681: The Price of Your Nightmares
05 Mar 2026The MacBook Neo, M5 MacBook Air, M4 iPad Air, MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max, the new Studio Display XDR, and the “new” Studio Display.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: The best (but slowest) website on the internet
- Million Dollar Homepage
- 2013 BMW M5 (PDF)
- 2014 Honda Accord (PDF)
- M4 iPad Air
- iPhone 17e
- New displays (‼️)
- Studio Display 2
- Studio Display XDR
- M5 MacBook Air
- M5 Pro & M5 Max
- M5 Pro & M5 Max MacBook Pros
- If you squint, a 64GB MBP got cheaper
- MacBook Neo
- Post-show: John had a post break containment
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple’s video podcast experience
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Chapters
- The best website?
- iPad Air (M4)
- iPhone 17e
- Sponsor: MasterClass
- “New” Studio Display
- Studio Display XDR
- Sponsor: Factor (code atp50off)
- MacBook Air (M5)
- M5 Pro/Max chips
- MacBook Pro (M5 Pro/Max)
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- MacBook Neo
- Ending theme
- Breaking containment
The best website?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let me start by saying I’m a little congested, nasally, whatever. It’s not because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco screwed up the editor or anything like that. I’m just ever so slightly under weather. It’s fine. However, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey redeem myself by telling you to, and all of you who are listening, I found the best website on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, is this better than Million Dollar Homepage?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Powell Yes, especially because I didn’t earn a million dollars from it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Troxell I think of all like the various like Internet clever things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What an amazing winner that site was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh God, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What, like, because it’s the kind of thing, like it only works once. Yup. And even if it could work another time, it wouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool if somebody did it again. Like it only works once, it only works for the first person to try it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what a fun, weird idea that was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so for those that aren’t familiar, what this was, and jump in and interrupt me when you’re ready, but it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each pixel or something like that was a dollar, and there were a million pixels on the homepage, So you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy any number of pixels at a dollar a piece and over the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million pixels on the homepage, that’s a million bucks. And it’s still at milliondollarhomepage.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredibly good idea. And I’m really impressed by it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco like you said- It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so tiny, I’m my big monitor now, I’m a big modern monitor. Oh, well, it’s not that modern, we’ll talk about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Glorious one megapixel image.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found the best website on the internet. Before we started recording, I asked both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the boys what model year their cars were. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I asked because I was looking at, what is the URL? autocatalogarchive.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you look in the chat, and I’ll put it in the show notes, there, John, is the official
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brochure for the 2014 Honda Accord. And because it’s my favorite of all of Marcos’
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cars, the 2013, as I always said, 2013 BMW M5. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M5 catalog is the international one, whereas the Accord catalog, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brochure if you will, is the American one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you posted mine, but what I wanna say is 1992 Civic. That’s what I wanna say. I’ll look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. All right, well, the problem with this website, even though it is the best website on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internet, it is also the slowest website on the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Autocatalogarchive.com, it is incredible. And so you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look up all different, like all the different marks. Is it marquees, marks? How do you pronounce it? M-A-R-Q-U-E-S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, M-A-R-Q-U-E-S. You could just
⏹️ ▶️ John say makes, in this country we say make and model.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. But anyways, very, very good stuff. It is impossibly slow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and impossibly disorganized. And yet this is my new favorite website on the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredibly good stuff.
iPad Air (M4)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a lot to do. We are going to do the unthinkable that we do every time there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Apple event, and issue follow-up, and we’re gonna jump straight into topics. John, how are we gonna cover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? It’s been a busy week.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t remember a time when we’ve had this many products released in this short a period of time. I know it wasn’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John one event, it was three days worth of press releases, yada yada. And I know like what they announced was now there’s no new product category,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not transitioning chip architecture. It’s like significance-wise, it’s not like it’s the, you know, iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John or the Vision Pro or the Apple Watch or something, but boy, is it a lot of products in a short period of time. And the only
⏹️ ▶️ John real like hitch to the schedule is that the M5 Pro and Max laptops could essentially got delayed
⏹️ ▶️ John until spring when they normally would have been back then. But still, even not accounting for those, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of products in a short period of time. So that’s why, even though this is not a quote unquote Apple event, even though there
⏹️ ▶️ John was an Apple experience, no follow-up, and this is just a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff to cover,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of goodies all at one time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, very much so. So you have in here, John, iPad 18 DNF
⏹️ ▶️ John did not finish. Yeah. Of all the rumored items. Cause obviously I have like the bullet points for all these items and based
⏹️ ▶️ John on the rumors, that was the only one that didn’t show up, which is also rare, normally like this rumors of like four or five things, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we know that the top three are the ones that are definitely going to be there. And then maybe a fourth or something. And usually the fourth doesn’t show up
⏹️ ▶️ John this time. They all showed up except for the new, uh, presumably a team powered plain
⏹️ ▶️ John old iPad, but that’s a boring product anyway. So nobody cares.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So the first real thing that we’re going to talk about is the M4 iPad Air.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s just, you know, they stuck an M4 on the iPad Air. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always interesting to see how they save money on these when they put them in the lesser product. So it’s got an M4,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s, you know, it’s been, as they say, in a in a particular way. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get it with an eight core CPU, which is three P cores and five E cores. And yes, we’re going to talk about those later.
