Mac Pro in its maximum expensive configuration is $40,000 cheaper than 2019 was. Why?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco when you brought the 2019 one up,

⏹️ ▶️ John like if you want that 56 core Xeon, Intel charges you a ton, and Apple charges you even more

⏹️ ▶️ John on top of that, right? Like the Mac Pro, you know, the 2019 Mac Pro was a more

⏹️ ▶️ John expensive machine than this one. So yes, doubling it into the quad would make it more expensive, but it still wouldn’t come close

⏹️ ▶️ John to matching the 2019 because everything in that was so expensive. Like going up to the high

⏹️ ▶️ John end, the high end was only 28 core and like going to 28 core was like add $5,000 or something like that. So I don’t think cost is an issue here. Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, Apple gets to keep all these profit margins without giving any of them to Intel

⏹️ ▶️ John and second of all, they’re not shy about adding $5,000 to the price. No problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I hope this goes in that direction in the future. I hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this product is, I hope that Apple knows that this is a compromise

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe a temporary placeholder until the chip situation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets better for this product. Because again, I love the way Apple Silicon has worked out for all the other Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fantastic. Just for this particular product, as the rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this product existing have been going around for years, We kept saying on this show, like, how are they gonna get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around issue XYZ with Apple Silicon? And the answer is they didn’t. They didn’t get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around any of it. And they

⏹️ ▶️ John probably won’t. And if you looked at it on the talk show live when Ternus was up there talking, like, they did not seem

⏹️ ▶️ John like they were super duper enthusiastic boosters and defenders of this machine.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not that they were lukewarm on it or were down on it or anything like that, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the reaction they had wasn’t like, are you, what are you talking about? This is the most amazing machine we’ve ever made.

⏹️ ▶️ John They, their response was measured. So they’re not gonna come out and say, we wish we could have made the

⏹️ ▶️ John quad. And by the way, people are pointing out in the chat, or they threw out a name from, a name from my youth, which they can

⏹️ ▶️ John bring back. And I would highly encourage this. Quadra, I lusted after a Quadra. It had a 68

⏹️ ▶️ John or 40 in it, the four Quadra, get it? They made a quad and called it, bring back the Quadra name, hell, they

⏹️ ▶️ John bring him back the Apple vision name, bring back the Quadra name. Anyway. M3 Quadra,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounds good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t nobody like the Quadra? Wasn’t that like the beige box

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John era?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, the Quadras were amazing. Nobody could afford them. I could only see them in the computer store. The only time I ever got to

⏹️ ▶️ John touch them, but they were amazing. But yeah, they didn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John again, no Apple person’s gonna come out and say, we’re really disappointed in the new computer we just put out, right? They’re gonna tout its

⏹️ ▶️ John strengths, and it does have strengths, and they touted them. But it didn’t seem like they were,

⏹️ ▶️ John just think of how Schiller was beaming about the trash can. Like they were so proud of that computer. They thought they had

⏹️ ▶️ John done an amazing job, knocked it out of the park. It turns out they kind of didn’t, but they thought they did. And I

⏹️ ▶️ John did not get that vibe from any Apple person talking about the 2023 Mac Pro. So I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John they know what’s up. Now, does that mean they know what’s up in terms of this thing is going down the tubes and they’re not going to make any more

⏹️ ▶️ John of these? Or does that mean they know what’s up and then the M3, they’ve got different plans.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of the talk show, you know, I was expecting some sort of victory tour from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mr. John Syracuse about something that was said on the talk show, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard nothing because that’s really not your style. But it seems pretty damn clear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, and I don’t know if it’s because a birdie told them or because a delivery actually was successful,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was pretty clear to me that they understood that the Mac Pro Believe shirt exists

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they have seen a copy of it. And I will put my own YouTube clip. This

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the first time I’ve ever used the YouTube clips feature. I also thought it looked exactly like the overcast clips feature.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, I’ll put a YouTube clip in the show notes. Yeah, they definitely knew about the shirt and that makes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me extremely, extremely happy.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I do wonder what they think about the shirt. I think, I mean, Jaws was putting the happy face on it and saying, you got the Believe shirts and we delivered

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro. Is that what you wanted? And it’s like, kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of. You delivered

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, let’s talk a little more. I mean, better than not introducing

⏹️ ▶️ John it, like, thumbs up there, but we should have a conversation about this Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, the two Apple executives clearly know that this show exists, and yet only one of us can get an invite to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC. Not that I’m bitter!

⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber didn’t do us the kindness of saying where the shirts came from. He used a passive voice and said, shirts have been printed.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Who printed those shirts, I wonder?

⏹️ ▶️ John You will never know.

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Gaming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk gaming, particularly, I guess not specifically on the Mac Pro, just gaming in general.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been a lot of news with regard to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey game development toolkit. And I think, John, you are certainly the most appropriate person of the three of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to talk that over. So what’s going on there?

