559: The Tall Lettuce
31 Oct 2023The M3 family, the new MacBook Pro lineup, and the updated iMac from Apple’s Scary Fast event.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Everything’s upside down, so let’s talk fashion.
- Apple’s October event
- Post-show: Hypothetical boxed lunches
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Chapters
- Good morning!
- Good evening!
- N3E isn’t ready yet
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- Dynamic Caching
- M3: 4/4/10/24G
- M3 Pro: 6/6/18/36G
- M3 Max: 12/4/40/128G
- RAM
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Low-end 14” MBP
- Space Black
- MacBook Pro
- 💸
- Mac gaming
- ATP Membership
- iMac
- Ending theme
- Box lunches
Good morning!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good morning. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to do it. So okay, so we’re recording the morning. This almost never happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very strange like to be here. Casey, you’re probably like wearing a tuxedo because I don’t know what you were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during the day. We both have our like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fully awake. Well asterisk, you know as much as they kind of be awake. Our dogs, you know in daytime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode possible outside noise from you know lawnmowers and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, everything is upside down. My voice is apparently upside down as well. There’s some viral thing going around Richmond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and probably the entirety of America right now. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco anyway. I think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple, maybe, yeah. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair. But yeah, so Michaela was sick last week and had like a cough and runny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nose and we took her in and she was tested for all the things and the doc said, no, it’s just a viral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. And so I think it’s now my turn. But anyway, so I sound a little weird. It’s not Marco’s editing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not anything like that. Or it could be, maybe it was because I was so excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey colors, and we’ll talk about that in a little while. Maybe that’s why I was just screaming at the top of my lungs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in excitement last night.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, continuing Apple’s Halloween theme, maybe you’re just doing like a Dracula voice or something. Yeah, that’s what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. What do you mean, I always sound like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have come to suck your wallet dry, or at least that’s what Tim said to me last night. Ay-yi-yi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, yeah, so everything is upside down. ATP is not a morning show. we all sound weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to some degree. I’m actually Marco, you sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But John, John typically has a morning voice. I haven’t heard too much of it yet. I obviously sound all sorts of funky. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re just gonna, we’re just gonna have a whole Halloween extravaganza this morning. Oh, that’s what I was gonna say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am in my official Limitless LLC dress, costume, tuxedo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, whatever it’s called, dress code, there it is. I have on an ATP shirt because I am that guy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wears his own Vans t-shirt almost all the time. I feel like we talked about this recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like during the concert, like during your own concert, you are wearing your shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah, yeah, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely. And I have on Mack Weldon, former sponsor, I don’t think future sponsor, but certainly former
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sponsor Mack Weldon sweats, or I forget what these are officially called, but I call them sweatpants, and they are the most comfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The ace sweatpants, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, yes, I think that’s right. The most comfortable sweatpants that I’ve ever put on. And I actually do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have Mack Weldon slippers as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They aren’t sponsoring this episode, man. I’m basically a walking Mack Weldon billboard all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should still be sponsors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike Cernicho, the host of the podcast. So anyway, so and I did have their slippers, which I also recommend. I am a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a rubber sole slipper kind of person. I know that’s a very controversial topic. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did have those on, although I’ve kicked them off because the office gets very warm when I close the door and start recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that is the situation here. Marco, you said you’re a walking Mack Weldon advertisement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, mostly I’m also, you know, it’s so like I’m also a marine layer advertisement, another one of our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco former sponsors. See, being a nerd,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I basically never go clothes shopping ever out in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of my clothes come from podcast sponsors and Instagram ads that I’ve come across. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John was funny, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently, I was buying, I wanted this, somebody made a really nice looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fake suede bomber jacket. I’m a sucker for jackets. I love jackets. I’m so like this morning I got to wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my beloved uh Relwen Instagram ad uh Relwen vertical insulator jacket which I think is my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jacket I’ve ever owned because it was finally cold enough to wear it. I’m such a Relwen fanboy. Anyway I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting this like vegan suede jacket thing from one of like the big mainstream stores on clearance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their website. I was you know doing like the find my fit thing. Oh should I get a smaller or medium? It was like all right which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these popular brands do you own something from to compare? and it listed all basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mall clothing brands, all the big names. And I literally had zero shirts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from any of them. All my stuff is from internet brands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s amazing. So it really told me, like, wow, I’m living in a very different world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than most people with my fashion choices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, it is after July in Boston. So I assume you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have on approximately — let me do some mental math carry the 115 layers on.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been still pretty hot here that that’s we’ve been having the thing where the summer lasts longer and longer. We were like
⏹️ ▶️ John an 80 degree days like last week. So I was still in shorts and a t-shirt but uh yeah now we’re back
⏹️ ▶️ John to fall weather at least here. So it was like what 39 degrees this morning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh I was thinking about I’m kind of dressed like how people dress in the hospital. Like if you’re in the hospital but you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like what you’re not you’re not stuck in a bed like you’re a patient in a hospital. You’ve been there for a while, but you’re not stuck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have your rump covered right now? Or is that flapping in the breeze because you have a hospital
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John gown on? Not
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, but just like, what are the most comfortable clothes that you wear when you don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John if anybody sees you? And that’s how I dress pretty much all the time. That’s living the dream.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So I’m just wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did you wear? Wow. Did you hear my voice crack there? Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m going through puberty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco today as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did you wear? Putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey lot of costumes today. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did you wear when you went to the office? Was your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John plate, was your- I always wore jeans. I
⏹️ ▶️ John sneakers, running shoes usually. And then I would wear some kind of long sleeve shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just usually sometimes with a collar. You’ve seen my like long stream, long sleeves like striped rugby
⏹️ ▶️ John shirts. I have various other kind of like waffly patterned shirts. Not too dressy, but it was always long sleeve
⏹️ ▶️ John even in the summer because the air conditioning was freezing in the office all the time. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s big John energy there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a t-shirt underneath like I’m wearing a t-shirt underneath my sweatshirt t-shirt underneath whatever long-sleeve thing I would wear to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is a this is also controversial these days I always wear what I would call an undershirt It’s just a you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a white Tee under my clothes regardless of the time of year and this is apparently a very nerdy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or old man thing to do which was
⏹️ ▶️ John What no, it’s it’s a it’s a sweat control thing That’s what I thought minimum
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you if you wear if you wear a long-sleeve Long-sleeve thing on top of nothing. It’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be sweatier in there and grosser smell Yeah, you can’t do that. That’s illegal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, though, I mean, like it is kind of amazing. Like, you know, this is we’re recording this on Halloween and that, you know, Apple’s done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this spooky event. And like, can you think of anything scarier than tech podcasters talking fashion?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John We’re really I mean, we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, that’s all. Is that that much
⏹️ ▶️ John better? We we do cover our bodies with stuff. Fashion, I feel like, is something
Good evening!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should probably dig in and as per tradition and as per the pre-flight that none of you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to hear, we are not allowed to talk follow-up and we will jump straight to Apple’s October
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 30th event. This was very quick. It clocked in at I think just barely over 30 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if by ATP tradition says we should go somewhere between two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and three hours this episode, so we’ll see what happens. But we’re getting a lot of attention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Mac and all the good Macs because we don’t to talk about the Mac Pro, right, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Ooh, sick burn. I mean, they did really emphasize that they were talking about laptops, but
⏹️ ▶️ John whose fault is that? Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ours. It’s mine. It’s actually Marco and mine, because we don’t have desktop now. No, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was interesting. Right from the start, there was Tim Cook’s intro. Well, first, there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little video about how Macs are doing all this hard work and making it easy on us, which was, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cute, fine, forgettable. But the cool thing was, They did this event at night
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it had this Halloween theme. The whole thing, you know, they’re playing all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these like spooky sounds and there’s like, you know, the choir chanting in the background as they like zoom through Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Park at night. And then Tim comes in and says, Good evening, you know, because normally he should have said good evening like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t think he has that in him.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, right. It is not possible to make Apple Park spooky. I’m sorry. I’m not sure. It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like like, do they have Halloween in California? All I can say is at Apple Park,
⏹️ ▶️ John not spooky like they they can’t. I don’t know if they have fall there, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John did amazing effects, amazing visual effects, but I didn’t like fog and it’s dark and they have like fake bats flying around
⏹️ ▶️ John like great, good. It’s not spooky. Apple Park is not spooky. Anyway, I give them an E for effort.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s look what Apple is challenged to do recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not seem like one of the biggest corporations in the world run by mostly a bunch of older white men.
⏹️ ▶️ John The way to do that is not to spend this much money on a half an hour
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco introduce a couple of Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John How much money did this cost?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I got to give them credit. To whatever degree they are able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a giant corporation, they seem to have some fun with this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, of course, it’s still a very corporate, basically commercial, but they did have some fun with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I think it worked. I think it would be a little much if they did this frequently, but they don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it was a fun thing for this one.
⏹️ ▶️ John It kind of reminds me of the holiday events they have in the live service video games, like video games that
⏹️ ▶️ John are ongoing. Sometimes you pay a subscription or whatever, like they’ll always have like a some kind of non-denominational
⏹️ ▶️ John winter holiday event and something for Halloween or whatever, just because it’s a fun
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to do because you have a bunch of people who are there and you want to mark the change in the holiday. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John take your game stuff and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, let’s have pumpkins on top of our sci-fi setting or our fantasy world or whatever. And now it’s like Apple’s doing that
⏹️ ▶️ John too, because I guess their keynote events are kind of like a live service game where we’re the community that’s always hanging around.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, I endorse it. I think it’s fun. It was just a little bit silly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it wasn’t too heavy handed, like you guys said. I loved Johnny Scrooge’s, Welcome to My Lab. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, there’s just something about that just made me giggle. He could have done that in a vampire accent. Also true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, so we’re here to quote, celebrate a product we all love, the Mac, which I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m here for it, but it just kind of struck me funny that we’re now saying a product that we all love, the Mac, when we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all pretty convinced, and I feel like it was all but officially stated that nobody cared about the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John for a few years. But they’ve turned that around. I mean, I feel like now at this point, it’s a little bit where
⏹️ ▶️ John every time they emphasize it, it makes me believe them less now. But anyway, the point
⏹️ ▶️ John is with their actions, they’ve shown that they do. So I feel like they don’t need to say it anymore. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’ve done has convinced us all, yes, you’re doing good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, agreed. So we do.
N3E isn’t ready yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Go talk to Johnny. And for the first time, to the best of my recollection, I believe Stephen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hackett had a post about this. I’ll try to link that in the show notes. But for the first time, we got all three or three of the four,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we would assume, of the different flavors of M3 all at once. We got the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M3, the M3 Pro and the M3 Max and all three nanometer. Which three nanometer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though, John, how do we know?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that’s tricky. So having them all at once is interesting. It makes it
⏹️ ▶️ John for a good presentation. like great, they can like roll out the whole the quote unquote whole line, not really, obviously we assume there’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be an ultra and maybe one more but probably not. It’s great that they can roll them all out at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? Why are they able to roll it out at the same time? That is the mystery.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it because the M3 is late and so it came out at the same time as
⏹️ ▶️ John the other ones? I think I said that on the last episode and someone sent in some follow-up saying actually
⏹️ ▶️ John if you measure the time from between the M1 and M2 the M3 is not behind schedule
⏹️ ▶️ John the plain old M3 is not behind schedule in fact it had like a month or two more to go to still be
⏹️ ▶️ John on schedule so I apologize for that mistake but so what that means is basically the M3 if you look at the spacing
⏹️ ▶️ John between the plain M1 the plain M2 and the plain M3 this is more or less on schedule for
⏹️ ▶️ John that chip if not a little bit early and that means the Pro and the Max are
⏹️ ▶️ John very early because they usually come after the plane M3. We talked about in the last episode
⏹️ ▶️ John what you know you’re in saying case like maybe this won’t be three nanometer right which is a reasonable thing to think because
⏹️ ▶️ John like what could you know we’ve heard all about the N3B process and how it’s expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John uh and how like they want to move on as quickly as possible to N3E this is TSMC we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John which will be less expensive because it has better yields and Apple is the only company that’s buying N3B
⏹️ ▶️ John and in the earnings call that we talked about in the the last episode, TSMC said they would be ramping up volume production
⏹️ ▶️ John in the fourth quarter of 2023 on N3E. And we’re like, hey, it’s the fourth quarter of 2023. Maybe these
⏹️ ▶️ John chips will be on N3E. Obviously, as predicted, Apple did not use the
⏹️ ▶️ John phrases TSMC, N3B, or N3E anywhere in any of their presentations or media
⏹️ ▶️ John communication about this. I’m not sure if asking a direct question, if they would
⏹️ ▶️ John answer the question. So we are left to speculate. One thing they did say, though, is three nanometers. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that narrows it down substantially. It’s one of those N3 somethings. And the only two possible ones we think it could be
⏹️ ▶️ John is N3B or N3E. And last episode, it seems like, hey, N3E,
⏹️ ▶️ John volume production fourth quarter, that must be what they’re doing. But our good friend Jonathan Deese
⏹️ ▶️ John Jr. wrote in to tell us this is some this is an insertive follow up into an event episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unprecedented. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, I’m telling John, this is unacceptable. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very relevant, because that’s what we were thinking, like, what the hell? So here’s what he says. N3B
⏹️ ▶️ John cycle times, we’re reading from his message here. N3B cycle times are extremely long. The cycle time is the
⏹️ ▶️ John total amount of time it takes to go from wafer start, when blank silicon wafer begins its journey, to wafer out,
⏹️ ▶️ John when a finished wafer comes off the production line. Exposure times for EUV, that’s extreme ultraviolet lithography
⏹️ ▶️ John tools, are considerably longer than for DUV tools. Or is that not extreme? D? I don’t know what the D stands
⏹️ ▶️ John for anyway. It’s less extreme than E.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, hold on real quick. Didn’t they mention, I swear they mentioned something about ultraviolet lithography
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John briefly. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no they did. Like that’s emphasizing that all the 3 nanometer things are EUV. But anyway, remember we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John how many different exposures? Anyway, continuing from the thing here. That means EUV, the more EUV
⏹️ ▶️ John steps a process requires, the longer it takes. The cycle time for N3B, the most EUV
⏹️ ▶️ John intensive manufacturing process to date, is said to to be in excess of 100 days.
⏹️ ▶️ John That means Apple likely had to begin ramping up production of the A17 Pro and Q1 of this year in order to ensure
⏹️ ▶️ John sufficient inventory for September iPhone release. And he continues, Anything 3nm
⏹️ ▶️ John that ships this year is N3B. N3E should just be reaching the volume manufacturer milestone
⏹️ ▶️ John now. That means TSMC will start to manufacture the first orders now, with finished wafers
⏹️ ▶️ John 90 days out. Those wafers will still need to be diced into individual chips, tested, sorted, packaged,
⏹️ ▶️ John to the device manufactured to be included in the final end-user product. Then that needs to be assembled, packaged and shipped
⏹️ ▶️ John around the world to various reach out channels prior to the product launch. Apple requires volume manufacturing by
⏹️ ▶️ John April to ship now. N3E products in shipping in 2023 has always been a non-starter since the day TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ John announced N3E. So here’s Jonathan coming down strongly saying these cannot be N3E because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no way anything would be produced in time for that, which means leaving the only alternative
⏹️ ▶️ John that these would be N3B, which, as we said, is the more expensive but better
⏹️ ▶️ John higher density, you know, more more layers, whatever process. And that is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, obviously we knew they would do it for the phone. You got to do
⏹️ ▶️ John what you got to do. Phone’s got to be out. You want it to be three nanometers. Spend the money. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John do it on M3B. But here we we have a full suite of the main
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 family of processors, 4 MAX, that seem like they
⏹️ ▶️ John are on M3B. Related to that, and possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John hurting Jonathan’s credibility, but I think I’ll include it here, before the event,
⏹️ ▶️ John Jonathan said, an M3 MAX size die on a 3nm process
⏹️ ▶️ John is impossible right now due to the economics of making a chip that size in this point in the yield curve. Yield curve.