⏹️ ▶️ John But a full M4 is four P cores and six E cores. so it’s down one P and it’s down one E to
⏹️ ▶️ John save money. The GPU is missing a core, it’s nine core instead of 10. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM is 12 gigs, which is an increase over the iPad Air, which only had eight gigs. So that’s nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You get the M1- In the iPad Air M3. Yeah, iPad Air M3.
⏹️ ▶️ John You get the M1 and the C1X, which is really nice. Apple’s latest chips, you know, for Wi-Fi and stuff. So you get a Wi-Fi 7,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get Bluetooth 6, that’s cool. It’s the same size as the iPad Air M3, but a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit heavier. And storage is no change. So you could go from 128 up to a terabyte. Same
⏹️ ▶️ John colors, environmental impact statements. I’ve been, I diffed them for this particular thing because
⏹️ ▶️ John like they say the same stuff all the time, but I’m like, what new stuff are you doing in the environment? Have they been any regressions?
⏹️ ▶️ John So just like the iPad Air M3 is 30% recycled content, 100% recycled aluminum in
⏹️ ▶️ John the enclosure and recycled cobalt in the battery. And the new thing that they’ve been touting for all their products, and you’ll hear it for
⏹️ ▶️ John each one, is manufactured with X percent of renewable energy in the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Air M4 is 40% renewable energy, which is nice, I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess. I mean, in the past they would say, we try to use renewable energy, but now they’re putting a number on it so it shows that they’re tracking it. So good job
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, keep ratcheting that stuff up. And the pricing is unchanged and not
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly interesting comes in 11 and 13 inch, cellular is 150 extra bucks, pre-order March 4th, available March 12th.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like it’s not an exciting product, but as we always say, every time there’s a speed bump,
⏹️ ▶️ John speed bumps are not particularly exciting, but it’s so much better than not having them. By all means, speed bump every
⏹️ ▶️ John product. If you don’t have a big redesign, just put new stuff in it. And this is, I think, is an ideal speed bump.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M number went up from three to four. It got the N1 and the C1X, so it’s got the latest
⏹️ ▶️ John modem chip and the latest wifi chip, the latest wifi standard, the latest Bluetooth standard in Apple’s lines,
⏹️ ▶️ John if not in the entire world, right? Thumbs up, good speed bump.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think the iPad Air, kind of like the base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M chip 14 inch MacBook Pro, which I have, but it’s one of those items that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a mid-range product that we talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe once a year when they update it, and we never think about it again, we never talk about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, but people out there buy it, and it’s fine. And it’s not like, it isn’t the most exciting model in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any direction in particular, It’s like right down the middle and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. And a lot of people out there buy it and are happy with it. Just like me and my 14-inch MacBook Pro. A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people are perfectly fine with this model. It doesn’t have the best of everything. It doesn’t have the worst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the best of anything. It doesn’t have the worst of anything. The only thing that I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would break down one barrier on the low-end iPads, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Face ID. Like I recently, I got a recent iPad mini for some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco testing and it’s Touch ID of course, cause all iPad minis to date have been Touch ID. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so, it’s brutal. Like once you’re used to Face ID on the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the iPad Pro is so expensive and has been pushed so high up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line. Face ID, I think should be table stakes for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones and iPads. And it is for most of them, except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mid-range and low-end iPads now. And I think that’s the one thing that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push you to pro for that I wish they wouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we have to wait for the next redesign, right? Cause this is not really a redesign. This is just an internal bump, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But maybe, like, you know, we’ll see, like there’s rumors of the next iPad mini going a little bit higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end with OLED. You know, we’ll see like maybe as OLED trickles down through the line, maybe they’ll use that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opportunity to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as they get the smaller face ID things, like it might take a while, I think, because there’s rumors of smaller Face ID stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in the upcoming iPhones, but that smaller Face ID stuff is probably gonna be exclusive to the high-end iPhones for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think you might have to wait two generations. We’ll see. Talk about being stingy about Face ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John When are we getting a Mac with it? So get in line, I guess, iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at least like on the Mac and on the iPhone, I feel like, you know, on an iPhone, Touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID was not putative because the way you hold the phone, your thumb is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already there and you were already using the home button on those models constantly. see your thumb is already there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the Mac, the Touch ID button is on the keyboard right where your hands already are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really easy to go hit it all the time. On the iPad though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my experience so far using this iPad Mini, Touch ID is a pain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the butt because you’re never already on it. You always have to like reach around for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is very disruptive to the experience and it feels very clunky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and punitive. Because like when they went from home button iPads, well again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your hand was already there all the time. When they went from the home button iPad to Touch ID iPads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was not a step forward. It was just like, we’re gonna take this thing that you need to do a lot and we’re gonna make it worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because on the high-end model, we made it better with Face ID. On these low-end models, we don’t wanna do that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish they would change that. That’s the one thing about the non-pro iPads that feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco punitive. And every time there’s an update to the Air or the Mini or the base model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope for that, But so far they have yet to deliver that, we’ll see.
