666: We Have Nothing That Hot
20 Nov 2025The rumored end of the Mac Pro, the rumored end of Tim Cook’s CEO tenure, and the resurrection of matte screens.
Episode Description:
- 🗣️ New ATP Member’s Special: ATP Diamond Dogs: Talk Me Out of It II
- ATP Diamond Dogs: Talk Me Out of It — 16 October 2023
- Follow-up:
- The origin of “diamond dogs” (via Jared Counts)
- Matte, glossy, glass, and nanotexture (via Johnny “Decimal” Noble)
- Steam Machine
- PlayStation 5 OS is FreeBSD-based (via Jesús Santaigo Narváez)
- Steam Frame
- Lenses (via Michael)
- Spec chart (via James O’Loughlin)
- Top strap image
- Steam → Apple Vision Pro using ALVR (via Iain Wallace)
- SteamOS
- Is not universally supported (via DavidSchaub)
- Alternatives (via solmnmagus)
- Anti-cheat considerations (via Julian Torres)
- Screw it, I’m installing Linux
- Steam strategy
- Is Steam-on-ARM popular?
- Steam has only one person to answer to (via charlesesmith)
- Single thread performance ranking (via Steven Op de beeck)
- “High-Res Antiglare” (via Adam Wunn)
- John mourns the recent news
- GPU issues (via Colin Cornaby)
- GeekBench Metal scores
- The Case for a True Mac Pro Successor
- Tim Cook to step down as early as next year
- Post-show: Declan discovers “HyperCard”
- Members-only ATP Overtime: The App Store on the web
Sponsored by:
- DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online.
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code atp.
- SKIMS: Comfortable underwear, socks, t-shirts, leggings & more.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Wood update 🖼️
- Special: Diamond Dogs II
- About “Diamond Dogs”
- Matte, glossy, glass, nanotexture
- Sponsor: SKIMS
- Steam hardware follow-up
- M5 performance follow-up
- Casey was right!
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Mac Pro: Don’t Believe
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- Tim Cook to step down soon?
- Ending theme
- Declan’s HyperCard
Wood update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m happy to report that all of my wood cutting and wood hanging and shelf hanging is complete.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hooray! Yep, I figured out a bunch of stu- I actually had to go to the hardware store twice, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, because I ran out of wood, because I needed more than I thought. Otherwise, it all went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. Uh, I didn’t injure myself too badly at any point. Good. I did probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as predicted, probably used way too many screws and probably dramatically overbuilt,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, things. But- That’s fine. I was I was happy to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all out and it worked out great and Tip was very pleased with it, and we’re all very happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the results. Did you do any sanding? Mmm. What’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I supposed to sand so you’re cutting pieces of wood when you have the cut end It’s kind of like sharp. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John sharp corners on the cut end.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, they’re a disaster
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t want to like Sarah saying you could sand those edges down a little bit, so they’re not so spiky and splintery?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would have been better. Instead I just left them spiky and splintery. I’m like I’m not gonna touch that it’s full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of splinters. I mean they’re all like most of these pieces of wood are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so high off the ground that you can’t really reach them without some kind of stepping device from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ground anyway so like it’s not really an issue and and they’re not they’re not really in places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’d be reaching without looking.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should send some pictures you put them in the slack we’d love to see your handiwork.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right yeah you You can see my, and now keep in mind, the disclaimer here is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did nothing to reduce the amount of stuff. All I did was put it all up on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wall. I know this looks great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You did a good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we still have a huge amount of stuff and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not changed and will take longer to change. At least now it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the floor. What are the brackets made out of? The ones that hold the shelves?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re metal, they’re like Amazon shelves. had, I’ve had a few other copies of these shelves around the house for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John of years. Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John see. So the shelves that you’re, what we’re just looking at is the wood backing that you described for getting around the, your stud issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And I did find every stud and screwed each board into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every stud. And there are, there are three two by fours holding up each, each shelf because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I originally had planned two. This is why I had to go get more wood. I originally had planned two, but the spacing of the screw holes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on those shelf brackets was such that it would have been like they would have been mounted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very close to the edges of the two by fours and I didn’t like the security of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and so I went back and I made them all three boards and I had to get more wood.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh there you go now I feel like you’re weak looking at this picture I feel like the weak link is your Amazon shelves and not your
⏹️ ▶️ John wood on the wall. Definitely like wood will be secure the wall and those brackets are going to snap in half from the weight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah like I mean the shelves like they’re they’re they’re not like massive like I wouldn’t store lumber up there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s good enough for like bins of household crap. They’re they’re rated for like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, 300 pounds each. I don’t think they would actually hold that. But certainly in their current figuration,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the metal of something would bend before they would fall out of the wall.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I was thinking you were making the shelves themselves, which is why I was worried about the sanding the edges. But these things being against the wall,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, Saving them still would have been nicer, but it’s fine.
Special: Diamond Dogs II
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, let’s do some, oh wait, I was going to say follow up, but I forgot a step. Thankfully, John has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put it in our internal show notes in purple font with a yellow background,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I think is deliberately hideous, but it served its purpose. Because I almost forgot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to mention, we have a new member special! We have ATP Diamond Dogs Talk Me Out of It 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, would you like to talk about this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you recall, members, there was a member special, what was it, about a year ago? Maybe a little more? Something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was basically John had an idea for an app and he wanted us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to talk him out of making it. This member special is a similar kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except this time I had an idea for an app that I might want to make. And I was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming to the Diamond Dogs, the advisory group here, and asking John and Casey to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk me in or out of making this app. So I think it’s pretty interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re into that kind of thing, I think you might find interesting too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. The last one was October 16 of 2013 for what it’s worth. What? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2013. Oh, is that what I said? Sorry. 2023. This is what I mean, not what I say. I was like, why is that startling?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s perfectly rea- No, that’s not reasonable at all. My apologies. There you go. When I said 2013, I meant 2023. We’ll fix it in post.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s fine. Anyways, so yeah, a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of years ago now that we convinced John to do or maybe not to do something. And now it’s our turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to convince Marco to do or not to do something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And lots of members who have already listened to it are, uh, they have offered their opinions about whether you should
⏹️ ▶️ John make the app and they were all saying, Marco, please make it because I want an app like that. So if you want to hear what kind of app
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re clamoring for and whether or not Marco is going to make it or, and, or whether or not he’ll ever redistribute it to them, check out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And for whatever it’s worth, um, I have done some feasibility studies in the meantime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see like if I do this, could I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what would it take and you know certain certain kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of tech demo efforts of like oh let me just see if this API works the way I think it does or let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me see if I can work around this limitation of this API and so far the demos are all pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco positive. I still don’t know if I should do it, but now I know that I can do it. It’s good for step
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I still don’t have a name. Oh, you got lots of names. I got lots of bad
⏹️ ▶️ John names. You got the one you got the one we talked about on the member special and you got many suggestions after that from other people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, they’re they’re rough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rough. Nothing could be worse than face splash. That’s all I’m saying.
About “Diamond Dogs”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. Jared Counts writes with regard to Diamond Dogs, the Diamond Dogs and Ted Lasso
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are actually a reference to an album by David Bowie, in which the Diamond Dogs are a gang of kids. Granted, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only know this because of the show The Venture Brothers, in which an elite squad of villains is called the Diamond Dogs and is led by either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Bowie himself or a shapeshifter who likes looking like him.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mentioned at the top of the member special that we had called AATP Diamond Dogs because at the time we made that special,
⏹️ ▶️ John Ted Lasso and the ep— particularly the episode where the Diamond Dogs were convened was kind of in pop culture
⏹️ ▶️ John memory, but now as time passes, that leaves our memory, and it turns out Diamond Dogs were actually pre-date. Now, we might have
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned this before in an earlier episode, like after the first Diamond Dogs, but I’ve forgotten. Anyway, turns
⏹️ ▶️ John out this reference is even older from a David Bowie album, although I will say that the David Bowie album and the gang of
⏹️ ▶️ John kids and everything isn’t the same as the Diamond Dogs and Ted Lasso, which is very explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ John a group of friends who convened to offer advice to each other, and that’s what we’re referencing in the title.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I guess every time we make one of these episodes, every two years or so, we will remind you why it’s called ATP Diamond
⏹️ ▶️ John Dogs. They’re not don’t have to all be talking me out of it. It just so happens that these first two
⏹️ ▶️ John have been about. Should I or shouldn’t I make this app?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Because we’re us. Because we are us.
