629: An Upsetting and Confusing Time to Be Me
07 Mar 2025The M4 MacBook Air, M4/M3 Mac Studio, A16 iPad, and M3 iPad Air.
Episode Description:
- 🗣️ New ATP Member Special: ATP Tier List: Corporate Logos
- Tim Cook teaser
- Mac Studio
- General announcement
- M3 Ultra announcement
- M3 Ultra
- Ars Technica
- It is 2× M3 Max
- According to to 🇫🇷 website: no interposer in M4 Max
- Gurman in April 2024
- M4 MacBook Air
- iPad
- iPad Air
- Post-show:
- Casey does free labor for Apple
- John’s computer speakers are dying ☹️
- Possible replacement #1: Kanto ORA
- Possible replacement #2: Kanto ORA4
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Siri is falling ever-further behind
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Chapters
- Dante and cash
- ATP Tier List: Corporate Logos
- “There’s something in the air”
- Mac Studio M4/M3
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- M4 MacBook Air
- Sponsor: DeleteMe
- iPad (A16)
- iPad Air (M3)
- Ending theme
- Casey’s problem
- John’s problem
Dante and cash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, I have two restaurant updates really really quick number one. I finally I’m using Dante
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Finally yeah, you went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve gone through the inferno.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it is So just like it just works like I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far I guess there’s not a ton of traffic on the network But like there won’t be like this It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much traffic gonna be on a restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t even allowed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they’re they’re allowed to use a tenth of one of the connections anyway So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so Dante turns out, this is the audio protocol that lets you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of send audio signals over the network. That’s going fantastically so far. I will report back later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on in the summer once there’s like real use of it, but so far it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, once you get your first sort of like someone using it in anger like the DJ thing for St. Patrick’s Day or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. The DJ won’t know it’s there. Well, you hope, that’s what I’m saying, we’re gonna find out. Yeah, so like I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the DJ input to the Dante system is in like an attic above
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hallway that the DJ usually sets up in. So what comes out of the attic is just two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XLR cables. So the DJ won’t even necessarily know what those are connected to and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how. So to them it just looks like XLR cables that they plug into, which is exactly what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was before. So we’ll see how that goes. But so far that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a promising technology. Secondly, today I had to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cash for the business. I recognize this is going to sound ridiculous to anybody who runs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real businesses, but I have now run what four or five businesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far without touching any cash. This is the first time I have ever had to deal with cash for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a business ever like I’ve never withdrawn cash from a business bank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account. So I and so you know because we’re about to have like a St. Paddy’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weekend and that’s kind of our soft opening. And so I have to like get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cash to put in the register drawers. And I’m like, first of all, how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cash do I have? No idea. Second of all, like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you get? Do you get like, you know, what ratio bill? So I went into the bank today and I went to the one of the like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account people that’s in there, like the cubicles off to the side. I’m like, hey, I have a couple of questions. This is not a robbery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you start with that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to do this for a business. I’m gonna never do it First of all, how much money am I allowed to take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out before it’s a crime?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not a robbery, but how much cash do you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much will you give me before it’s a crime? Yeah, so so that’s one thing is that you know There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these I know like if you would draw a certain amount above you have to like report it with counterterrorism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like ten thousand dollars or whatever. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s it’s I mean, that’s probably high enough if that’s not gonna be an issue, but like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you ask someone at the restaurant before you went to the bank?
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, so I asked. This is gonna be like NASA asking the woman astronauts how many menstrual
⏹️ ▶️ John pads do you need per period? A couple hundred, well a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco couple hundred do it. Exactly, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was tampons by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, so yeah, and the manager told me roughly what I needed, like total amount.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it was, you know, it’s just like, it’s kind of just like a ballpark guess and it’s kind of unpredictable. So yeah, it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out that what I needed was below the threshold. But I was thinking like, how big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is cash? Like I brought my whole backpack into the bank. It’s like a duffel bag from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat. And by the way, it turns out it’s way smaller than my backpack. But I’m like, I know it probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t fit in one of those just like envelopes they give you when you’re a regular person taking out your own
⏹️ ▶️ John You carry it out into the wind in a loose pile. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I felt like when they were handing it to me, some of them were like bundled up still and they’re handing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to me through the window I’m stuffing it in my bag, I feel like I’m in a movie. And I’m like, what a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerd I am. Like, I’ve done so much business in my life, but just net, like, cash feels like so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like I’m holding like hot lava. I’m like, I don’t wanna deal with this, get this outta here. Meanwhile, now I’m entering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a very cash-heavy business. Like, I don’t know how to do that. Like, I don’t have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went on Amazon and just searched for like cash bag. Like, I don’t know how people do this. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so embarrassing. You know, Peak Designed the special bag made to carry cash.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I figure, you know, in the cartoons you see those like big like, you know, duffel bags with the big dollar sign on the side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can probably buy those. Yeah, no, don’t you don’t get those. Those are not a good idea. Yeah, for lots of reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, so this is another yet another new world I’m entering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, oh, I have to deal with cash, which and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really no way to run a bar in the United States, especially in New York, and not deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with cash. So it’s a reality of the business, but it’s just yet one more area that I just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero experience with, and it’s all new. And I’m going through the motions like an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alien. I have an, I don’t know, how do you do this? Like, what do I do here? How much cash do I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need? Is $10 million enough? Like, I don’t know. Like I- Trevor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Burrus Have you had the staff come in yet, or are they still absent on account of it being off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of the managers have come in and started setting stuff up and everything. So we’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So have they, granted it’s in their best interest, it’s self-serving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for them to be like, Oh, Marco and Tiff, you’re doing the best changes. These are the best. I’m so excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But like, really though, are they excited about all this? Like the, do they give a crap about the Dante
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John stuff? They’re excited to still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, right. But I’m saying like, does any of this register at all to them? And speaking of registers, have you changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, the POS, that was another fun thing. So the POSs were installed this week and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the guy who they sent to install it, you know, you have to take the ferry and everything. So they blocked out, they had sent this guy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume, it sounded like it was some kind of like, you know, contractor situation. But they had sent this guy on an eight hour
⏹️ ▶️ Marco block to go do this. It turns out like, because I had been running all the wiring, like usually when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the POS vendor gets to a restaurant, they have to run all the network stuff because the restaurant doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is why it’s done so neatly. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So he was, for this eight hour block of time, he was done in like 90 minutes. He’s like, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the easiest one I’ve ever done. Because here I was thinking like, you know, I’m used to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other tech people. Look, I’ve been guilty of this. We all have probably. When tech people encounter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the work of other tech people, our instinct is to say, this is all crap. I got to do it my way. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re very territorial. We’re very kind of, you know, stupid brutes in that way. We do it with code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We do it with equipment. do it with wiring is like ever ever whatever have been done before I got here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that guy was an idiot I got you know I’ll do it I’ll do it from scratch my way so I was expecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of attitude from the person installing this the system and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I I was very like I was there from minute one I had all my wires like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in place right where they had to be so there’ll be no possible reason for anyone to even suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running their own stuff and instead the guy was super I said was just really thankful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that he didn’t have to do any of that work. And so all my wiring work paid off that now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the POS guy had a nice, he cut his day short by six
⏹️ ▶️ John He had a nice four-hour lunch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. Because we didn’t pay for the installation, at least not directly. I’m sure all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the monthly fees that we’re going to be paying for the system, we’re going to be adding up to contribute to that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he had a good day, I had a good day, the POS is installed. I get to keep saying that acronym and laughing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my head every time. time. And moving on to the next challenge, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to deal with cash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was Apple Pay supported at the restaurant? Of course it is, come on. I had assumed nothing less.
ATP Tier List: Corporate Logos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what else is exciting? A new ATP member special. And we have one for our ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey members. If you’re not a member, go to ATP.fm slash join. And this month you can hear us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a conversation about corporate logos. So this is ATP tier list, corporate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logos. Uh, this was John’s idea. I will throw it over to John to describe what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, but I wanted to comment. Nobody’s like accused us of anything but honesty here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I wanted to make it clear on the record that John often, especially when it comes to tier lists
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will surprise us with not only the fact that we’re doing a tier list in the first place, like we,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when Marco and I showed up to this call, neither of us knew what we were talking about. We just knew John had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a plan. And so we got on zoom together and then suddenly Marco reacted. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I was not looking at the correct one of my seven screens that had zoom on it at that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exact moment. And what had happened was John had started sharing his screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of his Mac. And sure enough, there was the tier list that he will describe momentarily. And our reaction, Marco and Mai’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reaction, that is genuinely an honest reaction. We, there are times that I’ll feign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprise on the show just to help the show move along and whatnot. Um, there, there are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also times that I’m genuinely surprised. Like I had no idea Marco bought a restaurant beforehand. Um, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is also one of those times where Marco and I had zero idea that that this was about to happen. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it makes for a much funnier show that way. But, John, what is it that we talked about exactly?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, let me start by saying that people who have been longtime members and have listened to our past members specials know that tier lists can sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And we took a little break from them,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially in the new year, and we watched some fun movies together and talked about stuff. But then, you know, I always had
⏹️ ▶️ John this plan that, okay, we’ll start the year off with some easy ones, but eventually we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to go back to tier lists. Because I had a very specific tier list in mind, and that is this corporate logos one. And you might think, what
⏹️ ▶️ John could possibly be contentious about corporate logos? So if you think that, A, you’ve probably never heard any of our tier list episodes before,
⏹️ ▶️ John and B, you haven’t seen the logos that we’re going to look at. As I said at the beginning of this episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to start easy to sort of calibrate the device as it were, but things get progressively
⏹️ ▶️ John more difficult and as Casey said, uncomfortable as the logo list goes
⏹️ ▶️ John on. So I won’t spoil it for you, but yeah, ATP tier list, corporate logos, check it out if you’re a member.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, John did a very good job of picking the array, the spread of logos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for us to look at. And I think that we were mostly in accord for a lot of it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we jumped right off the cliff toward the end. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear that disaster, and if you want to hear me be more uncomfortable on a tier list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I think I’ve ever been before, then check it out at hp.fm slash join. Or if you’re a member already,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you’ll find it or probably have already found it in your feed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed. Yeah I think without spoiling anything I think it’s safe to say Casey took the biggest risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of his career during this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true. It is so incredibly true.
“There’s something in the air”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, this is, there’s a lot of news that happened over the last week. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll tell you that it was deliberate that we delay today in order to have more time for everything. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just, I was at a Cory Doctorow event here in Richmond yesterday with my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good friend Sam. And so that’s why we didn’t record yesterday, but it worked out for the best because now we have all sorts of stuff to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. I’ve been instructed by the creator of Follow Up, copyright John Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 2011, that we are not doing Follow Up this episode. There’s There’s too much to say. So there’s so much to say you could even you could even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phrase it as and we’re going to start with Tim Cook spoiler where he said there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, now I I put this in here because it’s like, why is he doing this? He’s done this
⏹️ ▶️ John many times before. This is not new, right? But like, why like a day or two before there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an announcement, especially announcement that we all more or less know what it’s going to be like that they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco introduce new MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air and you know, iPad Air as it turns out or whatever, right? Why? Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t? Why are you doing that? It used to be that Apple would say nothing before, even if we all knew what it was coming is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we all know this thing’s going to be announced because it’s been so widely rumored. We’re sure it’s going to come and then it does come right. No
⏹️ ▶️ John surprise. They still won’t say anything. But then the past, like, I don’t know, five or 10 years, Tim Cook just can’t help saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John wait until tomorrow. There’s something in the air. What the heck is going on with that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Tim just desperately wants people to think he’s like interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and exciting and that’s just not his actual persona at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not always him. Sometimes it’s Shiller, sometimes it’s other people, right? Sometimes I mean it’s usually it’s Tim.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well anyway, Stephen Hackett had a post on his blog reminding everybody that the there’s something in the air
⏹️ ▶️ John teaser thing has been used in the past for the original MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, it turns out that they actually announced the iPad Air first, but we all know MacBook Air was coming in it did as we’ll talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about. But anyway, I’m gonna say I disapprove of this because if you’re going to tease us about it, tease us about it when it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John like when was something that only Tim Cook could know not when we all know that MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Air is I had
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Air in the show notes before he tweeted that. Okay, so we knew it was coming.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, goodness. Well, I’m so sorry that you were disappointed. But we it is not time to talk about the MacBook Air. It
Mac Studio M4/M3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time to talk about the Mac Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, normally we do these things like an announcement order, but not this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John has exercised his right as the king to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decide the order, and so you can blame John if you don’t like it. But one way or another, we’re going to start with the Mac Studio. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did you order a Mac Studio?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we’ll get to that in a little
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey bit. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the Mac Studio is interesting because it wasn’t actually rumored for this announcement.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was rumored to be coming out sometime between like, you know, spring or maybe a WWDC at the latest,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it wasn’t actually rumored for this announcement strongly until like a day or two before
⏹️ ▶️ John it came out. And at that time, there was also
⏹️ ▶️ John a weird rumor that started circulating, I think like the day of or the day before that eventually German posted about, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John actually heard about it through other channels before German had posted about it. a strange one about
⏹️ ▶️ John what might be in the Mac studio. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John turned out to be true. The Mac studio is here and the Mac studio comes with
⏹️ ▶️ John an M4 Max and an M3 Ultra. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco as Gruber said when he was, Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ John was on the, on like the press call about this, he just thought the person misspoke. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John all the letters and numbers. He obviously means M4 Ultra anyway, go on. But
⏹️ ▶️ John then he said it again and then Gerber was like, oh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s kind of been the reaction of everybody. It’s like, oh, what? Well, so
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get to that in a little bit, but yeah, that’s the good place to start. The Mac Studio, the little,
⏹️ ▶️ John the big Mac mini, M4 Max, which of course everyone assumed would be in it because the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac’s CPU is usually in the Mac Studio. I know these words, I’m trying to enunciate. I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ John a bad job. M-A-X, M-A-C, it’s tough. Anyway, so the M4 Max is in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also the M3 Ultra, chip that had not previously existed. So a
⏹️ ▶️ John couple of quick hits on this from Ars Technica, from their article. When asked why the high-end Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not
⏹️ ▶️ John every chip generation will get an Ultra tier. So you’re already reeling from the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that this thing has an M3 anything in it. And then they hit you with, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John not every generation’s even gonna get an Ultra. and you’re like, and you count on your fingers, wait, there was an M1 Ultra?