iPhone 17e
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Next up, we have the iPhone 17E, the 17E.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this definitely is fulfilling the promise of the 16E, which is that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would get updated every year, which is exciting. And they have fixed the one major complaint that most of us had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the 16E, which is that it actually has MagSafe this year, which is very exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the one big fumble on the 16E. I couldn’t believe they did it. They corrected it immediately. So I’m excited
⏹️ ▶️ John that the 17E exists and I’m excited that it has MagSafe because that really
⏹️ ▶️ John made it, went from a product that I felt like I couldn’t recommend to people because I just felt like, like you’re spending so much money
⏹️ ▶️ John for this phone, it’s not that cheap. Get one with MagSafe, it opens up this whole world of peripherals and
⏹️ ▶️ John sticking it to magnetic things on your dashboard and all sorts of other, you know, pops and magnetic pop sockets and
⏹️ ▶️ John holders for cards and all sorts of other great stuff. And it just seemed a shame they didn’t have it and they fixed it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the 17E is one of these models that like we are talking about it now, we will probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never talk about it again, but it serves an important role in the lineup and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have done seemingly by all accounts a pretty good job this time. You know, the 16e seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good for what it was, but we all said, except MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, now they’ve fixed that. This seems like, you know, a nice model that those of us like who tend to buy the higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end phones, we’ll see it in the store, we’ll pick it up and be like, ooh, this is really small and light and simple. This is kind of fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No camera bump, kind of. Right, yeah, sort of, yeah. Like we won’t be the ones buying it, but a lot of people will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, if you are in this budget category, if you can go $200 more to go from the 17E
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the base model 17, you do get a lot of upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. So it is kind of worth considering, especially in the area of the screen. You get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promotion, you get always on, which like that does dramatically change how people use a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone. So if the screen is important to you, that might be worth it. Otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just want the absolute cheapest iPhone of like a new generation, this is a really solid option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I do like that they’re updating it every year, seemingly now, that’s gonna be really nice for them and for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who buy these phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and we would be talking about it. It’s like, and we won’t talk about it again. You know why we would talk about it again? If they didn’t update it for like three
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, when are they ever gonna update the, like remember the SE would just sit there forever and we would talk about it because
⏹️ ▶️ John you would say, what the hell? Like, are you making this phone or you’re not? And you know, this, I feel like putting the number in it and
⏹️ ▶️ John they fulfilled the promise so far of like, we will update this phone, we will put better stuff in it, we will correct our mistakes quickly,
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of like, oh, we made an SE, but the feature set isn’t quite right, I’ll see you in three years when we try to fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s great. It does have an A19 in it with no cores disabled, which is cool. The GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John is four core instead of six, which would be full, so they’re saving a lot on the GPUs there. It
⏹️ ▶️ John gets the C1X modem, but it does not get the N1, which is interesting. It just has Wi-Fi 6,
⏹️ ▶️ John not even 6E, and it has Bluetooth 5.3. but they do mention stuff about, in their comparison
⏹️ ▶️ John list of features, like next generation portraits with focus and depth control. I think that’s just a software
⏹️ ▶️ John change because it’s as compared to the 16E, which said portrait mode with depth control, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this says next generation portraits, which I think it’s a software thing, but I’m not entirely sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John It might be A19 powered with like the image processor. Speaking of screens, this does have the ceramic
⏹️ ▶️ John shield two front durability thing which does, I think, make a difference in scratching. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good that it gets that even if the screen itself is not much better. It charges faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than the 16E, they say 50% in around 30 minutes. There’s no more 128 gig option, it starts at 256, so thank goodness for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s about the same, it is exactly the same size as 16E and weighs two grams more.