⏹️ ▶️ John In the keynote, they talked about it like, hey, port your games to the Mac. If you’ve got a Windows game, you can use this cool tool

⏹️ ▶️ John we have that will run your Windows game right on the Mac and you can see what kind of performance it’ll be like. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John based on that, you can use our amazing tools to help port your shaders to metal and to, you know, rebuild your

⏹️ ▶️ John game on our APIs and it will run even better than it does in this, you know, a little test environment.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and you can find the source code to this. We’ll put a link in the show notes. This is an open source

⏹️ ▶️ John patch to a bunch of open source stuff that was existing. Uh, interestingly,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, Apple’s patch. I mean, I saw Christina Warren says, and I don’t know if it’s actually true, but in

⏹️ ▶️ John the heat of the moment during Monday’s keynote, I think she was saying like, because of open source, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, GPL licensing type stuff or whatever, they didn’t submit patches to the actual open

⏹️ ▶️ John source projects. Instead, they submitted a patch to Homebrew, the package manager for

⏹️ ▶️ John Macs. So when you install it, the Homebrew package that Apple added will

⏹️ ▶️ John modify the open source software, but because it’s part of Homebrew and not part of the open source package, the licensing is different. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know if that’s true, but the bottom line is it is a Homebrew thing. It’s like 20,000 lines of code in a homebrew thing. And

⏹️ ▶️ John what it messes with is something called Proton, which is, I’ll put a link in the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ John to that. This is right from the people who make Proton. Proton is a tool released by Valve Software that is

⏹️ ▶️ John integrated with Steam Play to make playing Windows games on Linux simple. Proton comprises other popular tools like

⏹️ ▶️ John Wine and DXVX, among others that a gamer would otherwise have to install and maintain themselves. This greatly

⏹️ ▶️ John eases the burden for users to switch to Linux without having to learn the underlying systems or losing access to a large

⏹️ ▶️ John lot of their library of games. Proton is still in its infancy. So support is inconsistent, but regularly

⏹️ ▶️ John improving. For those who don’t know what that whole big thing means, you know the Steam

⏹️ ▶️ John Deck, which is a handheld thing where you play Windows games? That thing runs Linux. How does a Linux thing

⏹️ ▶️ John run Windows games? This is how. And so Apple’s thing uses this.

⏹️ ▶️ John And also there’s an existing Apple product called Mac product called Crossover, third-party product called Crossover. crossover

⏹️ ▶️ John from their website, is the easiest way to run many Microsoft applications on your Mac without a clunky Windows emulator. It

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is not an emulator.

⏹️ ▶️ John It does the work of translating Windows commands into Mac commands so that you can run Windows software as if it were designed native to the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s existed for many, many years. Wine has existed for many, many years. Apple has done some work to

⏹️ ▶️ John make this whole setup work on Apple Silicon Macs. And from Gokhan Avkaragulari,

⏹️ ▶️ John who is the director of software engineering at Apple working on GPU stuff, he posted this, I believe,

⏹️ ▶️ John to Mastodon. He said, we built a DXIL to Metalib converter.

⏹️ ▶️ John DXIL I imagine is DirectX Intermediary Language and Metalib is the library that implements Metal.

⏹️ ▶️ John We built a DXIL to Metalib converter and a DirectX 11 and 12 to Metal runtime translator.

⏹️ ▶️ John Non-graphics APIs are translated by Wine, which is that open source project that converts like Windows calls to Mac calls,

⏹️ ▶️ John but we don’t use any tech from MoltenVK or DXVK or Spurve, Cross, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ John The shader converter can be shipped by games and can be used in the game development asset pipeline. So what did Apple do?

⏹️ ▶️ John They wrote the required translators to talk to Metal from the

⏹️ ▶️ John modern DirectX APIs. Metal as it runs on ARM. This is kind of the piece that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is best positioned to do because who knows how to write really good GPU drivers for Apple Silicon GPUs?

⏹️ ▶️ John The people who work at Apple who write those drivers for a Mac, right? And this was the missing piece for getting

⏹️ ▶️ John Wine, Crossover, Proton, all these open source projects to play Windows games

⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple Silicon Macs better. And so everybody’s saying, I’m gonna try out this quote

⏹️ ▶️ John unquote porting toolkit. And they’re like, hey, I put Diablo 4 on my MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ John and it runs amazingly through this, you know, don’t call it an emulator, not an emulator translation layer. Now

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s pitch for this is, use this to see how your games are, Windows game developer. And if they seem

⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re okay, you should port them to Mac. And I imagine a Windows developer is gonna be like, why would I port

⏹️ ▶️ John them? run okay. Now here’s the difference that I read that description of Proton

⏹️ ▶️ John and talked about the Steam Deck for a reason, right? The reason people buy the Steam Deck

⏹️ ▶️ John and play with it and maybe they don’t even know it runs Linux, right? Because they’re just playing like the same Windows games you

⏹️ ▶️ John know. You know why they’re able to do that? Because Valve, the company that runs Steam, has

⏹️ ▶️ John taken the burden upon themselves to take these quote-unquote Steam games, which are just Windows

⏹️ ▶️ John games and make sure they work on their Linux handheld.

⏹️ ▶️ John They make sure the ports work, they make sure all the controls work, they make sure the performance is good, they qualify

⏹️ ▶️ John them to work on the hardware that they sell. They are taking that responsibility. Valve is

⏹️ ▶️ John the company that’s working on Proton, the translation layer. Valve doesn’t make all those games, they sell the games and take

⏹️ ▶️ John a cut of them like App Store and Patamon, right? But they don’t make all those games. But Valve has put themselves

⏹️ ▶️ John in the position of being the responsible party. Says we have a platform come Steam Deck it runs Linux, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need to know that in game developer We are gonna make sure that your games run okay on it And so you can

⏹️ ▶️ John sell them to people on the Steam Deck and those users Won’t have to worry about any of this crap. They don’t have to worry about emulation

⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have to worry about downloading a weird thing They don’t have to worry about it’s not gonna work or the performance not gonna be good We’re gonna take care of

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple very pointedly is not doing any of that. They’re saying game developers

⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s some tools Do what we want you to do which is to port your games natively to the Mac and no game developers can

⏹️ ▶️ John do that because there There are so few Mac users who want to buy games. Apple is not taking, like, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Arcade is like, oh, these native games, you can run them on all our platforms, that’s great. But the entire world of

⏹️ ▶️ John Windows games, Valve recognized that if they wanted to have a platform that was not running Windows and therefore

⏹️ ▶️ John not be holding to Microsoft, they would make that platform on Linux, which is what they did, but it needs to run Windows games

⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s where all the games are. So I think this environment is really cool, but what’s

⏹️ ▶️ John missing is a business commitment from Apple to do what Valve is doing. because remember Valve,

⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s a real platform. Like I don’t think Valve is demanding that people make Linux games,

⏹️ ▶️ John although there are native Linux games, right? Valve is committed to making Windows games

⏹️ ▶️ John run well on its Linux handheld. Apple is not committed to making Windows games

⏹️ ▶️ John run well on Macs. They’re committed to trying to figure out if they can get more Windows developers

⏹️ ▶️ John to port their games. And honestly, a bad port of a Windows game to a Mac will probably run slower

⏹️ ▶️ John than that game running through Wine DVX, these metal lips or whatever, which is sad

⏹️ ▶️ John but true. So this is really cool technical stuff, but continues

⏹️ ▶️ John to kind of highlight Apple’s non-commitment to gaming on the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, and then we have more bad news in that department. An anonymous ex-Apple employee

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that worked on, that I guess didn’t necessarily work on gaming, but it was, oh, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked on gaming inside Apple. They wrote, man, you have no idea. It’s so much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more screwed up in so many weird ways than you would ever believe. Ducked.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so much more ducked. The only reason any core tech for games is getting built is because Nat Brown

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still there, for now, holding it down on the engineering side. The business side is the big issue, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really an executive issue. Mike Rockwell hates games, which makes me sad about the future of games on Vision Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Once Bill is gone, it’s gonna get worse. And then, John, I think you pulled out a little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey snippet from the talk show, is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is another sort of tea leaf reading from the talk show live, which is why this show is so valuable. You get to hear Apple execs

⏹️ ▶️ John talk without prepared remarks and you get to hear their actual voice. Mike Rocco was out there talking about the Vision Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John He had one snippet that’s vaguely related to this. And he said, we wanted the Vision Pro to

⏹️ ▶️ John be useful and we wanted to build an incredibly powerful tool, not a toy. And that drove a

⏹️ ▶️ John whole set of decisions around making these displays that have incredible resolution so you can read text. And we’ll put

⏹️ ▶️ John a YouTube clip to this in there. I even put a little audio link in case Marco wants to

⏹️ ▶️ John the part that this is relevant is They wanted to build an incredibly powerful tool not a

⏹️ ▶️ John toy now if you are having uncharitable interpretation You could say boy when Mike Rockwell said not

⏹️ ▶️ John a toy I can tell he hates games or what he’s really saying is just we wanted to make sure the screens

⏹️ ▶️ John look good So you can read text or what he’s saying is the gaming headsets don’t care that much

⏹️ ▶️ John about resolution because frame rate and graphics Power is more important You can read it tons

⏹️ ▶️ John of different ways, but here is one random anonymous person From inside Apple saying

⏹️ ▶️ John Mike Rockwell quote hates games, which is obviously some kind of exaggeration But it seems

⏹️ ▶️ John like Mike Rockwell who was in charge of the headset Did not have

⏹️ ▶️ John again high-end gaming or any kind of gaming in mind when designing this thing because it’s supposed to be a powerful

⏹️ ▶️ John tool Not a toy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I don’t for whatever it’s worth. I mean first of all I I came away from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this whole thing thinking pretty highly of Mike Rockwell. He seems like not only a very,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very smart person, but also a very broadly smart person.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s smart about a lot of different areas. So that’s, I would first of all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not underestimate or simplify him too much. But also if you look at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the headset market that has existed so far, it has been mostly a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming market and it had like what we’ve seen is like in that context yeah game

⏹️ ▶️ Marco games on a whole games are a big category of thing but VR gaming really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a big category and really has has not set the world on fire and has not proven to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have tons of broad appeal or necessarily lasting value for a lot of people so in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the context that Mike Rockwell has worked the headset I can see why taking gaming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seriously has not been a super high priority for them

⏹️ ▶️ John and Well, we don’t even know that hasn’t been a priority. This is one anonymous source versus one statement that’s only vaguely created.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just more of an example of you can read this both ways depending on what mood you’re in, right? Because we don’t, I don’t know how much, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco again, hates

⏹️ ▶️ John games, hates games. Like, what does that even mean? Like, he hates to play games. That’s, you know, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, but you know, it’s, what we can tell is what Apple produces is not a gaming focused headset, which is perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ John fine and perfectly fair. And I think like, you know, to your point, a smart move because it’s not like VR gaming has set the world on fire.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like VR gaming has existed for years and years and it is not, not gonna say it hasn’t caught on, but

⏹️ ▶️ John when you can get one for your PlayStation for a fairly low price, and the attach

⏹️ ▶️ John rate to the PS5 is as low as it is, it hasn’t caught on, you know? It’s, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John and so I don’t blame him for not doing it, but in terms of gaming at Apple, we know the entire organization, setting