⏹️ ▶️ John There was an M2 Ultra? Now there’s an M3, what are you saying? Why, why would you say that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you telling me that there’s not even gonna be an M4 Ultra? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re telling you. They couldn’t hit us over the head harder with that fact.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the question was about why does this have an M3? And they say, you know what? You’re not even getting an M4 Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John so shut up. Pretty much. We’ll see, we’ll see how that turns out. But I just think that has been out
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Second thing to know, what is the M3 Ultra? It is in fact, two
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 Maxes stuck together. This throws a big monkey wrench
⏹️ ▶️ John into the whole theory that we’ve been discussing for months, which we had frustratingly not concrete information
⏹️ ▶️ John about, which is when the M3 came out, remember we talked about this on the show? I remember because I was frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ John by the lack of closure on it. Somebody said, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the M1 and M2, and you can see they have the little section on the bottom where you’ll connect them together. There’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John silicon interposer, there’s like a big strip of little things. Like that’s where you’re gonna stick two of them together to make an ultra on
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 Max and the M2 Max, right? And then next to it is a picture of the M3 Max. And you’re like, see,
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 Max doesn’t have that little strip on the bottom. There’s no place to connect them. That means there’s not gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John an M3 Ultra. And the question I had on that show where we discussed it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John there really nothing there or did they just crop it out of the picture? And the answer was,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. No one ever told me. No one, I didn’t, I can’t, I have, do not have the ability to uncap like
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 Max SOCs and see if that thing’s there. So I’m relying entirely on other people doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this. And I just never found out. And I stopped thinking about it because who’s thinking about the M3 in 2025, right? It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, because there never was an M3 Ultra. Like, well, the M3, M3 Max, M3 Pro, they all came
⏹️ ▶️ John out. And then we moved on and then the M4s came out and blah, blah, blah, like, you know, whether or not there was
⏹️ ▶️ John an intraposer on the M3 Max, we just never got an M3 Ultra, so whatever. But lo and behold,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s an M3 Ultra, and it is, in fact, two M3 Maxes stuck together with an
⏹️ ▶️ John interposer. I still don’t know if the M3 Maxes had interposers on them. Maybe they made
⏹️ ▶️ John separate M3 Maxes with no interposers that year, and then in 2024, end of 2024 slash beginning of 2025,
⏹️ ▶️ John they made the ones with the interposer to stick together to make M3 Ultras.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, finally, on the interposer topic, the question was about the M4 Max. hey, can
⏹️ ▶️ John someone shave the top off of that chip and tell me if there’s an interposer there? Because that might tell us if there’s going to be an M3 Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now it doesn’t even freaking matter because if they don’t find an interposer, we can tell them, I didn’t find one on the M3 Max either, and we still
⏹️ ▶️ John got an Ultra. This is very frustrating and upsetting to me. In many,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is unusual. The other thing that struck me as odd, and many people have said this already,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that we were under the impression, and forgive me, maybe John, you remember the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code names or what have you, but the particular process that the M3 was on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like a half step to what the M4 is on. Do you remember the two code names?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, M3E is the second one. The M3B, I think, was the
⏹️ ▶️ John really expensive one. That’s the other thing we don’t know. We don’t actually know what process the M3 Ultra’s on. We assume it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on the expensive one. We assume it’s on the expensive one that the M3 family was
⏹️ ▶️ John made on originally, but we don’t actually know that. Uh, some of the chat rooms are saying with M3
⏹️ ▶️ John and then M3e. I thought that the first one had a thing, but anyway, we don’t actually know what process is, so it’s hard to say. It
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like it should be the same process as the M3 Max, the M3 Pro and the M3, just because
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably they were all designed together and this is two M3 Maxes put together and the M3 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John was on, I think the first one, but anyway, it’s hard to tell, Apple’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, uh, at this point it’s kind of moot because it’s like, well, whatever process is on it’s here, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, but you know, people, many people were saying they’re not going to make any more chips on that. And there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John when we get to the other products, we’ll see that there, I think there are explanations for why the other products might have M3 based
⏹️ ▶️ John things in them. But the ultra is the most difficult one to explain. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John well maybe not because look, the M3 ultra is the lowest volume run. They’re not going to sell a lot of these. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really expensive. So maybe it’s like, yeah, well, are we going to use the more expensive one
⏹️ ▶️ John with crappier yield? Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John the M3 Ultra. It’s like a rounding error in terms of how many of these we’re going to sell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JS Yeah, but I mean, the going theory amongst all of us was, oh, the M3 line, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, that’s reaching end of life as they’re debuting the M3. CW Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we’re waiting for the M5 imminently. Like, no one is thinking about the M3. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the M4. This was the year that everybody’s going to change to M4. We’re all getting these
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 chips. Who’s thinking about the M3?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And yet, here we are. Here we are, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah. So here’s what Suruji had to say about it, and I think it’s one of the press releases. M3 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John is the pinnacle of our scalable system-on-a-chip architecture, aimed specifically at users who run the most
⏹️ ▶️ John heavily threaded and bandwidth-intensive applications. This is very laser-targeted language from someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows what he’s talking about, saying, here’s what this chip is good at.
⏹️ ▶️ John Heavily threaded, bandwidth-intensive. Single Core
⏹️ ▶️ John not so much because an m4 iPad will probably crush it in single core. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Heavily threaded nothing can touch it. It’s got a huge number. Of course bandwidth intensive. Nothing to touch
⏹️ ▶️ John it It’s got a huge amount of bandwidth in every other regard the m4s so
⏹️ ▶️ John That as always they’re very technically precise and truthful
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying here’s what this chip is good for and obviously GPU based things Which didn’t say but it’s also true
⏹️ ▶️ John One more bit about this. This is translated from a French website. I just use the translate feature
⏹️ ▶️ John and no, I think this was that was Mine, I don’t know might have been Mac rumors to do this translation I forget either
⏹️ ▶️ John me either me on my phone or Mac rumors did this translation from a French website? And this is
⏹️ ▶️ John what it says in translation How to explain Apple’s choice to use the m3 ultra in there
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has a very simple justification which regulars of computer disassembly had already discovered There is
⏹️ ▶️ John no ultra fusion connectors on the M4 Max chip. It is therefore impossible to merge two fourth-generation
⏹️ ▶️ John chips to make an M4 Ultra. So this French website is saying, hey, we looked at the M4 Max, no interposer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Therefore, there’s not going to be an M4 Ultra. Well, we just went through that with the M3 where someone
⏹️ ▶️ John also said there was no interposer on the M3 Max, and we still got an M3 Ultra. So I don’t know what to think.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also have never seen, as I’ve mentioned on many past shows, I still have not seen a die
⏹️ ▶️ John shot of the M4 Max showing the lack of interposer. But even if I did see a lack of interposer, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if that means anything. But then they did say not every generation have an ultra. Maybe they’re talking about the M5 generation, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is the actual upcoming generation. It’s a upsetting and confusing time to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, remind me, I’m not snarking yet. What is your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until this week? What was your intention for your Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Pro and the potential replacement for it. I thought you were looking to see what happened with the with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the studio and potentially, you know, making it happen now. So I’m not asking you to tell me what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to do. But like leading up to this week before you saw what’s here, what did you think was going to happen?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my 2025 plan was, let me see what the M4 Ultramac
⏹️ ▶️ John studio looks like. And let me see what the 2025 Mac Pro looks like. And And then based
⏹️ ▶️ John on that, most likely I would just end up getting an M4 Ultramac Studio. Obviously that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not happening. So yeah, something else might happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John But at this point, I’m definitely waiting to see the Mac Pro. And speaking of chips, speaking of big Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John chips, just we’ll put a link to this to remind everybody what German had said in April of 2024.
⏹️ ▶️ John And due to his not very clear writing, and the fact that he didn’t emphasize this because he didn’t think it was very important.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of people missed this, including me. I went back to this article that we covered in the show and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I had missed this detail or just dismissed it as him either being imprecise or just being wrong, which also happens sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s what he said in April of 2024. The M4 chip line, and he’s talking about the M4 hadn’t yet been released,
⏹️ ▶️ John includes an entry-level version named Dub Donin, more powerful models named Brava, and
⏹️ ▶️ John a top-end processor named Hydra. For the Mac Studio, Apple is testing versions
⏹️ ▶️ John with both a still unreleased M3-era chip and a variation of the M4 Brava processor.
⏹️ ▶️ John The highest end Apple desktop, the Mac Pro, is set to get the new Hydra chip. Okay, so this is so
⏹️ ▶️ John unclearly written, but what this is basically saying is, M4 has a thing called Donan, that’s the plain M4, okay?
⏹️ ▶️ John And more powerful model is named Brava, and I believe that is the Max. I might’ve cut
⏹️ ▶️ John out something here, or maybe he left it out, but anyway, Brava is the M4 Max. And then he says, the Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is testing versions with both an M3 era chip and an M4 Brava.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what did we get? A Mac Studio with an M4 Brava, that’s the M4 Max, and a
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote M3 era chip, which is the M3 Ultra. He got it exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if he understood that this was actually true and going to come to pass, he should have emphasized it way
⏹️ ▶️ John more because this is a bananas thing to happen. To in 2025, to get a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that comes with an M4 Max and an M3 Ultra. Oh, he still unreleased M3. Maybe he didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John the details, but that’s what happened. And he said it in 2024, right? And again, he
⏹️ ▶️ John leaked it after the embargo, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But 2024, he had the story, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the final bit is, the highest-end Apple desktop, the Mac Pro, is set to get the new Hydra chip. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Hydra chip, H-I-D-R-A, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it right. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably Hydra, don’t you think? I know it’s not spelled the way Hydra’s typically
⏹️ ▶️ John might be Hydra. I keep saying Hydra, but anyway. That’s not the M3 Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a different chip that we have not seen yet, because according to this rumor, that chip
⏹️ ▶️ John is only going to be in the Mac Pro. It’s certainly not in, you know, this, it, it,
⏹️ ▶️ John so this is a, you know, that’s why I’m also waiting for the Mac Pro. If, you know, he was
⏹️ ▶️ John right in 2024 that the Mac Studio is coming with both an M4 and an M3 chip, and it did.
⏹️ ▶️ John If he’s right that there’s a new Hedra chip that is not one of those that’s coming in the Mac Pro, I want to wait to see what that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On one hand, I think you’re being ridiculous because- Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Why am I being ridiculous? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even need a Mac Studio, let alone- It’s PCI Express breakout box called the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need a Mac Studio, I need a Mac Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you absolutely do not. You’re in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you’re absolutely nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU, GPU, I need that GPU. What are you doing with that GPU? I’m hoping to play games on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh yeah, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re living in a fantasy world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hoping to play games is different than playing games.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’re living in a fantasy world.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the activity of thinking about the possibility of playing games, which is very different from
⏹️ ▶️ John playing them, but is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in fact still an activity. All right. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much, but you’re living in a fantasy world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so on one hand, yes, you are being ridiculous in the sense that the computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you are waffling between, you don’t even need either one. But that being said. I mean, I didn’t need this 2019
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro either, but I sure like it. Right, exactly. And that’s the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what do any of us need?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of us need most of the computer resources we have. I buy Honda Accords and ridiculously big Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay? Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that being said, I think it actually, for you and for nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, but for you, sure it makes sense to wait and see because, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gurman’s rumor has so far proven correct about this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because he says that the alleged Hydra that’s supposed to be going in the Mac Pro is of the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco family, that is really interesting. And I think that, I mean, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve waited this long and you don’t buy computers that
⏹️ ▶️ John often. I’m not suffering on my computer. Like it’s not, I’m gonna die in here. Let me tell you, I’m not really missing the Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s true, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fair. And plus I have
⏹️ ▶️ John access to it five feet away on my wife’s computer and it’s just, it hasn’t been a big deal. But yeah, anyway, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the year that I’m looking at, let me see what the offerings are, right? And so I’m definitely willing to wait to the W3C.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Remind me, when did you buy that Mac Pro? Was it 19?
⏹️ ▶️ John 2019, this is a six-year-old computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s actually fairly quick for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, for a computer that I bought just before Apple went through a process transition, I’m getting good mileage out of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Agreed, yeah, but it is, I think it is, you know, time. And I think whatever you get next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should probably be smaller. But I think before the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Silicon transition, when you look at the Intel workstation Xeon line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple would previously put in the Mac Pro, it had a similar dynamic most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of its life, which was the Xeons, they were also like much bigger, higher core
⏹️ ▶️ Marco count chips than the consumer lines of the time. And as a result, they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often lag behind the cutting edge consumer chip in like the individual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core performance or this especially like single threaded performance because they would often be using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like last generation cores but in a larger manufacturing situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you know and a larger die size and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything or the current generation but under clocks because there were so many and they couldn’t clock them as high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, possibly that too. So we’ve we’ve always had the situation. We’re not always we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time had a situation with the biggest, baddest Mac workstation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the single core performance of it was often not as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the cutting edge consumer single core chips of that same time period or shortly after the time period that they came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. So that’s kind of been a reality of the of the processor business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, just because of the nature of how these things are made and the different logistics and realities that go into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So we now have the situation where we have this, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flagship brand new release from Apple that has, you can get a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core count chip that is, you know, the highest best core you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for each of those cores but a small count or you can get the, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco twice as many cores chip, the bigger version, which is a way bigger chip and it’s cost way more more money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will perform better in parallel workloads or in GPU based workloads it will perform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantially better not twice as well but at least substantially better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the trade-off there in addition to the cost and the heat and everything else is that each one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores is not as fast as the current cutting-edge fastest core so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind I mean look it sucks that you have that trade-off to make but that is how this is always gone it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the The difference between the M4 Max and the M3 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in even those single threaded tasks, like you’ll notice it in the benchmark, but you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not notice it that much in like actual use. And obviously it depends on your use, but again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is how the Mac Pro always was too. If you would benchmark the Mac Pro against the latest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation iMac for most of its life, the iMac would beat the Mac Pro in single threaded tasks.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the Apple Silicon era though, kind of, I mean, we talked about this when Apple Silicon came out, like, oh, this is probably how we do the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing because this is how Intel did it. But Apple really confounded us in the beginning of the M era by doing the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Ultra so close to the rest of the M1s and same thing with the M2.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even in the, I think in the M, was it the M4 where they did the Pro and the Max were released before the plain M4 and Max?