⏹️ ▶️ John Defect densities have to settle down before you can go that big. If Apple were to do that, it would be unprecedented on so many
⏹️ ▶️ John levels. Well, they did it because because they said
⏹️ ▶️ John three nanometer and they introduced the pro and the Max and the plane and they’re all three nanometer. So after the event, Jonathan had
⏹️ ▶️ John this to say. This lends credence to the rumor that Apple struck a deal with TSMC to only pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for known good dyes rather than paying for a fixed wafer cost. What a deal. Like, you know, we
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t to pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John your mistakes. Just all right. He says, I guess if you give TSMC $3.5 billion, they’ll run
⏹️ ▶️ John their leading edge fab at full capacity for the better part of the year to deliver your order, even if they end up scrapping
⏹️ ▶️ John half the output. It is the most efficient way to run the fab and the quickest way to improve yields. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said before, unprecedented. So this all seems reasonable to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that these would be N3B, it also fits with the rumor we were saying about, oh, Apple’s manufactured all these IMAX,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we’ll get to later, already and they’re sitting around since June or August. With all the lead times
⏹️ ▶️ John involved and the fact that they said they would begin volume production that takes 100 days from the time a silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John wafer goes in to the time it comes out finished, I’m willing to believe that these are N3B,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is kind of cool from our perspective because again N3B is the best
⏹️ ▶️ John process available. N3E will be cheaper but slightly worse and then there’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be be the other processes after that. So this this is pretty cool. If Apple is if either
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is eating this cost or Apple is forcing TSMC to eat this cost we may be getting better
⏹️ ▶️ John three nanometer Mac chips than we would have otherwise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the only weird kind of side note to this is that you know by by all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accounts from every analyst including Jonathan Dietz who knows a lot about this a lot more than us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for and all the all the tech analysts who follow the chip business more closely, by all accounts this N3 or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N3b as it’s called by a lot of us, this process is quote a dead end, meaning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it doesn’t seem like TSMC intends to produce these for a long time into the future on this process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you look at Apple’s products, the the Pro and Max chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in each family of these M series chips, they’re like the iPhone Pro line,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re produced for only the time they are the current version, and as soon as a new version comes out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like as soon as the M2 Pro and Max came out they stopped selling things with the M1 Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max in them so they could stop manufacturing the M1 Pro and Max presumably around that time or you know shortly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before whatever and so with this we’ve assumed and and I was speculating last last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode that maybe the reason they would do the M3 Pro and Max now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not do things earlier actually I was talking about the A17 Pro but regardless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if If TSMC is not intending to run this process for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then Apple probably isn’t going to be selling these chips for longer than the current generation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is interesting in the context of, say, the iMac, which was on a two-year cycle before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are they going to keep making non-Pro M3s for longer than they make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M3 Pro and Macs? On this process that’s apparently a dead end? Maybe? I don’t know how the timelines work
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, you keep talking about it as dead end. I know what you mean is saying that they’re not going to keep running this for five six seven years
⏹️ ▶️ John like that And that I feel like that’s true of all their processes is that they eventually get to the most economical
⏹️ ▶️ John variant of five nanometer of centimeter seven nanometer whatever and that’s the one they won for years because they have a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of ones that Are not quite as good that they run for short periods of time But eventually they find the one that is the sweet spot. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how they pick that Is it the cheapest is it the one with the best yields? Whatever? Is it the highest performance? But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah This the very first one you do is probably not the one you’re gonna be running for years and I forget it already deleted
⏹️ ▶️ John this from the notes but I forget which one of these processes were sort of compatible like the idea that if you have a chip design
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ve designed it for N3B can you use it in N3E can you use it at N3S or P
⏹️ ▶️ John or all these other things it’s not always straightforward to say oh I’ll just I’ll just use your new process to
⏹️ ▶️ John to fab my chip that I already designed that’s not always easy to do so I get where you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John is like look if they’re going to make M3s for the the next two to three years in that iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does that mean TSMC is running and three B for three years and instead of instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of stopping running it as soon as they possibly can? The thing I think about related to that
⏹️ ▶️ John question is. What are the volumes like? Maybe they sell so few Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to like iPhones that they’ll just stab all the M3 chips and N3B, they think
⏹️ ▶️ John like within the next six months, right? They think they need
⏹️ ▶️ John just get them all, put them in a box, put them off the side. Same thing with the Mac chips. Maybe I’m maybe I’m wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they would never do that. And it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d be guessing. I doubt it, because like think about like the risk you’d be running of there being a big shortage if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ran out and then you didn’t have a new MacBook Pro slated for like six months away. Like you then you just couldn’t make MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no. And plus, you have to pay. You’d have to pay for them up front. It is mysterious, but like but here’s the thing. Like if these
⏹️ ▶️ John really are in three B, then people like, oh, and you know, the only thing that will ever be an entry is a 17
⏹️ ▶️ John pro. If these are really N3B, that assumption was wrong. Like that the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea is that yes, N3B is more expensive and crappy or whatever, but maybe Apple is saying, I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John because the three nanometer processor TSMC came out later than TSMC originally
⏹️ ▶️ John had hoped it would. Right, and I think it came out later than Apple had hoped it would. That was part of the rumor with the new GPU core
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in the A17 Pro and also in these Mac chips. That GPU core was rumored for last year,
⏹️ ▶️ John not last year really, but anyway, That was rumored for the M2 generation. But I think that GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John was designed for three nanometers. So, of course, they couldn’t put it on the M2 because three nanometer wasn’t ready. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that has disrupted everything here. And maybe Apple is saying, look, I know you don’t want to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know the financial terms of our deal with means we’re kind of screwing you by making you do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re just going to have to keep making that entry be stuff for us for longer than you would otherwise want to
⏹️ ▶️ John eating the costs. And I know you basically said you can never make it as good as M3 in terms of yields
⏹️ ▶️ John and every chip you make, you’re going to have to throw out half of them or whatever. But tough luck, because that’s what we need
⏹️ ▶️ John you to do. And we’re your biggest customer. And so there may be something like that going on. I guess we’ll find out like
⏹️ ▶️ John what there are still unknowns here. First, we don’t know that these are in 3B. We think they might be based on
⏹️ ▶️ John this feedback, but we don’t know for sure. Surely once people get these chips, start chopping them open or something, someone will be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John tell. And second is we’ll have to wait to see how long maybe they actually
⏹️ ▶️ John update the the iMac to the M4. Maybe they just sell it with the M3 briefly. Maybe the M4 comes sooner
⏹️ ▶️ John than we think now that 3nm is selling down. There’s a lot of questions here. But I think, despite all the
⏹️ ▶️ John questions, I think it seems like the outcome is good no matter what. We
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, you know, we don’t have these chips in our hands yet, and we’ll talk about their specs in a second. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re N3B, we like that because that’s the best process. And if they’re not, we like that because
⏹️ ▶️ John it means that we got this whole family of chips, know, all at once when maybe we wouldn’t have. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I even though I’m curious about the details here, I think no matter what the case
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I’m happy with all these chips coming out all at once, and I’m happy that they’re all three nanometer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the real tell will be whether we end up seeing the M three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in products that are that are usually kept around as the cheaper last year’s model. So, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Air, that would be like a real tells like, does Does the MacBook Air get the M3? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Air stays on M2 and skips M3 and goes right to M4.
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Air has higher volume. Like that’s what we’re talking about. Like, oh, they usually roll out the plain M3 and they usually roll it out
⏹️ ▶️ John first on the cheap computer. But here they are rolling out the plain M3, but they’re not rolling it out on the cheap laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John first. Maybe because the cheap laptops sell too many.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe they are longer term gonna create some segmentation. Maybe they’re gonna always keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Air one behind the Pro, who knows? I mean, there’s lots of different paths they could take here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, typically, you know, we are presented as the public and the, and the nerds are in the circle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple presents us with a product lineup that generally abstracts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away all of the stuff that’s happening below, you know, behind the scenes with chip manufacturing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supply chain and stuff like that. We, we don’t see any of that. All we see is this year you get M3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last year, you had M2, like all you have those nice clean, you know, the illusion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a much simpler arrangement behind the scenes than what actually is going on. Occasionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some detail about the manufacturing situation leaks out into the products where you get,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, oftentimes you get some weird long delay before a product gets updated or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skips a generation, you know, and oftentimes the reasons for that are some of those details. I think it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be interesting to see like as we go through the next, you know, year to 18 months, what happens to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M3 line after it’s no longer the newest? Does it stick around? Does it do certain products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never get it? Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does Apple revise it so it does work on M3e? Because that’s a thing they can do, you know, like it’s more cost,
⏹️ ▶️ John more work, more time. But if they really do want to keep the plain old M3 around for a long time and eventually put it
⏹️ ▶️ John in the MacBook Air and they want it be an N3E they can change it to make sure it works with N3E.
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Dynamic Caching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So where did we leave off? We’re still in the lab with Johnny and we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how it’s 3 nanometer. And then something was brought up and I genuinely don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand what this is. Like I understand the words that were used in the explanation, but I don’t think I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the application. So Johnny starts talking about dynamic caching and he says it’s in the hardware, it’s transparent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to developers. And he starts explaining that, oh, a lot of decisions are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made at compile time, and we’re going to basically do them just in time at runtime with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory allocation, specifically on the GPU. John, do you have any idea what this is about, or Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either of you? Can you explain it? In the
⏹️ ▶️ John presentation, it was very confusing. They showed some diagrams. They’re basically saying, we’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John more efficient use of resources, which I think is the level you should present at if you’re going to say anything about it at all in this kind of presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fine. You show me a diagram. I can look at the little boxes and say, you’re making more efficient use of resources, thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ John But from a technical perspective, I didn’t know what they were talking about. Here is
⏹️ ▶️ John a quote from Jason Snell’s article, and he actually talked to Apple folks. So I’m hoping he has a better take
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, but I still have questions. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to his article. Quoting from Jason,
⏹️ ▶️ John memory is usually allocated to different threads at compile time, meaning that some threads
⏹️ ▶️ John allocate a larger amount of memory in order to handle peak need, while other threads might choose a smaller amount of memory, at risk
⏹️ ▶️ John of bottleneck. The M3 graphics system dynamically allocates the memory per thread in a way that’s completely
⏹️ ▶️ John transparent to software developers. Apps don’t need to be rewritten to take advantage of the new system, which Apple says makes some huge
⏹️ ▶️ John gains by wringing a lot of memory efficiency out of the system. Memory that was previously reserved for a specific thread can be given
⏹️ ▶️ John to a different thread instead. A thread that’s in a bottleneck can be given more space.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all to the goal of increasing overall throughput. So here’s the question that I have about this whole big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s architecture, as they emphasize many times, is a unified memory architecture where there is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a separate pool of VRAM and regular RAM. There’s just a pool of RAM, and the GPU has access
⏹️ ▶️ John to it, and the CPUs have access to it. This idea of allocating
⏹️ ▶️ John memory to threads at compile time based on their peak need in the GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s too many words there that I don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Right? Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it’s not just me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so here are some possibilities. Again, hopefully someone with knowledge of Apple’s GPU architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John will write and tell us. One, even though there’s a unified pool of memory, maybe the GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like the CPU, has a cache hierarchy. Or maybe it is the CPU’s cache hierarchy
⏹️ ▶️ John of level one cache, level two cache, so on and so forth. And maybe those chunks of
⏹️ ▶️ John small pools of local cache memory that are local to the GPU or local to the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores, maybe that’s what’s being statically allocated at compile time, when you
⏹️ ▶️ John compile something for some code that’s gonna run on the GPU, it says, okay, for this
⏹️ ▶️ John thread where you’re gonna be running, you’re gonna need this much memory. And what memory are they talking about? Some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny, very local pool of memory inside the GPU core. That is a possibility, because GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores do that, there is cache hierarchy does exist or whatever. The second possibility is they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about chunks of main memory, and somehow things that run on the GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, are hard-coded at compile time to preallocate chunks of main memory
⏹️ ▶️ John that they sort of have exclusive access to for their threads so they don’t thrash with that memory getting like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they wire it so it doesn’t get swapped out or whatever. And that’s what they’re using more efficiently. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I don’t know the answers to those questions. This also could with anything that Apple says about GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very possible that what they’re saying is either something that has existed in the quote unquote PC GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John space for ages, but Apple just has a different name for it, or they’re doing something new to accomplish
⏹️ ▶️ John a task that PC GPUs have been doing for a long time. It’s very rare that Apple does anything with their GPUs that
⏹️ ▶️ John is unprecedented in the GPU, but they’re not the GPU leader. But they do do interesting things because their
⏹️ ▶️ John trade-offs are different. So maybe this thing that they’re doing is novel in that the PC
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU world just uses brute force and they don’t care about this, but Apple does care about more efficient user resource. So I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John conceptually that it’s basically saying, hey, your program may be written to do this, but that is an
⏹️ ▶️ John inefficient use of resources, what those resources are, we’re not sure. And so dynamically, without your program, knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John we will shuffle things around to make more efficient use of resources. And that’s good. So again,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though we don’t understand this kind of like the n three and three B thing, even though we don’t know the details, it all
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds good, right? More efficient use of use of use of resources is better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, we can’t really, this is kind of I was thinking about this when we’re watching the presentation, we’re going to talk all
⏹️ ▶️ John about this presentation that Apple gave. And the Apple did provide a bunch of performance charts. But when I was thinking about what we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to discuss, I’m like, well, of course, we can’t talk about performance. And the reason I say, of course, we can’t talk about performance is the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing we have to go on our apples charts that have like, that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John abstract that they might as well, they’re not Bezos charts, because there is like, there are labels on the axes and
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of, but they’re real close. I feel like we can’t talk about performance until people actually get these
⏹️ ▶️ John and start testing them and benchmarking them. Because Apple’s claims, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that they’re useless. Like, it’s good to know what they think, like in the ballpark. But with respect
⏹️ ▶️ John to the dynamic caching. That’s all well and good. Cool presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John What does this mean for the performance of this GPU in a given task? Does it run
⏹️ ▶️ John games at a higher frame rate? Does it do some rendering thing and some video app faster? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care that much about the details of the tech stuff in terms of it,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a presentation meant for the general public, unless it provides something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they didn’t say, hey, now that we’ve done dynamic caching, you get an hour extra battery life when playing Resident Evil
⏹️ ▶️ John Village on your MacBook Pro or something like that, because we make more efficient use of resources. So it burns less power
⏹️ ▶️ John to play the game at the same frame rate or something like that. They didn’t make any claims like that, really. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I say the jury’s still out in dynamic caching. Seems cool. I would love to see it in a WWDC presentation. Like that’s the level you would
⏹️ ▶️ John expect to see all these little block diagrams and the dynamic allocation. But it was kind of weird
⏹️ ▶️ John to see it in this presentation. I get that they’re proud of it and it’s a new feature of their GPU. But all I want to know is show me
⏹️ ▶️ John the frame rate. Like, what is this doing for me?