Matte, glossy, glass, nanotexture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Johnny Decimal Noble writes, listening to you talk about the nanotexture iPads, it struck me that for years we had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nanotexture. We just called it matte. Then it went away, and now it’s back, and it costs hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of dollars? Seems like a terrific marketing trick by an evil genius. What’s up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, in all fairness, it was not always free in the past. So there used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be, right before the Retina transition in the laptops, the outgoing 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro before that had what we called glossy or glass screen, and it also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a matte, no, I think it’d be four glass. So it was glossy and it was matte. The matte option, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost like a hundred bucks more back then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And wasn’t it like marginally higher resolution? Not wildly higher, but I think it was lightly higher.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know about, well, cause they changed, they tweaked the resolution, like in the very last year of it to be a little bit higher. So that might’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been what you’re thinking of. Maybe that’s what I’m thinking of. But yeah, it was an option for a matte screen and it was a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more money. But generally speaking, what happened was like everything, I don’t think it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, a marketing thing to first go glossy and then make us pay later. Basically, everything went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to glass front of screens instead of before. It was, I think, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a plastic layer in front of LCDs before. Right, John? Was that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, all they were. I think the area you’re talking about with, uh, with the matte option for extra money,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, was in the era before there was glass in front of the screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John The history of sort of flat screen monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. There was plastic glossy too. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John The flat screen monitors were a matte finish for a very
⏹️ ▶️ John long time. CRTs were basically glass cathode ray tubes, and some of them had
⏹️ ▶️ John anti-glare coatings on them and stuff like that. But in the era of LCD flat panel monitors, very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very often from the beginning, pretty much all of them had some kind of, I don’t know, hazy
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of plastic on the front. Some of it was for light dispersion, you know, but it was it was they were matte. What we would
⏹️ ▶️ John describe now is Matt. The quote unquote innovation was glossy displays. That happened very
⏹️ ▶️ John late before the transition to glass screens on Mac laptops, like toward
⏹️ ▶️ John the tail end of the LCD. PC maker said, you know what, if this, if we put, if the piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of plastic on the front of this LCD is really, really shiny plastic, shiny things
⏹️ ▶️ John attract consumers. Like there are those birds that are attracted to shiny things. Magpies is it? Maybe they just collect stuff. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John Shiny people like shiny things. So let’s put really, really shiny plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John on the front of our LCD panels. And that became known as the glossy displays. And they were all over the PC market.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was quote unquote behind here because they didn’t put shiny plastic on
⏹️ ▶️ John their LCDs, but they couldn’t stay away forever. And eventually maybe they couldn’t even get many matte screens
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple transitioned to putting a shiny piece of plastic on the front of their LCDs instead of a cloudy
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of plastic and then offered the cloudy slash matte piece of plastic as an extra cost option.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then eventually Apple went glass for their screens, where the surface that you would touch with your finger was
⏹️ ▶️ John made of glass. And that’s where we are today. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the origin. Like everything was matte for a really, really long time. And then there was the glossy plastic era,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I didn’t like because I thought they looked awful and I thought it looked like there was too much glare and reflections and it was plastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it was kind of like wavy and disgusting. Anyway, I didn’t like it. Then Apple still said, well, for the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John still want that matte look, we offer this. And then Apple went glass. Nanotexture
⏹️ ▶️ John is the return of matte in the era of glass because nanotexture does not take a glass front
⏹️ ▶️ John on a screen and put a thin film on it, which you can do. Lots of screens do that. Lots of displays do that. It’s a piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of glass and they put like this sticky film on it. That is the matte film. Instead, it is various ways of etching
⏹️ ▶️ John the glass to make the glass itself have a fuzzy and less smooth surface.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why does it cost more now? I don’t know inflation. It’s probably more complicated to
⏹️ ▶️ John etch that surface onto glass, especially when it’s very fine etching versus rough etching. Again, Apple uses,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, three different methods to etch the Pro Display, XDR, the iPad and the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John displays. So anyway, there you go. That’s that’s a brief history of matte versus glossy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the only one I really, really didn’t like was glossy plastic because it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John the worst of all possible worlds.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that was the worst one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And matte plastic was better. I do like the glass displays of today
⏹️ ▶️ John without the nanotexture and then nanotexture has lots of fans like Marco who really like that. So there you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And to be clear, like if you look at when people today say why they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t like nanotexture, you can see why, like the reason why everyone switched to glossy was not just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a fad. It’s because the the the glossy front screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had less diffusion in the surface of the image. You know, the way that matte
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nanotextures, you know, textures work is they diffuse the light as it reflects off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, they have some kind of bumpy surface on some level or a grainy or something. There’s something in the surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or on the surface that diffuses the reflection so it scatters those light beams. What that also does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is scatter the light beams from the image itself in from the display so it does slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blur the image now back in the olden days before retina the pixels were so big no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one cared it like it didn’t matter but
⏹️ ▶️ John was and also those matte plastic screens the texture was very fine it was like that on the pro display so
⏹️ ▶️ John very very fine texture it wasn’t it wasn’t like it was blurring
⏹️ ▶️ John it like if you put like a paper like thing on top of an iPad screen like that’s much worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, oh, definitely. And the reason why, and the paper-like is way more diffuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than nanotexture because to have that kind of, the paper-like texture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need a decent amount of thickness and you need a decent amount of friction. So like the grain of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the surface has to be like, you know, it’s like coarser sandpaper type. It’s like, you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a higher grain to be like more friction, you know, and that higher grain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blurs the image more. nanotexture is a very, very, very fine grain. So it still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scatters a light, but it blurs the image a lot less than most of the other options, but it still blurs the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco image more than clear glass would. And so as we went into the era of higher resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brighter, more saturated color screens, people wanted to see the full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effect of that. They wanted to see all those super sharp retina pixels. They wanted to see all those super bright,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they wanted the contrast. Like that’s the matte finishes raised black levels in TV parlance, which means that if you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John totally black screen, it looks a little bit gray because light coming from literally anywhere that hitting your screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of it will bounce into your eyes because the matte surface scatters it in every possible direction. Whereas if you have a glossy
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, you’ll see like light reflecting from like a light overhead as a clear
⏹️ ▶️ John reflection of your screen, but the parts that don’t have the light on it, they’ll be black, the blackest of black. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want maximum contrast, you want glossy. If you don’t want to see a mirror like
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly sharp, bright reflections of light sources, you want matte of some kind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I actually, I said, I believe in the last episode how I had tried a nanotexture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad pro in a store and I tried the pencil on it and it did feel more textured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the flat glass iPads, like when writing with a pencil, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not even close to as textured as the paper-like film feels. So, you know, you’re optimizing for different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. An iPad with the paper-like film, or like my preferred one is the Astro Rock Paper Pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is very similar in qualities to the paper-like brand, except it sticks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on magnetically, so it’s way easier to install and remove and reinstall if you want to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is always a pain with the actual paper-like sticky films. But an iPad with one of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paper texture films, the picture quality takes a significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit. have worse contrast, it does have less brightness, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more blurry, like it takes a significant hit, but if you are optimizing for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a textured paper-like feel, that might be a valid trade-off for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nanotexture, I find, is a nice middle ground between the two. If you want a little bit of friction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you do not want to sacrifice almost any image quality, that’s nanotexture. And if you don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about pencil friction at all, and you want the best image quality to watch movies in John’s bed, get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OLED iPad and have glass front. And so we kind of have all those options now.
Sponsor: SKIMS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Skims. We all wear underwear,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least most of us, you know, every day or at least most days. And so what’s really nice about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Skims is this is a brand that’s been making women’s clothing for a while. It’s been pretty well regarded.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve gotten into men’s clothing recently and they have this really great underwear. Now they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sent me a couple of pairs and I admit, I was like, it’s underwear, you know, it’s probably gonna be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so much nicer than I thought. Like number one, when I first put it on, the first thing I noticed, oh my gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this fabric feels amazing on me. And if I’m honest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it looks amazing too. I know this is really what everybody wanted to hear is descriptions of that, but if you can either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture that if you want to, or more likely avoid picturing that, it looks amazing and it makes you therefore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel good because you know that you look amazing. And of course, as I said, like the fabric is smooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and soft and it wears very sheer. And so basically like you can put on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, pants or shorts or whatever, and they can be snug if you want, and you won’t see your underwear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outline because it’s like a nice, thin, sheer fabric. So you can look good, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel good, it’s nice underwear. Check it out at skims.com. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shop their women’s stuff, their men’s stuff, whatever you want. I’ve had both the cotton and stretch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco materials for the boxer briefs, and they are great. So skims.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check them out yourself. Let them know we sent you. After you place your order, What you do is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you select podcast in the survey of how you found them and select our show in the drop down menu that follows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So once again, skims.com, place your order, select podcast and tell them you came from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this podcast. And if you’re looking for the perfect gifts this season, the Skims Holiday Shop is also now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open. Once again, skims.com, S-K-I-M-S.com. Thanks to Skims
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show.
Steam hardware follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to the Steam Machine, David Schaub writes, uh, inciting a Eurogamer article, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steam Machine doesn’t have an APU with an integrated GPU like other consoles. It is more like a gaming laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a discrete GPU. Uh, the CPU is a semi-custom AMD Zen 4, 6 core, 12 thread up to 4.8 gigahertz, 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watts. Uh, what is TDP again? I’m drawing a blank. Total design power? Something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. Uh, GPU, semi-custom AMD. Thermal design power? power as semi custom AMD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CUs 2.45 gigahertz sustained clock 110
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watts TDP, eight gigabytes of GDDR6.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also valve has told YouTubers that it will be priced more like a PC than a console.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s kind of a disappointing. They didn’t have a combined, uh, uh, CPU GPU like the PlayStation
⏹️ ▶️ John five has. Uh, but it would probably would have cost a lot more money to develop one of those. Cause they’re kind of custom
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re not going to just get the one from the PS five or whatever. So it turns out it’s more like a fancy gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop with a huge heatsink, but then you can see the power distribution here. It’s 30 Watts just for the CPU and it’s 110
⏹️ ▶️ John Watts for the GPU. Again, it doesn’t matter, this is not a laptop, it’s plugged into the wall, it’s a little six
⏹️ ▶️ John inch cube, but there you go. It’s more like a small gaming PC with a discrete CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The PlayStation 5 OS is based on FreeBSD, not Linux. Thanks to Jesus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Santiago Navarez for pointing this out. From
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wikipedia’s BSD, or Berkeley Software Distribution page, code from BSD’s Open Descendants have themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also been integrated into various modern platforms, including the system software for the PlayStation 5. From
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the PSDevWiki.com website, the PlayStation 5 kernel is based on FreeBSD 11.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John correctly my mistake. I was saying how they playstation as an example of a non-windows platform
⏹️ ▶️ John playing PC caliber games Because I said it was based on Linux. It’s not it’s BSD
⏹️ ▶️ John the kernel anyway I mean who knows what the user space is like on those things. I’m sure ps5 devs know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There enough the Steam frame their quote-unquote vision Pro Michael writes the quest 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 3 s use Fresnel lenses the Cornell for now That’s what I said for now lenses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the quest pro in quest 3 have pancake lenses Pancake-ay, just like the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Steam Frame. James O’Loughlin writes, The Steam Frame
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very similar in display and optical stack as the MetaQuest 3. Both have pancake lenses. Both are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roughly 2K per eye and use LCD panels with similar backlighting. They’re likely to be in the same ballpark in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of price. The Snapdragon 8 chip on the Steam Frame is slightly newer and more powerful than the Quest 3’s 8th XR 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gen 2 chip. James also writes, Here’s a handy chart and a great website for comparing specs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is VR compare dot com. We will link in the show notes. Also, I believe they’ll sell a top strap for the steam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frame separately, including knuckle straps like index controller style. Curious what other accessories will ship. Here’s an image from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Upload VR. Put a link to that in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, their top strap looks kind of like Apple’s old top strap, like just a like a well, there’s this Velcro, I think, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John a basic strap that goes along the top when you have to adjust kind of manually by, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John undoing the Velcro and redoing it. So it’s still kind of clunky. but again,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Steam Frame has all sorts of potential options because that whole front part disconnects from
⏹️ ▶️ John it, so they can refine the ergonomic setup without changing the
⏹️ ▶️ John compute part. And the divide on the cheaper headsets, it’s confusing because of the names,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Quest 2 and 3S have Fresnel lenses, which are cheaper and
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller, but the Quest Pro and Quest 3 have the Pancake lenses, which
⏹️ ▶️ John are not, do you guys know what Fresnel lenses look like. I think I
⏹️ ▶️ John last time as like a, like a circular ridges, like on a ruffled potato chip, but in circles.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, if you took a regular sort of like lens that’s, you know, shaped like a lens in your eyeball and
⏹️ ▶️ John sliced it into a million concentric circles and then laid those concentric circles flat, that’s literally what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’ve ever been to visit a lighthouse and they take you to the very top, they show you the thing that’s in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of the light to magnify it. And it’s this kind of Rigi glass thing. That’s a gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John Fresnel lens. The smaller was it’s a way to magnify things without having a big thick lens