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, the time, what you had said is what we had already expected, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John felt like Apple had sort of done something different and was like kind of baffling why they would be,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would they have high-end chips ready so soon after the low-end ones, and sometimes even release the high-end ones on Macs before the low-end
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. But yeah, you’re right that the M3 Ultra is actually arriving on a Xeon timeline, looking
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Xeon. The one thing, and we’ll get to it when we finally, we will eventually get to this actual
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio, we’re about to, the one thing that kind of sucks with the SoC is now all
⏹️ ▶️ John of a sudden GPU is so tied up with this, right? Like they’re not independent entities, because like you could say Xeon
⏹️ ▶️ John versus, you know, a core processor or whatever, But then you’d also make your GPU choice and those were two independent choices
⏹️ ▶️ John and that is not the case here. If you want a big GPU, you have to also get
⏹️ ▶️ John just probably way more cores than you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and again, that’s something that for Apple having gone to this unified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco architecture with everything in package and everything, that was a whole bunch of trade-offs to do that. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re optimizing for with that, or what they were optimizing for with that is most of their machines,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which are phones, tablets, and laptops. And by optimizing for those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs, they didn’t need to worry too much about, how could we get three cutting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge GPUs in these computers or more than half a terabyte of RAM?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They didn’t have to have those worries when they were designing things primarily for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops and consumer grade machines. And even what I would describe as kind of mid-pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machines, which is what we have now in the pro line. We can’t hit those same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive resource levels, big GPU card slots that we had in the Intel era,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we are actually exceeding the Intel resources and performance in a lot of other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. And the trade-offs they made by putting everything with unified memory and putting everything in package,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those trade-offs greatly benefit the entire rest of the line in lots of other ways. So this is a trade-off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they made. And what’s interesting is that actually this trade-off, which I don’t know if they knew this when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were making this trade-off. But one thing this has enabled them to do is make machines that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are kind of accidentally really good at running local AI models because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have all of that unified memory for the GPUs to access. Which, you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at the PC world, it’s pretty hard and pretty expensive to get PC GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have a whole bunch of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John why they have those special custom ones just for AI that cost as much as a car that do have a ton of RAM, but
⏹️ ▶️ John are also not consumer devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple, I think, has kind of fallen into this amazing position that they’re in, which is, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen to want to run very large, or not very large, large AI models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco locally on your machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John On a PC-class machine, if you don’t want to spend $50,000 to get one of those big giant Nvidia things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if you want to run local models, high-end Macs are the best devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that on for certain price and capability categories. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some ways this trade-off is actually helping them, but again, this entire architecture does have that giant trade-off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it has to be unified memory and it has to not support GPUs and slots, so everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be built in. So again, they’re just, they’re optimizing for different things, and I think that’s actually fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think it’s definitely the right move for them because it does benefit the vast majority of their product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line in pretty big ways, and if they can’t solve the very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge cases of, you know, really, you know, opinionated people in the Boston
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area who want to play games on their Macs. Like, you know, if it can’t solve that need quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well as the previous generation, like, oh, well, it solves a lot of other needs really, really, really well. And they take that trade off.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’re getting close to it though. And again, wrapping up the rumors that are here, you know, not every generation
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to have an M4 Ultra, but the Hydra, high-end Hydra that’s coming in the Mac Pro has not yet been
⏹️ ▶️ John seen. Well, if not every generation is going to have an Ultra, but there’s still a high-end chip, This
⏹️ ▶️ John really puts a lot more weight behind the idea that you’ll get like an M4 Extreme in the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. It’s not an M4 Ultra, it’s not two M4 Maxes stuck together. The M4 Max doesn’t have an interposer, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah, blah, like basically the Mac Pro will have a chip that is not an Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is bigger and better and badder than an Ultra, which would justify the Mac Pro existing instead of just
⏹️ ▶️ John being a giant PCI breakout box for the Mac Studio. We shall see at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so tell me about this computer, John, or do you want me to go through
⏹️ ▶️ John I can go through some of the things here. Fine, collecting the stats in this was such a pain, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John because, and I feel for Apple here, Apple needs to minimize SKUs. They cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John have a thousand products. It wasn’t that bad when Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John had components and you could pick like how much RAM, how much storage, which CPU, blah, blah, blah. But now that so
⏹️ ▶️ John much stuff is tied together, they have to manufacture 700 different combinations. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, here’s what you get with, let me see,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I have this broken down? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John should ignore that top part and just move on from, let’s see, yeah, we’re talking about the M3 Ultra here. Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what you get in the Ultra. You can get 28 CPU cores with 60 GPU cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s your sort of like binned, not everything works choice. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get 32 CPU cores with 80 GPU cores. That’s the everything
⏹️ ▶️ John works model. And those are the only two choices, which, you know, fine. Like, that seems
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable. It seems like a pretty big drop in GPU cores, 60 or 80. Like 20
⏹️ ▶️ John of them are disabled, but you know, like it’s a big chip, really it’s just 10 per chip or whatever, 28
⏹️ ▶️ John versus 32. Like, I still look at these things and I’m like, well, I mean, you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John a 28 core like Xeon back in the day, but these cores are more powerful, so it’s not that big of a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John You do get double the neural engines from your two M3 Maxes stuck together. So you’ve got a 32 core
⏹️ ▶️ John neural engine instead of the 16. Apple touts this as Marco was alluding to. AI
⏹️ ▶️ John professionals can use Mac Studio with M3 Ultra to run large language models with over 600 billion parameters
⏹️ ▶️ John directly on device, making it the ultimate desktop for AI development, even though Nvidia does have that little Mac mini looking thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever. Same deal with the media engine. They’ve got twice the
⏹️ ▶️ John components. I don’t think they’re actually using all of them, but they are using both sets of ProRes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s got two times the resources of the M3 Macs and can play back 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422
⏹️ ▶️ John video. So yeah, two M3 Maxes, pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, same deal with the SKUs, RAM choices.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you get the M3 Ultra with the 28 CPU cores and 60 GPU cores, the Bind one, you have two choices in the amount of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get, just two. It starts at 96, which is nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the best starting RAM I’ve seen in a long time on an Apple, it starts at 96. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t want 96, your other choice is 256. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you get the big M3 Ultra where everything works, 32 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, it starts at 96. Your
⏹️ ▶️ John next choice is 256, which is an additional $1,600. Gracious.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then your only other choice is 512 gigabytes of RAM, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John please add $4,000 to upgrade the RAM. Great. five, 12.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just to reiterate, that is not how much that RAM actually costs.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, anyway, that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John the margin Apple. Yeah, the the M three ultra has over 800 gigabytes per
⏹️ ▶️ John second of memory bandwidth, which is actually the same as the M two ultra. Like the M two ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John has 819.2 gigabytes per second when they say over 800. I’m assuming they mean that like, it’s interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John that they haven’t bumped the memory bandwidth from M three ultra down From to ultra to M3 ultra is what it is
⏹️ ▶️ John and just for comparison the M4 max has 546 gigabytes per second so if
⏹️ ▶️ John they had if they had stuck to M4 maxes together somehow and doubled it they’d be over a thousand But they’re not there 800
⏹️ ▶️ John Still very high bandwidth, but not no change over the M2 ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John So that that’s the M3 ultra Mac Pro not a lot of configurations all the configurations
⏹️ ▶️ John are good They all start at 96 gigs of RAM which and by the way like you say who cares what it starts at
⏹️ ▶️ John But starting RAM is so important to your wallet when it comes to Apple products, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the one where you don’t have to add an obscene number to the price. So starting at 96 is
⏹️ ▶️ John fantastic. If this was an M4 Ultra instead of M3 Ultra, I’d be like, this is great. I’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John determined through experimentation over the past several years that 96 gigs of RAM is plenty for me. That’s what I’ve got on my Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John now. I never have to look at RAM. I never go into, just, it’s fine. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John starting RAM. It’s like, I can save so much money by not touching that RAM thing in
⏹️ ▶️ John the product configurator. It’s just the price. It comes with 96 gigs of RAM, but
⏹️ ▶️ John alas, it is in fact an M3 Ultra, not an M4. The other thing is like, why are you poo-pooing the
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 Ultra? It’s got 80 core GPU. The M3 Max was actually pretty good with half that number
⏹️ ▶️ John of cores. Maybe it’ll be great. So I’m waiting to see some benchmarks, but you know, it might be, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2025, it really wouldn’t feel good to me to spend so much money
⏹️ ▶️ John to get the biggest GPU Apple offers knowing that its GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t as good, its CPU cores aren’t as good. Like knowing that it’s old tech, knowing that the M5 is
⏹️ ▶️ John around the corner. And it’s not just entirely academic because right after this announcement came out, I saw something fly by on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John where somebody was announcing a change in Xcode 16.3, which is due out
⏹️ ▶️ John soon, I think, and it’s in beta now or whatever. and a new
⏹️ ▶️ John tool and instruments. You can do this like a low overhead CPU profiling
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to give you more accurate flame graphs for CPU usage per call stack, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. Right. Only works on M4 or later. Like rolling
⏹️ ▶️ John out a new potentially useless, useful feature, like for like checking the performance of your app, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it only works on M4 or later, like a day after you released your
⏹️ ▶️ John fastest computer ever with an M3 in it. It just feels punitive. That’s the type of stuff you feel like you’re missing out on. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, who cares about the performance difference? The M3 Ultra is gonna be great. It’s like stuff like that, where it’s like really
⏹️ ▶️ John a feature that only works on M4 or later. That would seem reasonable if they were only putting out M4 computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re not. So here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so CPU options. We’ve got 14 CPU, 32 GPU, or 16 CPU, 40 GPU, a 16 core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neural engine. This is in comparison
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 32 cores for the M3 Ultra. There’s M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max, which with 14 and 32 cores is 36 gigs, take it or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leave it for RAM. And the M4 Max 1640 cores is 48, 64 or 128 gigs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 128 gigs being an additional thousand dollars. And as was previously mentioned, 546 gigs per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second memory bandwidth.
⏹️ ▶️ John These RAM configurations seem a little bit punitive, Like 36 is the only choice for the Bind M4 Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, whatever. The non-Bind one isn’t that much more expensive. And 48, 64, and 128, it’s kind of annoying that 96 isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John an option, especially since the 64 gig upgrade is 200 bucks. But if you want to go to 128, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John thousand. So something between 64 and 128 would have been nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause if you feel like, oh, 64 isn’t quite, it was like going to 64 for 200 extra bucks, like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it hurts because this is not real RAM prices, but it’s fine. But I wish I had just a little bit more. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, can you add $800 on top of that? But anyway, you know, and I have to say the M4
⏹️ ▶️ John Max Max Studio is a good computer. It is a MacBook Pro without a
⏹️ ▶️ John screen and better cooling. If that’s what you want and, you know, better IO and blah, blah, blah. They made
⏹️ ▶️ John that and it’s priced like you would expect it to be and that’s a good computer. The M4 Max is a good CPU. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have no shade on the M4 Max Max Studio, right? And in fact, if I ended up buying
⏹️ ▶️ John a Studio this year because the Mac Pro didn’t appeal to me, I’ll probably get an M4 Max one just because
⏹️ ▶️ John I would take the money I saved and put it into like storage and stuff because I have a whole storage upgrade Cascade
⏹️ ▶️ John that I have to go through because I’m really pressing up against the edge of four terabytes says in my backup vortex
⏹️ ▶️ John and By getting the M4 Max I would be saying I’m not gonna try to game on this like it’s just this
⏹️ ▶️ John is just gonna hold me Over until something, you know five six years from now or whatever So I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 Max Mac Studio is actually a really really good a good Mac for people
⏹️ ▶️ John who want a desktop Mac with more power than a Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, honestly, I’d say for most people, unless you know for sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Ultra would be faster for work that you do a lot of, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max is probably the better computer. And for lots of reasons. Number one, you’ll save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two grand. So that’s a lot that can be allocated to other resources or other
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I have to say, the pricing on the Ultra, not that bad. The M3 Ultra in the grand scheme of things,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s expensive, but especially if you don’t touch the RAM and stuff, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro painful. Fair, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is painful. And you know, so if what you’re looking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a really good desktop workstation Mac, and I honestly think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base model Mac Studio is a pretty good option for you. You know, I might option up a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few things here and there, but like that’s for two grand, that’s a really good deal. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most people, that’s going to be the better option.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say, get, I would say, no, get the base model, get the M4 Max with everything working,
⏹️ ▶️ John the 16 core, 40 core one,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco get that one. That’s what I’m into. And then add the 200
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks for 64 gigs of RAM. And you’re still like, it’s priced very much like the laptops without
⏹️ ▶️ John a screen. Like it’s not, it’s not, the prices are pretty comparable. I think if you like chop off the screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John think about that or like it’s, cause you get so much more with the Mac, You get so many ports in that thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, giant cooler and everything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s pretty good. Yeah, it’s actually priced very similar. Like, because if you want a MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that same M4 Max chip without any cores disabled, it’s like 3,500
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or $4,000. And the Mac Studio, same thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all the cores available M4 Max is 2,500. So it is substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheaper. Like if you already have a screen. No screen, no keyboard, no trackpad. Yeah, bring your own keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mouse, you know, but if you already have a screen or if you want a different kind of screen and you don’t need to be a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great. That being said, I think, you know, the MacStudio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M4 Max being a really good buy for most people also kind of highlights, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re in the market for this for, you know, horsepower reasons, I think you should consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the desktop laptop lifestyle. Obviously it can be more money depending on, you know, what hardware you already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have and stuff, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re ever gonna use a laptop, it’s a better deal. Like if you know, like me, that you are never going
⏹️ ▶️ John to, if you had a laptop, you would literally never touch it or look at the screen, don’t get a desktop. But if you’re kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, I don’t know, I might like to have a laptop, yeah, get the laptop. It’s a no-brainer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or like, if you would otherwise also get a laptop. Like if you’re like, well, I need a desktop and a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you should evaluate whether you can just get an M4 Max MacBook Pro and have that serve both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roles. But that being said, this looks like a really good computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s interesting, two things. Number one, I think the Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I have never seen one in the wild outside of an Apple store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen anybody who buys this computer. I can’t imagine they sell a ton of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But to me, I think Apple’s naming scheme here has bitten them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the butt in two ways that are probably unfair to this product. Number one, as I’ve said before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this should be called the Mac Pro. The Mac Studio is in every way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the modern Mac Pro. And what we call the Mac Pro is, as I said earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a PCI Express breakout box for the Mac Studio. And what do you name that one? The Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Extreme? How about the, I don’t know, the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Expansion? Yeah, there we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Big Mac is perfect. That might be a little bit of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. So honestly, if you look at resource levels performance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it fits in people’s workflows and lineups, the Mac Studio is, for all intents and purposes, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro of today. But, you know, they still have another product called Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is a Mac Studio with slots. And that’s basically the only difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so. For now, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and again, yeah, maybe they’ll create more air above it in the future, but for now, that’s what it is. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think people don’t consider the Mac Studio who maybe should because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not called Mac Pro. And then secondly, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John other kind of- Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Studio Pro. Yeah, the other kind of like, you know, naming conundrum they have themselves in is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the performance of the M3 chips versus the M4 chips, the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips are indeed faster. And in fact, that was a bigger leap from chip to chip than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the, most of the similar generations are. However, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I think a lot of people going to hesitate to, in 2025, buy a brand new $4,000 plus computer with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only, quote, only the M3 in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s naming sends messages and when they have the M3 coming out now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else is M4, that tells people this is the old one, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as good, which is technically true, but I think when people hear that name and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that difference, I think people assume it’s a bigger difference than it is. Like again, compare back to the Xeon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, nerds like us might know that, oh, this Xeon has, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core, whereas this one has, you know, the, you know, bad river core and this one has desert storm or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, we would, we would know those, you know, the weird Intel names of the, like, we would know that stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people didn’t know. It was just like, oh, I got the Xeon. It’s fast. I got how many cores is yours at 14 on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine, 16, you know, that’s it. With this, Apple has branded these chips with such clear, easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know names that it sounds like it’s a pretty big deal when you go from one to the other. And it’s similar to like, you know, back when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would have the iPhones with the S phones, it was like, I went from a four to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, oh, it’s only a, it’s only an S year, four S, I’ll skip this one. It’s not very, the S’s don’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. And in reality, those were often very significant upgrades, but their naming made it seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they weren’t. In this case, going from M3 to M4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds like a really big leap, when in fact, they’re both insanely fast. The difference is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that huge when you’re at this kind of level. And that being said, though, I think people will, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel a little bit bad ordering the M3 Ultra version. Maybe that could really backfire. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that depresses sales slightly, and Apple says, no one’s buying the big chips. I guess we don’t need to make them anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple does know that this is an awkward situation. The only other thing I heard about this
⏹️ ▶️ John vague, you know, wafty, unsubstantiated rumor or speak blah, blah, blah. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the M3 Ultra was held back because they couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John some some problem with some certification thing on it. And really, they like Apple. In other words, Apple would have
⏹️ ▶️ John liked to have released this at a less embarrassing time, but they could not. I don’t know if there’s any
⏹️ ▶️ John truth to that, but I do know I feel like everyone kind of looks at this and says, Hmm, it is. I mean, here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is Apple’s fastest chip, but it is also soon to be two generations
⏹️ ▶️ John old technology and like it’s right in the name. They put it in there. So, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it is what it is like. They can they can redeem themselves with an M4 extreme. But boy, if that
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro comes out of WWC with an M3 ultra in it. Man, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to tear off my Believe shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I was rending my
⏹️ ▶️ John garments. If we should, we should speed through the rest of this. So the the storage situation
⏹️ ▶️ John on these things on the M4 Max, you can get 512 up to eight terabytes, you know, 512, one, two, four and eight
⏹️ ▶️ John on the M3 Ultra you can get it starts at one terabyte. Again, starting
⏹️ ▶️ John specs matter so much in this land of margins shoved into options starting at one terabyte. So
⏹️ ▶️ John good. You can get one, two, four, eight or a new 16 terabyte option. I was trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John calculate what this would cost. Just jokingly doing some math. And what I did to calculate was I googled
⏹️ ▶️ John for 16 terabyte SSD. I found an Amazon link for a price that was like
⏹️ ▶️ John twenty two hundred dollars and I multiplied it by six point five, which was the multiplier I came up with when doing the math.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it came out to some obscene number, but much more realistic would have been to look at how much eight terabytes cost and double it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what Apple did. So eight terabytes, if you want to upgrade to eight terabytes, so you start at one terabyte and you
⏹️ ▶️ John add seven terabytes to upgrade to eight. Adding that seven terabytes will cost you in magical Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John fantasy land. $2,200. So how much will going from one to 16, adding 15
⏹️ ▶️ John terabytes cost you? Will it cost you 2,200? No. Will it cost you 4,400? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll cost you 4,600 because Apple. So 4,600, add $4,600 for that 16 extra terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where all the margin is. It’s great. Thunderbolt 5
⏹️ ▶️ John and USB 4, which is great because guess what? When the M3 came out, we didn’t have Thunderbolt 5.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they somehow found a way to stick Thunderbolt 5 on an M3, which must’ve been a pain.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, at least they did that. Cause can you imagine if the M3 Ultra only had Thunderbolt 4, but the M4 Max one had
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt 5? Embarrassing. But no, Thunderbolt 5. And the good thing is, as usual,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s just so much more hardware inside the SoC, on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra one, it’s got Thunderbolt 5, four Thunderbolt 5 ports on the back, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John front ports are also Thunderbolt 5 on the Ultra only. On the Max one,
⏹️ ▶️ John the front ports are USB-C, 10 gigabits per second, blah, blah, blah, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Still got USB-A ports in the back, woo! You know, use that space.