⏹️ ▶️ John Comes in black and white and a new color, soft pink, which, you know, black and white are boring, but straight
⏹️ ▶️ John up the middle. It’s nice that it comes in one color that is not black and white. I hope they rotate that color because
⏹️ ▶️ John the pink looks fine, it looks good, but maybe do a blue next year or a red or a green. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John again, with the lowest end, you know, bargain basement phone, you’re not gonna get that many options, but it’s good to see
⏹️ ▶️ John one more. Environmental stuff, 30% of recycled content, 85% recycled aluminum, 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John recycled cobalt in the battery. And the new thing for this year, 55% renewable energy
⏹️ ▶️ John manufactured with 55% renewable electricity, not renewable energy. That’s across their whole supply chain,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they say. Price is 599.52.56, which was the same price is 16e128 so they got rid of the 128 but actually are selling the 256 the same
⏹️ ▶️ John price they sold the 128 which is nice because sometimes they get rid of the low-end config
⏹️ ▶️ John but they just sell the higher-end config at the higher price and then the 512 gig is $100 less than the 512 gig 16e was.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again pre-order March 4th
⏹️ ▶️ John available March 11th. Pretty good update to the ePhone.
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“New” Studio Display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the point in which I, as the kids say, crash out a little bit. New displays.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually, I think all three of us will be crashing out for different reasons come to think of it. But Apple has released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two new displays. They have the studio display, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically the same as the one that I’m looking at right now. It has a better center stage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera quote now with improved image quality and support for desk view. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also apparently better audio, particularly 30% deeper bass. It is moved up to Thunderbolt 5,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that can be up to 120 gigabits per second, including one upstream Thunderbolt 5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port for the host with 96 watt charging for that host. And then one downstream
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thunderbolt 5 port for connecting high-speed accessories or fascinatingly, daisy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chaining additional displays. Very cool stuff. Then there’s also two USB-C ports, and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be talking more about the distinction between USB-C and Thunderbolt ports later. The SoC in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the A19, which is different than the A13, and we’ll be talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the A19 later. It is still $1,600 with standard glass. It’s $2,000 when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get the height adjustable stand, or $1,900 with nanotexture, So that’s a $300 Delta and thus $2,300 with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a height adjustable stand and nanotexture.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $400 for that height adjustable stand is really hurting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a, we had a good throwback, a snarky
⏹️ ▶️ John toot from Jack Wellborn that used our, uh, uh, bluish new banner on an angle.
⏹️ ▶️ John It used to actually be the logo for the show. It was the fav icon for ATP.fm website at a long time. Early on in the,
⏹️ ▶️ John in ATP, we all attended a WWDC where they updated the Mac Pro with the Mac Pro that they said
⏹️ ▶️ John was new, but it wasn’t really new. I forget what they did to it. I didn’t even think it was a speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They raised the minimum spec to a higher tier. Yeah, like they got rid of the low-end model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think like, because Intel got rid of the processor. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s a new Mac Pro. We’re like, that’s not a new Mac Pro. Well, this, the Snark is less,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, less powerful now that we know that it comes with the A19, because it’s not literally the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they actually changed the hardware. They didn’t change it a lot, but they did change the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware. They didn’t change the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen part of the hardware. And when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John displays, the screen part of the hardware is a really important part. Now I’m not complaining, like by all means, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John under update to Thunderbolt 5, put an AA19 in it for whatever that does, right? That’s good. Daisy
⏹️ ▶️ John chaining is a cool feature, but the bottom line is this is like exactly the same specs as
⏹️ ▶️ John the old studio display, which I believe was from 2022. Is it old display? It’s 600 nits, it’s 60 Hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s exactly the same resolution. It’s exactly the same size.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is exactly the same price, which is insane because the price did not make any sense. That’s what we’ve been harping
⏹️ ▶️ John on for the past several years. Like here are the specs, it’s a nice display, but $1,600 without
⏹️ ▶️ John a height adjustable stand and $400 to add the height adjustable stand, those numbers do not make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense for these specs. And they didn’t change the screen specs, the thing you look at with your
⏹️ ▶️ John eyeball. So it’s extremely frustrating product. Now, I think they should still make this product
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m sad that the price hasn’t changed and good luck for them selling it in an increasingly competitive market where there are
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many options with similar or better specs for way less money, even if they come in cases
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t quite look as nice. But this product, like if they had changed the price, I would have been
⏹️ ▶️ John fine with this. But keeping the price the same is just like a, it’s like a finger in the eye. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what the right disrespectful expression is, but it is disrespectful. And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they did update the internals that has an A19S Thunderbolt 5, but like not changing the screen is just very upsetting
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. So this, you know, I continue to not be enthusiastic about the base model studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder like, who is this product for besides Casey? Oh, hold on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey second. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who? Because it seems like if you want a nice monitor that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best monitor you can get, there are so many better options that like in the world of PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitors now, I mean, I guess we still often have like, you know, lack of integration with Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cases aren’t as nice or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like, but here’s, but the price, I just felt like you can’t keep the same price without changing the screen part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor. It’s just, it’s, it’s insulting. You can’t if you’re Apple. Yeah, but we’ll see, we’ll see how they sell. Like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like they’re, they very often travel with their displays in a Mac Pro-like trajectory where they make bad product