⏹️ ▶️ John aside the headset, the entire organization doesn’t seem to be super into games, and this person’s saying, like, once Phil’s gone, it’s gonna get worse.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is Phil our gaming champion? He’s got his, what, doesn’t he have, like, the VR driving rig at home, or whatever the rumor is,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But I wouldn’t call him like a super duper, like the champion of games at Apple. He’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just a powerful person at Apple who knows the game exists and likes to play them. And I think we need more

⏹️ ▶️ John of those people, not less. And, you know, Mike Rockwell, like, I don’t think,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna put someone, pin Apple’s approach to gaming on someone, it’s not the guy who did the Vision Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John He seems like he did a great job with that and gaming is not his responsibility, but he also

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t seem like he’s a champion of gaming either.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So our anonymous friend continues, the overall issue with Mac games could easily be solved or at least helped in a meaningful

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way through clever diplomacy with Valve or Steam. Epic is obviously dead to Apple now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Which

⏹️ ▶️ John is a shame, because Epic is kind of important in the world of gaming because of their Unreal

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Engine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, but if you ask Valve, the biggest issue they’ve had is Apple’s reluctance to commit to ongoing support of the technology,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is accurate and true.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why Apple has trouble in the gaming space, because anybody they talk to, if it’s somebody with a long memory, they’re gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ John like, we’ve done this before, and you always bail on us and it sucks. And if it’s a new person, they’re gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ John like, Apple, you don’t have anything to do with games. And so they’ve kind of made their bed here and this

⏹️ ▶️ John would be a difficult thing to turn around even if they wanted to, but it seems like they don’t want to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think overall, I think there, I believe it was either Jaws

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Craig made this comment during the talk show, but if you look at the Mac gaming market, I think it was Craig,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the Mac gaming market, one of the challenges they faced over time is that they were using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these crappy Intel integrated GPUs for most of their products. You know, like the average

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac sold, you know, or most Macs sold were like MacBook Airs and stuff that had just, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, no GPU power from these little dumb Intel chips. Now, the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is much better at the base levels for gaming. So maybe, I mean, obviously Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has lots of problems getting game developers to care about them. Like there’s a lot of challenges there on multiple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco levels, But at least that one big one of, you know, most of your hardware can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco play games very well, that is dramatically improved now. Like now, like the Apple Silicon

⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs are so much better. Even the lowest end one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like, you know, the regular old M1 is so far ahead of Intel’s crappy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old GPUs in similar products. Like, so at least that problem is alleviated now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it isn’t like nothing has changed. Things have, like the environment

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has changed significantly. So I think the odds of getting a healthy Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming ecosystem going are, I wouldn’t say they’re great, but they’re better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than ever now. And they are significantly different than where they were three or five years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I remember when that point came up. That’s good to bring that up because it is like, and what we’re not saying is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, Mac GPUs are good now. Here’s the important point. the addressable market for your game,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re a game developer, is going to get bigger. Because previously you could sell to 1% of Mac users and

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone else couldn’t run your game. Now you’re basically gonna be able to sell to 100% of them. Because there are no

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, you know, Apple Silicon things that are useless for games. Every single one of them is

⏹️ ▶️ John gaming capable. Is it gonna be amazing, amazing frame rates, and amazing, no. But there is not a single one that does

⏹️ ▶️ John not have a GPU that can play a modern game reasonably. And that has never been true

⏹️ ▶️ John before. We still have to wait for a lot of turnover. Maybe we’ll gotta get rid of their Intel Macs, people gotta get new ones or whatever, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the addressable market was essentially gonna be 100%. Now, is 100% of the Mac market attractive enough? It’s more attractive

⏹️ ▶️ John than 5%, right? But you still have an uphill battle.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, so it’s kind of an, if you build it, they will come. If you build it, you’ll be able to have more reasonable conversations,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you still have to talk to them, Apple, right? So I think the situation is looking up and I hope that comment coming

⏹️ ▶️ John out, I hope that means that like, maybe they’re seeing that in their conversation with gamers, like that’s part of their

⏹️ ▶️ John game developers, is that part of their pitch. It’s like, I know you don’t wanna talk to us because like none of our users could run your games,

⏹️ ▶️ John but pretty soon they’ll all be able to run your games. And so now are you interested? And they might go, eh,

⏹️ ▶️ John still not interested, but it’s a positive move for sure.

macOS Sonoma

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk Sonoma. And I am not running any betas anywhere, including Sonoma, but John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on Switchglass stuff alone, I think you’re running it, is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ John I am running it, and I have two important things to report. First, number one,

⏹️ ▶️ John the notifications UI, where you try to mouse over the thing to make the buttons appear, and they squirm away, and they disappear.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think they fixed it. Oh, thank God. I’m not willing to say 100%, because

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve only been in it a little bit, but I think they fixed it. Every single time a notification

⏹️ ▶️ John came up and I just went to click on the button in the normal way that a person would, I was able to click on it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Hallelujah. And this is Sonoma Beta 1, so already I’m liking Sonoma. That’s good. So it’s still a crappy

⏹️ ▶️ John looking design,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but at least it’ll work better.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, well, and then you can click the button, at least you don’t go to get it and it disappears. Big thing, two years we

⏹️ ▶️ John had to deal, all right. Thing number two, my weird window

⏹️ ▶️ John dragging bug Does not happen in Sonoma.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s exciting. Now, does it not happen because it’s a clean install? Yeah, I was thinking the

⏹️ ▶️ John same thing. Or does it not happen because it’s fixed? I think it’s fixed. And the reason I think it’s fixed is

⏹️ ▶️ John because I’ve been tearing every single third party thing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey out of my computer for

⏹️ ▶️ John months now. I made two brand new fresh accounts with nothing in them

⏹️ ▶️ John called Test One and Test Two. And I used those accounts and didn’t log into my other accounts.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s nothing in them, they’re not signed into any Apple IDs, they’re clean as clean can be on a clean system with no third party

⏹️ ▶️ John anything, and it still happens in Ventura 13.4. Does not happen in Sonoma. So

⏹️ ▶️ John right away, I’m going to say that I am liking Sonoma so far.