⏹️ ▶️ John 10 gig ethernet, HDMI, headphone, SD card slot, which is still UHS-II.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi 6E, because Max don’t get Wi-Fi 7 until Apple rolls out their Wi-Fi chip,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. I don’t know. Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, instead of Wi-Fi 7
⏹️ ▶️ John and Bluetooth 5.4, whatever. The good news on the display front
⏹️ ▶️ John is huge number of displays with Apple’s weird way of describing this. If you get in the M3 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John Max Studio, you have simultaneous support for eight displays. I don’t know where you would fit
⏹️ ▶️ John them, but you could run them. Eight displays without the 6K resolution at 60 Hertz or 4K at 144 Hertz,
⏹️ ▶️ John four displays at 8K at 60 Hertz or 4K resolutions at 240 Hertz, which is nice. DisplayPort 2.1 over USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John and then HDMI, one display
⏹️ ▶️ John at 8K at 64 Hertz or 4K at 240 and support for VRR,
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR and multi-channel audio. And the M4 Max version, you get about half
⏹️ ▶️ John that. You get support for five displays with similar specs, just fewer of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do have more environment stuff that they’re bragging about with each one of these products. None of these are carbon neutral,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I recall, but 30% recycled content in the Max Studio, 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure,
⏹️ ▶️ John 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets, no mercury, no bromated flame retardants and PVC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Packaging is entirely fiber based and Apple is still trying to get all of its plastic out of its packaging by 2025. Starts at $2,000 or 1,800
⏹️ ▶️ John can pre-order right now, available on March 12th. That is your really weird 2025 Mac Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m hearing you bought two already.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, waiting for WWDC, Just me and my 2019 Mac Pro, I just tap
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the shoulder and say, it’s you and me, kid. Just, we’re just gonna wait this out. We’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John see what the deal is. You tap it on its hot, slow shoulder. Hot? How
⏹️ ▶️ John dare you? This has just massive cooling. It’s not even breaking a sweat.
⏹️ ▶️ John I took the second GPU out, it has nothing to do in there. It’s just these huge, lazy fans rotating
⏹️ ▶️ John like in a noir movie.
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M4 MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then we also got some other computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that apparently John doesn’t care about. So
⏹️ ▶️ John since I do care about this one, this is the computer that I told my dad to wait for. I said he needed a new computer to run TurboTax.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t buy it. I’ll tell you when you should buy. This is my dad’s computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right. So we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got an M4 MacBook Air. You’ve got a couple of processor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey options. You’ve got eight CPU, 16 GPU or 10 CPU core, 16 GPU cores, 120 gigs a second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory bandwidth. The RAM options are 16, 24 or 32 with 32 gigs being $400 extra.
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, that RAM, that $400 extra RAM going from 16 to 32, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is twice as expensive. That 16 gigs of RAM is twice as expensive as on a Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing for when you go for, from 16 to 24, you are paying twice
⏹️ ▶️ John as much for the RAM on your MacBook Air. Why? Because margins. There’s just not a lot of place to
⏹️ ▶️ John get the margins on the MacBook Air and the numbers are smaller. So the RAM literally costs
⏹️ ▶️ John twice as much as Mac Studio RAM. Gracious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Storage options, 256, 512, one or two terabytes with the two terabytes running $800 extra.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You get Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4, which is 40 gigs a second, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The camera is the new-ish 12 megapixel center stage camera with support for desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey view. The M3 MacBook Air by comparison had a 1080p FaceTime HD camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Displays, this is very exciting. You can do up to two external displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the lid open with up to 6K resolution at 60 Hertz. You have Thunderbolt 4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey digital video output. You have support for native DisplayPort 1.4 output over USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By comparison, the M3 MacBook Air only had one external display with the lid open with up to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 6K resolution at 60 Hertz, and you have to close the lid to use a second displayed up to 5K 60 Hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Battery life 18 hours, which is the same as the M3 MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have different power adapter choices, 30 watt to 35 watt dual for an extra 20 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 70 watt, which is also an extra 20 bucks. Again, 13, 15 inches, midnight starlight, silver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a new sky blue, which is also a very good Peter Gabriel song.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The sky blue I’ve not seen in person yet, but looked like the standard, wait, that’s silver’s. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, oh, there’s a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ John glue there. When I first saw photos of this, I thought like the white balance was off because I’m like
⏹️ ▶️ John the white balance must be off because the silver one looked bluish. No.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how subtle it is. It’s so subtle that it could be slightly off white balance or it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be the sky blue one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It starts at 9.99 for 13 inches, which is a hundred bones less than it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before. And it’s a hundred dollars less still for education.
⏹️ ▶️ John it starts at 16 gigs, which we already know because of the M3 and the M2, but just want to reemphasize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the 15 inch starts at basically 1200 bucks, 1199, 1100 bucks for education, which again, a hundred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollars less than before. Here it is, as Ben Thompson has said many times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or he’s the one I’ve seen, you know, banging this drum most loudly. iPhones and a lot of Apple products
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have basically gotten cheaper over time on account of them not moving up with inflation. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re getting cheaper in a literal, well, I guess they’re both literal, but they’re getting cheaper in terms of the price tag,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the price tag has actually gone down 100 bucks. And you can pre-order these now, they’ll be available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 12th, which is really cool. And the M2 model is still available in some countries.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is pretty, I mean, this is what everyone expected M4 MacBook Air, we knew it would be great because we knew the M4 was great,
⏹️ ▶️ John we knew the MacBook Air was great. All you gotta do is swap out the M3 for an M4 and we got that. And in between
⏹️ ▶️ John the time when we were anticipating it, they did the 16 gig RAM bump. So the base model,
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 MacBook Air for $1,000 is an amazing, it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John best deal on a laptop Mac that has existed in ages because you don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ John change anything about that except for the SSD because it’s 256. But let’s say that’s plenty for you because there is
⏹️ ▶️ John scenarios where 256 is plenty for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. But if you listen to the show, it’s not. If you’re a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John listener, don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just at least get the 512. For people listening to this show, probably not. But like, look, so when I was
⏹️ ▶️ John getting a computer from my dad and I was asked, they don’t have data, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they use it as a glorified web browser and to like watch videos and stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They do have a photo library, but they barely take pictures at all, right? So I did wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ John could he fit in two, I wouldn’t get to recommend it again, but I did wonder academically. And the answer is yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John he could, but I’m still gonna have him get the 512.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can never upgrade it for the love of God, at least get the 512. If you’re a nerd, you probably want the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabyte, at least, just please. Yeah, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John really starts killing the price of this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, so 512 was plus 200 bucks, and that I feel like you could stop, because they lowered the price 100 bucks. So now it’s only really plus 100 bucks, so whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus one terabyte is plus 400 bucks, which is a significant portion of the
⏹️ ▶️ John price of this machine. It really started to hurt. But anyway, this is straight up just an
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 version of the MacBook Air, right down to, it’s still Wi-Fi 6E, still Bluetooth 5.3, it’s the same as the
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 one, but the M3 one was already a great machine. I think the reason they can cut off $100 in this price is
⏹️ ▶️ John because this is like, what, the third iteration of basically the same computer
⏹️ ▶️ John with just the SoC swapped out more or less. This is a good deal on a good computer. And the reason they
⏹️ ▶️ John can cut off the price is because there’s not a brand new screen. There is a new camera, but it’s like, it’s a camera
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s been in a lot of other Macs. Like they didn’t add any expensive stuff. So remember when they bumped the price 100 bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John when they went from the wedge shape to the non-wedge shape, because that was an all new case and they had to recoup the costs of
⏹️ ▶️ John the fancy casing and all this stuff or whatever. Like this is the cycle. It’s kind of like car generations,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever generation MacBook Air this is, towards the end of the generation, it gets cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and it’s nice, you know, it’s a miracle to see Apple essentially passing on that
⏹️ ▶️ John savings to its customers in the entry-level model. They bumped the RAM to 16, so now people
⏹️ ▶️ John can get by with the base amount of RAM, and they lowered the price because they’ve been making this generation
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while. It doesn’t have an HDR screen. It doesn’t have mini LED. They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do anything to it. It’s the same as it was, but what it is, with the exception of a lack of SD card slot, what it
⏹️ ▶️ John is is pretty, and a USB-C port on the other side, what it is is pretty good. So, boy, like this is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John such a phenomenal upgrade for my dad’s computer, because whatever he was running, like it’s too old to run
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the minimum OS version for TurboTax is. So I think it’s like a seven or eight year old computer or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is, it’s Intel, okay? He’s gonna go from an older Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac to an M4 MacBook Air. It’s just gonna be like a miracle. like completely
⏹️ ▶️ John silent, just everything is fast. Everything is instant. The thing weighs nothing. The
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life is gonna be just insane compared to what his ancient computer was that he’s just been leaving
⏹️ ▶️ John plugged in half the time. Like it’s just gonna be such an amazing upgrade. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the only possibility is like, well, maybe the screen, you know, cause he had a MacBook Pro before that. But I think the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John will probably be close. But anyway, I’m excited for him to get his new computer. This is great. I’m gonna buy this
⏹️ ▶️ John computer for my daughter. This is her college computer. I’m not sure how I’m gonna spec it yet. She
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t yet picked a color, but this is pretty cleanly good news. I would
⏹️ ▶️ John also say that I feel like we’re kind of approaching maybe one or two years away from the
⏹️ ▶️ John end of this generation of the MacBook Air, where they’re gonna have to, where they’re gonna have to, where I think they should do something
⏹️ ▶️ John like consider upgrading the screen, you know what I mean? But this is a good time to buy. The
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 is a really good chip for a lightweight laptop because it is low power,
⏹️ ▶️ John but single core is just so fast. and that’s what you want if you’re just doing like simple things with your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I love my MacBook Air. I have the M2 one. I absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love it. It is an amazing computer. As I mentioned last time or the time before, I’ve used it so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much that I’m starting to wear out some of the keyboard keys. It’s getting worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the sky blue color was better, I might be tempted to get this new one. But what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is wrong with them with these colors? Okay, the MacBook Air now comes in silver-ish, silver-ish,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silver-ish, and black-ish. Why? Why? You have four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alleged colors, none of them are color.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? I do like the midnight one though, which is not actually black, it’s actually very dark blue apparently, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that does stand out in a crowd I feel like now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, because all the fingerprints stand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean it’s fine. It looks, when it’s clean it looks decent. When it’s clean and in good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighting, then you can see that it’s not black, but it actually is navy blue, and it does look decent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll give you that. but like the other three colors, again, like when you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at Apple’s website, look at like the videos of other reviewers or go see them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in real life. And you could see like, oh wait, that’s the allegedly blue one.