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s gonna takes the big thick lens light slices it into rings and squishes the rings takes out the middle part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Lens, but it does blur things up a little bit And so pancake lenses are more like it what you would imagine a traditional
⏹️ ▶️ John lens looks like inside a camera lens or a telescope lens or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John There you have it. I was trying to look up some specs of see we’re saying Oh pancake lenses don’t block a lot of light every
⏹️ ▶️ John lens blocks some amount of light I the specs I saw that I looked up were more
⏹️ ▶️ John optimistic than the person who posted they said that like pancake lenses don’t allow 15% of light transmission,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the thing I said for a look thing I found by Googling was like a particular pancake lens in
⏹️ ▶️ John a in a particular headset was allowing 25% light transmission But you know all lenses cut down on light transmission
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s no getting around it when you have to Project the image from these screens into our eyeballs and some I need
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of lensing system Um, so yeah, that’s why, that’s why screens of all types need to be bright inside headsets
⏹️ ▶️ John to make their way through the lenses that are in front of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Ian Walls writes, want to stream games from steam to an Apple vision pro. Yup. You can do that with ALVR.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’ll need a PC and controllers, but it works well enough for people to beat expert level beat saber. Uh, one John Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have found a guide on Reddit, which we’ll link in the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes. Yeah. Lots of people are talking about this. Like you have to go to like a GitHub page and download a thing. And it’s, it’s a little bit of an
⏹️ ▶️ John involved setup, but it’s basically it lets you, what they’re saying is stream VR games
⏹️ ▶️ John to your Vision Pro. I guess you would use the PlayStation VR controllers with your Vision Pro and stream them there. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s a way to use your $3,500 headset as merely a streaming display
⏹️ ▶️ John for a game that is running on a PC. But you know, you can do it if you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in all fairness, what most people who like the Vision Pro tell us they use it most for is as an expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display for some other kind of computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John That hurts. Or watching content that’s downloaded directly to the Vision Pro. It’s a good television watching
⏹️ ▶️ John device as well. Although that could be streamed, you know, from another place if you wanted to as well, but it’s not, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John coming from the device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey More from David Schaub this time with regard to Stream SteamOS. It does not yet support arbitrary PC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware. It just lets you try it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the PC way. Might work, try it. The Apple way would be to not let you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try it. Also fair. Solon Magnus writes, Steam Machine is a great step forward for those that don’t want to build something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey themselves, but there are at least two Linux distributions that deliver SteamOS-like experience. Bazite,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey B-A-Z-I-T-E. And look
⏹️ ▶️ John up pronunciation for this one. I kept saying bazite when I read it. I honestly have no idea how to pronounce it. Like bazil? Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s B-A-Z-I-T-E. How do you want to say it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bazite, bazil. Is it a mineral? Bazite? I don’t know, man. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey KakiOS. These make an effort to include Valve’s patches and updates for the best compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and offer images that launch into Steam’s big picture interface. Steam Machine itself has some hardware features for TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like TV use like CEC, But 95% of the experience can be replicated today with low
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to mid-range gaming PC. Julian Torres writes, many of the biggest multiplayer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PC games, typically FPS games, actually require Microsoft Windows because of cheat detection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software that is deep ties into the Windows kernel. Without it, some games just straight up won’t run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or even when the game itself would work just fine on SteamOS. For what it’s worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we note that the Windows anti-cheat stuff is also an issue on the Mac when you’re using crossover or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar adapter software?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, a lot of people were suggesting, you know, I was talking about gaming on ARM and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, thinking of my ARM Mac future and like you should try crossover. And then my
⏹️ ▶️ John immediate question was, does it work with anti-cheat? So I’m familiar with this because Destiny has some anti-cheat stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in and so do a lot of competitive, I don’t know, multiplayer games
⏹️ ▶️ John where cheating is a problem. Where if you were to run some software locally on your PC
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, you could try to change the game such that you have an unfair advantage,
⏹️ ▶️ John like making walls invisible or auto-aim things that automatically put your crosshair on people’s heads and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, cheating stuff. And in multiplayer games, that ruins the game for everybody if you try to join
⏹️ ▶️ John a multiplayer game and some people are cheating. So the anti-cheat stuff has to do
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that Apple OSs are familiar with from a security standpoint, which is stop someone from doing
⏹️ ▶️ John something to the software that’s running on their machine. And the way lots of Windows gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John anti-cheat stuff does this is with deep, deep hooks into the kernel, into the Windows kernel
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, detect if anything has changed or modified or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s these anti-cheat things themselves are sort of scary software because they’re like running inside your kernel and doing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff with it. It’s the only way that they can stop other, they can either detect or stop
⏹️ ▶️ John this cheating software from running locally on people’s PCs. And as far
⏹️ ▶️ John as I’m aware, that Windows anti-cheat stuff, we don’t have a way, nobody’s figured out a good way to
⏹️ ▶️ John make that anti-cheat stuff work when those games are running on Linux. Cause obviously it’s running the Linux kernel, not
⏹️ ▶️ John the Windows kernel. And I know there’s adapter layers for all the DirectX APIs, and there’s emulation and so on and so forth,
⏹️ ▶️ John but down at the kernel level, apparently this is a nut that hasn’t been cracked. Maybe they put them in a Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John virtual machine somewhere or something like that, but even then, it’s not quite the same thing as, you know. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John if, if they, those games were allowed to run on Linux, that seems like another venue for cheaters because
⏹️ ▶️ John they could find a way to defeat the anti cheat software that thinks it’s running a windows, but it’s really running on Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re able to fake it out. And anyway, it’s a complicated problem, but it does mean that some of the most popular
⏹️ ▶️ John games, uh, won’t work on, uh, Linux, um, steamOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and also won’t work for Mac users who are trying to run windows games with crossover or with Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John game porting toolkit or stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing from Julian, I’m not aware if this is something Valve is already working on, but I bet that they are. These big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey games have a lot of mindshare in gamers’ heads, which ends up keeping a lot of people in windows. I think that when that domino falls
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Valve can essentially emulate those systems, or maybe become popular enough to come up with their own anti-cheat system that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compatible with Linux, Microsoft might wake up to the Steam threat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and we’ll get to a little bit more of that in a second, but like that’s, you know, if Valve
⏹️ ▶️ John is able to convince people, like these big game makers who are making like Call of Duty or even like Destiny or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, I know you’re using this, usually using like a third party anti-cheat thing that has deep hooks into the Windows kernel,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, here’s what you should do to make an anti-cheat system that works in SteamOS
⏹️ ▶️ John on Linux, or maybe they’ll vend their own third party anti-cheat service and then get,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, convince game makers to install that in their game. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft should already be waking up to the threat of these, but if they’re, but if they’re able to convince game makers, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you know, that windows game you’re making, add a bunch of complication to it so
⏹️ ▶️ John that it can run on Linux with all the anti-cheat protection that you desire. And if, if any
⏹️ ▶️ John game, any big game makers say yes to that, Microsoft should absolutely wake up because like they’re stealing your market.
⏹️ ▶️ John But maybe not. I will see in a moment or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Nathan Edwards writes on The Verge today, screw it, I’m installing Linux. Valve’s hard work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting Windows games to run well on Linux-based Steam Deck has lifted all boats. Gaming handhelds that ship with Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run better and have higher frame rates on Bazight, a Fedora-based distro, than they do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Windows. And after reading about the upcoming Steam Machine and fellow Verge writer Antonio’s experience running Bazight on the Framework
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Desktop, I want to try it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, one note for Nathan. I think if you’re going to say that Valve’s hard work getting Windows games to run well on Linux-based
⏹️ ▶️ John Steam Deck has lifted all boats. You got to put tide somewhere earlier in that sentence. Is a tide that has lifted all boats? You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t use just half of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey common saying. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the editor should have caught that one. Anyway, a lot of people sent that in, whatever this recent, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a link to it in the article of like, whatever this recent test was showing higher frame rates for running a Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John game on Linux than you get on Windows. Again, Microsoft should wake up. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is a sign that things are not going the way you expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to strategy, How many people are running Steam games on ARM? Well, we can answer that, sort of. Store.steampowered.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash hwsurvey. Lars Boris writes, according to the Steam hardware survey, about 95%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of users are on Windows, 3% on Linux, and 2% on macOS. Not a perfect source, but still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite interesting. And Ava adds, and of that 3% that’s Linux, only 27% is running SteamOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s obviously, it’s still mostly Windows gaming. Like, this is interesting because they’re getting a foothold.
⏹️ ▶️ John and obviously the Steam Deck has existed for a while, but that is a handheld gaming PC,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a category that the Steam Deck essentially, you know, pioneered, if not
⏹️ ▶️ John the Switch pioneering, like sort of handheld PC caliber gaming, but still it’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ John big of a market, even though there are more people entering it. The Steam Machine may or may not change that. Like previously
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like, okay, well, what if I don’t want to play handheld? Is it easy for me to get a SteamOS
⏹️ ▶️ John powered desktop caliber gaming thing? And the answer up until now was, oh, you could build
⏹️ ▶️ John one and there are some other small fault factor PCs, but this one being blessed by Valve is a little bit of a big deal. But
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Valve is not going to promote the Steam Machine that hard, because again, they make all their money from the store. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it will just be a curiosity. Maybe these numbers won’t move much, but there was a story, a couple of stories recently
⏹️ ▶️ John that even though the numbers are small, that Linux percentage has grown a lot recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, granted, it’s still only 3%, but if it was 1.5% six months ago, it
⏹️ ▶️ John has doubled. So, you know, the trend line is interesting, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft doesn’t have to worry too much that they’re going to, that their gaming dominance is going to disappear overnight, but I do think they
⏹️ ▶️ John should be paying attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Charles E. Smith writes, Valve is not publicly traded. It can do a lot of things that Sony, Microsoft, or Apple would never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do because it doesn’t have to answer to anyone, but Gabe Newell, the president and co-founder of Valve. It’s worth noting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other founder, Mike Harrington, sold a stake in Valve to Newell in 2000, left the company. Charles continues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Valve is already effectively a monopoly in PC gaming, but unlike the app store, the steam store has only gotten better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They have already played the hell out of the long game and they can do that with this as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And why does steam get better? Because you can buy games, not on steam. Game companies
⏹️ ▶️ John have their own terrible stories. Usually there’s the Epic store. You can buy directly from the game maker. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the only store in town. The only, it’s not the only game in town. Uh, not the only
⏹️ ▶️ John game store in town. See what I’m doing, Nathan. I’m trying to work in the saying and the anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it has been forced to get better and it has. And there’s you know, they’ve steam has
⏹️ ▶️ John earned its position by being a valuable product. And the entire time they’ve had to compete with not steam,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the whole rest of the PC gaming market. And as for,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Valve, Valve is very much sort of like a founder led founder controlled company where
⏹️ ▶️ John they are willing to do things without having to explain how this is going to pay off over the long term. and they’ve done lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And I bet if you had seen them experimenting with making game controllers and selling Linux machines
⏹️ ▶️ John that run Windows games and VR headsets, you’d be like, this is just a boondoggle for a company that became
⏹️ ▶️ John famous for making a couple of good games in a store. And now they’re just like, this is the company that runs the store. Why are they doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this other stuff? They do it because Gabe Newell apparently wants to do it. And by the way, we got through that
⏹️ ▶️ John whole previous episode without referencing the extremely common off-sited
⏹️ ▶️ John nickname for the Steam Machine, which is a six inch cube that is a gaming PC, kind of like a gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John console that runs SteamOS. Anyway, the Gabe Cube. G-A-B-E-C-U-B-E.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. But I realize lots of people might not have been born when the Nintendo GameCube was released, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s That’s what it’s referencing the game, the Nintendo GameCube, the Gabe Cube. There you have
M5 performance follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to the M5 having the best single core performance ever, Stephen Opdebeke,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, Opdebeke, writes, this is a recent ranking of single thread performance in an artificial benchmark across all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey types of CPUs. This is cpubenchmark.net and sure enough, ARM Apple M5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 10 cores all the way at the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so same caveats about benchmarks and who knows what they’re doing or whatever, but it’s worth noting that
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe Apple chips are the top five, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of the top 10.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s a strong showing in single core performance. So number one is the M5, number two is the A19 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John in the phone. Number three is the M3 Ultra 28 core, and number four
⏹️ ▶️ John is the M3 Ultra 32 core, and number five is the plain old A19. Only at position number six,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you see the first non-Apple chip, which is the Intel Core Ultra 9285K.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, if you go to Geekbench, you’ll see all sorts of CPUs ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John single score scores because I’m assuming they’re massively overclocked and like cooled
⏹️ ▶️ John by some exotic system or whatever. But I think this one is just like, you know, non exotic, non
⏹️ ▶️ John overclocked system. And the other thing to note is that if you look at the top 10, there’s a gradual slope from number 10 to
⏹️ ▶️ John number two. And then from number two to number one, there’s quite a change.
⏹️ ▶️ John That could just be because maybe the M five finally fit some part of this benchmark into its L two cache
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. So it’s hard to tell with benchmarks. But Apple’s marketing claim
⏹️ ▶️ John or the common phrase that you’ll see in a lot of reviews that the M5 is the highest single-core performance
⏹️ ▶️ John ever, there is some foundation to that.
Casey was right!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, we have some real-time follow-up from Adam1. The MacBook Pro 2010 to 2020, sorry, 2010 to 2012 model years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a 15-inch screen non-retina, had a matte option that was $150 more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the regular resolution glossy screens. The matte monitor’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey native resolution was 1680 by 1050 pixels, and the glossy was 1440 by 900 pixels. Casey was right.
⏹️ ▶️ John and the 150, I think, is not so much because the matte monitor costs more, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was so rare, like at that point, everybody had wanted glossy, but I do remember all the nerds
⏹️ ▶️ John in our circle saying, and of course I got the matte option because everyone was very much against glossy in
⏹️ ▶️ John those days. And as a bonus, getting high res.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the way I remember phrasing this, maybe this was a case-ism, but I don’t think so, was high res
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anti-glare, is what I believe we all called it at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Or probably what Apple called it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you’re right. There was one generation, I think, one or two, right before Retina on the 15X MacBook Pro, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was, that’s when it went from 1440 to 1680, I think, across. Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s exactly right. So I would just like to state for the record that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one time in 2025, I actually remembered something. Look at me go. That’s a good one though.