M3: 4/4/10/24G
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s talk about the different CPUs themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We start with the M1, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, sorry, M3, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meant. I was reading ahead. The CPU cores as compared to the M1, there we go,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are the performance cores are 30% faster, the efficiency cores are up to 50% faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was a good time to mention that Apple loves to compare this chip to the M1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this entire presentation was comparing it to the M1 mostly and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, also the M2. Like it was, it was a very, which actually I love that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here I was, I skipped the M2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And so I’m like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just for you, Mark. You know, it was for both of us. It was the ATP presentation because I am also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting on an M1 Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I get by it. Like, and I’ve said this on Mastodon, people were like, well, but a lot of people are up, not everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrading from the M2. Like that’s why they do it. Like, I don’t object to them comparing it to the M1. I object to them
⏹️ ▶️ John not comparing it to the M2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they did both ultimately. Like they did show it for most of the performance comparisons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they made, they showed M1 and M2 comparisons.
⏹️ ▶️ John they showed it on the graph, but they didn’t say it as much or didn’t emphasize it. Sometimes they would just say
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1, sometimes they would say both of them. But here’s the reason why comparing to the M2 is important, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t own an M2. Because when Apple releases a new line of computers, especially in the pro
⏹️ ▶️ John line, where they’re emphasizing performance, like scary fast is the theme here. Even if you don’t own
⏹️ ▶️ John an M2 and you just own an M1, what you wanna know as a buyer, as a
⏹️ ▶️ John tech nerd buyer anyway, is how big of a leap is this new line of
⏹️ ▶️ John computers over its predecessor? Like, is this the generation I should buy, right? Because let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John say the M2 came out and it was 1% better than the M1. You don’t care how much better it is
⏹️ ▶️ John than like the past Intel one, of course, Apple compared stuff to the Intel as well. You care like, is this
⏹️ ▶️ John generation like a big leap over the previous one? Is this the time to buy or should I wait? Is this a generation
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just kind of like, eh, it’s a really incremental update, maybe you should wait. And you’re not waiting because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than what you have. Like say you still have Intel, right? You’re waiting because you think, eh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John one seems like it’s not as a big a leap over as press as it could have been, so maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I should wait. That’s why comparison of the M2 is important. We’re just saying, how well did you do Apple in this new generation?
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, is it the same, you know, the distance between the M1 and M2, is the distance between the M2 and the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as that, bigger or smaller, right? And I think that is a very relevant piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John information regardless of what you currently own. Because I think most people, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone doesn’t upgrade every year, right? Most people have computers that are so old that no matter what they get,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna be fantastically faster. Like, I’m in that situation and I’m a tech nerd because I buy these really expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John computers. It takes a long time to save up this money, right? But like you’re not questioning whether it’s going to be faster than what you
⏹️ ▶️ John have. You know, if you buy anything, you know, if you buy like a low end MacBook Air, it’ll be better than your Intel iMac or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John What you want to know as a tech nerd is like, is this the one to buy? They really knocked it out of the park this year. And by
⏹️ ▶️ John knocking out of the park this year, what you mean is how much faster is it than the M2? And that’s why I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t just show the M2 on slides, but also made it
⏹️ ▶️ John the primary source of comparison. And then I feel like you can say they can say, you know, we
⏹️ ▶️ John did, you know, X percent better than last year. And then they can say, and by the way, if you’ve both still got an old
⏹️ ▶️ John M1, look how much better we are. Like, like ramp it up to that, you know, don’t not compare to the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 do, but that’s like, that’s your cherry on top. I really want to know how it compares to the M2. Anyway, they did put it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John graphs most of the time. And here’s the thing. Very often those graphs were impressive versus the M2. It’s not like they’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to hide something like, oh, we can only compare to the M1 because it’s not that much better than the M2. No, very often it was better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the M2 by a significant amount. So weird decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing with the vanilla M3, same multi-threaded performance as the M1, but at half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the power. It’s one quarter the power of what they claim to be an equivalent PC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip or Intel chip. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco one fifth the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power. Whatever that means. Yeah, exactly. I think they did actually have in the bottom right-hand corner what they were using, and I think it was an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intel i7, I want to say, but I don’t remember for sure. one-fifth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the power of the equivalent PCG, sorry, it uses one-fifth the power of the equivalent PC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GPU. It’s got a 16-core neural engine, which is 60% faster than M1. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I didn’t understand for a moment what they were talking about. They said the Media Engine adds AV1.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was like, man, I’ve heard of this. Why do I know this? And then they continued, for YouTube and Netflix and other things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that makes sense. So M3, eight CPU cores for performance for efficiency,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the same quantities as the M2. 10 GPU cores or eight if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the cheaper version. Same as on the M2. 25 billion transistors, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allegedly is five billion more than the M2 and eight to 24 gigs RAM, same as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M2. But and Marco, future Marco, feel free to edit in the sad trombone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. Only one external display. Whomp, whomp.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t understand that at all. Like, I mean, being the same makes sense. It’s the low-end
⏹️ ▶️ John one. I think they have, I think for performance and for efficiency is a reasonable balance. It’s a small GPU because it’s the small
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap chip. Where did the extra 5 billion transistors come from? Remember that these are not the same GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores, right? They’re the new fancy ones with dynamic caching and the ray tracing stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of things. So, you know, I’m assuming that’s where a lot of the transistors come from. And also the, the CPU cores are not the same
⏹️ ▶️ John either. They’re a little bit better, as you just noted, like they’re, you know, they’re more efficient. They
⏹️ ▶️ John can do the same work with less power and they have a higher top end. When you’re in
⏹️ ▶️ John there making your brand new M3 chip and you’ve had two generations where people have been
⏹️ ▶️ John annoyed by the fact that there’s only one external display supported, this would be the time to add it. Like when
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 came out, we excused it and said, well, you know, yeah, one external display, but maybe they didn’t realize that people
⏹️ ▶️ John would be cranky about it. And you know, the M2 had to be planned. They didn’t have enough time to make this change for the M2, but maybe in the M3 generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer is no, not in the M3 generation. So maybe Apple thinks this is fine and that you
⏹️ ▶️ John should just buy a better chip and not get the Plano M3 if you need more than one external display.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, there are also workarounds with all sorts of USB-C things and stuff like that. It just, it seems like an odd
⏹️ ▶️ John choice. It seems like it’s gotta be driven by, you know, the size and
⏹️ ▶️ John the power draw and the space and the cost of supporting more external displays in the lowest of low-end
⏹️ ▶️ John chips. And they really want this to be able to extend down low. Maybe they wanna make sure it,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can jam it into a Vision Pro in the future, for example, like a context where external display support
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make any sense, and why would you burn the chip space and power budget on that?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know exactly what happened here, but that is the one disappointing aspect of the plain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think at this point, you know, there is some element of a trade-off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how you spend your limited die space on the CPU die. There’s a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of stuff that has to go in here, display controllers and Thunderbolt controllers are not small, I mean, they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive, but they do take up space on the die. And so it’s a trade-off. And you’re making this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller chip made for lower end, smaller, cooler running products. There’s only so much die space you have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gotta choose the trade-off for different things. But I think at this point, three generations later,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this seems a lot more like intentional market segmentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John unreasonable. It’s a little bit unreasonable given the fact that this isn’t, as we’ll say in a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in a MacBook Pro now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but that, you know, that new MacBook Pro has a few asterisks on it, which, and we’ll get to that in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m actually very happy about that product overall, but at this point, they’re very clearly saying, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna drive more than one external display, you’re gonna need the Pro or Mac chips, and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s totally unreasonable. I do think if you’re holding out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope that maybe the M4 will support two external displays, I think you can probably stop holding out that hope.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so here’s the thing. I have heard some rumors that the M3 was originally
⏹️ ▶️ John planned to support more than one display. And obviously that plan changed plans change all the time. But the fact that it
⏹️ ▶️ John was planned to support more than one shows that someone thought that maybe the M3 generation
⏹️ ▶️ John would be the time to reconsider that decision. But then they reconsidered it back, which makes me think that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking about the Vision Pro, like in terms of the tradeoffs or whatever, what is their
⏹️ ▶️ John most important product where where it’s really important that the M3 be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to extend low? I don’t think it’s the MacBook Air. I think it’s the Vision Pro at this point because you really don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John the power budget on the Vision Pro is harsh. It’s with the external battery back two hours battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life is not great. That that is a great reason to say, look, we need the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John to go all the way down to our face mounted thing with a tiny battery. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John so remember we plan more than one display. know that gets cut. We can’t afford the power budget, the space,
⏹️ ▶️ John anything like that. So who knows? I mean, every year we’ll keep checking, but I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re going to have a limitation like this, you’re right that the lowest end chip it makes sense on, but this M3 is being asked to do a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming it will eventually be in the Vision Pro unless they have an all new chip for that with a V in the name or something in the future,
⏹️ ▶️ John which means it has to go all the way from the head mounted thing with a tiny battery all the way up to
⏹️ ▶️ John the lowest end MacBook Pro, and that is a tough task for this chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s a bummer, though, I I concur with what Marco was saying that it certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smells to me like market segmentation, which stinks. Like I get it. That’s their right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I know there’s been a handful of times that I’ve been talking to people about what Mac they should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get. And it even if it’s a non-technical person, I always have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask, well, what are you plugging this into? Is this getting plugged into HDMI?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because that may make you want, you know, a MacBook Pro. Is this getting plugged into multiple monitors? Well, then you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely don’t want like a MacBook Air, for example, even though from a compute standpoint, it would have been more than sufficient,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera, et cetera. So that’s a little bit of a bummer. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I mean, speaking of those caveats, the thought about this one is we’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John to the line of computers in a second. We’re still just talking about the CPUs, but that’s kind of the way now that
⏹️ ▶️ John especially the Apple’s laptop line is in such good shape. the way I’m measuring how
⏹️ ▶️ John well they’re doing is no longer saying like, does the keyboard work? Does it have a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco number of ports? Is the performance good?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s all good. Yeah, the basics are taken care of. Yeah, now it’s like, is there anything I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Casey’s point?
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because we feel so great about these computers. Like, if you get one, you’re getting a great computer. Don’t worry about it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we said the same thing about the M2s. We said, you know, the MacBook Pros were not in desperate need of an update.
⏹️ ▶️ John We love that they got updated, but they weren’t desperate need of it because the M2 ones were already great. But this,
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole like, oh, wait, wait, wait, are you gonna use external displays? And like I said, you can use more than one external display
⏹️ ▶️ John through various USB-C shenanigans that we’ve talked about on past shows. It’s just a complication that if someone
⏹️ ▶️ John is asking you about what computer to buy, you should ask them about it. Oh, do you plan
⏹️ ▶️ John on using two external displays? How are they connected or whatever? And the second thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is the whole one SSD chip versus two that halves the speed of your SSD. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t yet know if they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that this generation, but I would assume they are. So that’s also a bummer. And that’s a list of
⏹️ ▶️ John like on this amazing line of computers we all think are great. The two things we need
⏹️ ▶️ John to ask people is if you’re getting M3, do you have more than one display? And if you’re planning on buying any of these,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re buying one of the models that that has the single chip SSD, that’s worth at least having a conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John about. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy it and it’s terrible. Like maybe you don’t care, but it’s it’s not like 1% slower.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like half the speed. So it’s it’s worth discussing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So let’s talk about what you would do if you were to go the next step up. Thank you.
M3 Pro: 6/6/18/36G
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk M3 Pros. The M3 Pro has 12 CPU cores. That’s four more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M3. That’s six and six, so two and two more than the M3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 18 GPU cores, which is eight more than the vanilla M3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s also 14 on the cheaper version. But both are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one fewer than the M2 Pro, which was 19 and 16, which is a little bit different. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess it’s one fewer and two fewer than the M2 Pro. Nonetheless, 40% faster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the M1 Pro. It’s 37 billion transistors, three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey billion fewer than the M2 Pro, which had an even 40 billion, which had eight perf
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cores, four efficiency cores, and up to 19 GPU cores. Max RAM, 36 gigs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up from 32 on the M2 Pro. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is a weird chip. Why does it have six efficiency cores?
⏹️ ▶️ John of the other M series chips, M3 series chips, have six efficiency cores. The little
⏹️ ▶️ John one has what, four? And
⏹️ ▶️ John big one, the Max, has four. The M3 Pro has six.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, fewer transistors than its predecessor. Part of that fewer transistors is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John due to the fact that it has fewer power cores, right? And then more efficiency cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have thought that with this arrangement that Apple would have made, you know, had an explanation. Here’s why we did
⏹️ ▶️ John it this way. Because I can think of reasons, like, you know, the efficiency cores, they emphasize, the efficiency cores keep getting better
⏹️ ▶️ John better. If you’re thinking of these as crappy little cores, they’re not. Like every year, the efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John cores get better and better. They haven’t done the comparison yet, but I imagine there’s going to be a point where the efficiency cores are more powerful than
⏹️ ▶️ John the power cores on some past M line chip. So maybe having six efficiency cores and six performance cores
⏹️ ▶️ John is a better trade off for this middle thing. You know what I mean? Because you get more parallelism because
⏹️ ▶️ John now you’ve got 12 cores. I don’t know. Apple didn’t give an explanation, but it is notable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s also notable when we get to the maxes that I meant to look this up as my memory is getting so bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in the earlier M lines wasn’t the fact that they The the pro was basically just the max with GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores cut off which generations did that was it just the M1 or was it? M1 and M2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was both and that’s what’s interesting here is like the the M3 Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M3 max Are basically nothing alike from their from their die design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they’re it’s totally different
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, one is not the other with things cut off there They’re separate chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything, like the M3 Pro looks a lot more like the M3 than the M3 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s closer to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the uniformity in that it’s got, you know, four performance, four efficiency, M3, and six and six on the M3 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s a symmetry there. I’ll have to look at the die shot to see if they, if there’s any family
⏹️ ▶️ John resemblance. But this, again, I like this. I like, you know, I understood like, oh, isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it cool? They can just sell the Pro and the Max and they just chop off the cores or whatever. but like I like three separate chips
⏹️ ▶️ John where they say, we’ve got our low-end one that has to do these jobs, we’ve got the middle one that most people will buy and we’ve got the big one.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I encourage Apple to do exactly this, which is make a separate chip for all three
⏹️ ▶️ John of those. Like we’re not asking a lot, right? Obviously you share cores and stuff like that, but, and it seems that they’ve done that. My only question
⏹️ ▶️ John is, why is six and six the right choice for this middle one? You know, again, we’ll find out in the benchmarks. Maybe it shows,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, this is a great trade-off because it’s the one most people buy and it has
⏹️ ▶️ John better battery life, for example, because it has more efficiency cores. And the efficiency cores are more powerful now and you rarely use the performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever the explanation is, I’m willing to believe that this is a good arrangement, but I love the fact that it
⏹️ ▶️ John is its own chip now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think when you look at the relative sizes and capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these chips now, again, the M3 Pro is a lot closer to the M3 than it is to the M3 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what we might see now is more products being offered with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M3 and M3 Pro options. So for instance, you know, the next generation of Mac mini, if it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, you know, then maybe you’ll see that. Maybe again, maybe you’ll see the M3 Pro appear in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next 15 inch MacBook Air as an option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that’d be cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it’s really not that much bigger than the M3. And again, many of the capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look like they scaled up the M3 for the M3 Pro, and then the M3 Max is this totally different design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we might start seeing these lines get shifted around as to what products get which of these chip options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The M3 Pro sure looks like it was designed to be in more products than the M1 and M2 Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I said, I think it does seem like on paper a good middle chip,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is, I think it is differentiated enough from the M3, if only from supporting more than
⏹️ ▶️ John one display, but 12 cores versus eight is a big difference, but it is not a giant monster chip
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Max. And I really do think this is the one that most people will buy because
⏹️ ▶️ John the M3 is clearly the bottom of the bottom line. It has a bunch of compromises or whatever. And the M3 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John is really expensive and big. So if you’re getting a MacBook Pro, when I say most people, I mean, most people are buying MacBook Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you’re getting a MacBook Pro, I think people will, you know, just from price anchoring, grouting towards the middle option.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is the middle option. I hope it is good. I hope this middle option is good. We’ll see. Again, we’ll see when people start benchmarking this
⏹️ ▶️ John and checking at the thermals and all the stuff like that. I hope this is a good compromise. But I like the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John it is its own thing. And also the the max RAM being 36. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get to RAM in a little bit when we talk about the max chip. But some weird amounts here for reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John that, again, we’ll explain. But like instead of 1632, you’ve got 1836. Right. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are multiples of three because there’s three sets of memory controllers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So but anyway, that’s two more in each measure. I like that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we so rarely get this. It’s always like, oh, well, you can only go up by doubling. It’s either to be eight, 16, 32, 64. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, this year on this machine, we’re not moving up from 16 to 32. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just going to be stuck on 16 until you get enough sort of activation energy to make the leap to 32. I
⏹️ ▶️ John love going from 32 to 36. That’s great. But, you know, I like the idea of buying
⏹️ ▶️ John a newer computer and having more stuff than the previous one, even if it’s not double. So I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, there’s reasons for that in terms of the memory chips or whatever, but I give that a thumbs up even if it was just an accident.