⏹️ ▶️ John The sky blue model should come with the silver one that you can always carry around next to it so people can tell it’s blue.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the only way you’ll be able to tell you need the comparison. Your eyes will adjust to the white balance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And starlight too, like sky blue and starlight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Starlight is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they look like different white balance settings on silver. Barely, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John balance settings where you’re not sure if you’ve bumped it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s so subtle that you need to see the silver one just so you can see, oh, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually silver. Yeah, I think you might need to move your head a little bit too. Yeah, like, oh man, it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird. Why are they so afraid of color? Look at the iMac. The iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a really boring computer, but yet it got attention because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it came in colors. That’s why everyone loves the iMac. It’s not because everyone needs a low-end desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people don’t. They buy the iMac because it comes in really fun, bold colors. Why not do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that? You know how many of these MacBook Airs they would sell if they came in like a real color?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One! I don’t even… just one real color. Yeah. Like, these colors, these are colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the way John Mayer sings. Wow. Harsh. And John Mayer is an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing… like, you don’t realize, he’s an amazing musician, but he’s so soft-spoken in most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his music. Like you can barely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John even tell. You
⏹️ ▶️ John want him to do everything, he can play every instrument in the world and he has to be a great
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco singer? Yes, he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talented instrument player. He’s amazing at guitar, he’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good musician. But he’s so restrained in his music. That’s how Apple, when Apple does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colors, they do them pretty well. Like when they’re real, bold colors, they do a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good job of them. And they just won’t do it the vast majority of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the vast majority of their products. Why? God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate the Apple color situation, and I know that nobody is banged on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drum louder than Jason, and he’s right. There needs to be a colors are at Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey convince them that A, professionals like colors, and at this point, B, freaking anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey likes color, because you’re right. What did you say? It’s grayish, grayish, grayish,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and blackish? I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco pretty much right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like imagine, okay. Granted, in this upgrade to the MacBook Air, which, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said, I freaking love my M2 MacBook Air, and I’m very tempted to replace it just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keyboard keeps breaking and I don’t have time to get it serviced. But, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love this computer so much, this is the least inspiring upgrade I’ve seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They keep doing these things where it’s like, well, we sort of gave you a color, a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t get my nanotexture, which, again, I didn’t expect to. I didn’t get cellular, which again, I also didn’t expect to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I think it is weird. Why didn’t we get nanotexture? It’s like a $100 or $200 option. Anything you do to this
⏹️ ▶️ John computer is at least a $100 or $200 option, so why not? I mean, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would welcome that if they ever add it. I’m not surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, because even though, yes, I know it’s on the iMac now, but it does seem like nanotexture is considered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Apple marketing to be a pro tier thing, which is a shame. And I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the MacBook Pro 14, but it just doesn’t feel as nice as this. Like when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carrying it around in a bag and picking it up and opening it up, like going in and out of like trains and planes and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my God, the MacBook Air is so much nicer than even the 14X Pro, it is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighter. And it just feels better in your hand. It’s easier to manipulate, you know, open and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close in and out of bags and stuff. It’s just, it is nicer. The battery life is better, there’s no fan. Like there’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are lots about it that are, lots of things about it that are nicer for my, in my opinion, than the 14 inch pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I just, you know, in this generation, like the same screen, it still has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly blurry, lower resolution pixel density of the battle touch bar days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They fixed that in the pros, they did not fix that in the air. So, and it still has only 500 nits brightness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, the screen, it’s still the same screen. It’s, you know, compared to PC laptops, it’s a very nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. Compared to other Apple products, it’s a fine screen, but it’s lacking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the new hotness of other screens they make. So it’s still an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing computer for most people. I just do wish they would have given a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit more in this update, something else to make it a little bit exciting besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a drop of color on the new sort of bluish silver
⏹️ ▶️ John model. This is not an upgrade product. They’re like, oh, you got one last year, get a new one this year. This is entirely like the
⏹️ ▶️ John product for people like my parents. Like if you are in the market for a laptop computer, get
⏹️ ▶️ John this one because it’s great. If you just bought this computer last year, there’s almost nothing to make you
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade because last year’s was so good already. And so is the M2 one, but it’s like, these computers are not for people who
⏹️ ▶️ John are like, let’s see what the new thing is this year. These are for like, I need a new computer because my old one
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work or is crappy or is broken. Let me arrive in the store. I need a laptop to do simple
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Show me what you got. And in that role, this thing fills that role even just a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit better than the previous one does, but it is absolutely not a product where it’s like, let’s make people with M3 MacBook Airs
⏹️ ▶️ John really wanna upgrade. Nope, not this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know how you do that? Colors. With colors, yeah. Like that, look, if you don’t have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, massive hardware upgrades, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you need to put fins on it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like then, yeah, give it a different look, a little bit, and it doesn’t need, I’m not saying redesign the case. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you’re gonna drive upgrades. Again, people who are buying $1,000 MacBook Airs are not upgrading every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and I’m not even talking about every year, But just like, when you look at, look at what happened with the 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch, one port MacBook that we all love, hated. People would often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy that kind of as a fashion statement, like as a fun thing. Like people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John purchase. To keep it in
⏹️ ▶️ John their inside coat pocket, you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say? Yeah, like people don’t always purchase computer equipment rationally. It isn’t like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, it’s time for the numbers to line up. Like no, people buy stuff because they want it and love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like not everyone, but not no one. So there’s a lot of people who will buy a product,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you see the same thing with the iPhone, like people who will upgrade a phone, not because their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old phone is broken, but because the new phone looks really cool. That’s a thing that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. And they do that with computers too, with desktops and laptops, they do it there too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not as much, but they’re still there. So if Apple would, again, it’s a spec
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bump update. Here at ATP, we support spec bump updates. We love spec bump updates, because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alternative is neglected products. And we don’t want Apple to wait around to give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any update until they have something mind-blowing and big. No, feel free, spec bump them whenever you can, that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, it does help to make an otherwise fairly uninteresting spec bump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update more interesting to do some kind of new cosmetic thing. And you can tell that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believes that too, which is why they keep adding colors, but they just keep adding like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worst, the most like barely colored colors that you can possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Like just, I think this, imagine if that came out and it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the same blue as the iPhone 16 blue that everyone loves, not the Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the base model iPhone 16, that blue that everyone freaked out about last fall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people were like switching away from the Pro for the first time just to get that color. Imagine if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air was that color. That’d be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They won’t do it. How if it was literally any of the colors of the iMac has been offered in for now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like four years. They won’t do that either. I don’t know why, please do it for the love of God.
⏹️ ▶️ John Supposedly they have tried colors internally and the story is that they actually don’t look as good in person as you think
⏹️ ▶️ John they would because laptops are not the same thing as phones and tablets, but you know, try us Apple, we think you can figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they literally sell tablets that are almost the same size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and are in bolder colors. Slightly. we’ll get to that like not that much bolder but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but somewhat some older hotel
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re bold enough that you could if you could tell what color it is by looking at just one by itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah exactly you don’t have to believe when you only have one in the room you don’t have to say is that the silver or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blue. You’re like, no, you can tell. But barely. Yeah.
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iPad (A16)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Still more to go. We’ve got the A16 iPad or I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s actually on Apple’s website, the iPad hyphen 11 if I’m not mistaken. I
⏹️ ▶️ John it was iPad parenthesis A16. That was the whole point of the top item. They didn’t call it iPad 11th gen. Let me just double check.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the URL is 100% iPad hyphen 11. Oh, no, it’s iPad. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know, but that’s 11 inch. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. You’re right. You’re right. You’re right. My mistake. My
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s iPad parenthesis A16 and it comes in 11 inch and 13 inch sizes. But anyway, the point is
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t call it iPad 11th gen, which is fine because you know, who can keep track of these generation? It’s easier, kind of easier
⏹️ ▶️ John to know this is the one that has the A16 in it, which spoiler, has the A16 in it. They also simplified the naming.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not 10.9 inch anymore. It’s 11 inch, which you get to get technical because it’s got rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John corners. Like when you’re doing diagonal measures, you measuring where the corner would be on the rectangular or you’re measuring it, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s 11, like it’s 11 inch. It’s simplified. the iPad A16 11 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so it has the A16 with a five core CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which means there’s one disabled core, a four core GPU, which means there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one disabled core.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which core is disabled in the CPU? I could not determine this because it’s, is it two power cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and three efficiency cores? Or is it one power core and four efficiency cores? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what, I’m assuming it’s two and three. I wouldn’t make that assumption. The efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John cores are really small. Yeah, well, I believe this is the only, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no like non-binned version of this. Like if you get the iPad A16, this is the base model cheapest
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad that you can get, and it is very cheap. You get an A16 with five
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU cores and four GPU cores. There’s no non-binned version of this. And this is kind of where I was getting it
⏹️ ▶️ John before, like when it makes sense to continue selling old chips, because the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get to the second, but the rumor was this would have a different chip. Like, why do we see these chips show up? Why
⏹️ ▶️ John does the iPad mini have an A17 Pro? Why does this A16, why does the iPad have an A16, these
⏹️ ▶️ John only have been to A16? At some point, they tried to manufacture a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of A17 Pros and A16s. Some of those chips had stuff in them that didn’t work. You could throw
⏹️ ▶️ John them in the garbage, or you could find a product to put them into. And guess what? They found a home for the A16s
⏹️ ▶️ John with stuff that doesn’t work. It’s just smart business. I think this is perfectly fine. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think an A16 and the base model iPad is good. If in exchange for that, you get a low
⏹️ ▶️ John price and I think you do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I have a question. Now that we’re talking about binning again, I have what I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a superstition and I wanted to get your thoughts on whether it actually is a superstition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will almost never choose to buy a bin CPU because I think it’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like buying a refurbished product. If one thing broke. Yeah, I almost think like, Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this will be less reliable for me over time. Like, is that irrational? Is there any basis for that in science?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I’ve also had that, I can tell you I’ve had that same thought, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly can’t come up with a rationale for explaining why I think that might be the case. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, I don’t, it’s not like, it was like a car made on a Friday when people
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t paying attention. It’s not like there’s an explanation where you can say plausibly, this is why it might be different. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what causes flaws? there was a problem with this section. Does that mean that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more likely to be problems with other sections? I don’t know what the origin of the problems is. Like, I don’t know, like, is it just,
⏹️ ▶️ John there might, the only thing I can think of is that maybe like if the Silicon wafer had problems, like that wafer
⏹️ ▶️ John had problems, for example, then presumably the whole wafer has problems. And so lots of bin chips
⏹️ ▶️ John came off that one wafer or something, but yeah. Like, I do feel better about everything working
⏹️ ▶️ John versus some parts not working, but I feel like on all these things, When they test them, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not guessing which parts work. Like they do a pretty good, like when’s the last time you got a CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and one of the CPU cores stopped working? Like while you had it? Yeah, when they ship
⏹️ ▶️ John them to you and they say it has this number of cores, those cores pretty much work until you get
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of the computer, especially Marco, but regular people too. Right? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that when they leave the factory, they’re pretty sure that the stuff they say is working is in fact working. If it wasn’t, things
⏹️ ▶️ John would break real fast. be like Casey with his bad RAM. Like you, if some CPU core
⏹️ ▶️ John is doing math wrong, uh, or like has some problem, you’ll probably notice that
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty quickly. Maybe not in a GPU where you just get artifacts or something, but anyway, I don’t know someone who knows more about Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell us, but I I’ve absolutely felt exactly the same thing. Give me the one with all the working parts because it
⏹️ ▶️ John seemed like that, like I just feel better knowing that they tried to make this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want the ones where they succeeded, but then I pay ridiculous amounts of money to get that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there is no Apple Intelligence, apparently 6 gigs RAM, and this is an improvement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over 4 gigs on the 10th gen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Couldn’t quite go to 8. Now, can the A16 do Apple Intelligence? That was the other question I
⏹️ ▶️ John had. I was like, maybe the neural engine is below the threshold, but… I don’t think so. I think no,
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, at first I thought they left it at 4 gig, but no, according to MacRumors, they went to 6. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they were close to 8, but maybe even with 8, it couldn’t do it. But anyway, like I’m not sad about,
⏹️ ▶️ John who cares? This is the low end iPad of Apple. Right now that seems fine to me. It does though,
⏹️ ▶️ John really, you know, talking about the baseline feature set, Apple was pretty strongly saying like, Apple Intelligence is the baseline
⏹️ ▶️ John feature set, but not on the really low end models, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The cellular version is now eSIM only. You get three storage options, 128, 256 and 512. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting storage is twice what it was for the 10th gen. And here you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do get some colors, silver, blue, pink, and yellow. I am very here for it. Imagine that, colors, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look great. Let’s do that in other places. And it starts at 350 bucks. $350, I mean, you can look
⏹️ ▶️ John at this and say, what is in that face ID? Why this, why that? But like, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John there, the family resemblance is there. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it’s a flat sided, rounded corner iPad, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John with no home button. Like it’s just, it’s 350 bucks. Like if you, an A16
⏹️ ▶️ John with six gigs of RAM is pretty good for most things that people are gonna use iPads for.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the MacBook Air of iPads, essentially. Do you wanna do web browsing and like do
⏹️ ▶️ John email stuff? And like, it just, it’s 350 bucks for this huge,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good looking touchscreen that you can do probably all the things most people do
⏹️ ▶️ John with iPads. If it wasn’t for the OLED screen, I could use this because all I do is freaking watch
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming video. I just need the OLED screen. But everything else about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I’m not taxing my M4 CPU while I’m watching a streaming video on my iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not taxing it watching YouTube videos and scrolling Mastodon in SlideOver.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I could do that on the $350 thing if it wasn’t for the screen. Yeah, this is one of the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deals in Apple’s entire lineup. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say the base model MacBook Air is probably the best deal, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that the base model iPad is probably second best. Like, especially when you compare it to the other iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just don’t get a keyboard. Yeah, like, well, when you compare it to the other iPads or iPad accessories,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this entire iPad is about, it’s in the same ballpark of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the price of every keyboard that Apple now sells for iPads. Like most iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboards are around 300 bucks. This is 350 for an entire iPad. The keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not have a screen. that true. So this, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like most iPads are used in very low intensity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situations. Most iPads are being used to watch video or browse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the web or check email or be terminals for something else. Like they’re used in really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low need situations most of the time. So this is like, this is one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those products that is, you know, fairly uninteresting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tech press like us most of the time. You’re like, we’ll probably never mention it again. But there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge number of people who buy these either for themselves or for their employees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or children or students. You know, like it’s a huge market out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is a really surprisingly good product for a surprisingly low price given
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of Apple’s MO in most places which is we’re gonna bleed you dry and you’re gonna to thank us for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is this is great. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is just like the product being dragged across the line. Like this product line has been dragged
⏹️ ▶️ John across the many of the lines of, you know, the flat side of things, the rounded corners, all that other stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ John once this iPad gets dragged across the OLED line, which will happen, you know, eventually, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if not all that, whatever technology has true blacks, right, eventually this iPad will have that because it will be the cheapest screen available.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that will happen. I think it’ll be a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John be a while. Just keep in mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this screen also historically has not had the nicest lamination techniques and stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, but again, that will all get caught up because the state of the art advances
⏹️ ▶️ John and eventually the thing that was previously state of the art is the cheapest. This screen is better than the original iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, for example. So when that happens, this is kind of like the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John as digital audio technology essentially satisfying
⏹️ ▶️ John the capacity of human hearing and video technology for flat images is
⏹️ ▶️ John approaching that rapidly. When this thing gets a screen with true blacks,
⏹️ ▶️ John there will probably be a $350 adjusted for inflation thing that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John buy that is like the ultimate watch streaming video
⏹️ ▶️ John in bed on your iPad device for 350 bucks. Like it’ll be so cheap to just say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want a thing that I can watch like, You know, video
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it’s supposed to look, that’s cheap and light and does what I want it to do. And I can do email and web browsing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that little thing, that little iPad will, you know, I’m excited about this
⏹️ ▶️ John because the idea that you could have a flat screen that shows the kind of image that I get on
⏹️ ▶️ John my M4 OLED iPad for $350 when that day comes, I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll feel like I’m living in the future. Like anybody can have the screen that would have blown your
⏹️ ▶️ John mind 10 years ago. and it’s a couple hundred bucks and you can have it around the house and give it to your kids
⏹️ ▶️ John and just, the iPad for those use cases, for the simple use cases,
⏹️ ▶️ John for when you’re not running up against the limitations of iPadOS or paying $1,500 for an iPad or whatever, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John increasingly just an amazing device. This really is like the iPad Air
⏹️ ▶️ John of tablets. And in that role, all of our frustrations with it fade away because like, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John this role. Like same with all my frustrations with the Mac Pro and the CPUs, So it fades away when you look at the MacBook Air. It’s like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not what this computer is for. That’s not what these iPads are for. And, you know, you can get it in pink.