⏹️ ▶️ John Good. How’s the system settings? Uh, still not great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Backblaze, Notion, and Eagle Nine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Locked. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ John show 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, N-T Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ John to Accidental, tech podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so long.

John’s special treat

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so earlier today, you know, Wednesday morning is my time to look at all the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey links, the just copious amounts of links that Marco and only Marco has put into the show notes document

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and make sure I’m caught up so I know what I’m talking about in the evening. And at the top of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey our internal show notes document, our Google Doc, we have a few sections, and one of them is after

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show. And sometimes we’ll have things here, a lot of times we won’t. But this week we have the following

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my interest is very, very peaked. It’s this after show John’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey special treat. What’s going on, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you’ve heard my my take on the new Mac Pro and how that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good thing, but also a bad thing. And I’m slightly disappointed and I’m not going to buy

⏹️ ▶️ John one. Even in the next studio, I’m going to wait for the M3, even though the M2 one is pretty darn good. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of have this, and I didn’t get to go to WWDC. And so in typical Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John fashion, I’m thinking, well, I didn’t get to go to WWDC. I would have paid a lot for that plane flight, but

⏹️ ▶️ John now I have, does that count as extra money?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, it does. And you know what? I thought to myself, as the internet would say,

⏹️ ▶️ John John’s can have a little SSD storage as a treat. Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was hoping you bought a Mac studio.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco same. Because what you should do. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is more important than that. I have finally said goodbye to spinning

⏹️ ▶️ John rust in my Mac. Ah. Oh, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco exciting. I

⏹️ ▶️ John have had a hard drive in my Mac since my Mac Plus, since it used to be under the computer, my Mac Plus

⏹️ ▶️ John in 1986 or whatever that was, or my Mac 128K upgraded, motherboard internal upgraded to a Plus,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is a thing you could do back then, believe it or not. You could upgrade your computer? What?

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would sell you an upgrade to upgrade your original Macintosh to a Mac Plus. You’d swap the motherboard,

⏹️ ▶️ John the back case, the analog board. You would leave the CRT in there, I believe.

⏹️ ▶️ John You swapped the floppy drive. Anyway, I’ve had a spinning hard drive for all that time. Part of the reason

⏹️ ▶️ John I love the big tower computers is because you can have internal storage. And

⏹️ ▶️ John over the years, that internal storage has usually taken the form of spinning hard drives.

⏹️ ▶️ John The original cheese grater had sleds, like four different sleds with 3.5 inch hard drives on it where you could slide

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing. It was awesome, loved it. 2019 Mac Pro, I had to buy this stupid bent piece of metal, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got a place for spinning hard drives. And I put them in there. And why did I put them in there? Because

⏹️ ▶️ John spinning hard drives are really cheap per megabyte. They’re still really cheap per megabyte,

⏹️ ▶️ John but over the years, having spinning hard drives has become more and more annoying. Obviously they’re slow.

⏹️ ▶️ John Also, I’ve had to do all sorts of Unix shenanigans to get them to spin up and spin down. I had that whole thing that would like wake my Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John up in the middle of the night and spin up my time machine drive and mount it into a time machine Mac up and unmount

⏹️ ▶️ John it, which also meant that I couldn’t run Time Machine during the day because I didn’t want that drive spinning up when I did Time Machine

⏹️ ▶️ John backups, right? And everything is slow. When I was doing Sonoma, I was without all of my little

⏹️ ▶️ John Unix scripty things that deal with my drives. And so they were constantly spinning up and they’re driving me crazy. And then during my

⏹️ ▶️ John various reboots in and out of Sonoma, I accidentally booted off my clone drive because I have a SuperDuper clone

⏹️ ▶️ John drive in there as well. Oh no. Which of course I didn’t realize because it looks exactly the same because it’s a freaking clone.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I noticed when logging in was taking 30 minutes. Oh my word. Cause spinning hard

⏹️ ▶️ John drives are slow. APFS is not designed for spinning hard drives. And yeah, they’re cheap per megabyte, but you know what?

⏹️ ▶️ John I decided it was time. So I replaced my spinning disks with the cheapest

⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs. I got the cheapest, slowest SSDs I could possibly find that are exactly the same

⏹️ ▶️ John size as the spinning drives that they replaced. Those spinning drives were bought three years ago. One of them, by the way, came

⏹️ ▶️ John with a bed piece of metal. So it’s not really a $400 bed piece of metal. It was a $400, eight gigabyte, eight terabyte hard drive plus

⏹️ ▶️ John a Benbis of metal. So I replaced my internal four terabyte and my internal eight terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ John spinning disks with internal four and eight terabyte SSDs. Now there is nothing spinning

⏹️ ▶️ John inside my computer and it is glorious. I finally made it. It took me such a long

⏹️ ▶️ John time because I’m such a cheapskate, but now I

⏹️ ▶️ John can leave my Time Machine drive mounted all day and it doesn’t make any noise. I still leave my clone drive unmounted for

⏹️ ▶️ John safety and it still wakes up in the night in clones and goes back. but no noise.