M3 Max: 12/4/40/128G
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then let’s talk about the M3 Max, baby.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 16 cores, 12 performance, which is 4 more than the M2 Max, and 4 efficiency. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fewer efficiency cores than the M3 Pro, but obviously more performance cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 40 GPU cores as compared to 18, or 30 instead of 14 for the cheaper one. So, the M2 Max was 38 in 30, now we’re 40 in 30.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Up to 128 gigabytes of RAM. The previous limit was 96. And here’s where the computer initially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got sold to one Casey Liss. Up to 80% faster than the M1 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My goodness. 92 billion transistors, 25 billion more than the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M2 Max, which is 67 billion. That is a lot of bees. A lot of bees. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a big increase year over year. Yeah, this this Max is not, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, just like an incremental increase over the previous one. It is like this is separating itself
⏹️ ▶️ John from the rest of the line, like four more performance cores, 25 billion more transistors. The GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores, even though there’s only two more of them, they’re again, they’re different GPU cores. 128 gigs of RAM is
⏹️ ▶️ John great because if you squint at it, you can say the ultra is going to have 256 has the Max, which is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John wonderful. I think the minimum RAM is 36. I mean, I guess now it now is time
⏹️ ▶️ John to jump into the RAM things for the Max because. There is well, we’ll do the RAM things for all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John in a second, but but let’s just talk about the Max. Like I I heartily approve of this chip
⏹️ ▶️ John if it is not a giant power and heat destroying monster, which I suspect it is not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Boy, this is great. And this really does make people with M1s and M2s look twice.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, yeah, that’s that’s what got me to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey We’ll get to that, but yeah, this is incredibly impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like especially like to go, you know, they had a process shrink
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here from 5 nanometers to 3, and so you would expect that, you know, that you’re able to cram in more stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the same general size class of chip. And you know, to go from 8 performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores to 12, that’s a huge increase. Like, that’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 50% more performance scores and to have each of the cores be more powerful than the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones by something like 15%. Like, that’s really good. Like, that’s a that’s a nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when we sit around as as nerds and we watch the process sizes from the fabs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we were like, oh man, we can’t wait until the next process shrink because it’ll be a big jump. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this case, I think it was I think this shows you that this this was a big jump. This was worth Like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you had M1 or if you didn’t even get that and if you kind of skipped M2, you’re like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M3 might be a process shrink. This is this is the kind of jump you were waiting for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they didn’t they didn’t give the size of the die in millimeters, did they, though? Because that’s the question. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John have they just simply made a bigger chip, which, again, I still approve of, but I’m not ready to
⏹️ ▶️ John put the a, you know, a laurel wreath around the three nanometer process quite yet,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if they just simply made the thing bigger and the density is similar as the five nanometer process,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not impressive. And again, we have to see the power draw figures. I endorse adding more power.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure how much of that more power we got, not for free,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we got as as a benefit of the new three nanometer process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, time will tell and benchmarks will tell and real life use will tell. But you can you know, they did give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you some idea in the presentation with their mostly label-free graphs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It appears that the M3 line of chips will push higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at peak power than the previous ones. It’s a similar move the M2 did compared to the M1. It is able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco peak higher, but they also claim… It does seem like it’s going to be more efficient in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same way that, you know, the M2 is technically more efficient than the M1, even though it peaks higher. But also, they claim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer battery life on the 16-inch now. So the 16-inch Max versus Max, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically claiming one additional hour of battery life compared to the previous ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I would think that the battery life claims we’ll get to them when we get to the machines, but I would think a lot of them have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with the fact that pretty much all of Apple’s battery tests are not like, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John max everything out.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, not even close. Yeah, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the efficiency cores are more efficient and better. And because, you know, overall efficiency is better. I
⏹️ ▶️ John would imagine that, yeah, the battery life is going to go up because you’re mostly hanging out on on the efficiency cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re better. But like we never see like the OK, what’s the everything maxed out
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life? And I would imagine as we go from M1 to M2 to M3, the everything maxed out battery life is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to decrease, even though the work you accomplish while burning your entire battery should be increasing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s that seems likely. I think that’s right. But but, you know, like when you compare,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, from my position as an M1 owner who keeps his laptop plugged in. Yes. Well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do bring it when I travel somewhere. I’ve always thought the M1 Pro and Max didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough E-Cores, the efficiency cores. We only have two E-Cores and then we have eight Pro-Core,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance cores. When you look at modern Mac OS, certain background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type of tasks, things like indexing and stuff, only ever take place on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco efficiency cores. That’s the way the OS schedules them. When I look and I see my iStatMenus menu graph
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my menu bar here, those first two cores are almost always well above 50% use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like sometimes they’re peaked at 100% both for a while, if it’s like indexing something or whatever. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the efficiency cores get well used on modern macOS. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go from two in the M1 line to four in the M2 line, that’s a nice jump.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like that’s the kind of thing, like when you’re looking at overall battery life usage, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understanding, like what I’ve heard from people who know more than I do about this, is that maxing out the efficiency cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically free in terms of power budget and battery life. Like you really don’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. They’re that efficient. They’re that low powered that you can basically max them out and not really worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And so all of this adds up to this overall battery life picture of these chips where,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, you’re right that, you know, if you actually do push them hard, of course, they’re not going to get 22
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours of battery life. That’s your like, you know, movie watching kind of battery life. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as time goes on, more and more tasks that you actually do are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running on those efficiency cores. Or a larger portion of what is happening is running on the efficiency cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as the performance cores get better, they do finish their work in less time. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there is a lot of merit to the fact that, yes, these actually are getting, you know, probably slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better or the same battery life as the predecessors, even though the chip might be running bigger or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hotter or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Related to the M3 Max, obviously there’s no ultra announcement today because the Max Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John was just updated and it’s probably not ready. Looking at the Max, it’s tempting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m excited about the Max because it’s a great chip for the laptops. It’s more powerful. Love to see the separation from
⏹️ ▶️ John the middle tier. Love to see going harder on the high
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco end. And you love laptops. Yeah. If
⏹️ ▶️ John they do the ultra as two M3 Maxes, that means the ultra will be that much more powerful.
⏹️ ▶️ John 256 gigs maximum RAM all this GPU or so many cores looks great I got to
⏹️ ▶️ John find a link to this to the show notes But I watched a video recently of Johnny Suruji giving a talk at his old University
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure how recent it was. But anyway Obviously, he’s not gonna say
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about anything, but if you watch these Apple executives during presentations, they’re very careful
⏹️ ▶️ John But usually you can glean something from them and of all the questions about what is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple gonna do about X or what? do you have planned for Y or whatever? He was willing to say one thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of in the way, the same reason we all knew that Apple’s gonna make a phone. Once Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John started saying, the phone is very interesting or whatever, it’s kind of like, I’m sure using Tim Cook phrase, but Tim Cook would talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John AR, VR in the same way, sort of an open secret. You haven’t said Apple is gonna do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once executives say an area is interesting in
⏹️ ▶️ John you listen. So what he said about, you know, future Silicon stuff or whatever, obviously that’s his business
⏹️ ▶️ John as part of the business was that he thought that packaging I’m not using the
⏹️ ▶️ John right phrase but packaging was an area of interest packaging for the future might be an interesting area of innovation or something
⏹️ ▶️ John something to that effect by packaging I mean you take the silicon chips that you get from the wafer and you stick
⏹️ ▶️ John them inside a container with all of the other stuff that they need and
⏹️ ▶️ John in the apples case you put the ram chips in there and and everything like you make a little package out of it. That’s your SOC, you know. He
⏹️ ▶️ John said the packaging might be interesting. I’m not sure if the silicon interposer between
⏹️ ▶️ John the Maxis that makes the Ultra counts as packaging because I’m not entirely clear on,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, does that nomenclature apply to the silicon interposer? Is that actually part of fabbing? Like what do you consider that?
⏹️ ▶️ John But we do know we’ve talked in the past that many other chip manufacturers have used various packaging
⏹️ ▶️ John innovations to put more stuff in a single package. The chiplet things, the various,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve talked about this in a past episode years ago, like the various words for the different technologies of arranging
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of different chips inside a single package and how you connect them to each other and what the cost trade-offs
⏹️ ▶️ John are and what the efficiency trade-offs and all of that. And because I’m desperate to hear good news about desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco heard him say that
⏹️ ▶️ John and saw this monster M3 Macs and thought, maybe in the M3 generation or the M4 generation,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the timelines of these are so long, They won’t do the end to end
⏹️ ▶️ John maxes as an ultra with the interposer. Maybe they’ve come up with a new way to package
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple units of stuff that they’ve made inside a larger chip
⏹️ ▶️ John that would allow them to, here it comes, put four of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love that. I’m basically out of nothing other than the fact that Johnny Struger said the word packaging
⏹️ ▶️ John in a talk that he gave where he otherwise revealed nothing about Apple’s future plans. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when I look at this M3 Max, at least I think, okay, if you make an ultra out of this, it will be a good ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John good, thumbs up. Like by ultra, I mean you put the two Maxes together. But if this really is
⏹️ ▶️ John a generation where there’ll be packaging changes, and based on the fact that the M3 Pro is its own
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and not, you know, or not its own thing, but I guess like it is more differentiated from the
⏹️ ▶️ John Max than it used to be. To Marco’s point, it’s less differentiated from the plain M3 than it used to be maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s more differentiated from the Mac. So maybe Apple is putting some separation between
⏹️ ▶️ John the middle and the upper, upper high end. So stay tuned
⏹️ ▶️ John to see if there are any packaging innovations that happen when we finally go beyond M3 Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John or if this is just another ultra interposer year.
RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you want to talk memory stuff now or do you want to save that for later?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, let’s talk about RAM because it is actually, people have questions about the RAM of the machines and we’ll talk about the
⏹️ ▶️ John machines in a moment. But in the end, the SOC, the M3,
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 Pro, M3 Max dictates a lot about the memory configurations of the computers Apple sells.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here, this is from Cameron McKay, another inserted follow up in an event episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unprecedented. Yes. I’m not a chip designer, but I work in a related field. Here’s how I make sense of the
⏹️ ▶️ John strange RAM configurations on the M3 series. This is based on looking at the memory controller blocks around the perimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John of the M3 series die shots and Apple’s tech specs. And Apple does put, like in their presentation,
⏹️ ▶️ John they put what we assume are real die shots where you can actually see the silicon chip,
⏹️ ▶️ John photoshopped a little bit to beautify it, as it would be in the wafer where you can see the different functional blocks
⏹️ ▶️ John by how the how the little transistors are arranged. Camera continues. The M3,
⏹️ ▶️ John two RAM chips with 100 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth. And you can divide up those two
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM chips this way. If you’ve got two 4 gigabyte chips, that’s an 8 gigabytes of RAM. If you’ve got two 8’s, that’s 16
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs, and two 12’s, that’s 24. So that explains the memory configurations of the plain
⏹️ ▶️ John old M3. You can get 8, 16, and 24. We’ll talk about the 8 later when we talk about machines. But anyway, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only two of them and those are the sizes they come in and that’s what you get. M3 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John three RAM chips, 150 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth, because there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, three memory controllers, you know, 50 gigabytes per second each. If they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John six gigabyte chips, that’s three times six is a total of 18, and if they’re 12 gigabyte chips, three times 12 is 36. That’s where you
⏹️ ▶️ John get 18 and 36 from. That’s where we got our little bonus. Instead of 16 and 32, we get 18 and 36. It’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s three times six, or three times 12. The M3 Max with the 14-core CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John has three RAM chips, 300 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, and it’s either 3x12 for 36 or 3x32 for 96.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then finally, the M3 Max with the 16-core CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John has four RAM chips, one more than the 14-core one does, so it’s 400 gigabytes per
⏹️ ▶️ John second memory bandwidth, and you get 4x12, which is 48, 4x16, which is 64, and 4x32, which is 128.
⏹️ ▶️ John continues, the M3 Max is a bit odd. The memory controller blocks in the die shot are twice as big as on the other M3
⏹️ ▶️ John series chips. I assume that means twice the bandwidth to each memory chip. Maybe the memory chip packages each contain two memory
⏹️ ▶️ John dies? Apple says memory bandwidth is up to 400 gigabytes per second. I’m assuming this means that the top-end M3
⏹️ ▶️ John Max is 400 gigabytes per second and the lower 14-core version has 300 megabytes per second.
⏹️ ▶️ John The available RAM configurations support this interpretation. It makes sense that Apple would disable one memory controller in the
⏹️ ▶️ John lower-end M3 Max. Look how much die area those memory controllers take up. So this is another
⏹️ ▶️ John example of Apple really pushing the top end, like to the point where the Big Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John is better in a substantial way than the not so Big Macs, because the Big Macs has
⏹️ ▶️ John four RAM chips, 400 gigabytes per second memory, four controllers. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ John just saw the right-hand side of this little thing, it says, so the configurations are 36 and 96 for this Macs, But 48, 64,
⏹️ ▶️ John and 128 for this one, what the hell? This is why. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how many RAM chips and what size they come in. And that ends up bifurcating,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially the computers that come with the M3 Macs, into these weird RAM tiers that don’t make any sense when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using a configurator. In fact, Apple has a little message, I feel for them, because I was making similar messages on our membership thing
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, when you click a different CPU, it changes the RAM for you
⏹️ ▶️ John because it has to, and then it pops up a little apology message, like, sorry, based on the CPU you picked, we’ve changed
⏹️ ▶️ John you to 48 gigs of RAM, which is a number you’re probably not used to seeing, but it makes sense if you look at the chips on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and in fact, user F. Hausler, earlier in the recording,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco posted a mastodon, an annotated diagram of the chip dies, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco F’s best guesses of what these different sections are. And it looks right to me, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plausible, or at least I’m sure most of it’s probably right. So it’s helpful to look at this to see kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how these chip designs differ, what they’re using their die space for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the trade-offs that they make. So it’s interesting.