iPad Air (M3)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally, we have the M3 iPad Air. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get CPU is for performance, for efficiency, cores, all cores are enabled.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GPU is nine core, one core is disabled. You get eight gigs of RAM, 11 and 13 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sizes, touch ID. There is no face ID. Pencil Pro and the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pencil are both supported, same as its predecessor. The sound, however, is a little bit different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the specs. this is reading from MacRumors, and the specs for the new 13-inch iPad Air, Apple has omitted the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two times bass feature from the device’s landscape stereo speakers. Double bass was introduced in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the previous generation 13-inch iPad Air with M2 chip in May of 2024. Your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage options are 128, 256, 512, and one terabyte. Your colors are bluish,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yellowish, blackish, and purplish. Starting prices, same as previous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air, 11 inches, 600 bucks, 13 inches, 800 bucks. You can pre-order it now, it launches on the 12th. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s also a new Magic Keyboard. It has a 14-key function row, a larger trackpad, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the price of the Magic Keyboard, what were you saying, John? The 11-inch Magic Keyboard, the keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the keyboard is $270, and the 13-inch is $320. Let me use this opportunity to remind you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the starting price, as John pointed out earlier, of the A16 iPad is $350. That is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mere, what is that, $30 more than the 13-inch keyboard. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, I guess this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you maybe get a third-party keyboard, if you really want a keyboard with this device, like if you’re really gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John end up using it as like a laptop, but then you’re really pressing up against like, maybe you should get a MacBook Air because of
⏹️ ▶️ John iPadOS, I don’t know, people like iPads. But anyway, this thing, you know, oh, the iPad A16, that comes
⏹️ ▶️ John in colors. As soon as you get a little bit more power, no, the colors are gone, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you ascend into the sky of resources, the color gets drained out like oxygen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, this is not the iPad Pro. This is merely the Air, but once you get to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Air, it’s like, I’m sorry, you’re too high end for color.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and then the Pro has all of the color drained out of it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so this one, I’m starting to give a little bit of side eye about the lack of Face ID, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John how long are we gonna wait? How long are we gonna hold that as a differentiator? The Touch
⏹️ ▶️ John ID power button, whatever, My parents can’t use it because apparently old people can’t use Touch ID because their fingerprints
⏹️ ▶️ John are too wibbly wobbly. Face ID. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like this should have been here, the iPad Air got Face ID, but I guess not. The iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Air does not look like a great deal to me because if you want the great screen or power,
⏹️ ▶️ John get an iPad Pro. If you don’t want that, what are you getting an iPad Air for? Is there something, is
⏹️ ▶️ John there some game you’re playing that is too slow on the A16 iPad Air that you need the M3 for its GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John power? Is there a CPU thing that you’re doing on your iPad that you’re somehow not gonna get a pro
⏹️ ▶️ John but the A16 is not good enough? Is the screen that much better on the iPad M3 iPad Air?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, is it better at all than the A16 one? iPad Air, I mean, the prices aren’t that bad, you know, $600
⏹️ ▶️ John versus 350, but I feel it’s kind of hard to justify the iPad Air.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe when you do storage prices, it works out better because maybe the, I don’t know, I haven’t looked at the
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade prices that didn’t break it down for this one. Well, I’ll find out because my mom is gonna get a new iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget what she has now, but it’s ancient. And I haven’t actually gone through the exercise
⏹️ ▶️ John with her of like, what do you actually want out of your iPad? How much storage are you using? She could end up getting
⏹️ ▶️ John an A16 one that might be fine for her. She’s certainly not gonna get a Pro like, cause she doesn’t need any of that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad Air, mm, I’m not feeling great about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so if you actually, the smallest amount of storage that you can match across all three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad lines is 256. And if you price match all of them as 256 11 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go 450 for the base model, 700 for the Air and 1000 for the Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So those are pretty spaced out when you match spec for spec.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, I also, I have to think like, who’s the iPad Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for? because back not that long ago, there was the iPad line, it kind of became the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air line briefly, and then there was the iPad Pro when it was newer. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad Pro was kind of like, that was the one you bought if you needed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pencil, the Apple keyboard, or if you needed certain nicer Pro things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Originally that was the only one that had the four speakers. So there were lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons to buy the Pro. Now, what it feels like, And obviously this is not counting things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inflation, as mentioned earlier, but what it feels like is that the Pro has been pushed higher end. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad Pro, especially once accessorized, is a pretty expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re up to like the $1,400 kind of territory pretty easily with the iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s feel like it’s been pushed up, leaving a big gap in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco middle. And what they’ve put in that gap is the iPad Air, the modern iPad Air. But the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air doesn’t have Face ID, it doesn’t have ProMotion, so it still has a 60
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hertz screen. And those are things that like, if you’ve used a Pro, you feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Like when it feels like a downgrade. So it’s hard now, if you had a Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past, not because you needed like the best of the best, but simply because that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be the nice one. You know, suppose you have a 2018 Pro, like Casey and I had, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose you have those. if you’re looking at what’s in the lineup now, the Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is closer to kind of what you thought you paid for your Pro back in the day, once again, once Accessorized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially. But the Air is actually a downgrade from like the 2018 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some of those screen details, face ID,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that matters, you notice that. So it feels weird to be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a kind of like a Pro, like a mid-range iPad buyer today if you were a mid-range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to high-end iPad buyer in the past, because it feels like now, the mid-range has actually gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse relative to what you used to have. So it’s kind of a weird gap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the lineup, and I’m not entirely sure who the Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is then for, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John everything I was just saying-
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the Pencil situation? What’s the Pencil situation in the iPad A16?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Pencil situation now is that every iPad supports Pencils. Now, yes, they do support different ones, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not that different anymore. So now, every iPad supports pencils. Every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad supports keyboards with trackpads. So there’s fewer of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differences. The details are a little bit different with each one. But like-
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad A16 support the pencil that magnetically attaches to the edge? And also, what’s the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John orientation? I didn’t actually look this up. I should have. Which edge is the camera on in the A16 in the air?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The LCD. The Apple Pencil USB-C is what’s supported on the base model
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so you don’t get the magnetic attach thing, although the camera on the base model iPad is on the landscape edge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correct. Yeah, just like the new Air and the new Pro, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera’s on the landscape edge on both of them. Magnetically attaching pencil is
⏹️ ▶️ John arguably something that could have been dragged down to $350 model, but maybe those magnets are expensive, who knows? Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a much easier job explaining why the base model iPad exists and why the Pro exists, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John Air in the middle is just gonna kind of get it from both sides. Like you said, it seems like it’s too expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John for what you get, but then you complain that you’re not getting enough, because it doesn’t have Face ID, and just them deciding what feature
⏹️ ▶️ John set will go in this is really weird. Like, I mean, granted, it’s A16 versus M3. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is a big CPU jump, but it’s kind of Apple’s own fault that we don’t feel like, again, except for playing games, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John any particular reason that you’re gonna be begging for a more powerful SoC in your iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even then, like, with iPad games, you’re mostly just waiting for the internet purchases to load. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much resource drain that’s gonna take advantage of an M4, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m sure there’s AAA games from four years ago that you can play on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, like, and that’s what, I think like, I mean, maybe that’s part of the reason why I’ve been, I’ve been motivated to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy any of these newer iPads because, partly because, again, I’m not a very powerful iPad user.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, God, let me just vent for one second. So, at the restaurant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was setting up the new sound playing situation. So I have, I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they used to have, literally they had an iPod Touch to play music off of, just out of its headphone jack into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mixer from the 70s. And the staff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, please replace that ancient iPod Touch, or they called it an iTouch, of course, but I’m like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John love it. You should have recorded them saying that last known person to say the word iTouch in the United States.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, so I have these two apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the iPad has to run. One of them controls the mixer, so that they can control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the volume and the inputs in the mixer. And the other one is just whatever is gonna play the music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in this case, that’s actually kind of in flux right now, but I’m using this service called Sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Machine, which is this business licensed commercial music service. And of course they have their own crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app or you can access through other crappy apps. Everything’s crappy. But, point is, what I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have loved is to get a 11 or 13 inch big iPad and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have these two apps running side by side in split view. That way they are always available. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app that controls the mixer, it only runs in portrait orientation. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because it’s basically a blown up iPhone. It isn’t actually running in the iPhone mode, but it only runs in portrait.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And still, as far as I know, as far as I could tell, in 2025,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if an iPad app only will support running in portrait,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you get a 13 inch iPad, There is no way to run two of them side by side. You can’t like rotate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and just have, okay, just give me two portrait apps in landscape view. You can’t do slide over? That’s the temporary
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s like a floating thing where you slide in and out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I guess maybe you could, but that sucks. Like who’s gonna, I’m not, like the staff’s not gonna do that. Yeah, it obscures
⏹️ ▶️ John app that’s underneath it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I wanted it to be easy for the staff, and because, you know, not only are they like not all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they aren’t all nerds, but they’re also busy. So like they only, they don’t have time to like go in and out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a bunch of different apps. So I wanted to have, and I was all prepared to get a 13 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad Air for this purpose. But because that app for the mixer will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only run in portrait, an iPad OS gives me no way to override
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that or to have two of them side by side and landscape on a giant screen. Then I’m like, okay, I guess I’ll just get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad mini and leave it in portrait. So that’s what I did. But it was like, I couldn’t believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like still, really in this year, iPadOS still doesn’t let you do
⏹️ ▶️ John try to run iPhone apps like Instagram. Yeah, exactly. Like your options for windowing and dealing
⏹️ ▶️ John with that are just so much more limited because it’s an iPhone app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you know what is not limited? The Mac. Like if I used a MacBook Air there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could run two iPhone apps side by side and it would be fine. Like, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t the newest iPads do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John iPadOS, don’t ask it to do anything complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like run two apps, but it can do that with other apps. Like I just, oh, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So all that is to say, I ended up with an iPad Mini, which is basically just a small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad Air. But I think the iPad lineup is still, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to justify buying the really high-end ones for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, because people’s needs for iPads generally are, as mentioned earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty low-end needs most of the time. But I’m glad the high-end is there for people who want it, but I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think like the high-end used to be for more casual users also, and nowadays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, it’s so expensive. But again, and then you put the iPad Air in the middle, and it’s like, well, the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air is in some ways a cut-down product from what used to be in those price segments, so I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m kind of ambivalent towards the iPad Air. I wish, I guess what I wish mostly is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Pro, especially the accessorized Pro, was not so incredibly expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, oh well, it’s Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think what you really wish is that the middle thing had been dragged across more of the product
⏹️ ▶️ John feature lines. Like, if the middle one had Face ID and
⏹️ ▶️ John ProMotion, but the rest of the features were basically the same, you’d be like, oh, well, if you don’t want the
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 one and you don’t need OLED, get the Air because it’s basically like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the MacBook Air. It’s non OLED, the CPU is not as good. Like maybe the Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John is slower. Like what do you want? Like we make so much sense of the MacBook Pro versus the MacBook Air. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, yeah, that division of labor more or less makes sense. The reason it doesn’t make sense between the iPad Pro and the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Air is because the Air is not filling the role. Like we feel like certain things
⏹️ ▶️ John that should be the baseline now, right? And we’re not saying that OLED needs to be the baseline. We’re not saying the M4 needs to be the
⏹️ ▶️ John baseline, but like Face ID should be. And you know, we won’t talk about on the Mac, but you know, none of the Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John have a pace ID, so it’s fine. But it’s such a glaring difference. Like it just, I just don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John they, kind of like the 16E, I don’t think they nailed the mix of features in the airline. The price
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything, the name of it, the price of it, like most things about the product are right, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t get the right ingredients in the mix. Like, I don’t think it needs the M3. I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John could put an M2 in there, but if they have promotion, like, I don’t know. It just, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this line doesn’t seem like it’s in a great place. Like I said, I’ll actually be curious to see when I do go through the exercise with my mom,
⏹️ ▶️ John where we end up on the iPad, because both my parents have unfortunately been
⏹️ ▶️ John trained by me over many decades. Every time I now recommend a modern Apple product, they’re like, I don’t need the pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why aren’t we getting the pro? You always told me I should get the pro. I’m like, things have changed. Trust me. You do not
⏹️ ▶️ John need a Mac. I’ve been getting the MacBook Pros because like they they use computers for years and years. It was real important
⏹️ ▶️ John to get them a high spec MacBook Pro, so it would work for years and years. that’s not an issue anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John With the M4, like the M4 MacBook Air will be fine for you. Trust me, it’ll be like a miracle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you just, just don’t, you do not need a MacBook Pro. You don’t want a MacBook Pro. This will
⏹️ ▶️ John be lighter. This will just, you know, the only thing, so the only thing I asked them is, is your screen not bright enough for you? He said,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, it’s plenty bright. I’m like MacBook Air, right? And so when we go to the iPads, what is that discussion going to be? Are they’re going to, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they have like, I don’t know if they have iPad Pros, but they have pretty good iPads for whatever decade they bought
⏹️ ▶️ John them in, right? and now it’s time for a new one. Are they gonna end up with the lowest end
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad because that is the only model that makes any sense? We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Delete.me. And thanks to our members who support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is our weekly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bonus topic called ATP Overtime. This week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the state of Siri and is Siri falling further behind as we see things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new Alexa announcement and some updates on rumors of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri overhaul. So what’s going on with Siri? We’ll talk about that in overtime. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join us to listen, atb.fm slash join. Thanks everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John you can find the show notes at ATP.FM
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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
Casey’s problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a weird problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has already been fixed and I didn’t do anything. Should you see your doctor about it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So a couple of months ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and unfortunately I don’t know exactly when it was, I think it was correlated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a point update to Aaron’s phone and my phone that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suddenly I was not receiving any of the pictures from her iCloud photo library or the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through shared iCloud photo library, any of the pictures that she took, right? These are pictures that her phone thinks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are in the shared library. These are pictures that we’ve taken when we’re standing next to each other or at home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, both cases, you know, they should be sent to the shared photo library. I, again, I’ve verified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything. Everything looks good. This went on for like a month or two. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I complained about it a little bit online and asked for help and nobody had any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea, and then I decide to file a feedback, God help me. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I had been pointed to their exist and I forget exactly where it is. You, I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can like search for it, but there exist profiles that you can download, you know, the same sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of profile you would use for like getting access to corporate stuff or whatever the case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may be. case may be, you can download
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a profile. Part four betas, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or, or certain betas. Yeah, I think that’s right. So anyways, you can download
⏹️ ▶️ Casey profiles for each of the different platforms that will do a lot more logging around photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically. And then getting that log file out can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a bit of an adventure. But I did this for a couple of days and, and I did it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Aaron’s phone and on my phone. And I’m going to butcher the details as to where you go,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but off the top of my head, you go into settings and then like privacy and then there’s like analytics data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. And you can search, thankfully, for photos. And so I did all that and I went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go airdrop my log. And when I did that on Aaron’s phone, settings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crashed. So then I tried to do the same thing on my phone. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will will give you one guess what happened. Settings crashed. So great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now I’m, next thing I know I’m hooking up, you know, the fanciest USB-C Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable I can find just to make sure I get as much bandwidth as I can to my Mac. And I’m syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my Mac and partying like it’s 20, you know, 2009 all over again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m syncing to my Mac and it takes fricking forever despite using like that hundred dollar Apple Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable, which I think is overkill because I think it’s only USB, whatever the USB rates are, are, are lower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the Thunderbolt cable. It doesn’t matter. I just wanted to get the best cable I could find. Takes freaking forever for both these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things to sync. Then at least there’s a PDF that Apple provides that shows you exactly where to go to find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the log file. And it turns out these log files are like gigs each,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is both alarming and potentially useful. So, I go to file my feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I attach these log files to my feedback and I upload them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my symmetric gigabit internet connection and feedback assistant says, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t upload. I mean, I saw you using, thanks to ISTAT menus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I saw my computer uploading hundreds of megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth of stuff, probably thousands of megabytes worth of stuff and yet feedback assistant says,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, not going to work. Can I do anything about that? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, can’t just try again. And then I try again. Is there a progress meter? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do I know if it worked or not? No. Can I do anything about this? Hell no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a feedback. I’m not even going to link the freaking thing in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s useless. If you happen to work for Apple and would like to see the feedback number, reach out. I’m happy to send it to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t you put them up on Google Drive, put a link to the Google Drive in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I don’t use Google Drive, and either way, I don’t think anyone will ever look at this anyhow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So why bother? I’ve already done hours of unpaid labor for Apple, I’m not doing more