⏹️ ▶️ John I did have one last challenge with the bent piece of metal because what I was buying was basically SATA SSDs,

⏹️ ▶️ John which are, you know, they’re gonna be connected to SATA ports and they’re cheap. You know, rather than buying a PCI Express

⏹️ ▶️ John card that’s fast and NVMe storage, like no, that’s too expensive. I need it to be cheap. So I bought cheap

⏹️ ▶️ John SATA SSDs and I took out the 3.5 inch drives and you can mount

⏹️ ▶️ John a 2.5 inch SATA SSD thing in there. You can just buy these little adapters that

⏹️ ▶️ John like make it fit into the screw holes of a 3.5 inch type of thing. So I did, I bought

⏹️ ▶️ John one of those for like seven bucks and put it in there or whatever. And it was like, oh, a single sled can hold two of these tiny little, is that what you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John seen? Like a 2.5 inch SSD, they’re really skinny. They’re not even the size of 2.5 inch spinning discs,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I bought one sled, put the two SSDs in there, took the bent piece of metal

⏹️ ▶️ John out, took the hard drives out, they’re so big and heavy that bent piece of metal is actually, you know, yes, granted it’s $400 with

⏹️ ▶️ John an eight terabyte drive, but it’s got rubber isolation mounts and it’s really solid.

⏹️ ▶️ John And what am I putting in this rubber isolated frame thing? Two tiny little solid straight drives

⏹️ ▶️ John that have no moving parts. That

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco weigh like

⏹️ ▶️ John as much as a feather. So it’s so ridiculous. But I put them in there and they’re stacked on top of each other. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John I was putting the thing back inside my computer and I realized I can’t fit the connectors

⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Because the connectors are right angle connectors. And these two SSDs are right on top of each other and you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John put two right angle connectors right on top of each other. I could have flipped them so they went the opposite directions,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But the wire, the SATA power and data cable that came

⏹️ ▶️ John with the bent piece of metal is so precisely fit that

⏹️ ▶️ John if you do not have the ports exactly where they would be on a 3.5 inch drive, the wires don’t reach.

⏹️ ▶️ John So no, I couldn’t flip one over and have them work like that, forget

⏹️ ▶️ John it. What I also realized is that the sled that I bought didn’t put

⏹️ ▶️ John the port in the same place as it would on a 3.5 inch drive, it put it dead in the middle.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s not where it is. If you look at a 3.5 inch hard drive, like a SATA hard drive, the port is to one side

⏹️ ▶️ John of the edge. It’s not in the middle. These wires are so precisely made

⏹️ ▶️ John that if you have the ports in the middle, you can’t connect both of them without

⏹️ ▶️ John basically tearing the wires apart because one of them reaches on the left and one of them reaches slightly higher

⏹️ ▶️ John into the right and that’s it. Oh, you want them both in the middle? just move each one over

⏹️ ▶️ John a centimeter. Oh, nope, can’t do it anymore. The wires are straining and pulling. It’s like, oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, I could have just bought more SATA cables, but the precision of these cables is kind of like when I talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John my Logitech 4K camera. It comes with this tiny little cable that’s exactly the right length to fit

⏹️ ▶️ John from the thing to the back of the XDR. I love that. That’s why people make PCs. They get exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John the right length wire with no extra wire anywhere. That’s what I want inside my computer. So I had to buy a second

⏹️ ▶️ John caddy that was offset and now they fit in the bent piece of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco metal.

⏹️ ▶️ John So one last go around with the bent piece of metal for the realities of the inside of this

⏹️ ▶️ John computer, which by the way, the inside of this computer, like this is part of the joys of my 2019 Mac Pro. People

⏹️ ▶️ John wonder why I buy this stupid thing. Every time I open this thing up, it’s like a joy. It’s a work of art in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are no wires anywhere. It’s not like they neatly routed the cables like they did on the Power Mac G5 or

⏹️ ▶️ John the G4 or the G3. There’s no wires to be routed. It is a thing of beauty, except for

⏹️ ▶️ John the SATA cables for the stupid bent piece of metal. So I damned if those things weren’t gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ John perfect. I didn’t wanna go buy other cables. I didn’t want them to be bent or kinked or torn apart or

⏹️ ▶️ John untaped and retaped. So I got them to fit. And now my computer is silent

⏹️ ▶️ John and I have these SSDs, which yes, they’re horrendously slow. I mean, like they’re, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John what? Quarter, a fifth the speed of my main SSD,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t matter because they’re so much faster than spinning discs and they don’t make any noise and I’m loving it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Congratulations, John. This is like when Apple stopped selling the non-retina iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is. Or when the last optical disc left the Mac line. This is an important

⏹️ ▶️ John part of my life because everyone’s like, oh, SSDs, SSDs, and I’ve had them for years and years, but I’ve always had spinning discs because I

⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t stay away from the bargain. They were so cheap. And now all I do is I turn my

⏹️ ▶️ John eye towards the Synology and say, you know, if I could fill that with 22 terabyte drives.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s funny you say that because just earlier today, Paul Haddad, who is working on Ivory,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mastodon client did tweet about before it. He tooted getting so close to an all flash

⏹️ ▶️ Casey network attached storage, and it’s a screenshot of Amazon showing the prototypical Samsung

⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSD, eight terabytes for $400. Now, $400 is a lot of money, but for eight terabytes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s really not bad at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s what I got. I got it, I can, I should find the links to the show notes. I bought Samsung name brand

⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs, like good, quote unquote, good SSD, but they’re SATA SSDs. Like they’re stepping through a straw. I saw one put it in the chat room.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s at 600 megabytes per second, which is maybe a 10th of the speed of my boot drive. Like the SATA

⏹️ ▶️ John interface itself is the limit here, obviously not the SSD. But it’s fine, like for what I’m using it for. It’s a time

⏹️ ▶️ John machine drive and a clone drive. I haven’t actually booted from the clone drive yet, but boy, it’s gotta be faster than that spinning

⏹️ ▶️ John disk. But most importantly, no noise, no, of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the spinning up.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, like that, just that’s what it would sound like. It would sound not just like an old hard drive, like tuck,

⏹️ ▶️ John tuck, tuck, tuck, like just there’s, you have no idea how much disk IO there is in

⏹️ ▶️ John modern Mac OS, because it’s designed for SSDs and who cares? There’s no, you know, there’s a penalty for seeking. There’s no penalty

⏹️ ▶️ John for random access. Any location is the same as any other. Not on a spinning disk. So this

⏹️ ▶️ John is a turning point. And this is a turning point in my life. The whole rest of my family has been living in this reality

⏹️ ▶️ John for ages. They don’t have spinning disks. Everything’s been SSD as soon as Apple started shipping, but I’ve always had the spinning disks.

⏹️ ▶️ John I do still love having the internal storage though, because, I mean, let me tell you, there’s room for way more inside there. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John if I got PC, like I said, if I got PCI cards with NVMe storage on them, I can put even more, even faster storage.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all inside one box and I love it. But I love the silence.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am excited for you, John. I’m glad that you got yourself a treat. I have not yet gotten myself

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a treat, but earlier tonight I was thinking to myself, I really, I really need to make moves

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on replacing my sonology because I really feel, even though everything sitting here now is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. Everything’s sitting here now is fine. As I knock on the relay challenge block

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, whatever. Um, I, I feel like I’m going to have some sort of catastrophic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue sooner rather than later.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s actually a story related to that. So we have, you have the same drives as I have in yours, right? The Western digital red.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, yes. Although many of mine have have been replaced. I don’t think I’m full on ship a thesis yet, but I’m close.

⏹️ ▶️ John My sonology, which we were given these by sonology back in the good old days when people would give us free things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the best. And this was what? Nine years ago or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah. 20, 20, 2013, 10 years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It was 10

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco years ago. 10

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey years ago. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John So they sent us these analogies for free, which is very nice of them. Uh, with hard drives. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John And mine came with Western digital reds. Every single one of those hard drives is still there. 10 years they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John been spinning continuously in the basement, except for during power outages for 10

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey years. Every single hard drive is there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where do you figure that out? I forget now. Storage manager?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we know when we got them. We got them in 2013. No,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, but you can go in the software and see how old these drives are. The

⏹️ ▶️ John power on time. Now, here’s the story related to that. Western Digital recently got into some hot water because

⏹️ ▶️ John their new Western Digital Reds come with this new feature that’s like, oh, it’s better than smart.

⏹️ ▶️ John It will tell you more about the health of our drive. I forget what it’s called, like WDDA or something, it’s some Western Digital

⏹️ ▶️ John diagnostic thing. And Synology supported this Western Digital Diagnostic thing. But the Western Digital Diagnostic

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, one part of it was it had just a flat out timer that said when three years have elapsed,

⏹️ ▶️ John fire off this thing. And when it fired it off, the Synology would say, whoa, this drive

⏹️ ▶️ John is damaged and it wouldn’t let you like rebuild the rate array on damaged drives of like, and there was nothing

⏹️ ▶️ John wrong with this except for three years had passed. And that pissed off everybody. So Synology stopped supporting this thing and

⏹️ ▶️ John said, we have learned we can’t pay attention to your stupid diagnostics. So you’re gonna pull shenanigans and say, oh, this drive is three

⏹️ ▶️ John years old. You should really think about replacing it, which is such a scummy thing to do. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John again, it wasn’t looking at the drive health at all. It was just literally a timer. And I have Western Digital Reds

⏹️ ▶️ John that are all 10 years old and they’re all doing fine, knocking on all the wood in the entire world.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I was looking at them like, I would probably buy Western Digital Reds again. These are great. They also had a thing where they were trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to sell shingled magnetic drives, but not telling people it was shingled. Shingled is a way of jamming more data on, but it’s not as reliable.

⏹️ ▶️ John Western Digital has done some shady things lately, but the reliability numbers from like Backblaze for Western

⏹️ ▶️ John Digital drives still look pretty good. But yeah, they’ve been in some hot water lately. I’m kind of surprised to hear you’ve replaced

⏹️ ▶️ John so many of those drives, but then again, it’s maybe your Synology is maybe not in, mine is in the,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s like people have wine cellars or places for cheese and stuff. My Synology is like

⏹️ ▶️ John in my basement, which is the most temperature mediated part of my house because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s like-

⏹️ ▶️ John You have a Synology cellar? Yeah, because it’s underground. It’s cool in the summer and