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Low-end 14” MBP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have to talk about the MacBook Pro. It is, it appears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be the same with some asterisks and daggers and double daggers. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is no more 13-inch touch bar MacBook Pro. Ding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dong, the witch is dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank goodness. It’s about, you know, we’ve been talking for a while and, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, one of the most scary things we ever heard from Apple wasn’t in their scary fast event. It was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe, last WBDC when they said that that was their second best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling laptop. Remember that? And that and everyone was like, Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, like really that’s and and it makes sense. You know, there’s there’s a as we talked about before. There’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s certain a lot of individuals who go into an Apple store saying I want something called a MacBook Pro and that’s the cheapest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one by a lot. And so they pick that also a lot of corporate and volume buyers. They say, oh yeah, we’ll give our employees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a MacBook Pro and then they buy them that one because again, it’s the cheapest MacBook. It’s the cheapest laptop that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco named MacBook Pro in the lineup. And so a lot of sales of that were basically people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying it because it was the cheapest thing called Pro, not because it was necessarily the one they liked the most.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it seemed like kind of a tragedy to us nerds that all of the modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conveniences of the actual new MacBook Pros and even the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Airs were not applying to this product. And yet they kept selling so many.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it seemed like one of those kind of, you know, tragedies in the lineup, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar to like the old non-retina iMac with the spinning hard drive. Like, man, when are they gonna get rid of this thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They got rid of this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and there’s an explanation for this, which is not very satisfying, but I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John come to believe, we joke about it all the time, I’ve come to believe it more and more. In fact, I think I said in Slack earlier today, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John real Tim Cook doctrine, or the real Cook doctrine, which is not own and control the primary technologies
⏹️ ▶️ John behind your products or whatever. It’s actually keep selling old products that you already manufacture
⏹️ ▶️ John to maintain margins on your product line. Because we’ve heard like from actual sources inside the company
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not just a thing we think on the outside, but that decisions are actually made inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple based on the overall margins of the product line. So why has this laptop been
⏹️ ▶️ John around for so long with the touch bar or whatever? Why didn’t it get the M2? Why, you know, why do we have to wait until the M3?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not because the people making these computers don’t know how to make good computers or like are trying to stick it to you or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. The straightforward thing to do would be, OK, you know, well, the touch bars are going
⏹️ ▶️ John away, so let’s upgrade everybody to non touch bar. I bet the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John control these product lines, that’s their first plan, like, yeah, all right. Well, you know, we decided
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re leaving behind touch bar. We got this new design. Let’s just do it. And apparently inside the company,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is actual pushback from people who care about the numbers saying, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John did that, the overall margins on the Apple laptop product line or the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro product line would be unacceptably low. So you have to keep selling the Touch Bar one
⏹️ ▶️ John for another year to maintain our margins. We don’t wanna hear that
⏹️ ▶️ John on the outside, but that’s just the fact of running a company sometimes. You know, again, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the way we think it should be run, but we see from the outside that it is how it happens. and
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently it’s not just an accident or like they’re not thinking about it or like, whoopsie,
⏹️ ▶️ John they forgot to update that one. It’s someone inside Apple saying, you gotta keep selling
⏹️ ▶️ John the crappy one for another year. And this is the type of thing where it’s like, I know Apple’s big thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is we make long-term decisions, not short-term ones, but I do feel like that type of decision,
⏹️ ▶️ John it hurts Apple’s reputation as a company a tiny, tiny, tiny bit
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you buy one of these not knowing the weird limitations
⏹️ ▶️ John and the fact that the features have been updated on the other laptops and you might be happier with them,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you’re slightly less satisfied or maybe even if you just listen to a tech podcast and everyone is saying that’s the bad one and
⏹️ ▶️ John you bought the bad one, you feel bad about it or whatever. That type of situation, it’s not a big deal. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John still an okay computer, it’s fine, right? But the fact that they sold so many of them, they’re not selling
⏹️ ▶️ John their best work. They know they can do better. They have done better, but they’re still selling this
⏹️ ▶️ John lesser computer that is less satisfying to customers and less useful overall to maintain the margins
⏹️ ▶️ John on the product line of the MacBook Pro. That is not long-term
⏹️ ▶️ John brand preserving thinking in my opinion. Maybe it is the right decision
⏹️ ▶️ John if you care about the long-term financial health of the company, but as a tech nerd,
⏹️ ▶️ John I care less about that to the degree, as long as they’re not going out of business and they’re doing well, I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about the tiny percentages. I don’t have a bunch of Apple RSUs that are investing or something, I’m not investing. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think Tim Cook cares. He’s a bazillionaire, he doesn’t need any more money, but I feel like Tim Cook, the real
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook doctrine is, don’t let margins fall, do what’s right for the company
⏹️ ▶️ John financially. Not because he’s greedy and wants money, he doesn’t care. But I think as a CEO of a company, as
⏹️ ▶️ John a person whose expertise was in operations or whatever, I think he
⏹️ ▶️ John sees that as his responsibility to make sure the company does well financially in addition to
⏹️ ▶️ John all the other things. And he’s really good at that. And so he does things
⏹️ ▶️ John to pursue that goal that I personally think are the wrong decisions for the Apple brand
⏹️ ▶️ John in the long term, even if they’re the right decisions for the Apple stock price in the long term.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t think it’s as ruinous to the brand as you seem to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John think so. I said a tiny, tiny,
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny, tiny bit. But non-zero, measurable, real.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s not ruinous so much as corrosive. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s a better word for it. And not even corrosive, it’s just like, it’s a less optimal decision. If your decision
⏹️ ▶️ John was, I want our customers to be the happiest, you wouldn’t keep selling that computer for a year, right? I don’t think it’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ John deal, but it is a thing. It is a trade-off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if they wanted their customers to be happiest, they wouldn’t have anything that starts with 256 gigs of disk space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so moving right along. So no more Touch Bar, the Touch Bar is dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, thank God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what was the other, the dagger, if you will, on that laptop? It only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has two non-Thunderbolt ports. Yes. Non-Thunderbolt 4 USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco ports, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so this new kind of lower end 14-inch is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a replacement for that Touch Bar Mac, price-wise, sort of. It kind of replaces the high end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the price. It starts at 1,600 bucks. The outgoing Touch Bar 1, I think was 1,314 or 1,500 or 1500 as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two configs in that ballpark. So this is a little more money. But first of all, I think, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the need for that in the price slot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is greatly reduced by the existence of the 15-inch MacBook Air. And frankly, the 13-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air. I mean, the MacBook Air is, you know, I think will solve almost everyone’s needs who have this kind of need,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with very few exceptions. But anyway, what’s interesting about this new low-end 14-inch Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it does only have two USB-C Thunderbolt ports. Only the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left ones. There’s no more one on the right for that model. And that’s because the M3 does not support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three USB-C Thunderbolt ports. It only supports two. So, there is a reason for that in the Silicon. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco die space, market segmentation, these are trade-offs. That’s why they did this. They didn’t just delete the port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to save ten bucks on the cost of the port or whatever. They deleted the port because the entire Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip does not support that many of them. That’s the same reason why MacBook Airs only have two ports, because they’re using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same chip trade-offs. And I think that’s fine. Again, this is a low-end product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, well, kind of a mid-range product at this point. Because what’s interesting also, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they were starting the presentation and they said, you know, we have all three of these chips, and they said they’re all going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go into MacBook Pro, I thought for a second, oh, crap, they updated the Touch Bar one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because where else would the regular… You thought they were going to put an M3 in the Touch Bar one? That would have been terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like where else would they put the non-pro and max chip? I figured, well it’s not going to go in the 14 and 16,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it must go- But anyway, so over time, as they were introducing this low-end 14, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking, wow, okay, so they added a low-end config to the 14 to fill that void,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great news, but surely they’re going to do things like take away some of the nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro screen stuff, you know, maybe it’s not HDR, or it doesn’t have 120Hz or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they didn’t do that. Then I thought, oh, maybe they’ll take away, like, some of the speakers, or the microphones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. Make the webcam worse. They didn’t do any of those things. They really just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took the 14-inch Pro, with all of the proness, which, by the way, matches the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in almost every way, in terms of, like, nice Pro features. They took the existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome 14-inch, and pretty much only changed the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip down to the M3, rather than the M3 Pro, and deleted a port. There’s not much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other change and that to me is actually a huge win for the lineup. Yes, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lesser computer than the 14-inch with the M3 Pro and Max chip, of course. That’s why it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco costs $400 less also. But it is a significant upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the Touch Bar 13-inch that it’s kind of mostly replacing. And so I consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, you know, I know this is kind of a hot take against everyone. You know, all the YouTubers are giving that face about this, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the YouTube thumbnail face. You lost a port. Oh my God. You know, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is a win. This, this seems like they made this new low end 14 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better than I would have expected for a replacement to the 13 inch touch bar model.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I agree with you. This is a solid machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad that the touch bar one is gone because that machine was ridiculous in this day and age. I’m glad they’ve got this new one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d like how they phrased it. It’s a price drop. I would have heard this at the price drop. They fooled me for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John did they drop the price of the, no, nevermind. Like they because they had never sold
⏹️ ▶️ John This line of product with these this you know hardware case and all that stuff With the plain m3
⏹️ ▶️ John in it and or with a plain M Whatever in it and now they were and that is why the quote-unquote price drop didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really drop the price of anything although to Be fair they didn’t also crank up the prices either You know and this
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a slight price increase from what do you but it’s but it’s a better machine Again in
⏹️ ▶️ John the in the age of SOC’s as you pointed out when you get the m3 you get everything that comes with it
⏹️ ▶️ John in the days when the components were more separate and battery life was worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could do things like buy the low-end CPU with a ton of RAM. Can’t do that in this day and
⏹️ ▶️ John age. It’s just a side effect of the architecture Apple has chosen. It’s not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John The plain M3 can go up to 24, which is fine for a low-end config. The fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that eight gigs is still the default in a thing that is called the MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think is not, and here’s the thing. I wouldn’t care if they offered that, if we
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t know that Apple’s RAM and all of Apple’s upgrade prices are insane. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco where the margin is.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where Tim Cook, right? It’s not so much that they’re offering an eight. It’s not even that eight is the default and that it’s unusable
⏹️ ▶️ John with eight. It’s none of those things. It’s that we all know the second, like in a Porsche dealership, the second you want anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not, comes with it by default, the price goes up so fast
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s where all the margins are. And that’s another thing we have to talk to people about on all these computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John is not specific to the laptops or anything like that. It’s just about Apple. It’s like, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to go in there and they’re going to get you in the door with the the the price that you’re going to see is like starting
⏹️ ▶️ John from blah, blah, blah. Now, let me begin the long process of convincing you not to buy that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have enough space.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t. It might not have enough RAM. And yes, as soon as you see how much it costs to upgrade those
⏹️ ▶️ John to even the very next notch, like the reasonable notch of like 512 instead of two pieces of excesses
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re going to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you sure I can’t get by with this? Like, please do not buy a 25060 SSD in your laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re spending so much money. Trust me on this. You’re gonna fill it and then you’re gonna be sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not that I think this machine is bad. I think that Apple has still
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially done nothing to address the real problem, especially on their lower
⏹️ ▶️ John end devices of huge margins that they collect on the upgrades. Huge margins disconnected
⏹️ ▶️ John from reality in every possible way. That’s where their margins are. Like I get it. I understand, but it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so painful. That’s why we’re always waiting for the, kind of like we were with the, what was it? Like the 16 gig
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones or whatever they were stuck at for years. We’re waiting for that year where Apple finally says, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the year where we raise the floor and now you can’t get an iPhone with less than this
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of storage. So it should lessen the pain. When does the low end
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple’s, you know, of the Mac line get off of eight gigs? Because that will
⏹️ ▶️ John be such a relief because we assume, I hope, that they will, in fact, double
⏹️ ▶️ John and go up to 16 and not go to like nine or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey something. It goes like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? When they go to 16, like that first year that they go to 16, again, thinking about when is the year to buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John when are the good ones, that year that they bump to 16, if they don’t wait a ridiculous amount of time, that’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ John year to buy because you will never have a healthier amount of default RAM. And then you can,
⏹️ ▶️ John we hope, if they fix the SSD situation, buy the base machine and not be punished for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But right now, if you buy the base M3 MacBook Pro with eight gigabytes of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it does come with 512 on the Pro at least, but that’s a machine where you have to really think twice
⏹️ ▶️ John about. So yeah, that’s just the cook doctrine plus the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John equals be a little bit careful this machine.
Space Black
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco and I, well, I don’t know if I speak for you on this. I think I might,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Marco and I have wanted for years. For sure, we’ve wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a cellular modem in the MacBook Pro. That’s not happened, unfortunately. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my computing life, I have very few regrets. I had a long time in the PC world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t regret it. I know John regrets it on my behalf, but I don’t regret it. I do. I’m sorry for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Sorry that happened to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. But perhaps in part because of my long time in the PC world,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I spent a lot of time, as we discussed on a member special, I spent a lot of time with ThinkPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And those ThinkPads were almost always black, or at least all the good ones were. And one of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computing regrets was not buying, not ponying up the $150, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was, to get a Blackbook, a black polycarbonate MacBook as my first Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Those things were so freaking hot. And I wanted one so bad, but I was too cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do it, and I had a white one that immediately had all my hand grease all over it. It was not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, I can right this wrong, because Space Black is here, baby,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m excited. I think this thing looks real good, and I’m told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Jason Snell, among others, that I need to pump the brakes a little bit. It’s not as black as I want it to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but oh, man, this thing looks good. And Marco, we didn’t get our cellular modem, but we got Space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Black, and I’m excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first of all, again, I got to see this in person. I’m really curious about it. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be cool to have a really black looking MacBook Pro for the first time ever. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, by all accounts, it’s hard to tell from the YouTube hands-on videos. When you click the thumbnail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after they give that face, usually you can see some kind of clip from behind the scenes of the event Apple held
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yesterday with all the YouTubers being able to take B-roll, and they’re turning the MacBook around. but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s under this harsh spotlight because they have like all this like you know trendy lighting and so it’s really hard to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how these are going to look in person. It seems like they’re going to look fairly dark but like space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gray was not a very dark gray at all. Space black looks like it is darker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then like you see the black plastic of the keyboard well and like well that’s much darker than the black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aluminum surround you know so I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John not ThinkPad black. No, it’s not even black book back like the original black Macbook I think
⏹️ ▶️ John was blacker than this thing appears to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, and I don’t I’m not sure what color Apple thinks space is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have had a number of colors over the years called space gray and space black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Midnight and all these all these terms that suggest an absence of light which would suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black and yet They keep making all of these different shades of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically are medium to dark grays. Look around your office, look around anywhere in the electronics business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lots of stuff is actually black. Just black, like power cords, black cases for other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The keyboard. Yeah, like lots of stuff. There’s a very clear reference for what black means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in electronics. And I don’t know what they’re doing here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think there’s a threshold. Like, like, like obviously the keyboard is not actually black black. It’s not like that
⏹️ ▶️ John Vantablack. It’s not like a black hole. Like it absorbs all light. But there is a threshold where most people will
⏹️ ▶️ John consider that is passed now from dark gray into black. And no computer hardware that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has made in recent years has passed that bar. I think the original black MacBook did pass that bar. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John if you show that to anybody, they would say this computer is black. But if you show this space black computer
⏹️ ▶️ John to people, I think they will say it is really dark gray. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what it seems. And yet it’s called space black, which is a different shade of black than the space black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Apple watch, which is a different shade of black than space and black. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and you know, so one of the, one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John issues with the, with black, like on the midnight Mac book air, which is a very dark blue,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, is fingerprints. And so Apple actually, uh, has something regarding that. They,
⏹️ ▶️ John they said it in the video, you know, that has a special finish that makes it so fingerprints don’t show up as much, whatever their wording was.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the idea is that they know this is the problem and they have what they think is a solution. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve heard two different reports about this. Jason Snell says, you can still
⏹️ ▶️ John see fingerprints. They’re not as prominent, and it is a big improvement over the Midnight one, but it does not
⏹️ ▶️ John totally fix the fingerprint problem. John Gruber says, as
⏹️ ▶️ John far as he could tell, it pretty much solves the fingerprint problem. So I guess it depends on what lighting you’re in,
⏹️ ▶️ John how greasy your fingers are. Any improvement is good though. The fact that it’s a coating worries
⏹️ ▶️ John me a little bit, because does that coating wear off? Same thing with the, you know, with the color, the dark gray
⏹️ ▶️ John color. One of the advantages of the more natural looking silver
⏹️ ▶️ John and even the the old space gray thing is that if you do scratch it and get through that finish,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not much of a contrast. But we’ve seen with the iPhone 15 pros with their various finishes this year where
⏹️ ▶️ John the YouTubers take like a razor blade to it or whatever they do for reviews and
⏹️ ▶️ John it into the side. Underneath there is very shiny titanium in that case, and it really
⏹️ ▶️ John shows up a lot. So the darker you make this thing, if the darkness is just a coating, when you scratch that coating,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna stand out more than if you had a lighter color. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John coating for the fingerprints, plus the fact that the anodization is darker and the aluminum underneath presumably is lighter,
⏹️ ▶️ John may present some challenges for the appearance
⏹️ ▶️ John being preserved over a long period of time. But we’ll find out once people get these. Like maybe the coating holds up really well, maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ John anodization doesn’t scratch easily. Either way, I endorse them addressing this problem instead of saying
⏹️ ▶️ John Johnny Ives style. We’ve made the perfect computer now, don’t touch it. Yeah. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, first of all, I think it’s really funny that I think they spent almost as much time introducing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the color as they spent introducing the M3 Max chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s how important- It’s a very important innovation. They’ve almost figured out how to make black.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. I mean, almost, not quite, maybe next year. It’s funny too, like literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all the YouTubers, the faces, half the video is about the color. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get it. And that is like a big appealing thing for people who like shiny things and don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about setting money on fire. So I get why it’s a big deal to everybody. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is it is pretty funny, like how big of a deal it is that we took your silver and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gray laptop choice and made it silver and darker gray. And everyone’s freaking out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can give the people what they want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I’m excited. So.
MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then we got Kate Bergeron to come up and tell us a little bit more specifics. A 14-inch MacBook Pro, 11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times faster than the fastest Intel MacBook Pro. See ya, Intel. I felt like they were,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to say snarkier. I don’t think that’s the word I’m looking for, but they were more aggressive about crapping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all over Intel this presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is, they’re not crapping all over Intel. Intel is actually making better and better chips, but they’re crapping all over is whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John chip was in Apple’s Intel laptop like three years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like yeah, they’re crapping
⏹️ ▶️ John all over themselves like Intel is not a stationary target Intel continues to put out
⏹️ ▶️ John new CPUs and some of them are actually getting better and so it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John like I get they have to stop comparing to Intel eventually because maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea is if you just say Intel people won’t think and they’ll say that means that Apple chips are a lot of times
⏹️ ▶️ John better than anything Intel has to offer which is obviously not true But they don’t realize they’re comparing to a really old computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like how long do you compare like it were? How long were we comparing PowerPC computers, 68K
⏹️ ▶️ John counterparts? How long did we compare the Intel ones to the PowerPC predecessors? Like you gotta let
⏹️ ▶️ John it go eventually. Like, because eventually the number becomes meaningless. Like, because it’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ John things have changed. The operating system has changed. Everything, all the software has changed. It’s no longer meaningful. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as much as I complained about not comparing to the M2, comparing to Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s fun to put a big number on the screen, but it’s silly and they should stop doing it, let’s say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think the context is basically, I don’t, like when they’re making that kind of comparison
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the, you know, the fastest Intel version of X, Y, Z of their own computers, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re talking less to PC people and more to Apple’s customers who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t upgraded to the M series of chips yet. That’s really the idea here is like, hey, look, this old, you know, Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac you’re holding on to, you gotta upgrade, now’s the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know, but like the thing is, they can make that point in other ways. And like, I think those people
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like people with really old computers, they know that no matter what they get, it’s gonna be so much
⏹️ ▶️ John faster. And maybe they need Apple to say 11 times faster or something to convince them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I just, I feel like that point could be, maybe it’s because it tends to be like in the same
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the little thing where they’re talking about benchmarks. And so they’re basically jumping from, here’s what you need to know
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of what kind of incremental performance improvements we’ve made to jumping immediately to, and by the way, if you’ve got an
⏹️ ▶️ John old Mac, you should really buy a new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We would like to stop supporting Intel, please and thank you. So now’s the time. So yeah, so 11 times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, sorry, John. 11 times faster than the fastest Intel MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kate specifically said, for the vast majority of workflows, you’ll never hear the fans. Ahem, gentlemen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Applause for that line, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1080p FaceTime camera. I wrote down, but I wonder, I might have this wrong. I think it’s for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDR specifically. It’s a thousand nits sustained, 1600 nits peak.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was unchanged. What was changed was that the non-HDR, SDR, regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content, that max went from 500 nits to 600.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they made an interesting point, which it took me to the second viewing to put it together what they were talking about, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have a studio display, that also for SDR content, or I guess for everything really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is 600 nits. So the brightness, the max brightness between the two screens is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey identical just in terms of brightness. And that’s kind of neat. I mean, it’s not a big deal, but it’s kind of neat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They haven’t raised that in a while. So that’s that’s why that was noteworthy. Like it’s been 500 on the pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for for some time. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s in the 600 on the what is the 600 on the MacBook Air or something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John out now is 600. I don’t remember offhand. I have you thinking of a phone. But yeah, no, there’s like this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing in the world of televisions as well, because you’ve got, you know, high
⏹️ ▶️ John dynamic range, HDR video. And then you’ve got, I guess, SDR standard dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ John range, which is like regular TV. And there are specifications for, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, before high dynamic range, there were specifications for regular, regular
⏹️ ▶️ John TV that would say, here’s what the maximum brightness should be for a non high dynamic range
⏹️ ▶️ John video signal. But that brightness is pretty low. And so most TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John these days say, yeah, even though the spec says we shouldn’t show higher than whatever it is, 300 nits
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, it’s really low. Like what the non high dynamic range TV maximum brightness should be.
⏹️ ▶️ John We know that it makes the thing hard to see if you’ve got a sunny room. So pretty much every TV says, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we can make the non-HDR stuff brighter, we will. And I think that’s what Apple is doing here. Not that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John any spec dictating what they should have on the screen, but like, yeah, at HDR, you can do this amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Like your UI is not HDR. The windows, the titles, the menu bars, the buttons, the background
⏹️ ▶️ John of your text editor, none of that is HDR. Unless you’re looking at HDR video, it’s quote unquote SDR
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. but, and they wanna separate the two because otherwise high dynamic range doesn’t look high
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s the same as, you know, but raising the standard dynamic range level
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can see it better is a, is probably one of the most important things they can do because unless
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re editing HDR video all day, you’re looking at your screen in the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John standard dynamic range mode all the time. And if you can’t see the screen because it’s sunny
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re at the beach or whatever with your laptop getting sand in it, it’s great that you can now crank that up. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John it will burn your battery more, but I do wonder how, like, cause they could choose, they could choose, and there are utilities
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get to do this. You can just run your screen at 1600 nits all the time when your windows can be 600 nits. I
⏹️ ▶️ John do not recommend this, it will burn your retinas out, but they could keep creeping those two things closer and closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to each other. Like, oh, the max is 16, and then the regular non-HDR max was 500.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now it’s this, now it’s that. And like, they can keep creeping it up, but if they get them too close to each other, then HDR loses its effect.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe the HDR peak will start moving up because televisions can go higher than 1600 these days, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They also have 16 inch versions of all these models, which that’s not for me, it’s not to say they’re bad, just not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco for me, they’re great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. The release schedule, John Ternes took us through, so you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could order anything immediately. The M3 is available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately. the M3 Pro is available this coming week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or next week, I guess, actually, I’m sorry, and then the M3 Max later in November is all we know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the teens, it’s like the teens of November are all the ship dates for the M3 Maxes.
💸
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess we can talk here about whether or not we ordered anything, then we have to briefly talk about the postscript of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire presentation. The entire iMac, you mean? That’s exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not yet ordered anything, but my current intention is to basically duplicate this machine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but in space black with an M3 Max. So I currently have a 14 inch M1 Max with 64
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs of RAM and four terabyte storage. My intention is, although again, I just haven’t had the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do it. my intention is to order a space black 14 inch M3 Max with 64 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The 96 is tempting and 128 is tempting, but I don’t think I would ever use it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably don’t even need the 64 if I’m really honest with myself, but here we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also you can’t, if you want all the CPU cores, you can’t pick 96.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s right. I forgot about that. Yeah, you’re right about that. And then I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to convince myself that eight terabytes would be nice for a little extra breathing room, but- And you saw the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then I saw the price and I said, nope, that’s not, I’m just gonna have to delete some stuff because that’s not gonna work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I’m gonna go four terabytes again. So again, like I said, I plan to get a replacement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this computer. I’m not entirely sure what I’m gonna do with this one, to be honest with you. I might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just trade it in. If somebody’s looking for one, let me know. But Aaron doesn’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one and the kids don’t need one. So I’m not sure what I’m gonna do, but we’ll figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I know you bought at least three laptops, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John as excited as I am for the M3 Max. I think it’s gonna be great in a laptop. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like laptops, I’m not getting one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Marco, the person I actually wanted to talk to you about it, I just had to get John out of the way. So what have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you ordered or what will you plan to order?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, as I’ve talked about many times in the show, I’ve loved using my 16-inch M1 Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro as a desktop this entire time. I have the ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro Display XDR. I have this amazing laptop that has been a fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop this entire time. This has been amazing, best computer I’ve ever had, my favorite computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve ever had. All of the downsides of using a laptop as a desktop from pre-M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days are gone. It is reliable, and I keep it in clamshell mode and a little stand-up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand. It is reliable, it is quiet, it is silent, like I never hear the fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has just been fantastic. And when the Mac Studio came out, it was tempting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, maybe I should double my CPU performance by getting the M1 or M2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultra versions of the Mac Studio. A lot of things kept me in the desktop laptop lifestyle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number one of which is I’ve been portable. You know, I’ve talked about, you know, I’m moving my house and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m back and forth a lot to different places. I’m so happy with the 16 inch as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that role where, you know, when I’m actually traveling somewhere, I bring that and I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get all of my, I have all my stuff on it. I can get all my work done on the biggest screen that is available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in an Apple laptop. That’s why I haven’t gone to the desktop, and I haven’t gone to the studio, even though the performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jump would be substantial. I could double my CPU performance, and for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my super heavy-duty Xcode work that I’ve been doing over the last few months, and that I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue to do for probably the next year very heavily, I really am maxing out the CPU all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of Xcode compilation, a ton of Swift UI work, a ton of Swift work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like tons of very CPU intensive work happening here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I skipped M2 because, you know, it was a nice upgrade but it wasn’t quite enough to make me replace it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This one I’m going with. This one I’m buying this. So I got the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M3 Max. I’m not going to apologize for this even a little, I maxed the whole thing out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s ridiculous. Oh my word. Because, you know, I actually use this. Like- You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think you’d use the RAM? Like I can get behind the SSD and I can get behind the cores and whatnot, but you really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think you would use all that RAM?
⏹️ ▶️ John his other choice is 64 though, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing, like if 96 was an option, I would have picked it, like for, but I wasn’t gonna give up CPU cores for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually do occasionally use swap on my 64. And I’m expecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this to last me another two to three years. So I’m like, well, if I’m already kissing that 64 limit now, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to happen over the next two years?
⏹️ ▶️ John When you say you use swap, like everybody uses swap. The swap files will be created and there will be things in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it could be just dormant stuff. So are you swapping? Do you see, I don’t know what weird
⏹️ ▶️ John resource-destroying things you’re running in your menu bar, but like, do you see swapping activity where your
⏹️ ▶️ John computer is spending time shuffling things to and from the swap file when it could be doing useful work? Or is it just the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that you see a swap file that’s been created and it exists and has some stuff in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see Activity Monitor reports there having been swap usage.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s what I’m saying. Like, there will always, there will almost always be swap usage. Like, because when things
⏹️ ▶️ John get dormant, they’ll get put into the swap file, swap files will be created. What you care about is swapping, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is excessive movement of things to and from. Like, to do it, to accomplish it, this is the worst case of swapping.
⏹️ ▶️ John To accomplish your task, you need some stuff that’s in swap. But then to do stuff later in that
⏹️ ▶️ John same task, you need to put things in swap and get the things you put there back out again. That is swapping, because
⏹️ ▶️ John then you’re going like, to do a single thing, you’re going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying you shouldn’t buy more RAM. I’m all for buying more RAM. Again, with my computer, you just want to solve the RAM problem so you
⏹️ ▶️ John never have to think about it again. And it sounds like, whether it is justified or not, you are currently thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM a little bit sometimes. So by going 128, you get in a situation where you can be like me
⏹️ ▶️ John and no longer think about RAM. But I’m not entirely sure that it was actually a thing that was affecting your life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe not, but again, this is kind of being forward looking. Also, there is a trade-off. RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses power. And so if this was a laptop that I frequently used on battery and was really stretching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life needs, I would not have jumped that RAM up because I would want to keep the power usage a little bit lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to conserve battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I do wonder, I mean, you’re right that more RAM is going to use more power than less. But back
⏹️ ▶️ John in the bad old days where a lot of our instincts about computers came from,
⏹️ ▶️ John If you got more RAM, it would be in the form of like more DIMMs. And each of those would be, you know, have like
⏹️ ▶️ John X number of chips on them and have to be powered and everything like that. But these days, the RAM increases pretty much come
⏹️ ▶️ John within a, you know, a certain range, come entirely from larger capacity chips, but of the same number.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re getting four RAM chips no matter what, I think. It’s just the question of how big they are. And yes, the big ones do
⏹️ ▶️ John use more power than the smaller ones, but it’s not the same as doubling your RAM and then doubling the number of chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was, that’s what it was in the bad old days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but but you are doubling the number of those little transistors that store the bits, you
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it is true. Like I do wonder like what the difference is. Like, I think it was much worse when you had an entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John new printed circuit board with all of its like power regulation stuff and like as opposed to just
⏹️ ▶️ John just paying the price for the extra transistors that implement the memory. So it’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying is it’s not it’s not as bad as it used to be. This is one of the advantages of the SoC era is
⏹️ ▶️ John that doubling your RAM is not as big a hit to your power usage as it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re probably right, it isn’t as big of a hit, but it does still use power the more RAM you have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And from my understanding, as of a few years ago, this might be out of date now, but as of a few years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that power budget was not nothing. It was not like massive. It wasn’t as big of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal as maxing out the CPU or as not maxing out the CPU. Or turning up the brightness on your screen, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kills it. Right, right. But it seemed to be a contributor to battery life you know, something on the order of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like maybe 5% of your battery life, you know, so 5 or 10%, like something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, I believe, what it was a few years ago. Again, I don’t know what it is now. But it wasn’t nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it wasn’t massive. But anyway, so I wouldn’t max out the RAM if this was like my portable battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life monster, you know, then I would actually be more conservative with it. But again, this is my desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, uh, and, and I love, by the way, I love so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, being in the desktop laptop lifestyle, we get the good chips first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac studio and the Mac pro have to wait until the ultra chip is ready
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. If you want the fastest Mac at most things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a MacBook pro. And that has been true for the last two years and will probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue to be true for the foreseeable future that like there are there are large parts of each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year where the fastest Mac at most tasks is a MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you say most tasks though, are you just excluding anything that has to do with the GPU? Because you kind of have to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I’m thinking you know things like the the individual single core performance
⏹️ ▶️ John important. Yeah, yeah, sure and even even multi-core even most multi-core things can’t take advantage of the parallelism,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the GPU thing is really the elephant in the room. But mostly also because
⏹️ ▶️ John if regular people are doing anything with a computer that they find slow, chances are good it’s a game. And in that case,
⏹️ ▶️ John the ultra is going to stomp all over the max because it’s got twice the power.