⏹️ ▶️ John you trying to fix your own problem in this case?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but then all of a sudden, around the, I don’t think it was because of the profiles, but around the time I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing this whole dance, it started working again. Did I do anything? No. Did they do anything on the iCloud side?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s all working again. But how fricking, have we ever talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that feedback assistant and the whole bug reporting process may not be up to snuff? Maybe we should talk about that sometime.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We can do a member special about feedback assistant, which will basically just be Marco bleeping me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for an hour and a half straight. But-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I don’t know why you put yourself through that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco because I’m an idiot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look, Apple has proven, look, if you are hearing this as somebody who works in Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re about to yell at me how much it matters. I look, I enjoy, or I appreciate that that’s what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s how you see it, but that’s not how it is to the outside. So to the outside world, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is extremely apparent, we should not waste our time filing feedbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the way Apple treats the outside world from the feedback system is hostile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at best, and certainly makes it very clear to us that we are wasting our time by using it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, like don’t put yourself through this trouble. Just don’t, like don’t file feedbacks. let Apple do their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco QA work or improve their system so that it actually is worth it for us. Right now, they’re doing either of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I mean, I wanted this to be fixed for me. So I thought, all right, if this is how I pay to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play, then this is what I’ll do. But you know what, Marco? I’m a frigging idiot because I shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have even bothered. Ah, it makes me so mad. Now, the good news is it fixed itself, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad news is I went through hours of unpaid labor. Like genuinely, this is stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t have done if I wasn’t kind of hinted that this is what I need to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get help, and I wouldn’t have bothered. And this probably took me a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours. And let me tell you, my rates on the extremely rare occasion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do consulting are pretty lucrative. This was hundreds of dollars of work I did for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for nothing. And it just drives me absolutely bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is hundreds of dollars of work that you threw away on something that you knew didn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, because I’m a moron. Like, honestly, like, so, okay, listeners, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure, I hope you’ve heard me over the years. I hope that you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that in general, I’m not like a super selfish person. I don’t think I am.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I try to be like a good citizen of the world and in a lot of ways that I can be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when it comes to feedback assistant, I have to always tell myself, someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else will probably file this bug. I don’t need to be the one wasting my time because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco odds are this thing I’m seeing, someone else will see it. I’m even like right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m on the iOS beta for I think it’s 18.4 now. I’m on the beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this beta is terrible. This is one of the buggiest point update betas I’ve had in years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s horrendous. And I decided I’m just gonna get off the beta. What am I doing? The only reason I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used the betas is A, to be able to see things and maybe talk about them on the show, which I’m pretty sure we’re not actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supposed to be doing anyway. But B, I always thought like, well, if my app breaks in weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subtle ways on the beta, I will see it and maybe be able to issue an update to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco avoid the problem before the release comes out. But that hasn’t happened in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. A point update breaking my app in a way that wasn’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed in the next beta has not happened in such a long time. Then I’m like, why am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I doing this for them? and making my phone less reliable and frustrating myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes, like when I hit some bug or something works worse than it did before, why am I doing that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like again, the relationship between Apple and us, I think is very clear in recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times that we are simply a resource that they mine. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why am I carrying their water? Why am I doing their free QA for them? Why am I running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their betas and why am I filing feedbacks when they’re very clear to us what we mean to them? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will present the same question back to you. Like, why do you feel the need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file bug reports when you know that odds are it will end in you being frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having wasted your time and probably not achieving anything that’s visible to you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, in this situation, the only person who could help him, the only entity that could help him was Apple. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s Apple stuff that’s broken, probably something on the server side. Right. They’re the only ones that can fix
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So if you want someone to fix it, that someone has to be Apple. and the way, the only way
⏹️ ▶️ John to have any chance of getting Apple to fix something for you, I guess you could go through phone support, which good luck, that probably would have
⏹️ ▶️ John taken you more hours and be less productive, or you can file feedbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and the thing of it is, is that there’s nothing actionable within the device, because I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go see a log, I can’t go look at network status, I can’t go- Can’t hit the big refresh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button. Right, there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I can do. Can’t clear the cache.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm, and so, I mean, if you fricking write me and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John say- Sign out of your Apple ID Everyone is writing you to tell you to sign out of your Apple ID. No thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will find you and punch you in the throat because that’s not happening. And honestly, it shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to. And it probably wouldn’t fix it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And it probably wouldn’t fix it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John So someone just posted about that. It was like everyone telling them to sign out of their Apple ID, so they finally did it. And it just made the problem worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It wasn’t Dr. Drang. It was just hours and hours of
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to restore stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was Dr. Drang, but either way. No, it’s just, no, I’m not doing that and I shouldn’t have to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s just so frustrating because this, to John’s point, this was the only avenue I had. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I guess I could have gone spelunking in console with Aaron’s device connected to my computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like, again, no, I’m not doing free labor for Apple. It’s, it’s, or unpaid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey labor for Apple. It’s just no. And the thing of it is, is it was just in, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not insulting, but I can think of a better word. It was insulting at every step of the way. Can I do anything to look into this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a technical user as an iOS developer? Can I really do anything to look into this? I mean, I guess I could have poured
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through their ridiculous, you know, ridiculously verbose debug output through console.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But effectively, no. Was there any way to manage this on device? Not really. Okay. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I want to go and I want to get the logs, which is a pain in the butt. I mean, I get why it’s a pain in the butt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s a pain in the butt. Then I go to try to collect the logs and settings crashed. Then I go to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to collect the logs and I have to connect to my computer like a barbarian. Then I go to upload it to their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bespoke first-party app running on their operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work three times in a row. Does it tell me anything about why? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I do anything about it? Absolutely not. It’s just bananas and it’s just frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now again, it fixed itself, which is all that really matters in the end of the day, but it’s just so very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this is the thing, and I would even say, maybe looking at it as unpaid labor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually is not quite, I think, productive because there are many cases in which, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I have an actual bug, I would actually pay to get it fixed or it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth it. But it’s not so much that it’s unpaid, as much as wasted and unappreciated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the signal that we get from Apple from the outside, even though, again, yes, Apple employee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to this, we hear you, that it really makes a difference. And maybe for bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that get to you and your team, that might be true. That’s not the common case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And from the outside, it’s very clear to us that the bugs we file are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time, not even looked at. And if we do luck out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one of them does get looked at and get a response, the response is almost always so dismissive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and obviously trying to just mask close bugs without doing anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes, it’s very clear to us, what it communicates to us is, our work is not being looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at, our work is not being valued, our work is not being taken seriously. And the people who are screening the bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just trying to go through the numbers and clear them out. That’s how it looks to us the vast majority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time. And that’s, again, even if we get a response, that’s what it is. Most bugs I have filed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never got a response of any kind. Just sit there open forever. So it’s very clear to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us, not so much that our work is unpaid, but that our work is fruitless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that our work is pointless, that we are the chumps for even having devoted any time to this whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So again, I ask you, Casey, I mean, I know you knew this already before this. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would strongly suggest, just set that bag of rocks down and walk away. Like, this is no longer…
⏹️ ▶️ John still needed his problem solved, so he
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was going to just
⏹️ ▶️ John wait around for it to solve itself?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes! Because that is probably what happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so I will give the counterexample of like, oh, I don’t need to file this because somebody else will. I’m the somebody else.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s both. Not really. Like, actually, sometimes when I
⏹️ ▶️ John look at a bug, I think to myself, no one else is going to file this. Like no one else will. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John I want Apple to know about this and no one else is gonna file it, I have to do it. Now that’s rare.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most of the time you’re right. If there’s some API bug, someone else is gonna find it. It’s gonna be filed, it’ll be fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always the case. Here’s the other thing. If only you file it, will they care and will they actually fix it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, you should, if you had remembered the show, which Casey certainly doesn’t, but you might, Marco, what bug am I
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking of? Oh, I forgot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, your window performance dragging
⏹️ ▶️ John Open up a lot of windows, performance falls off a cliff when more than one user is logged in. I’m the only one who’s gonna find that bug,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, but if you didn’t complain on a podcast for a month about that, would that have gotten fixed? Not a chance
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but I’m the only one who filed it, you understand? Like, they fixed it based on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filed it and then you announced it on a podcast for a month, like that’s what got it fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure, but the point is, if I didn’t do that, this would never have gotten fixed, because it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just talking about it on a podcast that gets it fixed, they do need a feedback to actually do stuff about it. who else is gonna find
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple users logged in in a bazillion windows? That’s me, I’m the guy who finds that bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you know what’s great actually? If you just complain on a podcast about it for enough, somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple who’s getting paid to work at Apple files it themselves. So you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I don’t think that anyone ever would have filed this because I don’t think they could reproduce it because I don’t think they really understood the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John and neither did I until I did it. So anyway, in those scenarios where I feel like this is not gonna be found by anybody else,
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to file this. It didn’t, it wasn’t particularly burdensome to file it. I think I filed
⏹️ ▶️ John it multiple times and I myself was narrowing down what is the deal with the bug? Do I have bad hardware?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is my video card bad? Do I have some kind of corruption? Is it an OS bug, blah, blah, blah. Like it took a while for me to narrow it
⏹️ ▶️ John down as well. But I did, in some scenarios, this is the only, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, it’s the only, I’m not gonna fix this myself, right? If I, you know, when I eventually determined
⏹️ ▶️ John trying it on a different Mac, it’s still there. It’s not the OS, tried the OS versions, clean install. Like I did all the things I could
⏹️ ▶️ John do locally At a certain point, it’s like, I can’t fix this. This is Apple’s, it’s a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple software, and I’ve narrowed it down enough to be able to file it. It did get fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually. Yes, the podcast obviously helped a huge amount, but I feel like if I did not file this and I merely talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about it on the podcast, it would not have been fixed. And certainly if I didn’t talk about it on the podcast, absolutely this would
⏹️ ▶️ John not have gotten fixed because who’s even gonna find this bug? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s mostly fruitless. I did file, I had a list of when I was doing, you know, hyperspace development, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a note with the running list of bugs I need to file and I’ve filed about half of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have another half that I may or may not get to. I got responses about one of the ones that I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John file, believe it or not, because I just talked about it in a place where Apple people could see it and they were curious
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. And the reason I didn’t file it, well, two reasons. One, you know, I’m busy doing development. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t consider it unpaid labor, but it is time that I would take away from doing development. right
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s more important for me to do. I’m going to make a note of myself. Mental note. If you get some, you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you get above this and you feel like you’re finally in a good place with the app, you should probably file this bug, this bug, this bug, and this
⏹️ ▶️ John bug. But one of the ones that I talked about frustratingly in front of some people who happened to be Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John people, I can’t, I tried to make a minimal reproduction, you know, start a new project, blah, blah, blah, do the bug
⏹️ ▶️ John and couldn’t reproduce it. So that one definitely goes in the pile of, well, I’ll get to that one later if I want.
⏹️ ▶️ John But someone from Apple contacted me about that and said, hey, I heard you talk about this bug. Did you file a feedback for it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, no, because I can’t reproduce it. But I described it to them and I said, good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I may eventually file that if I can narrow it down because I do like helping people fix bugs,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they’re not my bugs. But yeah, you really have to decide
⏹️ ▶️ John what is a good use of your time. If it’s a bug that someone else is gonna file or if it’s the ones I didn’t file
⏹️ ▶️ John or haven’t done anything about, I worked around them in my app. That’s what we all do. You find something that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John behave the way you expect, you do a workaround. You find some way to make the app do something
⏹️ ▶️ John sane. You put a big scary comment that says, I’m doing this because X, Y, and Z.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe Apple will fix this someday. You know, XXX to do whatever you want to do to market
⏹️ ▶️ John later. You can remove this when Apple fixes this bug, and then you move on with your life. Because you can’t, every time you find
⏹️ ▶️ John a bug, like do an exhaustive feedback and file it and wait for a response.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just, that’s not productive. So I think there’s a balance to be struck between when is it time to file a bug,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it really fast and easy to file this bug, fire and forget, and you just like hope it does something, you’re just voting
⏹️ ▶️ John with the bug, filing a dupe, or is it something that only you are ever gonna find or is only important to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John or is it something that’s just gonna be taking too much time away from what you’re actually trying to do, in which case, maybe write a two-sentence
⏹️ ▶️ John note and then move on with your life.
John’s problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So what’s your deal, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I, uh, have, uh, I think I’ve talked before about how I have speakers connected to my computer, but I turn
⏹️ ▶️ John them off all the time. They’re just not on. So my computer makes no noise. Uh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly the way I like it is very much unlike the way Marco uses his computer. Wait, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what noise is made when the speakers are on? Beeps. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t know what, what noise is your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought you meant like you could hear a hum you freaking bat, but no, I
⏹️ ▶️ John like a YouTube video audio from a YouTube video, uh, you know, music,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You just sit there in silence. Generally speaking.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but anyway, I do have to be connected. How
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I know. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the opposite of your whole life. Casey, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have all the
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, when I do want to hear audio of watching a YouTube video or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, playing the rare case, I play music. I do have speakers connected. But obviously I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about those speakers because I basically never use them I was trying to figure out how old my current speakers are
⏹️ ▶️ John and I just I couldn’t find them They’re not in my Amazon auto history. There’s no receipts in my email. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t honestly I think I might have bought these in person This is the problem with really old purchases kids sometimes we used to buy things in
⏹️ ▶️ John person in stores and there’s no record of that unless you’re one of those people obsessively like scans Your receipts and I am NOT
⏹️ ▶️ John So as far as I could tell based on my photo library which is the only actual livestream like record of my life.
⏹️ ▶️ John The oldest picture I could find of these speakers sitting on my desk was more than 16 years old.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ve had these speakers for 16 years. They are cruddy, creative,
⏹️ ▶️ John GigaWorks T40 speakers, not the T40 2s, normal numeral two,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the plain old T40s. They’ve got two very small midrange
⏹️ ▶️ John drivers and a tiny tweeter between them in a vertical arrangement. They’re top ported. They connect
⏹️ ▶️ John with a headphone jack. There’s a DC plug that goes into one of them. And then there’s a thing that connects to the speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have dials in the front of them. They have an on and off switch on the back, bass, treble adjustments and volume.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, these are, okay. I love speakers enough that I’m willing to forgive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain aesthetic sins because they sound good. These would have to sound really
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s the thing about the speakers. Anyway, what’s going on with these? You’re seeing them without the
⏹️ ▶️ John grills in them where you can see the stupid yellow speaker cones.
⏹️ ▶️ John not the T40 IIs, not the T40 Series II, not the Roman numeral II, the plain old T40, which
⏹️ ▶️ John looked similar, but not exactly the same. But anyway, they started just spraying static
⏹️ ▶️ John at me in a very unpleasant way. So they’re telling me we are
⏹️ ▶️ John not working. I wanted to confirm that they’re not working because like maybe it’s the power cable, maybe it’s my Mac, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s this, right? So all I needed to do, they take a headphone jack and all I needed to do is play some music into these speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John with a different cable connected to a different device. Should be easy, right? Not when nobody’s home, because every
⏹️ ▶️ John other device I have in the house is USB-C, and they only have lightning to headphone adapters. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was thought of using my daughter’s insane CD player, but I don’t think that is a headphone jack anyway. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I ended up scavenging a, you know, headphone to headphone
⏹️ ▶️ John wire from my, like, airplane noise-canceling headphone
⏹️ ▶️ John bag. I found a lightning to headphone adapter. I grabbed an old lightning iPad out
⏹️ ▶️ John I put it in, connected it to the speakers and they’re broken. I mean, they, it’s the speakers, it’s not my Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the wire. The speakers in a particular frequency range produce
⏹️ ▶️ John very awful static. And so they need to be replaced. So it was time
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to be looking at computer speakers, which one of the things I do not look at constantly, unlike televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John and cars and other things like that. So I did not know exactly what I would be getting replace them because I really don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers. And despite what Marco just said, one of the most important criteria
⏹️ ▶️ John for someone who doesn’t care about speakers, like me, for the speakers to be on my desk is their footprint,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I want to be small to reflect how important I think they are, and how they look.