Sponsor: Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform for entrepreneurs like you to stand out and succeed. Whether you’re just starting out or managing a growing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website and engage with your audience and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell whatever you need to sell for your business, from products to content to time, all in one place and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your terms. So Squarespace has been this amazing website building platform for all these years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were our first sponsor, our oldest sponsor, and we love them. And one of the reasons we love them is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s just a really good service. If you have somebody who needs to make a website or you need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a website, you can send them to Squarespace and it’s done. It’s out of your hands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so easy to use. You don’t have to be a nerd. Everything’s visual. There’s no configuration. There’s no software. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no patches. There’s no coding. It is amazing. They now have full AI integration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built in. So you can have things like brainstorming content. You can have designing logos for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. and it’s all like, you know, controllable and yours. So it’s as much or as little AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help as you want. All this is backed by their wonderful design intelligence system. They have amazing Squarespace payment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support as well. So for your customers to check out and to pay you, they support everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under the sun. Of course, all the credit cards, things like direct debit, of course, Apple Pay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also things like Afterpay, Clearpay, Klarna, you know, buy now, pay later kind of services. It’s amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Squarepay supports for you. Their shopping engine supports, of course, physical goods, digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goods, but also things like member gated areas, paid podcasts, paid newsletters. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wanna sell consulting slots, if you’re a coach or something, you can do that too. All of this on Squarespace. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see for yourself by building a free trial. Find out how well Squarespace works for you without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving them a dime. Try it, I bet you will like it. Squarespace.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you go back there, you’ll save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain when you’re ready to buy. So squarespace.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP for 10% off your first purchase. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our
Mac Pro: Don’t Believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve really thought about bringing up a bottle of vodka and doing the thing I would never ever do again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have a feeling I don’t you’re not going to need me for the rest of this episode because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone probably John put in the show notes in our internal show notes the Mac Pro colon don’t believe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, this is quite a capper too. I mean, I kind of covered this in the last episode. A lot of people are writing to me online
⏹️ ▶️ John asking me what I think about this and what I’m going to do. I think I actually did cover that in the last episode. I’ll repeat
⏹️ ▶️ John it again here, but just FYI. It’s not as if this is a shock. I’ve been increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of histrionic about the complete lack of any news about future Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John products for a long time now. All these rumors I’ve been reading about all these other products. This product’s gonna have this
⏹️ ▶️ John chip and this year we’re gonna do this thing and that and nothing about the Mac Pro, just nothing. Or like
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’d be something, we’d put it in there and the next week they’d say, actually, let me take the hot air, Let me
⏹️ ▶️ John deflate that rumor. That was a misinterpretation of a thing. Don’t get your hopes up. That’s not a real thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so like I said in the last episode, you know, I was supposed to get a new Mac this year as
⏹️ ▶️ John soon as I figure out what they were doing. The Mac Pro Apple did nothing with it, and by the time it became
⏹️ ▶️ John clear they were going to do nothing because I kind of had to wait into like the October event just when they, you know, do much stuff that came
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Now it’s too late in the year. Now I can’t do what was my early in the year plan, which is like, let me just get an M4 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio or something. But with the M5 out now, I can’t do that. So the new tentative plan as
⏹️ ▶️ John of last episode was, next year I’ll get an M5 Max, Mac Studio, and
⏹️ ▶️ John or unless Marco convinces me to get an M5 Ultra, Mac Studio, assuming the M5 Ultra exists,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a separate issue. So that was my plan, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John continues to be my plan. But now finally we have some news about the Mac Pro. The news is not good.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s better than no news. I will say that. Uncertainty was killing me, but the certainty in this case is bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you want to read this guy? Do you want me
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can’t? I feel like you should.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t it hurts me too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All right. I’ll take this one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll read Collins thing after
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. You don’t have to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, I don’t mind. I just feel like I’m stabbing my friend in the back. Mark Gurman writes, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey longer an M4 Ultra in the works. A Mac Pro to support it was also next and the next high end desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip will be the M5 Ultra. So far, Apple is only focused on a new Mac Studio for the processor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggests the Mac Pro won’t be updated in 2026 in a significant way. From what I’ve heard inside the company, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has largely written off the Mac Pro. The sentiment internally is that the Mac Studio now represents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both the present and future of Apple’s professional desktop strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we noticed Apple. We noticed, I mean, it’s got an M2 Ultra in it and even that
⏹️ ▶️ John took so long for them to take it off of Intel. And when the M3 Ultra came out, they didn’t update it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though it would have been dumb, they could have, but they didn’t. And there was gonna be M for an Ultra, but now apparently not.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now they’re saying there’s gonna be M5 Ultra, but it’s not going to the Mac Pro either. And I know this is not a thing that Apple does.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know Apple doesn’t come out and tell you like when they’re not going to do something or like
⏹️ ▶️ John about their future plans in any way. But interestingly, one of the few times in recent
⏹️ ▶️ John history that Apple has ever told you about a thing they’re gonna do in the future, it was the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John round table. They said, we’re gonna make a new modular Mac Pro that’s not gonna suck. And they did, they made a new modular Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro that didn’t suck. in the next several years, however long it took. So it would be kind of nice for them
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, we’re not doing the Mac Pro anymore. Just put us out of our misery. Just tell us you’re not doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it instead of pretending you’re going to, but then never ever updating it because it’s just an embarrassing
⏹️ ▶️ John machine. It’s a Mac Studio in a giant box with card slots that have very limited usefulness with an increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ John ancient processor. It’s just an embarrassment. I mean, even though I would have complained
⏹️ ▶️ John if they had put the M3 Ultra in it, at least they would have been like, well, this dumb product that you made, it is now an up-to-date
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb product. But not doing anything with it, it seems like they
⏹️ ▶️ John should like announce an end of life or just say like, we’re not making that anymore. Now, part
⏹️ ▶️ John of me thinks this, the case on the 2019 Mac Pro, the Intel 2019 Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John that case is big and expensive and fancy and we knew they would keep it because you gotta make
⏹️ ▶️ John your money back. It’s a low volume product. It’s not like they’re gonna change the case for the RM1 and lo and behold, they didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though they did change the case for some of their other more popular products, how long do they have to keep making
⏹️ ▶️ John and selling something called the Mac Pro before they’re satisfied that they’ve made up the
⏹️ ▶️ John money that they spent to develop it? That’s the only reason I think this product still exists for sale. It’s gonna become
⏹️ ▶️ John like the trash can where they were selling it for years after it was just a total embarrassment, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John just to recoup the cost of the factory that only made this one product. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, it’s sad, I’m sad, but this is at least, I mean, I know this is an official announcement,
⏹️ ▶️ John but German giving support to the idea that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there ever was any kind of internal battle inside Apple about should we or shouldn’t we do the Mac Pro, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John the we shouldn’t team is winning. And again, as we can see from the outside, but here’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John rumored confirmation from a somewhat reliable source that things are not going well internally.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, he’s vague here. This suggests it won’t be updated in 2026. If it is updated and
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets an M5 Ultra, All it’s doing is, it’s like putting the M5 in the Vision Pro. You haven’t changed the product in any
⏹️ ▶️ John way. Whatever problems the product had, it still has. And the problem being, it’s thousands of dollars more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John than the Mac Studio, but it is absolutely no faster because it literally has the same chip in it. It doesn’t make a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of sense. Colin Cornaby, who is a fellow Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John fan, writes in to clarify that this is not a, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s like, who cares? No big deal, nothing was lost, right? Not entirely true.
⏹️ ▶️ John as Colin points out, this is a thing from a toot. The M3 Ultra has
⏹️ ▶️ John finally caught up to the Radeon 6900 XT in my 2019 Mac Pro. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an old GPU with only a fraction of the power of something like a GeForce 5090. Apple is really behind on GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John performance. Even if I wanted to upgrade today, it would be a side grade or a step back. I’m hoping M5 Ultra is
⏹️ ▶️ John better, but I was really hoping for an M5 Extreme or the mythical 2X Ultra Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. And I had to look this up just to confirm. I looked up Geekbench score metal
⏹️ ▶️ John scores for the Radeon 6900 XT, which you can put in a 2019 Mac Pro. That’s a 231 K and the M3 Ultra is 225 K.
⏹️ ▶️ John So and the Radeon 6900 XT is a video card that was released in December 2020.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Apple’s current best GPU, the M3 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John fastest GPU Apple sells today and the end of 2025 is
⏹️ ▶️ John just about as fast as a five-year-old GPU that you could get with the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. And I think you might’ve been able to put two of these in the Mac Pro, but I’m not sure, but I’m not gonna, don’t quote me on that. You might’ve been able to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a dual card or something. But anyway, Apple is very, very behind in
⏹️ ▶️ John absolute GPU performance. When I was talking about the back in the M1 days, the possible sort of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, M1 Extreme, that’s like two M1 Ultra stuck together, The back of the
⏹️ ▶️ John calculations were that that ultra, that sort of, you know, two ultra quad type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John would be competitive with the fastest single GPU available back when the M1 was out. Still,
⏹️ ▶️ John that calculation may be valid for a theoretical two M5 ultra stuck together,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the thing is Apple has never made that chip. They never have, and their current best
⏹️ ▶️ John ultra is two generations behind. The M3 ultra is the best ultra, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the M5 is out now. So not only have they never made a quad one, even their double one is two generations
⏹️ ▶️ John behind, which is why the very fastest GPU you can get in a Mac is
⏹️ ▶️ John as fast as a five-year-old GPU. And not just any five-year-old GPU, a five-year-old GPU that you could put
⏹️ ▶️ John in an incredibly slow Intel 2019 Mac Pro, setting aside like today’s current
⏹️ ▶️ John fastest GPUs in the PC space. Now I know, who cares about GPU? It’s all about
⏹️ ▶️ John AI and much faster, wider memory bandwidth for the unified memory architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John and who cares that GPU is garbage for anything except running games and the
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 Ultra would beat in any modern benchmark that did AI and yada yada yada. But the thing is graphics and
⏹️ ▶️ John games are in fact a possible use of lots of computing power.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just got done talking about the all that Steam stuff and that market for you know PC games and gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware and Apple has massively raised the floor on their GPU system on their systems in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of GPU. We We talked about this over and over again in the Apple Silicon era. All of Apple’s products now
⏹️ ▶️ John have non embarrassing GPUs for the amount of power that these things use. They
⏹️ ▶️ John do a mate. They have amazing performance. But Apple has basically abandoned the high end,
⏹️ ▶️ John even in their supposed high end products. So maybe I’ll make like a Mac Pro rest in peace
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt or something like that when Apple finally signs off on the thing. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not as if nothing was lost. Nothing was lost for people who don’t care about GPU power or gaming on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac at the high end But for people who do something was definitely lost something
⏹️ ▶️ John is currently lost and will continue to be lost Because it’s very difficult to get high-end GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John performance in a box size like the Mac Studio Look at the Steam Machine. It’s a six inch cube.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does not have high-end gaming PC power It’s not supposed to it also doesn’t cost as much as the Mac Studio. I
⏹️ ▶️ John hope um But the high end does exist Uh, when we were looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at the, uh, iPod sock videos last week, looking at the, that Apple phone
⏹️ ▶️ John strap thing that I’ve already forgotten the name of. I think it was in that video, or maybe in like one that YouTube recommended
⏹️ ▶️ John similar, it was like, maybe it was even that thing that Steve Jobs was there on stage doing a thing that he’d done
⏹️ ▶️ John so many times before. Uh, bragging that Apple had the world’s fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John personal computer. He’s said that on stage many times, whether or not has it always been true.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s wanted to say it because it’s bragging rights. We have the world’s fastest personal computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple hasn’t been able to say that in a long time and it doesn’t look like they’re going to for a long time. They can say they have the
⏹️ ▶️ John world’s fastest single core performance maybe, which they did say, but I’m not sure who’s interested in
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And people who are interested in the high end are interested, maybe they’re interested in AI and Apple can say we have the world’s best AI
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that’s not an Nvidia card that costs as much as a car or some other thing. I just miss the days
⏹️ ▶️ John when Apple was, you know, shooting for the stars and producing the world’s fastest personal computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John the world’s most powerful personal computer, the world’s most whatever. They could still say that with an M5 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John Max Studio. This is the world’s most powerful AI workstation or something like that. If they can come up with something to back it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying it has to be gaming performance. I think it has to be, you know, frame rates in some popular game or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But just even the trash can, I feel like they were shooting for something impressive. They missed,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they were shooting for it. And it just disappoints me to see them given up on trying to shoot for
⏹️ ▶️ John this particular kind of bragging right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think what ultimately has killed this version of the Mac Pro has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a combination of decisions they’ve made and factors that have changed over time. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as John hates this, I think they do not care about a number of the markets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all that used to be pretty well served by that machine or something like that machine. So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by going to Apple Silicon, they totally gave up Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Boot Camp, Parallels, gaming. Now, gaming, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things have always kind of been side benefits. Apple did not switch to Intel to get gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to get Windows compatibility. They switched to Intel because at the time those were the best chips and the chips they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on were nowhere near the best and they needed to switch just for competitive performance reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they did switch and it was a big deal, but it wasn’t to get those markets. Those markets kind of came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and they helped Apple a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they did. The effort they put into Boot Camp was actually kind of surprising. You remember the kind of shock? I’m like, oh yeah, you can boot Windows in it. We’ll support
⏹️ ▶️ John it with this thing. Like Boot Camp itself is sort of from another era of Apple where
⏹️ ▶️ John they were saying, here’s a thing we know you probably are gonna wanna do with your machine and here’s a first party
⏹️ ▶️ John solution for it. And they supported that pretty much till the end of the Intel era, which was impressive and interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that shows that someone somewhere in Apple had enough clout to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, we’re so close to doing it. And a few people will wanna run Windows games. Why don’t we just let them boot Windows? And they
⏹️ ▶️ John said, sure, fine, do it. And they did it, and they did it for all the Intel era. So I do appreciate that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that was like a side bonus. And there was, at the time also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Intel transition, especially early on, Apple was still very much trying to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to switch over from Windows. And so Windows had ability through, Bootcamp secondarily, but I think primarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like parallels. I think that helped them a lot, gains some of that market share, kind of giving people like some training
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wheels to bring their Windows software along for the ride as they slowly switch to Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John because it could run natively. And I experienced that in me getting Max into the workplace during that era to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, we can run Windows software at full speed. But you could like as long as you have enough RAM to run the virtual machines. You know, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John running a games, but you could run Microsoft. You could run full fledged Windows right there in your Mac. It was great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But, you know, the move to Apple Silicon dropped all the Windows support. Basically, I mean there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are small ways around it But nothing that he was really doing because they’re not very good or don’t work very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or very slow or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John or because Microsoft’s Windows on arm strategy is not compatible with what Apple’s doing There’s no technical reason
⏹️ ▶️ John those two crazy kids couldn’t get together and let you run Windows and arm except that Windows and arm kind of Sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, and God knows what Microsoft is doing these days. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is what they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t think they’re caring that much about Windows So anyway, so they you know the gaming market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is something that Apple has institutionally never really tried for in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meaningful way or understood and most PC gamers hate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple for lots of reasons some of which are very good reasons so like Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple and gamers with the exception of John as the only person in the middle of these Venn diagrams Apple and gamers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do not get along in either direction and they don’t care about each other’s markets and so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know you’re left with like high-end or specialty high-end production maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video audio production.