⏹️ ▶️ John stays warm in the winter because it’s so, and we have a dehumidifier down there, so it’s a pretty controlled environment,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they’ve literally been down there spinning for 10 years.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So looking at my array, five of the eight disks are three terabytes, which is what originally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got loaded with, but I think a couple of those still have been replaced. Like this one’s 22,000 hours. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I think only like one, maybe two of mine are the originals.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the funny thing is now, just capacity-wise, you could probably get away with two.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they make 22 terabyte drives now. Yeah, you could just get two drives in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAID 1 and be done. But what if you had eight 22 terabyte drives, Marc?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I’m talking about. So my initial thought, I don’t have a model name in front of me, but my initial thought is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is an 1813 plus, and so I was basically going to get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 1823 plus or whatever the closest equivalent is. Because the way I remember it is, Eight indicates

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the amount of drives, 23, or in my case, 13, indicates the year it was built. And I was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just gonna get whatever the newest version of this is, but I wonder, like, I probably will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that because I’m a dummy, but I wonder if I should go like four or six bay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey instead, because as you pointed out, Marco, you can get much, much, much bigger drives than three

⏹️ ▶️ Casey terabytes now. And most of mine in this, like, it’s like two thirds, three terabytes than a handful of 10 terabytes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But do I really need an eight bay NAS? I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco probably don’t. You really don’t. But well, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I can’t talk to you about this because you’re not as into this as I am, but, uh, I don’t know. I, I, if you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are a Synology person and have a thought, I’m happy to hear it, but I don’t know. I just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like it’s about time that I get something new and start the migration

⏹️ ▶️ Casey while I, while it’s happy.

⏹️ ▶️ John You got to ride this out. It’s like, uh, the people who drive until they run out of gas, so they go as far as they possibly can. You got to ride it

⏹️ ▶️ John out when it dies. Yeah. By all means, get a new one, but like, but don’t preemptively get a new one. Yours is not as

⏹️ ▶️ John golden as mine. And by the way, I just looked at some of my drive hours. I’m in the same ballpark, 85,760 hours, which is like 9.7 years. But

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I’m just riding this thing out until it goes. But in terms of the bays, I’m constantly shopping for Synologies

⏹️ ▶️ John because I love doing that. Sometimes to get the good stuff, like the good

⏹️ ▶️ John networking, 10 gig ethernet, the good CPU, GPU, whatever, for

⏹️ ▶️ John video encoding, you end up having to get the only choices are 8 bay or 6 bay.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or

⏹️ ▶️ John no, one of them, I think, are the only choices, rate bay or 12 bay. So sometimes you’re forced to get more bays. But

⏹️ ▶️ John just get them empty. You can always fill them. I would just fill them with this motley collection of drives that I

⏹️ ▶️ John have. I just freed up a 4 terabyte and 8 terabyte. And you don’t want to probably buy

⏹️ ▶️ John the 22s. So you look at the Backblaze. Backblaze is our frequent sponsor and backup provider that we all

⏹️ ▶️ John use. Actually sponsoring today. Yep. Yeah. They have tons of hard drives.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they have spinning hard drives because they’re cheap. and they do a report on reliability of these incredibly abused drive that

⏹️ ▶️ John they have literally hundreds of, sometimes thousands, so they have really good numbers on reliability.

⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes when you look at them, you find out like, oh, this is the exact same drive from the same manufacturer,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the 22 terabyte drive has a reliability that’s twice as bad as the 16

⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte drive, or vice versa. Like it’s not even just that the bigger ones have lower reliability, it’s just sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John certain sizes have lower reliability than certain other sizes. And there’s no formula for you to figure it out, You just

⏹️ ▶️ John have to look at the numbers. So when I was looking, it turned out that I think the 22s, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John 22s, first of all, there aren’t as much, isn’t as much data because they’re new, but also they had less reliability than

⏹️ ▶️ John the 12s, but the 16s were the best. And so you try to want to buy in that sweet spot. I also

⏹️ ▶️ John did the math on like cost per gigabyte. And let me pull that up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey While you’re looking at that, drive stats for quarter one, 2023 from Backblaze, 236,893 hard drives

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of which there have been 889 failures. Yeah, they have lots of numbers.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the cheapest one per gigabyte or per megabyte or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John was the 18 terabyte, believe it or not. It was $16.67 per gigabyte. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the most expensive one was the two terabyte at $40. So $40 per gigabyte versus 16. That

⏹️ ▶️ John is the range on the Western Digital line. And they vary, there’s 18, 18, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25. Like as the sizes get smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ John they get less and less of a bargain. So the sweet spot for cost is 18 terabyte.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the sweet spot for reliability, I think was the 16. But anyway, look at those backblaze numbers. And you too

⏹️ ▶️ John can have a magical Synology that lasts for 10 years, longer than 10 years. You hear me? Stay good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing is having lived through and it happened to be early on in the pandemic when it was difficult to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do anything about it. But having lived through what I thought was a catastrophic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey failure, I now have just an asinine amount of backups of my Synology.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s quite Syracuse level, but I am knocking on the door. But anyways, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to go through, I don’t want to have a desperation upgrade. I’d rather have a casual upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so because of that, I’m planning on, I told the family chief

⏹️ ▶️ Casey financial officer, chief family financial officer, I told her that my plan is sometime this year

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go ahead and get a new one. That was before I was mentally… You were saving money

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a headset. Right. And we’re talking about similar money to get an 8-bay Synology and load it up full

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of drives. One of those is more fun than the other. And one of them is, well, I don’t know, you and I both get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreasonable. Synology is a lot of fun, but… Yeah, exactly. So anyway, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know what I’m going to do. I think I will upgrade at some point, and it’s just a question

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of which one I get and how many bays and so on and so forth. but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a good problem to have. I’m very lucky that this is something I can contemplate doing, So it’s not so bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you want to make it easier on me, atp.fm.

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