⏹️ ▶️ John decisions and say, well, see, look, no one’s buying it. It’s like, well, what are you doing? You’re not, like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like, as we’ll see in a second, It’s not like there aren’t ways to continue charging ridiculous margins on
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors. You just gotta make a really fancy, really nice one and then you get your margins. But like trying to be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like as someone pointed out, I forgot who it was, I’m sorry, but like someone was saying, it’s just such a shame that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does not make any basic monitors. As we’ll see when we discuss later products, Apple is getting better
⏹️ ▶️ John at making just the basic version of a lot of its products. But monitors is like, no, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no such thing as a basic monitor from Apple. You have to buy it from a third party. And that’s terrible. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, by all means, make these fancy monitors, right? But there should be, you know, a studio
⏹️ ▶️ John display Neo. You know what I mean? Like there should be a basic monitor for people who just wanted a monitor. Why won’t you sell
⏹️ ▶️ John it to them Apple? Yes, the margins will be a little bit lower, but like, anyway, this thing is a dud.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The first minor update to the Retina iMac was the late 2015 model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco About 10 years ago, that panel in the late 2015 27 inch retina iMac was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 27 inch 5k P3 wide color 500 nit panel 10 and a half years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now John remind me what are the specs on this? Was it 600 nits? 600 nits. Is that the only
⏹️ ▶️ John significant difference? I would guess so. Maybe the viewing angle is a little better. Maybe the image retention isn’t quite, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, it just tells you like it’s this is not cutting edge technology going into this panel.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and this monitor has a faster CPU than the iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fair, but like, okay, at this incredibly premium price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, what you are getting is a very, very, very similar panel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and monitor and general image quality and specs to the 10 and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half year old iMac panel. I think it’s a little weird to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be pushing this a little further, or at least to not be lowering the price. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I don’t argue.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like if they had made this the basic panel and lowered it to $9.99 or something like that We’d all been singing
⏹️ ▶️ John its praises We’d like finally if you just want a basic monitor you have a Mac laptop You want to get an Apple monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John to match it? You don’t care about fancy specs This is the one for you, but they did not change the price. Apple does not
⏹️ ▶️ John sell any basic monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean I’m in support of them revving it. I think Generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking. I’m not actually that disappointed with this when you ignore the price tag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I concur with both of you, particularly John, that once you look at the price tag, it’s like, come on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Really? You can’t lower it any? And the nanotexture is still hundreds of dollars, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tilt adjustable or height adjustable stand rather is hundreds of dollars. Like, really? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re Apple, you can do it. You
Studio Display XDR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then it’s okay because you you two have a positively ancient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitor sitting in front of you and There’s a new version and it’s better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever Ish there’s not a new version That’s so that’s the thing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so our monitors the Pro Display XP XDRs have been killed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re discontinued. They are gone Apple has released a new monitor that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an expensive desktop monitor with XDR in the name, but it is not not a replacement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Pro Display XDR. Because the Pro Display XDR is a 6K 30 inch, 32 inch monitor. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not release a 6K 32 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor today. They killed their 6K 32 inch monitor and replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it with a better 27 inch 5K monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, what were the resolution and screen size of that 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a half year old iMac? Oh, that’s right, 27 inch 5K.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of weird now that there’s so many more third party 6K monitors. Like Apple was kind of first to the party with like
⏹️ ▶️ John a big fancy 6K monitor and eventually third parties started releasing them too. And Apple’s like, you know what? Nevermind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very sad. Like, you know, Apple has gone in and out of making very large monitors over their history.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve always been really good. And like when when there’s a span where Apple’s not making the biggest monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size, everyone’s kind of like, oh, I guess I’ll get the third party one. but oh man,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they did release with this XDR 27 inch looks pretty good for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 27 inch monitor. But once you are accustomed to a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lifestyle, it’s really hard to go back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it is hard to go back real estate wise. Like that’s the whole thing with monitor sizes. Like in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John the trend across the entire industry, including Apple’s product lines, to be honest, has mostly been upward. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple did make the 30 inch non-retina, Cinema Display, and then there was a while, there was a while in the wilderness where they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make anything that big again, but then eventually they came back with a 32. So maybe we’re going through that cycle. Let me find the