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D, remember they demonstrated Maya on the trash can? Like that kind of sort of high-end 3D that requires
⏹️ ▶️ John high GPU but it’s not a game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and you have like some scientific computing applications and things like that, but most of those markets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are markets that Apple has let go over the years. Either through outright
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neglect or just kind of the markets themselves moving because Apple was clearly not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serving them very well. Most of those markets now use different hardware, PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware, Linux, cloud stuff, on-premises like servers, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re moving on to lots of different hardware. They’re mostly not using Mac Pros. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the AI revolution comes along. What powers the AI revolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is NVIDIA accelerators. And Apple and NVIDIA do not get along at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stuff has not included NVIDIA components for a very long time. and the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world of NVIDIA and CUDA is totally separate from Apple. Like Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no foot in that market. And so these markets have either been abandoned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Apple or have left Apple or have developed outside of Apple completely and Apple has never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been part of them. So at the same time Apple Silicon is a huge benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the markets Apple holds on to and cares about the most and has the most success
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s also very good at AI. I mean, coincidentally or not, like Apple Silicon, the SOC
⏹️ ▶️ John with the unified memory architecture, it’s extremely good at AI workloads. It just so happens that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the market leader because they’re not selling $30,000 GPUs for the data center, but
⏹️ ▶️ John for running AI things locally, Apple Silicon is amazing for that. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolutely. So Apple Silicon benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s core markets substantially and we’ve talked about how amazing it’s been for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone, the Mac, like it’s been amazing for Apple’s core markets there. But Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just fundamentally not friendly with the idea of external GPUs. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you take out GPUs from the reason for the Mac Pro to exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of Apple Silicon transition, it’s like, well, what else is it for? And it has some answers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It, you know, there are certain like audio video, I.O. cards that are used pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequently in this kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John Setting aside the cards though, what it’s really for is the thing that Apple has never made. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the case, the 2019 Mac Pro case, which again, they’re not gonna redesign anytime soon because it costs a lot of money to make and it has low
⏹️ ▶️ John volumes, is very good at cooling. It has a tremendous cooling capacity, has huge fans,
⏹️ ▶️ John huge volume for huge heat sinks for a huge amount of air to go through. So you can put in
⏹️ ▶️ John there a thing with an integrated GPU, some monster chip that gets really hot, that gets
⏹️ ▶️ John hotter than you could fit in a Mac Studio case that goes faster and is more powerful. And Apple has simply
⏹️ ▶️ John never made that. Every chip they’ve made that has been powerful has been in the Mac Studio. So it’s had to be designed
⏹️ ▶️ John to fit within the power envelope of a Mac Studio cooling system. So forget about the card slots, just view
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro case as a thing that can cool something that’s too hot to fit in a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio. But Apple has never made that, despite all the rumors and the attempts and they were gonna make it and then they
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t. And remember a long time ago, the rumors, like it’s not on the roadmap anywhere until at least after the M7 or something. So
⏹️ ▶️ John tune in in a few years to see if that thing ever comes true. But that was a thing that we mentioned in the show ages ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s what this case is for. Yes, it has card slots, but it’s like, it can cool something hot
⏹️ ▶️ John that won’t fit in your small cases. And Apple’s like, we have nothing, we have nothing that hot. We
⏹️ ▶️ John could get something that hot. It would do more work. It would be more powerful. It would be faster because the faster you go and
⏹️ ▶️ John the more transistors you put on there, the more heat you generate. It’s like, oh, we can’t handle all that heat. It won’t fit in a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It won’t fit a Mac mini. won’t fit in a Mac studio. It’ll fit in this case. Those huge
⏹️ ▶️ John fans are begging for something to blow on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but yeah, but like, you know, they, they have this machine and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has dropped most of its markets. And at the same time, Apple is not helping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by never updating it. And by the fact that the cheapest one is $7,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they, when they launched it, I don’t think they were intentionally trying to kill this product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line over time, but you could, I could see why people might assume that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on how they’ve executed on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, right. It’s like, it’s almost as if like the enemies of this thing within the company
⏹️ ▶️ John have like subverted it intentionally. Like there’s, there’s obviously proponents and enemies and the proponents like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re winning, we’re shipping a product and the enemies are like, we’re making sure that whatever you ship is garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. We’re going to make sure that no one buys this. So that way we can say, look, no one buys this. We can stop making
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s exactly it. self-fulfilling prophecy. So, you know, like I would love to see the back and forth
⏹️ ▶️ John on this, but it’s probably just, you know, this type of thing, even just look at the iMac, such
⏹️ ▶️ John a storied name, and yet I’m sure it was a battle to say, can we actually make a decent
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac again? And that battle was won with those colorful ones. Now it’s like, okay, but you can’t do anything with them for the
⏹️ ▶️ John next six years besides bump the CPUs, which is fine, but like, it’s like these sort of boom and bust cycles.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be clear, I mean, the iMac is obviously, it’s not a laptop, so it’s not Apple’s bread and butter anymore, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a very, it is a higher profile product name than the Mac Pro, let’s say. Like iMac still has some
⏹️ ▶️ John cache, even though nobody buys desktops anymore. And it took such a long time for Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John finally give that product its worth with that colorful redesign, which was great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m glad they’re updating it with the new SOCs and it’s still a pretty good computer, but you know, every five or seven
⏹️ ▶️ John years would be nice if they maybe like made the screen a little bit bigger or, you know, did something
⏹️ ▶️ John else fancy with it or rethought some of the compromises that they put into that particular computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like, you know, the Mac Pro, like, you know, the iMac still has a strong market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not, it isn’t what it used to be, of course. I mean, laptops took over most of the consumer market, but the iMac is still like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want like a stationary computer, especially if you care for it looking nice in like an office
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something, the iMac is a great choice for that. That’s just not as big of a market it used to be, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no market. And Apple, I think, does a very good job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serving that market with the iMac. The Mac Pro, you know, the world has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved in a direction that has shrank its market, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, by their own choices, shrunk it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much further by their own, you know, choices and neglect, which is a choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it isn’t that, like even if Apple did a great job and kept this updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was very capable, it would still be a very small market today. But Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exacerbated this by their execution and their choices.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other thing is that the iMac market is much more tolerant of like skipping a year and not being on the cutting edge, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a cutting edge computer. Like the people who buy the iMac don’t care if it’s like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John nine to 12 months behind on the fastest SoC. but the market for something like the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do care. Not that they want it to be changing constantly, but they want it to not fall behind, because part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the reason they spend all this money on this big computer is A, they want something that only a computer this big with this many
⏹️ ▶️ John fans can do, which Apple has not offered in the Apple Silicon era, and B, they want to feel like, oh, I spent
⏹️ ▶️ John all that money, but I’m getting the best. I’m getting the fastest. And Apple’s been like, it’ll be the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John for like, well, in the case of the M2 one, never. It will never be the fastest, But like
⏹️ ▶️ John say they had put the M3 Ultra into it, the Mac Pro before the other things. It’ll be the fastest for a little bit, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone will be faster in two years. So sorry about the $7,000 you spent on this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, like when you look at the Apple Silicon scaling story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The CPU scaling is not good once you get past like the the Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the ultra, even like going from from the base through the pro, through the Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t get linear CPU scaling with core count. And that’s true of any architecture, but Apple Silicon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you definitely see, in the cores they’ve made so far, you can see there’s a clear ceiling, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going from base to max, you get a pretty decent jump, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2X. And then going from max to ultra, you get another jump that’s nowhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near 2X. GPUs scale very well. GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have scaled almost linearly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although they did screw that up with one, I forget which one, but they did screw that up with one of them. And part of that, part of the non-linear CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John scaling, the argument there is that it’s the Silicon Interposer. Like the fact that they made them
⏹️ ▶️ John out of two Maxis stuck together, that is the, if you simply built a dedicated one with that
⏹️ ▶️ John same number of resources, it would be better than trying to take two Maxis and get this economy of scale and only
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do the Max design plus the Interposer. Like that’s the argument that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and there’s other bottlenecks I’m sure too. Like, you know, it’s like scaling CPUs is complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in particular, like setting aside when they screwed up the GPU thing by under resourcing some buffer or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that they insist on building their ultras out of two maxes is, it’s a clever idea if
⏹️ ▶️ John it had worked out for them, but I think that hurt the scaling more than anything else. Whereas if they had made
⏹️ ▶️ John the dedicated chip, it wouldn’t. But if they made a dedicated chip, they can’t justify the expense. That’s been a little thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with the extreme, like, you know, with the quad thing. They can’t justify the expense. We’re not gonna sell, we’re gonna sell this many
⏹️ ▶️ John of them and it’s gonna cost this much to make. It’ll be our most expensive, you know, Like Intel had this problem to some degree, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not really because they were sold to server firms and everything like this chip, this whatever, this high-end
⏹️ ▶️ John chip is going to cost the most and be the most complicated chip that we make.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re gonna sell a tiny, tiny fraction of the number we sell of our other chips. So like, why are we doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this again? And I’d point them to my case for a true Mac Pro successor article and saying, you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Mount Everest, you’re climbing it because it’s there, blah, blah, blah, blah but Apple doesn’t have that. They don’t have that in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t justify it. Someone comes down and says, cost benefit, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I think ultimately the Mac Pro as we know it today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only is very obviously doomed and abandoned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think that’s been clear for a very long time. But I think, as I’ve argued on the show before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Studio is the Mac Pro. Like when you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happened to the Mac Pro in the Apple Silicon era, If the tower version was never released,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would look at the Mac Studio, the Mac Studio would probably be called Mac Pro, and we would just say that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon. I wouldn’t say that because Mac Pro is the computer that Apple produces and says, this is the world’s fastest personal computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they never said that about the studio because it’s not true and it’s also not expandable. So it has none of the qualities
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac Pro. Now I agree with you that Apple probably would have called it Mac Pro, but saying
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio is the new Mac Pro is only true in the sense that it is the fastest computer from Apple you can buy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not the world’s fastest personal computer. It is not, let’s see how fast we can make things go,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, cost almost no object. It’s not that, it’s just not there. It’s not the concept car. It is just
⏹️ ▶️ John their most powerful desktop, but it is so clearly constrained by trying to keep it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, cute and contained and kind of a big brother Mac mini and don’t be too obtrusive. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John something that has never been a concern for the Mac Pro. Being obtrusive is what it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s true. But the Mac Studio, I think when you look at, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro in the Apple Silicon era can’t solve high-end GPU needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the design of the architecture. So there’s no external GPU, so it can’t solve high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU needs, at least that high-end.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could if it had a quad. Again, back of the envelope, it could be as fast as a single, well, you know, they just never made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Right, but like, so you look at like, the GPU market is locked off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also because of the Apple Silicon architecture, the very high amounts of RAM market is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been lopped off. It used to be 1.5 terabytes in the Intel era. Now I think we’re, where are we now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, yeah, 512 is the max now. It’s not reaching for the same extreme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heights, but on the other end of the resources, the processing power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way better. Like the CPU power, way better. Any kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, neural and ML stuff might be better depending on how it’s architected, but CPU processing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s way ahead of the Intel era and way ahead of everything else, just not by a linear amount, but way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead of everything else they make if they keep it updated. And then things like throughput
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Thunderbolt bandwidth, they probably have advantages there because it’s newer. And so there are areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in which the Mac Studio is the Mac Pro of today. It just isn’t all areas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the tower covered almost no additional ones than the Mac Pro did.