⏹️ ▶️ John And although these are not beautiful speakers, I think they look okay. With the grills on the front, they’re vertical slabs,
⏹️ ▶️ John they lean back a little bit, they’re dark colored, they don’t stick out too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John The The problem with all of the quote unquote good speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ John which people would argue any powered speaker is not a good speaker, whatever. The problem with higher
⏹️ ▶️ John quality powered speakers that you can connect to your computer is I find so
⏹️ ▶️ John many of them so ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Just so ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To be fair, that is true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I cannot tolerate how, and I know it’s like, why are you picking speakers based on how they look? You
⏹️ ▶️ John listen to them, you don’t have to look at them, but I do have to look at them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they’re right next to your screen. They’re within your field of view all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I don’t, I just, I either want them to just like be unobtrusive,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just not ugly. And so many of these just bother me, like the shape of them bothers me so much. So I was really
⏹️ ▶️ John just narrowing the field based on what can I tolerate the appearance of that doesn’t take up too much
⏹️ ▶️ John room. And that really gets you into the territory of just terrible speakers, as you can imagine. Like the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John I currently have, because like I’m not picking based on sound criteria. Anyway, I did eventually find
⏹️ ▶️ John myself being herded towards some speakers that I can tolerate the appearance
⏹️ ▶️ John of. They are kind of small and I didn’t buy anything yet. I wanted to talk about this in this show just
⏹️ ▶️ John so people who own these speakers can tell me what they think of them. Here are the two choices. These are from the
⏹️ ▶️ John company Kanto, K-A-N-T-O. I have some speaker stands from them that are very nice that are holding up some
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers around my TV. They also make a bunch of powered speakers. They make a line
⏹️ ▶️ John called the Aura, O-R-A. I don’t know how you’re supposed to say it. They make the Kanto Aura and the Kanto Aura 4.
⏹️ ▶️ John 4 is just no space, Kanto Aura 4. These are basically the same speaker. The 4s have
⏹️ ▶️ John a bigger woofer and therefore are bigger speakers. If that was really the only difference, no brainer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kanto Aura, I should just get that one because I don’t need it bigger. Smaller is better for me. Small footprint, they basically look
⏹️ ▶️ John the same but the Aura 4s are just bigger. Why would I get them? And the why is because
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as I don’t care about speakers, they know how to get me on these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John the Aura 4s support 24-bit slash 96 kilohertz and the two 16-bit slash 48 kilohertz.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I won’t be able to hear that, especially on a terrible quality speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John like this. Like why do we even care? But it bothers me. Oh, and by the way, the Aura 4s, 50
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks more than the Aura. It’s like, well, why would anybody buy the Aura? Oh, well, what
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want it to be 0.9 inches narrower? Mm, I do kind of want it to be narrower.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I am leaning towards the Aura 4 just for that reason and presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John they will sound better because they do have a bigger woofer and maybe I can get away with not having a subwoofer when I play video games.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the other time I turn the speakers on playing video games. So the only downside I know about them
⏹️ ▶️ John is they do not have any kind of adjustment on the speaker for like bass and treble and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I can EQ on the computer or on the source, which is probably what you’re supposed to do anyway or whatever, but for a
⏹️ ▶️ John casual person like me, I kind of like having bass and treble, especially because some of the reports have been
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Aura 4 is a little bassier than the Aura and I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John bassier in my life. I do like the subwoofer for like the little kick during video games of explosions and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John guns going off and stuff. But anyway, if you own either the Kanto Aura or the Kanto Aura 4 and
⏹️ ▶️ John you either like it or don’t like it, send me some email, toot it me on Mastodon, tell me what you think of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, mostly what I’m picking these on is because I can tolerate the appearance and also because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John powered, they’re USB, so it’ll be digital audio going from my Mac instead of analog,
⏹️ ▶️ John which appeals to me. They do support a sub out, which I probably won’t buy a sub with them, but if I want a sub, I like
⏹️ ▶️ John that I can just connect one to it. That’s what I’m leaning towards. Haven’t bought anything yet. Please send me your feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John if you own the Kanto Aura and Aura 4 and what you think about them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so I do wanna give two little bits of data points here. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I actually did look at Kanto a while back and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco briefly owned one of their subwoofers. I also tried out the Kanto TUK, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tuk, the T-U-K model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is their higher-end model speaker. I actually ended up returning those because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought they did not sound like their price. The subwoofer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought, was a little bit closer to a good value, but it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my opinion of them at the time was, I think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were more of a design brand than an audio brand, to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it nicely. Because they do look nice. I found them in person to be a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit cheap looking and feeling, but they do… I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re inexpensive speakers. I mean, the exception of the expensive one that you got, like most of their speakers are inexpensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. So, you know, so go into it with that in mind. I mean, compared to what you’re coming from, I’m sure it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be an upgrade. As for the subwoofer and bass claims, the Aura 4 has a 4-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco woofer. You’re gonna want a subwoofer if you care about bass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A 4-inch woofer is… I mean, a 4-inch driver in general on a speaker. You can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some bass out of that, but not a lot. To get good bass out of a speaker driver, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally need it to be bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a way bigger cone than is on my current speakers. Like way bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true, yeah. And you currently don’t have a subwoofer, right? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did for a while, but it was so bad, I just disconnected it because it was just like not worth it. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is, these speakers don’t really support a subwoofer. When I had this up over, it was that weird arrangement where like the audio
⏹️ ▶️ John goes from the computer into the subwoofer and the subwoofer does like the crossover sort
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of. Yeah. It’s just a bit. And it has an output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the speakers. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, but anyway, the the the auras do actually they do auto crossover themselves like 80 kilohertz.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you connect a subwoofer or 80 hertz, sorry, if you connect a subwoofer to them. And so like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not gonna be neutral audio, it’s not gonna be good audio, like I’m not looking for that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, I want them to look nice on my desk, to sound better than what I have, and to not take up too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, if you can get yourself into the subwoofer lifestyle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’ll be able to even better optimize for the other factors you care about. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get like any kind of bass that’s actually sounds like full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range sound, you’re generally looking at like a five inch driver at least. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s- I have a subwoofer attached to all my game consoles for that very reason. Tiny little satellite speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ John big subwoofer, you get the good game sound.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. Like once you get a subwoofer in the system, then you can have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the small desktop speakers on top that are pretty and tiny and you lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot less of the overall sound when you have that kind of setup. But that being said, this was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fine choice. you know, again, huge upgrade from what you’re coming from and given your state of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preferences and what you wanna spend and how much you care about certain things. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the 24 bitness of it is comical in this category
⏹️ ▶️ John would they not put that in the small one? You obviously have the chip. Does it cost two cents more? Just put it in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it could be just like a chip generation kind of thing, but I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would not, like the difference in noise floor that the extra four bits of sampling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution gets you.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not gonna make a difference. This is entirely like getting the CPU where all the parts work, because it makes you feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s not like that, because at least then you’re getting more resources. In this, you literally cannot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like not only can your ear not-
⏹️ ▶️ John My computer won’t even be putting out that audio anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you think, so okay, the bit depth of sound,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that gives you is more dynamic range before you hit the noise floor. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already, 16 bits gives you, I think something like 100 decibels of dynamic range, and 24
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bits extends out to like 120 or something. I forget the exact numbers, but it’s something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the thing is, not only can the human ear not hear that difference,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but these speakers probably can’t produce that difference. No, they can’t, absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t. So you’re very unlikely to have that matter at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Literally in any way. It’s not like you have one fewer CPU core. It’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if the CPUs Computed five extra zeros on the end of every integer
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like the good feeling that you get that the other parts will work better because because
⏹️ ▶️ John It had all the other things working on it that it’s less likely to have a flaw or something. But anyway, yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing about is the or four it’s like a A little bit less than an inch wider
⏹️ ▶️ John and a little it’s actually shorter than the current speaker So it’s not that much bigger I figured it would give me a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John more base to maybe tide me over longer without a subwoofer Like I said, these are these the cones on these
⏹️ ▶️ John things are like one and a half inches or something So it’s still an upgrade and you may be asking yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t you get the giga works t40 series 2? It’s entirely because of the stupid little stand
⏹️ ▶️ John they have underneath them I think it makes them look uglier and also I do want something better than I had before I do want to actually upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why I’m just not getting essentially the same speaker as I have You know 16 over 16 years
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good run for some cruddy little computer speakers that Actually for their size and price that I got
⏹️ ▶️ John these for I think they like they’re this is like a less than $100 speaker That I bought ages ago. They’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ John like 70 or 80 bucks when I bought them maybe less Phenomenal sound for a 70 or 80 dollar
⏹️ ▶️ John power computer speaker like incredible bargain. They don’t sound good, but it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John like 70 bucks, I mean, what do you expect? Like they’re siblings in the same price range where
⏹️ ▶️ John like those disgusting white PC speakers that you get with like your Gateway 2000, they were just
⏹️ ▶️ John garbage. I had those, they were
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So bad, I had them too. I had them attached
⏹️ ▶️ John to my Mac and I can tell you, they were in the same price class as these things and these are so much better. So kudos
⏹️ ▶️ John to Creative for filling a price point with speakers that were just so much better than everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else’s, Now I am graduating upwards to more expensive speakers. Maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See why I think you should go retro, go for like those like clear sound stick things that came on Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sound sticks. I was never a fan of those. And I think Stephen Haggett still has them. I don’t know if she still is. You know, I was never a fan
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Harmon Card and sound sticks and the jellyfish sub. But what about the little like little ball ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that looked at you? The spheres, those spheres weren’t bad. I had them when I reviewed the G4 Cube.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had those. they came with it as like part of the whole big package setup. They were pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John for like single driver little round speakers. They and
⏹️ ▶️ John like that clear case, there was like Apple quality, like the clear case that they came in was solid enough. It actually was
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty sturdy case. A lot of speaker quality actually has to do with the case. For people
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t know about speakers, believe it or not, the case is significantly affects the speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so when you can make a solid one, it does help. But, you know, in the end, they were one tiny driver. or so what do you expect?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, one thing that you will probably also encounter here, one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve noticed a lot is that speaker engineering and speaker technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has really come a long way in the last five to 10 years. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers that used to seem really good or used to sound really good compared to their peers like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 20 years ago, like they did back then, but compared to a modern, even like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mid-range modern speaker. Modern speakers, largely, not all of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but many of them are just so much better than speakers used to be. And part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, yes, they are now often doing DSP and kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equalizing the sound to sound better on them to make up for their flaws.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s pluses and minuses to that, but that’s fine. Also just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of advances in engineering, we’re able to engineer better enclosures. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John was just saying, the enclosure around a speaker matters a lot for the sound. Just, it affects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how the air moves in the speaker, how resonances occur, and reflections and distortions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes a pretty big difference. Well, there’s been so many advances in speaker design and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology over the last few decades that people are 3D printing insides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cases to minimize reflections and all sorts of fun techniques like that. Speakers have come a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long way, way more than you might assume like in the last five or 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And modern speakers are really, in many cases, a pretty big step above what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we used to have. And that’s impressive, because what we used to have was also really good. But they’re even better now.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another thing that I’m looking for when I was looking at the speakers is the wires that come out of the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of them can’t be humongous, which you think wouldn’t be a big deal, especially if you’re thinking of passive speakers. But remember, these
⏹️ ▶️ John are powered speakers. usually the power only goes to one speaker. So you somehow have to get both sound
⏹️ ▶️ John and power to the other speaker. And the speakers that I prefer for my gaming consoles, I like
⏹️ ▶️ John them because they’re cheap and they sound good enough for games and they have strong bass. But the cable
⏹️ ▶️ John that connects from one speaker to the other is like a garden hose.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who cares? Why does that matter? Because I have to position the speaker,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a left speaker has to be positioned to my left and the right speaker has to be positioned to my right. So I have to get this garden
⏹️ ▶️ John hose like cable that has to come from somewhere and go pretty far to the left for the left
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker. And it doesn’t want to, it’s like think of trying to manipulate a garden hose full of water. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to be cable managed in any way. It wants to be this giant snake that’s just like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t bend me. It’s just, I don’t know what’s in it. It’s incredibly thick. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s thicker, I’m trying to think of the equivalent. There is no equivalent cable. It is thicker, it is as thick
⏹️ ▶️ John as my outdoor extension cord. That’s how thick it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is. Think about
⏹️ ▶️ John an outdoor rated extension
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cord. Oftentimes I have seen that cable be an ethernet cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, no, you’re thinking of the Kef things because you’re a fancy boy. But yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, but even other ones. I used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a little class D amp that did that same thing between its things. I’ve seen that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes, the cable that goes between the speakers on a powered speaker set, oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in some form. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like power over ethernet for the power and then audio. like yeah, ethernet is common. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco other one is the one that- Or at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least it uses, you know, it uses RJ45 and, you know, Cat6 cables. Like it’s not, it might not be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ethernet protocol. And you can pick
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever cable you want. It could be nice and flexible. You can use flat cables, the yada yada. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Kanto Auras use what basically looks like a four pin serial connector. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John wire is thin-ish, you know, it’s not bad. It’s, my current one that I have,
⏹️ ▶️ John my current cheap speakers, essentially use what looks like speaker wire to connect the non-powered speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s basically the best you’re gonna get. I don’t didn’t expect that but Because it’s analog
⏹️ ▶️ John right everything’s analog and this thing is analog audio going into it. It’s analog audio going between them I believe on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Auras is certainly is digital going into the back because I’m gonna be connecting it with USB C And then I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John it is digital from speaker to speaker as well. I know there must be power as well So anyway, we’ll see how it goes. But it well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the point is it’s not a garden hose I should take a picture of and send it to you. Maybe it’s not as big as outdoor extension cable
⏹️ ▶️ John extension cord maybe it’s indoor extension cord, but it is monstrously thick and does not want to be
⏹️ ▶️ John cable managed. And it’s because the speakers are so small too. Like when you try to pull the speaker towards you and
⏹️ ▶️ John it slides back because the cable doesn’t want to make the 90 degree off the end of the desk. Like that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John ornery these cables are. It’s real bad. Speakers are nice though. It’s the, I think I wish I have, I have like
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of Logitech, like Dolby THX. So it’s just for gaming. It’s like, it does
⏹️ ▶️ John not realistic sound, but the on-desk speakers are small and the subwoofer is not
⏹️ ▶️ John too big and unobtrusive. and it’s real cheap to get the setup, but I’ve bought two of these so far. Despite the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John the stupid potentiometer or whatever the hell it is that is the volume knob gets static after a while and I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John spray like an electrical contact cleaner into it, still, still I bought a second one even knowing that. It’s kind of like my cheese