⏹️ ▶️ John language. I think, what did they say that like, I think they said something to the effect of the Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John Display XDR replaces the Pro Display XDR. So it’s not like, oh, we’re just surmising
⏹️ ▶️ John this because they stopped selling the Pro Display XDR, which they have, they stopped selling it. But they literally said
⏹️ ▶️ John the Studio Display XDR replaces the Pro Display XDR. So if you read that, you’re like, oh, well, that’s a clear signal
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re not going to come out with the rumored Pro Display XDR successor.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would mostly agree that that is like, if I had to put money on something, that’s what I would put it on. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple was going to come out with a Pro Display XDR successor in a year
⏹️ ▶️ John or a WWC in the summer, they would say the exact same damn thing. They would say the Studio Display XDR replaces Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it does, it does replace it. They stopped selling the Pro Display XDR. They started selling Studio Display, it replaces
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And then, you know, WWC comes along, And they’re like, oh, Pro Display XDR 2. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that did replace it, but now here’s this. They’re never gonna say like, oh, don’t save your money because we might introduce a new
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger one. So my fingers are still crossed, you know, keep hope alive, yada, yada. There were
⏹️ ▶️ John rumors of a Pro Display XDR successor. This one is not called Pro Display XDR. It’s called
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio Display XDR. So the name is still available, but right now this replaces it. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you can find used ones cheap or increasingly cheap, but like, as we’ll get to in a second
⏹️ ▶️ John with the specs in this, the Pro Display XDR is starting to become the like, oh, I don’t care about image
⏹️ ▶️ John quality, I just want a lot of pixels. Because as the image quality improves across
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire industry, the Pro Display XDR specs look less impressive, but the number of pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John you get stays just as impressive because there’s a lot of them and the screen is big. So I’m glad I’ve still got my
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor, I hope it never breaks. I would not want to replace it with one of these despite the fact that it
⏹️ ▶️ John has better picture quality in a lot of ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Righto, so the Studio Display XDR, as you guys said, 5K, 27
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch, same resolution. There is a mini LED for the backlight with 2,304 dimming zones. John, do you happen to remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that’s more or less or otherwise? Pro Display XDR has 576 or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John 2,300 dimming zones is pretty good. It’s not the best in the world, but it’s pretty,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good. It’s also more dense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s a significantly smaller monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, exactly, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So much sadness for Marco. There is up to 1000 nits brightness in SDR and 2000 nits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey peak brightness in HDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are big numbers by the way, cause first of all, no one, you do not want it, well, maybe Marco does, but most people don’t want to blind themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re gonna put it at 1000 nits SDR. That means like your window, white windows would be 1000 nits. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John unless it’s a really sunny room, that’s very bright. And 2000 nits peak is higher than the XDR cause
⏹️ ▶️ John the XDR was 1600 nits peak. So good specs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And most importantly, I would argue, is that this is Apple’s first entry, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far as I’m aware, is a 120-hertz external display. There have been 120-hertz internal displays.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the first time we’ve seen it on the outside. And we’ve been theorizing that this was coming. We had heard some rumors that maybe 90-hertz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be the peak, but no, apparently, 120-hertz refresh rate and adaptive sync, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allows it to vary the refresh rate between 47-hertz and all the way up to, of course, 120-hertz. This is what peaked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is what’s making me wonder, should I buy one of these? Cause I, even though I don’t need 120 Hertz,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I certainly don’t need many LED. I don’t need all that brightness, but I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John want it. Yeah, this is a better monitor than the studio display as the name would
⏹️ ▶️ John imply. It is a better monitor specs wise than the Pro Display XDR. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as big. If I had never tasted the forbidden fruit of 6K, I would be tempted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by this monitor. Unfortunately I have, and so I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so that’s the thing, right? But the color reproduction, it has Adobe RGB color gamut support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in addition to P3 wide color. And both of them are available from the same default preset. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to like switch modes. I mean, I guess that’s just standard, but they called it out specifically. So I’m assuming as this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a default mode and you get Adobe RGB and P3, if you look at the little triangles on the color area,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not quite the same, but they’re similar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, it has 80% of the REC 2020 coverage. And they also leaned into, on the, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember where I read this, but they leaned into somewhere that it has DICOM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey medical imaging presets and the medical imaging calibrator to enable the use in diagnostic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey radiology, that’s D-I-C-O-M. The medical imaging calibrator on macOS is pending FDA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clearance, but is expected to be available soon in the US. So that’s something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different, and I don’t recall having ever seen before an Apple documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s a high-end monitor. It has good color support. that it’s well calibrated and they’re just trying to get a certification