⏹️ ▶️ John only due to Apple’s choices. Like again, it’s sitting there waiting for something bigger, faster, hotter. Hell, they could have just put
⏹️ ▶️ John an overclocked M3 Ultra in there and just overclocked it and said, well, it’s overclocked, but the extra heat produced is moved
⏹️ ▶️ John away by these giant fans. But they’re just, they’re just not into that. They’re just not interested in doing
⏹️ ▶️ John anything advanced. The M2 Ultra Mac Pro kind of proved that and the complete lack of updates
⏹️ ▶️ John since then proved it further. So I’m sad, but it’s good to have some kind of of rumor-based
⏹️ ▶️ John closure for this and M5 Max Max Studio. Let’s see if they can put that out at WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John and make me at least somewhat happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re taking this better than I thought, John. I’m proud of you.
Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to make everyone vulnerable. Here’s how this works. There’s all these data broker sites out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when you search for somebody’s name on a search engine, what you’re seeing usually is a list of data broker websites.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’ll be advertising like, get their address and phone number and all this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by usually paying them some money. And it’s kind of a gross business. Nobody really wants their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data out there on all these sites. So each one of these sites usually has some kind of like opt-out or take-down process,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s hundreds of them. So what Delete.me does is they do all the hard work of wiping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your and your family’s personal info from all of these data broker websites by filing all those opt-outs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and take-downs for you. And it’s an ongoing service. So if your info pops up somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it wasn’t when they first started, don’t worry, they’ll get it. It’s ongoing. a new data broker pops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up that, you know, just a new company out of nowhere, they are watching for them and they will figure out the opt-outs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you. So it’s constantly working for you. Like you could go and file your own opt-outs for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hundreds of sites and keep an eye on it, but that’s a lot of work. No one’s really gonna do that. And you know, Delete.me is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here to help you. I personally was looking for a service like this a couple of years back before they were a sponsor. I chose Delete.me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because all the reviews said they were great and I can say, yeah, they’re great. It’s that simple. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for our listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP and use promo code ATP at checkout. The only way to get 20% off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to go to joindeleteme.com slash ATP and enter code ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at checkout. That’s joindeleteme.com slash ATP code ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you to Delete.me for sponsoring our show.
Tim Cook to step down soon?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In 2021, Tim Cook was talking to Kara Swisher for the New York Times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we discussed this in ATP 425. Kara Swisher said, are you going to be at Apple in 10 more years?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Tim Cook said, 10 more years? Probably not. But I can tell you that I feel great right now and the date’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in sight. But 10 more years is a long time and probably not 10 more years.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you glided over this in the quote, but I double checked it. the transcript, because this is a podcast, you can listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to the podcast. Tim Cook says 10 more years. I probably not. He’s like 10 more years. I
⏹️ ▶️ John and then he interrupts himself and changes course on the sentence. So he does say, I probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you said, probably not. Anyway, the point is that Tim Cook, who is a very careful speaker,
⏹️ ▶️ John managed to not carefully speak in a sentence and started one sentence and decided to turn in a different
⏹️ ▶️ John direction mid sentence and go to probably not. But anyway, there was we talked about on the show. This was
⏹️ ▶️ John merely a cap. It’s like up to, you know, whatever, uh, megahertz
⏹️ ▶️ John or gigahertz. Um, because Cara, uh, set the Kara Swisher set the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the boundary. Will you be at Apple 10 more years from 2021? So in 2031,
⏹️ ▶️ John and he just said 10 more years, probably not. He didn’t even say definitely not. He said, probably not, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John need to reiterate 10 more years is long time. Probably not 10 more years. So all he said was,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, 2031, I probably won’t be there, but we have some news in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that front. So on the 14th of November of this year, the Financial Times wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under a four-person byline, Tim Bradshaw, Steve Morris, Michael Acton in San Francisco, and Daniel Thomas in London.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is stepping up succession planning efforts as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executives as soon as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next year. Several people familiar with discussions inside the tech group told the Financial Times that its board and senior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey executives have recently intensified preparations for Cook to hand over the reins. John Ternes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering and former best friend of John Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is widely seen as Cook’s most likely successor, although no final decisions have been made. People
⏹️ ▶️ Casey close to Apple say the long-planned transition is not related to the company’s current performance ahead of what is expected to be a blockbuster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end-of-year sales period for the iPhone. The company is likely to name a new CEO before its next earnings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey report in late January, which covers a critical holiday period. An
⏹️ ▶️ Casey announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey events, its developer conference in June, and its iPhone launch in September, the people said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey These people said that although preparations have intensified, the timing of any announcement could change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Gruber’s take is, I don’t think there are many people, if any, outside of Apple’s top executive team and board
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of directors who have any insight into Cook’s thinking on this. That quote, several people quote, spoke to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Financial Times about this, says to me that those sources, members of the board, did so with Cook’s blessing and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they want this announcement to be no more than a little surprising. I would also bet that Cook moves into the role of executive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chairman and will still play a significant, if not leading role for the company when it comes to domestic and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey international politics, especially with regard to the monster in chief. Sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to Trump. All right. So Joe Rosigdon from MacRumors writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s current chairman is Arthur D. Levinson, who turned 75 on March 31st of 2025. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corporate governance guidance, excuse me, guidelines say a director may not stand for reelection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after age 75, but need not resign until the end of his or her term. Apple is unlikely to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name a new CEO before its next earnings report in late January, according to the Financial Times. But it said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an announcement could happen early in the year. There’s one potential wrinkle. Apple typically releases the proxy materials
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a shareholder meeting in mid January, and that filing would need to indicate that Cook is up for election as chairman. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be before Apple’s next earnings report in late January. So the specific timing of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how this might all play out remains to be seen. It is unclear if Cook would become chairman or executive chairman in the former
⏹️ ▶️ Casey role, he would focus more on managing the board and corporate governance. In the latter role, Cook would remain more involved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Apple’s day to day operations and decision making, which could help ease the transition to a new CEO. Alternatively,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple could opt out, excuse me, could opt to exempt Levinson from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the age policy as it did for the now 77 year old director Ron Sugar last year. Alpo could also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey elect someone other than Cook as chairman.