Mac gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances are they’re not playing the game on a Mac though.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, Apple, that was one of the rumors by the way, we didn’t talk about this, but like, why was this at 8pm? Oh, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John spooky. That seems to be the answer, because it’s spooky, but there was a lot of things like, oh, they want it to be during the daytime
⏹️ ▶️ John in Japan because they’re gonna have the big gaming announcement, and they’re gonna have all people from Japanese game companies, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they did talk about gaming, and they did show the same games they always show, but it was not,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t have like famous people from Japanese game companies companies talk to us about their games. They didn’t have any announcements
⏹️ ▶️ John about any partnerships with big Japanese gaming companies. So I feel like the whole we wanted this to be on
⏹️ ▶️ John during the day in Japan thing didn’t really pan out. But then, you know, then they emphasize gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way that they always do when they talk about the Mac lately, but they didn’t have anything to announce in this
⏹️ ▶️ John area. I do like that the next GPU is better. We’ll see what the benchmarks look like. But, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, don’t don’t game on a Mac laptop, I guess is the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think I think at this point, you know, regarding gaming, it is wonderful, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a huge game changer, sunglasses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That all Macs with Apple Silicon now have decently gaming capable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs. That was something that was not the case in the Intel era. Like the Intel era,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only the MacBook Pros and only the high-end MacBook Pros had GPUs that could do anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in games. Now, every Mac with Apple Silicon, which is now every Mac that’s old, has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decently gaming capable GPU. Yeah, I know it’s not the highest ending in the world, but it’s decently gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capable. That wasn’t the case until again, the modern era. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue with gaming on the Mac now is not GPU power. Now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say environmental factors.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit GPU power on the high end still.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But only in the high end. But again, Apple’s not getting high end gamers. Like high end gamers are gonna build gaming PCs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I know, but Macs, you know, Macs are the PCs of the Apple world. Like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is that market, right? And to the extent that you’re looking at that market
⏹️ ▶️ John at all as in PC gaming, when you say PC gaming, you usually mean the games that will
⏹️ ▶️ John stress your PC and people want the PC that costs more money than they can afford, that will play
⏹️ ▶️ John the game that they wanna play on their PC at a better frame rate. And to the extent
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple wants to be in that market at all, they are now less competitive than it had ever been. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just that mark. And the whole rest of the, if you don’t look at PC gaming, but you look at like
⏹️ ▶️ John mobile gaming, casual gaming, stuff like that, playing AAA games that everyone else played three years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago. Yeah, Apple’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well in that area. From a game maker perspective, in the Intel era,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were not enough people who would play, who would buy games on Macs, who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had gaming capable GPUs. Because everyone had these crappy Intel-engraved GPUs on almost every Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that limited the market by a lot. Now the numbers are now there. Like now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s not going to be as much. Are there
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, right now, the percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac, the percentage of the Mac user base that can play your game at all and have a good experience is going way
⏹️ ▶️ John up, which is great. But the absolute numbers of Mac sold is really the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco convincer in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of like, should we make a Mac version of this game? There’s a thing about follow up that we’ll talk about in a future episode about another company saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we’re not going to make the Mac version of a game anymore. And why? It’s not because my hardware is bad. So just
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t enough Mac users, even if literally 100% of Mac users that exist in the entire world bought your game. Some people may be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Yeah, not sure we can just. And that’s on Apple. Like that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone gaming is so popular. You know how you get gaming to be popular in the iPhone? Send it, sell a bazillion iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then people like, yeah, my potential customer base is how many billion people? Sure. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever my game is, I will make sure I can port it to the phone, the iPhone, because you’ve sold so many of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple could sell as many Macs as iPhones, gaming on the Mac would be amazing, but we’re not quite there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably a better discussion for another day, but like, you know, Apple seems to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an institutional inability to court developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Developers come to Apple willingly for the high volume platforms, mostly the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone, because we are so motivated to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on those platforms platforms that we will tolerate Apple’s BS as a developer, that they give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us as developers. Whereas the platforms where Apple kind of has to try to get people to them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are terrible at that culturally. They are not used to not having the power because Apple is so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they think of all of their developer markets the same way they think of the iPhone. Like why aren’t people lining up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and knocking on the door and tolerating all of our BS and paying all of our fees? What do you mean everyone isn’t desperate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that on this platform that has way lower volume. But Apple is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incapable, culturally, of dealing well with those markets, of actually courting developers, of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually getting big companies to care about their platforms in a strong way and devote a lot of resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they don’t have to. And it’s unfortunate, but that’s the way Apple is, culturally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would take a lot of change in the company to change that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We saw that in a lot of the court cases. It’s kind of like an attribution mistake, which is understandable, but when they would talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about the app store and their fees that they take and whether it’s justified or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seemed like when a lot of Apple executives were up there, the misattribution they were making was,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have made this amazing product, the iPhone, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna be on it because of the great job that we did in making this great product. And that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John we deserve some of the value because without this platform, what would you be deploying
⏹️ ▶️ John your thing on? It’s a give and take, but they’re saying like, It’s because we did such a good job with the iPhone that you wanna be on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like you said, Margo, the actual thing is the thing you did a good job with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is selling a lot of iPhones. Now, yes, those are two things are connected. Oh, they sell a lot of iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s a good phone. Like I get it, right? But I feel like the Apple executives feel like because we have made
⏹️ ▶️ John a really good product, that’s why we deserve to be successful in this market, to have developers
⏹️ ▶️ John wanting to develop or whatever. And same thing with the Vision Pro. Like the Vision Pro may be an amazing product, Like eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John when, you know, how do you get sustained developer interest? You have to sell a lot of your product.
⏹️ ▶️ John And despite the fact that those two things are linked product quality and how many of them you sell,
⏹️ ▶️ John they diverge in certain areas for historical and, you know, other reasons like
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, right? The Mac is a great product. We love it. They don’t sell as many of those as they
⏹️ ▶️ John do iPhones. They don’t even sell as many of those as the world does Windows PCs. And so the thing Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John always seems to be proud of is the quality of their product. But I feel like I should say we deserve
⏹️ ▶️ John part of your money because we sold 17 billion iPhones that like we did that
⏹️ ▶️ John and that makes you able to make money on our platform. Why not because the phone is great, but because you sold a
⏹️ ▶️ John billion of it’s like one degree like they they’re so focused on. We’ve done such a good job on our products. That’s why we
⏹️ ▶️ John deserve this when they I wish they were focused more on how can we sell more of these and if you wanted to sell more max for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d cut your margins, you’d make a low cost MacBook that we keep talking about that will maybe eventually be released. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there are different ways to sell more Macs. And I love the fact that they made the Macs better and they’re great and they’re awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John That should help them sell more. But if you ever really want to move the needle on Mac gaming, you shouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John like people should be coming and banking games on our platform. Maybe we just need to make the technology better. No, Apple, you need to sell more Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how you do it. Sell more Macs. I know Tim Cook doesn’t need to hear that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in the meantime, like it is kind of a chicken and egg problem. Like, yeah, there’s not a lot of gamers who want to game on Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s not a lot of games on Macs. Like there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem there. And the way you solve that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by making APIs or making faster hardware. You gotta do that too. You do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not, yeah. But the way you solve that is by making much larger changes and investments. Things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like paying for your own games to be made or dealing better with game developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Buying a couple of gaming studios and bringing them in house like every other big game platform does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how you do that kind of stuff. Like Apple has spent decades giving the finger to gamers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly and game developers. And so you can’t just all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect that to change. There’s a deep cultural resentment of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco among many gamers and game developers based on their actions over years and years and years and based on the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realities over years and years and years. And you don’t just change that. Like, I mean, God, look at the Mac App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s an abandoned flea market. There’s so many problems they would have to address.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly no one’s going to want to pay them 30%. Look at Apple Arcade, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful idea that seemed to have a decent start that has seemingly been super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either under-invested in or at least under-promoted.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s being so successful they raised the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. They would have to change a lot to make big impacts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in gaming. And they seem to be standing around twiddling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their thumbs expecting developers to just line up and knock down the door. And that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to happen with gamers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, if you want to essentially force developers to pay attention to you and
⏹️ ▶️ John go on your platform, sell a bazillion more Macs. Seems easy, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or apply money to the problem. Like, buy a studio, whatever it is. Like, that’s how you do that. I mean, and
⏹️ ▶️ John to be fair, that seems like what they’re trying to do, bootstrapping this. They are spending more
⏹️ ▶️ John money, more time, and more attention. It’s just slow going, right? But I
⏹️ ▶️ John just always get back to like, you know, if if they sold ten times as many Macs, this
⏹️ ▶️ John conversation would be so much easier for them
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because it’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be like they are with the iPhone. We’re like, no matter how annoying you are, people like, well, I got to grit my teeth and do it because look
⏹️ ▶️ John at all those iPhone customers. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. Anyway, so, yeah, I bought the big MacBook Pro and I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get the black one, which is uncharacteristic of me. But I just I’ve I’ve had silver now for a few generations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a row. And I just kind of wanted a new change of pace color, even though if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks a lot like space gray, I’m going to be disappointed by that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t match your stand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the stand is wood,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but the bigger thing is it doesn’t match my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor stand or my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey headphone. Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not gonna match.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s all the way off to the side. So I don’t actually look at it that much.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, on this desktop laptop thing and your discussion of it again, I just want to
⏹️ ▶️ John reemphasize the point that we gloss over a lot when we talk about this. One of the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John advantages of your desktop laptop of you not having to like you basically having your life with you
⏹️ ▶️ John and that thing, like when you go from place to place and you put it down and you connect it to a monitor, there you are like you pick
⏹️ ▶️ John up right where you left off. I feel like that that huge advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of a condemnation of Apple’s adoption of cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John storage and syncing. we talked about with the Chromebooks and everything like that, that is a fact of life because
⏹️ ▶️ John most things are local and there is no easy solution for syncing that much local storage
⏹️ ▶️ John efficiently. But imagine if Apple only made Chromebooks. You wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John buying Mac studios for every place where you needed to be because you’d be like, well, of course all my stuff is there. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying that Apple should do this and it’s easy. Like I understand, like there are technical reasons why we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people don’t do a whole lot of their work on Chromebooks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, exactly. Like I get it, especially with the more demanding you work, the more important it is. But like when I look to
⏹️ ▶️ John the future and I say, this is actually a vestige of history that
⏹️ ▶️ John when technology, we should be working towards making it so we don’t have to deal with that. Because I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like that is one of the biggest reasons you use this, Rick. And looking at this machine that you’re buying, I do think it is ridiculous. Like you want
⏹️ ▶️ John a desktop, you’re maxing out this laptop to the extent that you’re sacrificing, like it’s portability and battery life,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you want the power. Why are you doing that? You want a gaming PC, you bought a Mac Pro. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason you’re doing that is the massive advantage of I unplug it, I will go somewhere else, I plug it into a monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing else I need to do. Everything is exactly how I left it. That advantage is so huge that you’re willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this because it’s the best option available to you. And I do look forward
⏹️ ▶️ John to a day when the availability of our stuff, of
⏹️ ▶️ John even your bazillion files and Xcode and the SDK and your Git repos and like just all that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, everything, your entire computing life was as available to you everywhere as like my Gmail
⏹️ ▶️ John is. We’re not there yet, but I hope I live long enough to see it.
ATP Membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week in part by ATP members.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please consider becoming an ATP member today. Membership comes with all sorts of great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little fun things, chief of which is the ad-free version of the show. That’s what most people get
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco and our past members and all members out there. Thank you.
iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so we should probably talk about the iMac before we hang up the phone. There is a new 24-inch iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It gets the M3, not the M3 Pro, not the M3 Max. No soup for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it does have a bunch of nice features. Gets Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3. It’s two and a half times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faster than the fastest 27-inch iMac. I don’t know if that includes the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Pro. What’s a 27-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco iMac? Yeah, exactly. See,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, by the way, like, this is one area, like, John Ternus. So what he said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he was describing this and he said, he was talking about how the 4.5K 24-inch screen is quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the perfect size to replace both the 4K and the 5K Intel models.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That to me says, if you’ve been holding out hope for a 27-inch iMac replacement, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might wanna give up that dream. Like maybe in the distant future that might come, but that statement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me says, stop waiting.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll come in time for me to win my bet. Let’s see. It’s in the calendar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even remember when that was, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, you gotta look
⏹️ ▶️ John for it in the calendar. It’s in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. All right. So yeah, so it’s two and a half times faster than the fastest 27 inch, four times faster than the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fastest 22 inch. It gets a quote, unmatched video conferencing experience, quote, 1,300
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks. You could order it yesterday and that’s basically it. All the colors are the same,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size is the same. You know, everything’s basically the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Still lightning port peripherals.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, which is a bummer. USB-C for, yeah. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, so I think I talked myself into being, feeling weirdly
⏹️ ▶️ John about these Macs with our past episodes. I love the fact that they have M3. This
⏹️ ▶️ John was the machine that needed to be updated the most. And it did, thumbs up, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John as I said, when I look at this machine, I think, okay, but the thing that needed to be updated the most
⏹️ ▶️ John about this is the base configs. The, maybe the 8GB of RAM less, but the 256 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John of storage and the fact that it costs 200 bucks to go to 512 and 400 bucks to go to a terabyte.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like regular people don’t use a lot of CPU, but even
⏹️ ▶️ John just regular like non-tech enthusiast people can and do eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John use a lot of storage space. Just like, it feels like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I don’t know, maybe this isn’t the year. Maybe this isn’t the year for the iMac to bump its base configs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s certainly not the year for it to decrease margins on the bumps to its configs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But at a certain point, this thing is gonna be overdue for
⏹️ ▶️ John one or both of the baseline specs to move up while maintaining the same price range. And
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, I think at this point, it’s the SSD that is worse, because 256 gig SSD is going to affect
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s lives much more than eight gigs of RAM. Yeah. And so if someone was buying one of these machines and
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to convince them to click one of those upgrade buttons, I’d be working hard to convince them to do the SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John one. The fact that this gets the M3, that doesn’t help with any of this. Like that’s why I feel like I’m slightly more
⏹️ ▶️ John disappointed with this machine. Like I thought, you know, the M1 is not going to be so slow that people are like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re using a slow computer because they all have SSDs, everything’s nice, you can do all the things you want to do. The M3 is great, I endorse
⏹️ ▶️ John it as a good upgrade, but it doesn’t fix any of that other stuff. And as far as I can tell, none of the upgrade pricing,
⏹️ ▶️ John none of the baseline pricing, none of sort of the value proposition of this machine has changed except
⏹️ ▶️ John for the fact that you get way more CPU and a better Wi-Fi and connectivity and stuff like that, but every
⏹️ ▶️ John other value propositions thing has not changed in three years in terms of like what do you get for
⏹️ ▶️ John a given amount of money in terms of RAM and SSD so I really hope this machine
⏹️ ▶️ John Keep it on the m3 for three years. I think it’ll be fine, but you know next year or the year after
⏹️ ▶️ John Get rid of that 256 gig SSD option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to see that kind of thing happen but ultimately I think the iMac seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be, you know, it’s, there’s, there isn’t a huge market for this, but the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there is for it, it seems to still be serving it just as well as it did two years ago. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, they seem to be putting as much effort into updating it as the market justifies and it seems to be serving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it well. You know, this is a market that oftentimes has very low end needs where they’re kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like terminals for things and like, you know, front desks of offices and stuff like that. Like so I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re doing fine with this product and there’s not much to talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and to that end, I think the lightning on the peripherals, I don’t care that much about it. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I do. It’s it’s I know this is it’s people think it’s a shame because they think this machine is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be around for a long time, which essentially extends the maximum lightning peripheral lifetime out to
⏹️ ▶️ John the lifetime of this line of IMAX, which could be two or three years. And I get that. But But
⏹️ ▶️ John from an end user perspective, the fact that this uses lighting for the peripherals doesn’t really affect their life.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the computer comes with the cable that does it. The only things you’re dealing about are the keyboard and the mouse that are
⏹️ ▶️ John right next to the computer all the time and it has the cable. And so it’s not the same as phones not being
⏹️ ▶️ John updated or like other things. It seems silly, but I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think most of the reaction about, oh God, it still has lightning ports on the peripherals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not because we all wanted to buy iMacs and we’re upset about that cable. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we all wanna buy new peripherals that have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John USB-C and we were curious. You’re not gonna buy these colored
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac ones anyway, right? Like all the iMac peripherals are color matched to the iMac. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they come in gray.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, there’s a silver one, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then also, like, you know, everyone kinda wants like, hey, wouldn’t it be nice if they updated the mouse, maybe? To be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John less bad. Updated it to what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Be careful what you wish
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for. I don’t even use
⏹️ ▶️ John that mouse. It is probably, you do not want them to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what I was thinking. Like I was a little afraid going to the event, like the Apple Magic Mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, I think, the oldest Apple product that I use. It is my mouse, I love it. I, you know, there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would change the charging situation, but otherwise this is my favorite mouse and this is the one I use everywhere. And so like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was a little afraid, like what if they ruined my mouse? But they didn’t touch it. So I guess that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than ruining it.