⏹️ ▶️ John that allows it to be used in this particular way because who else is gonna buy this monitor at the prices that we’re about to see?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 12 megapixel center stage camera with desk view, which your Pro Display XDR does not have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a six speaker system with force canceling woofers and wow, I don’t think I realized that, force canceling woofers, that’s pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not new, that’s the old Sudio Display has that as well. Does it? Yeah, the only difference in the speaker setups is 30% deeper bass. Okay, fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so that’s the same as the new non-XDR studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display. I’m not snarking. Your display is only the display, right? No speakers, or does it have speakers? No speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK. The same, or similar story, if not the same story. Oh, no, similar story with the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thunderbolt 5 ports up to 120 gigs a second, gigabits per second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One is for the host, which allows up to 140 watt charging up from 96 on the non-XDR version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then again, you can, uh, the other one is for downstream with additional data, daisy chaining possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John They distinguish the ports by putting like a dot, like a little like bullet next to the one that is the charging
⏹️ ▶️ John port essentially. And the other one is the daisying chain, like the upstream port has a dot on it. So, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I, there’s four forts, four ports in the back. So two have lightning bolts
⏹️ ▶️ John or thunderbolts or whatever. The two with little lightning bolt symbols are the thunderbolt ports. The one that has a lightning bolt
⏹️ ▶️ John and also a dot, that is the. a charging upstream one, and the other one
⏹️ ▶️ John is the daisy chaining one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then this of course also has the A19 Pro, as per Mac rumors. Also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a day one software update, which is kind of funny. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way, they differentiated that as well, because remember the other one has an A19, this one has an A19 Pro. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not entirely sure why it needs the A19 Pro, maybe to handle the dynamic backlighting stuff, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same number of pixels, same everything, but maybe it’s controlling the backlight displays, but that is a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then there was a big question from me about what is the story with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Mac support because they had said, oh, it’s a Thunderbolt 5 port. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we had talked about at some point in the past, well, is there enough bandwidth in any flavor of Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do 120 hertz at 5k? And I honestly don’t remember what we concluded. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think we thought that there was, but only just.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is, especially with display stream compression, but there are like, as you’re about to read the compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ John specs for this are not entirely based on hardware features.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so I had read, I was nervous at first, because I’m kind of lusting after this thing. I was nervous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that my lowly M3 Macs wouldn’t be supported because it’s only Thunderbolt 4, not Thunderbolt 5. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had assumed initially that, oh, you’re going to need Thunderbolt 5 to support 120 Hertz. As it turns out, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incorrect. There is some information about what Macs are supported. Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Display XDR is compatible with following Mac models with Apple Silicon, sorry, John, and macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tahoe 26.3.1 or later. Sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone who doesn’t want to update to Tahoe, this monitor requires Tahoe, presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John of display drivers that are only part of Tahoe, but that’s a software choice by Apple and only
⏹️ ▶️ John supporting Apple Silicon is probably hardware-based because I imagine the Intel ones might not be able to handle
⏹️ ▶️ John the adaptive sync stuff or whatever, they just didn’t write drivers for it. But anyway, these are not ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John requirements. The OS one is a little bit ridiculous. Like you need the latest, latest, latest operating system to use a monitor, really?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s kind of silly, but it’s the truth. And Apple Silicon, like whatever, like that’s most Macs anyway, so it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So basically it’s MacBook Pros with asterisks 2020
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or later, MacBook Airs 2023, or I’m sorry, 2020 or later in some cases, the MacStudio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Mini, Mac Pro 2023, and later, Sia John or the 24-inch iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then what’s interesting is they say, they note that, well, let me just read it. Mac models with M1,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, M2, and M3 support the studio display XDR at up to 60 Hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All other studio display XDR features are supported. So that implies that to get 120 Hertz,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need an M2 Pro Max or Ultra, you need an M3 Pro Max or Ultra, woohoo! M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro or Max, M5 Plain, M5 Pro or M5 Max. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s confusing, but like, do read the things because you don’t want to spend the money for this monitor and only be able to drive it at 60 Hertz. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have like an M1 Ultra and you’re like, it’s really fancy computer that you bought, you know, a Mac Studio M1
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra ages ago. You’re like, I’m gonna get this fancy new monitor and I’m gonna get 120 Hertz. You’re not. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a bummer, but that is what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so with the environment, 100% recycled aluminum, standard glass display contains 80% recycled glass,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 100% fiber-based box has been extensively redesigned for collapsibility, allowing it to be broken down into smaller pieces.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’ll fit in most household recycling bins. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the YouTube video I wanna see. I wanna see someone getting the box. Like, cause what does that mean? Like, do you not have to use
⏹️ ▶️ John a box cutter to break it up? Does it like come apart with a Velcro? Some YouTuber, please make this video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to see this box. Quinn, get on it. All right, so you can pre-order them today as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we record. They’re available March 11. We said the Pro Display XDR is not for sale. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these are going to be incredibly affordable, right? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John so here’s the thing. The pricing, it replaces the Pro Display XDR, and thank God it doesn’t cost what
⏹️ ▶️ John the Pro Display XDR did. But it costs a lot. So, but I think, all right, so here’s the price.