⏹️ ▶️ John This I feel like is actually some of the most disappointing news for this week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, even worse than the Mac pro thing, not Tim Cook leaving. I’m all for that. As we know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that every article I’ve seen Gruber, the Mac rumor is everybody’s saying, Oh, Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ John might sit down with Zoe’s next year. And let’s talk about the timing. Let’s talk about the 75 years old, blah, blah, blah. The idea that he would
⏹️ ▶️ John step down. I talked about this the last time we talked about Turner’s transition, that he would step down, but stay
⏹️ ▶️ John on as chairman, like that’s the last thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I want. And I understand, I understand why people are talking about that. Cause it makes sense. Here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you are going to take over as the new CEO of a company, if a company is
⏹️ ▶️ John doing terribly, you have a lot of political capital to make lots of changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like Steve Jobs at Apple in 1997, the company is practically bankrupt. He cancels a million programs,
⏹️ ▶️ John changes everything radically. Obviously, he was the co-founder coming back. So that gives you a lot of political capital. But also
⏹️ ▶️ John when things are bad, people are willing to do things radically different. Apple, as all these
⏹️ ▶️ John things report, is about to have like its best quarter ever. iPhones are sounding like crazy, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the company is not doing poorly financially. So you get a new CEO in there. And what
⏹️ ▶️ John I want is that new CEO to do many, many things different than Tim Cook.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if Tim Cook, I think he should retire to an island and just forget about Apple and just go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if he’s like, no, I’m going to be on the board for 10 years because I’m 65 and I could be there till I’m 75. In fact, I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be the chairman of the board. I’m going to be overseeing lots of things, especially our interactions with the government. I want to say, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim, go away. Let somebody else make different decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, I have no idea if John Ternus agrees with everything Tim Cook has done or hates all of it or like I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do know that if you’re the new CEO and the old CEO that took your company from like
⏹️ ▶️ John 350 billion to like $4 trillion is still there as the executive chairman and is still having like an active role
⏹️ ▶️ John in day to day things, it is next to impossible to come in on day one and say, guess what? We’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of things different around here, everybody. And let me tell you, we’re doing this, this, this, and this. And Tim is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t know how like the corporate structure works in terms of the balance of power
⏹️ ▶️ John between the board and the CEO. different in every company and I’m not familiar with the intricacies, but I do
⏹️ ▶️ John know if he hangs around and is on the board or as chairman of the board or as executive chairman
⏹️ ▶️ John of the board, I’m still going to be in this program saying Tim Cook should go. Should he leave a CEO? He already
⏹️ ▶️ John did that. He needs to leave Apple so that we can have different decisions be made. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is more upsetting to me than the Mac pro. Really? Yeah, because the Mac pro it’s like, you know, products
⏹️ ▶️ John come first of all, John Ternus is supposedly a fan of the Mac pro, but you think he’s going to bring the Mac pro back with Tim
⏹️ ▶️ John Cook staring over his shoulder and saying, no, I saw the spreadsheets, no Mac Pro, John. But that’s, again, that’s the least
⏹️ ▶️ John of our concerns about Tim Cook. I want so many things that he did need to be exactly reversed,
⏹️ ▶️ John totally the opposite. And you can’t come in and say, well, our previous CEO is like the best CEO we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John ever had in terms of financial return, but I’m gonna do everything differently. That’s not, that’s hard to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. So I’m sad about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am actually very, very happy about this. I have a different take.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so obviously I agree with John that, yeah, I want Tim Cook out. I’ve been very vocal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that, and I think-
⏹️ ▶️ John He should go play golf somewhere, or football. He can buy an island. So many things he could do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and we know Tim Cook is such an exciting character, he’s gonna do none of those things. He
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco football. He could
⏹️ ▶️ John go pay out the contract for the, did he already do that? Sorry. Whatever he wants to happen with Auburn football, he can go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, first of all, I definitely agree with John Gruber that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the way this is sourced and the way this is coming out on the Financial Times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with four different people bylining it with a lot of sourcing for something that’s probably a very internal discussion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost certainly a planned leak like by Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very much in the way Tim Cook does things with big decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is very likely to be true and that’s very exciting for me. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, the good thing about a leadership transition is that it shakes stuff up and that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t always going to be good. It isn’t always going to be smooth, but it shakes stuff up. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do agree with John that like Tim staying on for a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time in a powerful position is not good. And it’s not good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the next CEO. And let’s say for the sake of argument that they’re right, that it is John Ternus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I were John Ternus in that situation, Like, you don’t want to be undermined by the old CEO
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still being very involved and very powerful. But Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cook also is a very carefully planned and measured person, somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a fault maybe. And so I actually wouldn’t worry about that being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very likely. I think if Cook, if the rumor is that Cook might step down into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of board chair position, whether it’s executive or non-executive chairman of the board,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s more likely more likely that would really just be to ease Wall Street in the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. That’s what Steve Jobs did when he handed the reins over to Tim Cook. The idea was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, we’re, we’re going to make this look like, you know, everything is just smoothly transitioning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it might be. Um, but I don’t think that would be a longterm plan for Tim to stick around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until he’s 75. I don’t think that’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to have to wait an extra two years of him sitting there to ease. I agree with you about the easing transition. That’s totally, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, They did the same thing with Jeff, what, easing Jeff Williams out and apparently easing the CFO out and maybe even
⏹️ ▶️ John easing JG out like there. That’s that’s how they work, with the exception of the forestall thing. Tim Cook’s
⏹️ ▶️ John leadership has been very sort of easy in transition. But what it does mean is that Ternus can’t come in on
⏹️ ▶️ John day one and do seven decisions that are the exact opposite of what Tim Cook was doing. But that’s what he needs
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t want to wait two years to like, oh, investors are happy now. So now now you turn
⏹️ ▶️ John it like. And also it’s like it would be an embarrassment for Tim Cook. Like, here’s the, you remember the speech Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John gave to Cook, as retold by, I think, Cook?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Just do what’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s talking to Steve Jobs on his deathbed or whatever, and Steve Jobs is like, never ask yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John what I would do, just do the right thing. And for better or for worse, eventually that’s what Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ John did. He clearly started doing things that he thought were the right thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He certainly never worried about what Steve Jobs would think.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, in the beginning, Tim Cook was a little, like, it was a little bit shy of making radical
⏹️ ▶️ John moves. In the beginning, I feel like he lived under the status, shadow of Steve jobs for a while. But
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually he started making Tim Cook moves, which is what job said to do. But that’s, that’s one of those monkeys,
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul curses, like, don’t worry about what I would do. Just do what you think is right. But what, if what you think is right
⏹️ ▶️ John is not right, then that’s advice for you to say, well, I did nothing constrains me. I’m the CEO and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what I think we should do. Therefore we should do it. And you just live and die by your own thing. There is something to be said for
⏹️ ▶️ John having some consideration of the legacy of the company when making decisions to try to to keep you grounded
⏹️ ▶️ John in some way to not say we’re going to be, we’re going to sell, you know, homemade yogurt or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now it’s like, well, we’re a computer company. It’s like, well, I feel like the yogurt thing is the right thing to do. It’s like, well, there’s a right and a wrong answer sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yogurt ain’t it. So and, you know, Tim Cook didn’t sell yogurt, but he did a lot of things,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially with the app store and the political stuff. And again, specifically calling out, I think I’ll hang around to
⏹️ ▶️ John interface with the administration. That’s the job he’s worse at, in my personal opinion, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not in Wall Street’s opinion, maybe not in Tim Cook’s opinion. But like, wouldn’t you like
⏹️ ▶️ John to see on day one an entirely different policy towards the US government? But that is absolutely not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, see, and this is where I think you’re not considering the reality of the situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think, even if Tim Cook was, I was going to say hit by a bus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but given this is episode 666, I don’t want to put that out there. Even if Tim Cook was immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he immediately retired and was not part of the board at all, I still would say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no way can the next CEO come in swinging. Because this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple in 2026 or whatever it will be. Apple is a financial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco juggernaut. They represent a huge, they represent trillions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dollars. They are massive. No one is going to walk into that company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and start swinging and making massive changes like that in their first few months.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the line that everyone’s been putting in their articles about this. What good is having FU money if you never say FU? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the cliche. This will be the cliche of our times. If anybody has FU money, it’s Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who’s gonna, who’s gonna, I’m making your argument for you. Who’s gonna stand up and be the one to say FU? It
⏹️ ▶️ John should be Apple. It’s not currently. With new leadership, it could be. I agree with you, it probably won’t be,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like Tim Cook hanging around and looking over people’s shoulders, there’s no way the new CEO is immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do things that essentially embarrass the former CEO. Not just because it would spook Wall Street, which it would, but
⏹️ ▶️ John also because you don’t get to be next in line to be CEO without having some kind of a relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John with the current CEO, which is such that you would never do that to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if Ternus is the new CEO and he gets in there and Tim Cook says, do whatever you want, man, and Ternus walks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, he still can’t, for example, some of the things that you’re suggesting, which I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, things like app store policy, if you walk in there on day one and you make major changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, you could cost yourself pretty big in the next quarterly earnings for things like high growth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas like your services area. If you screw that up or if you are too quick or too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sudden or too rash about it, you could cost the company billions of dollars in a high growth area that can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tank the stock significantly. And then think about all the rich people who are gonna lose a bunch of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a result of all that. So when you think about the pressures on this job,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a juggernaut of a company in a juggernaut of a financial system. Anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who gets into that job is going to have to very slowly turn that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wheel. They’re not going to, it’s like trying to turn a cruise ship on a dime. Like, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to do it. It needs time and space to make changes. They have to very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly course adjust. Like, it’s not going to be somebody coming in there and doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything noteworthy in a one year time span.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem with the political stuff in particular is that any turning of the wheel, this is what I talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John in the episode I was bemoaning the limitations of the appeasement policy. If you do literally
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that is not pleasing to the administration, it is as if you have done everything
⏹️ ▶️ John against them, because that’s what appeasement is. You keep them happy and they can get unhappy really quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John So let’s say John Ternus declines to go to the state dinner with the murdering guy from
⏹️ ▶️ John Saudi Arabia. That would be front page news headlines, Stockwood tank. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just didn’t go to a dinner. How slowly can I turn the wheel on this giant ship? It’s like, sorry, with
⏹️ ▶️ John the appeasement policy, if you do literally anything except for appease them, we’ve decided you are
⏹️ ▶️ John you are no longer a friend to the administration because that’s how authoritarianism works. And so that’s why I say, like
⏹️ ▶️ John on that particular issue, there is no avoiding the FU, so just do the FU. But they’re probably not going to, which
⏹️ ▶️ John means that this is one of the the timeline wise, one of the hopes and one of the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have discussed is that Tim Cook could stay out the rest of the Trump term
⏹️ ▶️ John and eat all of the crap and put all the sin on him and then have the same leave with him and the new person can get
⏹️ ▶️ John a clean slate. You know what I mean? Now, that’s not going to happen if this happens next year. So it necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John taints the incoming CEO who. Seemingly has no
⏹️ ▶️ John choice but to continue the stupid appeasement policy, otherwise, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the stock tanks and blah, blah, blah. And I think they should do that like again, a few money, like they should say a few.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I agree with you that they probably won’t, especially if Tim Cook is still there. So, um, I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I just hope that Tim Cook wrote out these last few years, however long Trump sticks around
⏹️ ▶️ John and then cleanly transitioned after that. It really got the hell out of the company. I let a new person go
⏹️ ▶️ John in and do entirely new things, but it looks like that’s not happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I mean, and I do think like, you know, the dynamics with Trump could, could be playing a role here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, but keep in mind, like Tim Cook’s actions suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that he is a Trump supporter and that he uses Trump to get what he wants. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s, let’s not try to pretend that like Tim Cook is trying to like minimize, make a plan to minimize Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exposure to Trump. No, Tim has put Apple directly into Trump so that they can get Trump to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do things that are convenient for them. Like, I don’t think it’s like a, a minimize the damage plan. I think it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you keep Tim around to keep cozying up to Trump, to keep getting things that benefit Apple. It like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not about harm reduction. It’s about opportunistically getting what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want. Like, look at all the preferential treatment Apple gets as a result of this cozying up. It’s-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not Tim quietly saying, screw you to Trump in the background and then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going and doing the minimum required. This is Tim stepping up to get favors, and it’s working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook is a Trump supporter. I hate to tell everybody. Anyway, it isn’t an angle of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s try to, you know, strategically plan out Trump. But and I will gladly say Trump’s name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as possible on episode 666 hoping for things like that to happen Nice. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoping that what happens here is Tim Cook Sticks around long enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep being The the Trump sink he is the Trump agent He
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes all the hate about Trump from people who believe in facts and decency
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think he still goes to these the dinners with the murderers? Well, John Ternus doesn’t have to even though