⏹️ ▶️ John How old is it? We should look that up. What’s your guess? Is it eight years old? I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like 20. Well, it’s, there’s some asterisks, because they revised it. It used to have the AA batteries,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then they later changed it to just have the lightning port and the built-in rechargeable battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John just talking about the overall shape, like the overall shape of this mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 14 years ago, October 20, 2009. Oh my God. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not complaining. Like I think if people like it and it works for them, I think it is beautiful to look at. Some people do
⏹️ ▶️ John like the mouse. I don’t think it’s bad that Apple can use this. I hate it, but like, whatever. You can always buy
⏹️ ▶️ John another mouse, but it is interesting. Like when will they decide, now is the time to make a new mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what will they do at that point? I can only imagine what a mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John made by modern Apple would look like. It would not look like this, that’s for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m picturing like you sitting down at my computer. Like, so you’d be sitting down to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop with an Apple mouse and a Microsoft keyboard. This is like your
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, I think I would like your keyboard better than the default Mac one that doesn’t have the inverted T arrow keys.
⏹️ ▶️ John like the default small keyboard, sitting in a desk with that keyboard, I see people do it all the time, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t, especially even programmers, like why are you doing this to yourself? But your Microsoft one is weird, but at least it has arrow keys.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you just send me a tooth that was reminding me that the small keyboard has arrow keys? Well, stop, because I know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re just not as conveniently placed as they are on the extended keyboard. That’s what I don’t like. And they’re half size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee and Collide, and thank you especially to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm.join. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long.
Box lunches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I know Casey wants to get to lunch, and I know that because I had the wonderful idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We should all pack box lunches for ourselves for this recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was a good idea. I did not do it though. How much time do
⏹️ ▶️ John you think we have to pack a box lunch? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately that idea did not get traction in our Slack channel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here for it. I just I didn’t do it because it seemed like that wasn’t actually a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t care. What would be in your box lunch if we had gotten our acts together and actually made them? What would be in
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this a boxed lunch for the purpose of eating while podcasting? Like I’m making something that I can
⏹️ ▶️ John eat in front of the computer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s part of the logistical challenge of one of the reasons I didn’t push it harder than just saying, wouldn’t this be a fun idea?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nobody actually wants to hear us eat lunch on a podcast. No. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were to pack a boxed lunch for eating right now, you know, as we are still recording for another three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours, what would it be?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a good question. I mean, so yesterday I was volunteering at Declan’s school and I did bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lunch and I don’t eat sandwiches very often. Typically for lunch, I’ll make myself a salad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but on occasion I will have a sandwich, and in this particular case, I had a ham and cheese
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sandwich yesterday, and that would probably be what I would do in this sort of scenario as well. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a salad is, assuming you don’t absolutely drown in dressing, a salad is in many cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot more healthy, and that’s what I typically eat. That was
⏹️ ▶️ John my question, in your salad thing. What is in your, when you make yourself a salad, what’s in it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s a lettuce base. I would use spinach, which is arguably more nutritious, healthier, et cetera,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I developed a spinach allergy a few years ago that I haven’t been brave enough to test to see if it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like a couple of year thing or if it was a forever more thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so I use whatever the tall lettuce is, not the circular lettuce, the tall one.
⏹️ ▶️ John The tall one is not the circular one. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco aficionado Casey List
⏹️ ▶️ John identifies romaine lettuce by its height.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Does it have a ruffly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge or a flat edge?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey romaine. It’s romaine. I think that’s right. It’s a tallness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Anyways. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey god. So that’s the base. And then I’ve, you know, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just the three of us here, right? So I
⏹️ ▶️ John honest. Do you put chocolate chips in it? Just tell
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey us. No. No, there’ll be the shells
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and cheese just lumped on top. No, if only. If only. No, the thing, the thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco going to get me- Wait, can I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess? Is it going to have bacon bits in it? No, I love bacon bits, but no, I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Bacon in quotes. I typically do not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, the thing that’s going to get me to move to California one day, it’s not the weather, which is perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in most places. It’s not that the cities at least are super liberal and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not the fact that it’s going to fall off the continental United States one day. It’s not the fact that it’s hilariously overpriced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the avocados, because I have become obsessed with avocados recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I probably put an unhealthy amount of avocado in. Typically the protein will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either some shrimp that I’ll just quickly cook with not a lot on it, or occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some chicken. We’ll oftentimes get a chicken from Costco and strip the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skin off and use that. What else do I put in there? Chickpeas sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey onion, what else I’m trying to think?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Cucumber. When
⏹️ ▶️ John you say onion, do you mean raw red onion that you cut up?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, raw or red or white, but always raw. I don’t typically saute it or anything
⏹️ ▶️ John is quite a mishmash we’ve got going here, but let’s get to the,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey let’s get to the, the, the,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a complicated, you know, arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John too. No, it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John me a while. Yeah, it takes me a while every day. Let’s get to the, let’s get to the big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finish though. What’s, what dressing are you putting on this? Oh, that’s what you’re aiming for. We talked about this once before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It depends how health conscious I’m feeling at the moment. I try not to use a lot regardless. But, you know, I think we had this very conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the show at some point semi-recently, but Ken’s, what is it, low fat or low
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cal, Thousand Island is so good. and that’s my fat free, no it’s not the fat free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think. I don’t know, I’ll have to look it up. I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ John know. That’s better than I thought it would be. I mean, I’m not sure culinarily if it holds together with all those ingredients you just described,
⏹️ ▶️ John but health wise it seems like you’re getting a lot of different food groups in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I got, usually I’ll use cherry tomatoes. There’s different colors. I don’t put on like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, tortilla chips or anything, you know, or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s low carb so far, right? No croutons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I did do croutons for a long time, but I’ve weeded that out of my diet, even though I love them. So you replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it with avocado? Yeah, pretty much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s true. I replaced all of my carbs with tons of fat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, you know, you make your choices, right? But anyways, no, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to think what else. Because I used to make much unhealthier salads and I’ve been doing better. Oh, carrots, I always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey include carrots. I love carrots. So you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that as your box lunch because I guess it’s too much stuff, it’s too messy and it’s too long prep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also you have some temperature contrasts going on in there that would not age well in a box lunch. Like your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hot cooked proteins.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’d make it perfect for WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s Ken’s Light, real-time follow-up, Ken’s Light Thousand Islands. I’m pretty sure what my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John kind of surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t go ranch. Ranch would be within your character, within your Americana processed
⏹️ ▶️ John food, Velveeta, Shells & Sheaves character would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ranch. I like ranch and Ken’s, if memory serves, makes a pretty decent light ranch as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a vinaigrette, a balsamic vinaigrette that I’ve used periodically. I also like a a Caesar dressing quite a bit, although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that tends to be very unhealthy if you’re not careful. So…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at any dressing. Oh, that’s also true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey They’re all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unhealthy, like comically so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I was talking to a couple of friends of mine that I meet for lunch like once a month and we were discussing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our routine lunches and I was describing the salad the same way and they were like, my God, that must take you forever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it takes, I don’t know, maybe 10, 15 minutes on an average day. It’s not that bad. And I’m not too fussy about, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, chopping the ingredients in a particular way or anything like that. But that’s my typical salad. I don’t know how we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have this is a show of tangents, but
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, you know, before sorry before we get up your salad and speaking of chopping, how do you how do you address
⏹️ ▶️ John the lettuce like do you cut it up into pieces? Do you tear it? Like what is your lettuce size target for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it used to be that I would chop it up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I really I have an unreasonable unnatural
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distaste not well, that’s a poor choice of words given we’re talking about food, but I really don’t like when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the backbone of the romaine leaves.
⏹️ ▶️ John More very precise culinary terms. Yes, we know what you mean. The spine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like to split the backbone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John such that- That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the best part. People love that crunch. Yeah, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like the crunch, but I don’t like when I have this four-inch wide piece of lettuce with the backbone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right in the middle. It’s hard to get it in your mouth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s got to do with my question. Is it you cutting it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco into things that are four inches?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, but are they four inches wide? Like what is your maximum dimension you’re willing to accept in lettuce piece?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so what I used to do, for a long time I was fussy about it, and I would cut straight down the backbone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I would just chop it up into, I don’t know, an inch or two per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John bit, if you will. Like basically squares or rectangles, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could do it per side? Yeah, exactly, and then Aaron eventually was like, what are you doing? Just tear the damn thing. And I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. And then eventually I got to the point of, what am I doing? I should just tear the damn thing. And so that’s what I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just tear, I try to tear off of the backbone, such as the backbone is still there. It’s not like I’m throwing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the backbone away. It’s just that it’s split between two different bites. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you gotta stop calling it the backbone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What is it called? What is it, the spine?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t know. The stem maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like you’re going against the grain here.
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely not a backbone. It’s not a vertebrate. Well, no crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just didn’t know what else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco to call it. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best way, in my opinion, the best way to cut a romaine heart, which is what I assume you’re actually using, being that it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is if you stand it on its end upwards, you’re cutting it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the horizontal axis in that orientation and cut it at one inch intervals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that way, every every strip contains like, you know, two or three inches of leaf and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the spine in the middle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You get a little. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then that you can stab with the fork. And that way you’re not like, you know, squishing the soft parts of the fork and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being able to pick it up. You pick it up really easily. You get that nice crunch. You don’t have to throw away any part of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s that’s how like the best Caesar salads are always chopped.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. He’s being saved in his cutting by the fact that Romaine lettuce, the leaves aren’t that wide.
⏹️ ▶️ John So he doesn’t even have to cut along that dimension if he doesn’t want to. But his his his allergy to the spine, as
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is causing him
⏹️ ▶️ John to mess up his Romaine. Anyway, now we all know more than we ever need to know about yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not what you would pack for your back lunch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. Oh, and I also had a bean sprouts or I think. or what are they, broccoli sprouts, bean sprouts, little sprout things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used to hate those, but over time I got into… I got
⏹️ ▶️ John little white wormy things?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Yeah, they’re great for food safety too. Bean sprouts, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, oh, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John They’re little spermies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, but for box lunch, I’d probably pack like a sandwich, either a peanut butter and jelly or ham and cheese
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, just to make it easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, if I’m packing a box lunch for consumption on a podcast, I would go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things that are like very, you know, dense that I could eat fairly quickly and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need a bunch of accessories like maybe, you know, too many drinks or silverware. So I think I would go like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a banana and some cheese cubes, you know, nice and simple, like it covers some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the basics, will keep me full for a while until the show’s over, but it doesn’t require a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ordeal or special tools to eat, and I can eat somewhat quietly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I actually meant to bring up, and now I wish I had because I’m I’m starting to get hangry. I had meant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to bring up, I have, is it Archer Farms? No, I don’t think it’s Archer Farms. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some like beef jerky vendor or whatever that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes just these absolutely delicious teriyaki, I call them beef sticks, I think it’s actually jerky strictly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking. But anyways, and I meant to bring one of those up as like a holdover, you know, a lot of protein, it’ll hold me over until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after we’re done recording and I accidentally forgot to bring one up, so now I’m hangry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, John, what’s in your box lunch? I
⏹️ ▶️ John would never eat on a podcast. So I don’t like the, the idea, the premise of this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing. I don’t even like
⏹️ ▶️ John For any box lunch thing though. Like I think portability is key. So I would probably go with the sandwich,
⏹️ ▶️ John the food invented for its portability, um, rather than like the, you know, the, the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fruit and nuts type route, although I did think about yogurt because you can eat that silently or more silently anyway, and I do like
⏹️ ▶️ John yogurt for lunch sometimes, uh, but no, I’d probably go with the sandwich and like, there are
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many, uh, unhealthy sandwiches filled with lunch meat that I would love to eat, but we tend not to have it in the house, because if we have
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the house, I will eat it and it’s not good for you. So we usually have in the house and I usually go to in
⏹️ ▶️ John case you already mentioned it. I’m peanut butter and jelly guy. I like peanut butter and jelly. And my move with the peanut butter and
⏹️ ▶️ John jelly is I often make it on toast because I think sometimes that improves it. Huh? Peanut butter and jelly
⏹️ ▶️ John on toast. It’s not not great for a podcast because it’s a little bit crunchy and a little bit crumbly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would destroy my office like it would be covered in crumbs like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it is a good portable box lunch. So if I set aside the idea that you’re saying, we’re going to bring this to a podcast thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John a sandwich of some kind of work. I mean, I wouldn’t do toast probably if I actually, if you said you have to eat it when you’re on the air,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not toast it. I would have a softer bread or whatever, but yeah, peanut butter and jelly is a good meal. And then, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, maybe some a little side snack. Again, this is not great for podcasting, but I have been on Nut Kick lately
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to find inexpensive and yummy nuts. They’re good. And I would probably throw them in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found it real time follow up again. Wenzel’s Farm Teriyaki sticks. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can get these on Amazon, which has been a point of contention in the family because they’re a pain in the butt to order. I forget where we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey source these, but because we get like a box and they last friggin forever. But the teriyaki beef
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sticks are super duper tasty. I really, really like these. They look like dog treats. They do. They