⏹️ ▶️ John John Ternus is the CEO. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so. I agree This is not necessarily guaranteeing that cook is stepping down next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. It’s more like Cook might step down as soon as next year, you know So or sometime next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year if not, like January of next year, right? and so like maybe Maybe they can swing it such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that cook sticks around for the rest of Trump’s term and then maybe John Ternus takes over after that That but that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least a few years out. So like that’s probably not within this timeline So I don’t know what’s going to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on there, but I’m hoping that once Cook is no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer CEO, I’m hoping that that gives Ternes or whoever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds like Ternes, a new chance to have a new take on that relationship and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually support Apple for what its core values really seem to be for most of its life and not what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been this past year. That being said, so setting aside all all that BS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thinking about a CEO transition at Apple, I don’t know that much about John Ternus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We certainly don’t know what he would be like as a CEO because he has not been a CEO.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We do know that he he leads a very successful division at Apple, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware engineering division. His division is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rock stars of Apple right now. They execute well. And if you look back, like when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook was made CEO, he came from operations. And at that time, operations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the rockstar division of Apple. They were doing great. They were bringing the company forward. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what John Ternus’s hardware division has been doing. They are top of their game, executing great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, bringing great products out and making the company very successful with their advances,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, among other things in the company. So I’m actually very excited to see like, the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chapter of Apple, if it’s led by John Ternus, even though I don’t know what kind of CEO he would be, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more excited about somebody who seems to like love computer hardware than somebody who seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to love spreadsheets and football and Donald Trump.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, leave football out of it, but otherwise I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so like Apple needs a product leader and ever since Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passed away they haven’t had one. Ternus might be that. He certainly has a much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chance of being that than anyone in the Cook regime ever was. What’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also interesting and I think a little bit exciting, and I don’t want to be mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the people I’m about to mention because I don’t intend it. What also tends to happen in a CEO transition is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of other turnover happens near the high ranks. I would expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of other people of the old guard to retire or move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on to a different company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jeff Williams already did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jeff Williams already did. I would expect we would probably lose at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Phil Schiller, probably also Craig Federighi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t think Craig is going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so there’s a number of ways that could go. Number one, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think this would be like on day one, but you know, what tends to happen in a transition like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is certain people who were who were not promoted to CEO either are upset that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they weren’t and you know, might leave as a result of that. Or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just don’t really want to work for the new person. Or, you know, like the dynamics
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they just think it’s a good time to leave because things are in transition. I was thinking retiring anyway, now’s a good time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. This is look, that’s what happened when we went from jobs to cook. A lot of, a lot of people shuffled around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You had the forest all versus I’ve problem. And then forest all was forced out. Like there was all things happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. And while I’m not like wishing in particular for any of these other people to go, because I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a lot of their work, I am excited about the prospect of turnover.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because these are people who have been in this upper echelon of Apple leadership for a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. They’re all nearing retirement age, although not super close to it. Like Federico
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I think like in his late 50s still. Schiller is like 61 or 62, something like that. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re not super close to like, you know, you know, Cook is 65. So that’s like, that’s a lot closer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to retirement age. But I think what we will see is in the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one to five years, I think we’re going to see a lot of people on that apple.com slash slash leadership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco page retire. And those positions will turn over.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve already started to see that’s not just Jeff Williams, is that CFO that I can’t remember the name of JG getting shuffled around
⏹️ ▶️ John for cause. And like there’s been like as those people age, they’re coming up again. This is definitely an inflection
⏹️ ▶️ John point for people to to rotate out like that’s That’s the thing with new CEO, especially we don’t even know who it is. We can
⏹️ ▶️ John attach all our hopes and dreams to it. And regardless of how we think the forestall and I have
⏹️ ▶️ John transitioned went, you always hope that these transitions are gonna take place and that the new person
⏹️ ▶️ John in that position will be better than the old in the ways that you care about, but sometimes they’re worse. And so it’s always a risky
⏹️ ▶️ John period. Like on the other hand, like I do always feel like the jobs to cook transition,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like, I don’t think anyone minded because we kind of liked the direction Jobs was taking
⏹️ ▶️ John things, but I always felt kind of disappointed that it took like three years for Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John look like it had a new CEO. You know what I mean? Like, and again, no one complains about that, but it’s like, well, we like
⏹️ ▶️ John what Jobs is doing. So we like that Tim Cook continued down that road, even though even though he kept quoting Jobs saying, just do what
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to do. He totally didn’t. He did what Jobs wanted to do for years.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, when that’s when that’s something mostly you agree with, it seems fine, but I hope it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John take that long this time. I hope I don’t feel like Tim Cook’s Apple sticks around for four more years because
⏹️ ▶️ John the new CEO is too cautious to do anything different. I know the big ship turns slowly. Don’t spook Wall Street, yada, yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I hope it does something new and obviously attaching my hopes and dreams. Hey, get
⏹️ ▶️ John someone in user interface design who knows anything about user interface design. You know, update your products
⏹️ ▶️ John more often. Be more decisive about your your products. You know, bring back the Mac Pro like all my
⏹️ ▶️ John play the hits. Right. I got all the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I want. Change
⏹️ ▶️ John your relationship with the app store. unify your operating system across all the regions to be more open because everyone’s making you do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So why are you fighting in every possible like there’s so many things, but there’s no guarantee that any of
⏹️ ▶️ John those decisions from a new CEO will go our way. And maybe new CEO will come in and screw something
⏹️ ▶️ John else up, like say, hey, podcast, let’s screw that up now. So, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ John I have just the I’m pessimistic because the times we’re living in, but like I do have lots of hopes and dreams
⏹️ ▶️ John for a new CEO, lots of things they could do differently. If I could sit down with the new CEO, I could do it like a 10 bullet
⏹️ ▶️ John point thing, do these 10 things in the next five years. But they have their own stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna do and maybe it has zero overlap with mine. And it’s a scary time. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as we’re annoyed with Tim Cook, Tim Cook’s Apple is such a known quantity at this point that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going completely into the unknown. It’s like, well, surely it’s gotta be better, right? Surely things have to improve. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, well, it could make certain things worse. And we’ll see how it goes. The fact that he did great in hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John That just makes me, it’s like the Peter principle. Like, great, keep that guy in charge of hardware. He’s doing great. It’s like, but actually he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be in charge of the whole company. It’s like when they put Ive in charge of hardware design and user interface design, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, I mean, he’s made some great products, but does he know anything about user interface design?
⏹️ ▶️ John Turns out, not really.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, he didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John So like making the hardware guy, again, like there’s no one person who embodies everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You know, Jobs couldn’t do a whole bunch of these things, too, they all have specific skills, right? So it’s just a question of
⏹️ ▶️ John like figuring out like we were talking about, does cook know how to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out whether a high level executive is going to be good. And especially early on in cook’s career
⏹️ ▶️ John is a bunch of like hires that flamed out a couple of them in retail that one
⏹️ ▶️ John was that paper master guy and like Silicon, like it’s hard, it’s hard to do that. Like no one, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John even jobs hire people who turned out not to be great and whatever. Like, so it’s just, it’s just such an unknown. So I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m, I think I’m, I mean, Obviously, I’m excited for Cook to leave, but I’m kind of more scared about what
⏹️ ▶️ John the future holds. Because not because I don’t want things to change, because I do, but I fear that they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John change for the worse, which would just totally be such a 2025 thing to happen. Yep, really would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I find this very exciting. I think the Tim Cook era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, surprisingly to me, almost over. I really thought that he would at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last through the Trump term.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is looking like he’s probably not going to. And I hope you know look I don’t wish ill on the man. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope he’s not like sick or something But I am happy for his era of leadership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To be passed along to somebody else because I think he has taken Apple as far as he can He’s had a number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of pretty big things that I wish they didn’t do a number of big directions that they that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t go in and should have a number of Big directions that they did go in and shouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like Game of Thrones where it seemed like it was going real good until the end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I didn’t see it, so I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a series that everyone loved until the final season when everyone was like, ugh. And I feel like this is the final season
⏹️ ▶️ John of Tim Cook, and everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, ugh. I mean, that’s like many TV shows, to be honest, including some of my favorite TV shows. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m excited to see Turnover, because we’ve had the same leaders for a very long time. And you’re right, Turnover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is scary, because it is risky. But what it also tends to bring is fresh perspectives,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new blood, new excitement, new directions, and new ideas. and that’s something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple could use. You know, they are very successful financially, and many of their products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are great, but they could use some new ideas, and some fresh blood, and some fresh leadership. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find this very exciting, even though it is risky. Yes, do things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are scary. Like, it is risky, it does scare me a little bit, but I’m ready
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see who and what is next at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should do a series of blog posts called Apple Turnover. Isn’t that a good pun? and then maybe Apple turn around after that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Delete.me and Skims. And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can go to atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. One of the perks of ATP membership is ATP Overtime, our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weekly bonus topic. Every single week, we bring you extra content just for members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in overtime, in addition to our monthly specials and things like that. So this week on Overtime, where we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store on the web and Apple’s other web apps recently. You can join to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen atv.fm slash join. Thanks everybody, we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast so long
Declan’s HyperCard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a weird parenting moment that happened over the last few days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me back up a smidge. When I was in school, in grade school, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about this in bits and parts throughout the years, several of the schools
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went through used Macs. And I thought they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very cool and very pretty. I didn’t want one, but I thought they were fun. And at some point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or another, presumably somebody pointed out to me or maybe I stumbled upon, HyperCard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And HyperCard to a 10-year-old was, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a way to make a choose-your-own-adventure game, right? And it was amazing. It was incredibly cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HyperCard to this day, even as someone who never really used a Mac growing up other than in school,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of my favorite pieces of software I’ve ever used. It was just so cool and so approachable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even for a 10-year-old. Well, Declan has apparently discovered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote unquote hypercard. And by that I mean I noticed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s been obsessed with doing something on his Chromebook recently. I’m like, what’s going on there, bud?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He said, well, I forget exactly the words he used to describe it, but he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, I’m making a rage bait game. This is apparently what the grade schoolers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think is the funniest thing in the world is making people grumbly and upset and angry by,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, doing, by asking silly questions and doing convoluted things. But what he’s doing is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well actually let me ask, John, what is HyperCard for Declan?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did he use the word HyperCard?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I was, because you wrote it in the show, it’s without a capital C, which I corrected. So I was wondering
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if there was
⏹️ ▶️ John a new product called HyperCard with a lowercase
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey c. Nope. Oh, can I guess? Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John intercaps. Intercaps were big in the early Mac days. Capital H, Hyper, capital C, Card.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is HyperCard for kids these days? I’m not up on the,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, unless he’s using like, like whatever Google’s PowerPoint equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That was my guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google Slides. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, Google Slides. That is his HyperCard. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s selling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HyperCard pretty short, but okay. It is, it is, it is. And I don’t mean any offense by that, I truly don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As I said, I loved HyperCard. This is a very different animal. But in the end of the day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what he’s basically doing is making a hypercard. What was it? Stack? Is that right? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making a hypercard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a stack of cards. Yeah. So he’s making a hypercard stack, again, my word’s not his, in order to mess with his friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s just so funny to me. A, there’s a little bit of like life finds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way. B, there’s a little bit of like everything old is new again. C,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s similar to what I would have done at the time. I think I was a little less nefarious, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. Um, but I just, I really thought it was adorable that here he is. He’s spending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours building up this choose your own adventure, rage, Beatty, hypercard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stack. Again, my words, not his. And I just thought that it was very adorable and very
⏹️ ▶️ John fun. Is there a programming thing in Google slides or is he just using links to other slides? Like, is there the equivalent of hyper talk?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. I don’t think so. I think it’s just links to other slides. Links to other slides. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m not sure if the hypercard is the analogy, he’s basically making web
⏹️ ▶️ John pages without web technology because he was just linking from one slide to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other. That’s fair. Yeah. But I guess the vibe of it just felt like hyper cards me because he’s drawing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buttons, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not a it’s it’s a GUI editor and you’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ John not writing markup and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right and he’s kind of drawing buttons and then he yells at me every time because I see, you know, a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rectangle or round rect really as a button and so I’ll tap anywhere on that button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you have to tap on the word. You have to tap on the word and he gets cranky me every time because I always forget.
⏹️ ▶️ John going to that’s going to be new in an iOS 27. I think they’re going to have that change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm hmm. But anyways, I just thought it was very, very funny that here was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same sort vaguely if you squint the same thing that I was doing in what? The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey early 90s is effectively happening again in 2025. Slightly different tech,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but same idea. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John doing rage bait things, I think, in HyperCard as well. I remember a HyperCard stack I had that I would use to troll my PC
⏹️ ▶️ John using friends. I remember at one point I drew a cave, and like in the black mouth of the cave,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was like a malevolent pair of eyes and a C, like a C drive prompt. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey making fun of drive letters and
⏹️ ▶️ John DOS, you know. I forget what it was called, I should dig it out, but it was basically like a Max or Better than PCs
⏹️ ▶️ John because PCs don’t have GUIs, HyperCard stack. Really driving the point home. That I would
⏹️ ▶️ John let my friends play and click around and they’d get angry. Yep. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was an adorable
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, I can tell. Did you
⏹️ ▶️ John play the stack and see if it worked? It did make you enraged? Yes, to a degree. Is it because
⏹️ ▶️ John it used young person slang that you didn’t understand?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some. Some of it was like one of the slides had a series
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of eight colors and each of these colors was a button and there was no label whatsoever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you just had to guess which one was the way to go forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is, yeah, so my kid has also made games, especially when he was like a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco younger, so those tracks. Games like that that basically it’s like Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of random failure and death and you have to just memorize the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco path through and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the it’s the old-school gaming and also the riddles in the dark from the Hobbit where? Bilbo can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think of any more riddles, and he says what have I got in my pocket? That’s a brittle. It’s like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which color should you click? I don’t know. Try one.