⏹️ ▶️ John 3,300 with the standard glass, 3,600 with nanotexture. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You get the adjustable stand as a no cost option. Can you imagine that on a $3,000 monitor that
⏹️ ▶️ John it might come with a stand? Amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey miracle. How generous of them. However, I am very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crabby about this. If you decide to opt for the VESA mount, which is what I would do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have my own stands, You save nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Good day, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like when you get like an automatic or a stick shift and they’re both no cost options.
⏹️ ▶️ John well, they can’t possibly cost the same amount. Nope. But that’s, yes. If you can get a stand or you can
⏹️ ▶️ John get no stand and there is no savings for that. So mad. And so here’s the thing with this price.
⏹️ ▶️ John First of all, I think it is somewhat unconscionable to have this price and not have like an iPhone quality,
⏹️ ▶️ John like good back camera as the camera. Because as far as I can tell, it has the same camera as the studio
⏹️ ▶️ John display, which granted is supposedly improved, but it’s still 12 megapixel, whatever. But like $3,000 monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe there should be room in the margins to put in a good camera from an iPhone, not
⏹️ ▶️ John a really gritty one, but whatever, maybe it’s hard to get those wide angle ones. Like they’re really into center stage because they’re not gonna have a little
⏹️ ▶️ John motor moving the camera, so they want a wide angle one. Like, I don’t know what the issues involved are, but it just seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of a shame that the camera isn’t significantly better. I mean, hey, this has got the A19 Pro instead of the A19,
⏹️ ▶️ John why couldn’t they bump the camera as well? and the price, although it is somewhat offensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the best big monitor you can buy from Apple and it is a very good big
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor by the standards of the entire industry. It’s not price competitive. You can get other monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John with the similar specs for less money, but it’s not as if there are other monitors out there that
⏹️ ▶️ John are a million times better than this. Like the specs of this, 1,000 nits sustained, 2,000 nits peak, 2,000 dimming zones,
⏹️ ▶️ John really good calibration, nice case. there’s not a lot of monitors out there that
⏹️ ▶️ John are actually better than this monitor. They’re only ones that are about the same for less money. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John call that a win. In the world of Apple monitors, we call that a win because you’re paying the premium, but you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John a premium monitor that looks really good and has modern specs, modern-ish specs. Like again, 120 Hertz, there
⏹️ ▶️ John are ones with higher rates than that, but this is not a gaming monitor. Like over 120 Hertz is kind of wasted on you
⏹️ ▶️ John scrolling your windows most of the times. You’re not playing a video game where you want 144 or whatever, or like, you know, 340 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So like for its purposes as a color accurate, high
⏹️ ▶️ John quality, well-made Mac native monitor, the features of this
⏹️ ▶️ John are good and I give a thumbs up. The price is not so good, but what do you expect? It’s the highest of the high
⏹️ ▶️ John end. And I say again, it is still less egregious than the XDR was, and certainly less egregious than the
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR was two days ago, when it was still for sale with the same specs from like six years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago. So the XDR needed to be discontinued, like to be clear, like it needed to either be price reduced, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a thing that Apple’s super into, or discontinued. And so it was discontinued, I don’t hold a grudge on that. I do continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to hope that someday Apple will release, like bring it back at the same price, like a higher end monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John that is essentially like this, but XDR sized and just do it at XDR. Like look at the price, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is 3,600 bucks, 5,000, $6,000 for an XDR with these specs, that’s in line with these prices. Like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John out of step with this technology. So I really hope they do that someday,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple statements is them trying to say, we’re not gonna do that, just buy this monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So should I buy this monitor? I don’t think I have any justifiable reason for it, but I kind of want
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you would enjoy it because you are a 5K monitor enjoyer and this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco better 5K monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John than all your other monitors, but it’s just, it’s probably too much money for somebody who’s already got three perfectly serviceable
⏹️ ▶️ John 5K monitors. So, you know, I’m not saying wait and the price will go down cause it won’t. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in two years, the specs on this will still be pretty good. Cause this is again, and not in the gaming realm,
⏹️ ▶️ John 120 Hertz and these brightness figures are going to be competitive for several years
⏹️ ▶️ John in the realm of somebody who is looking at windows on their computer screen and pictures that
⏹️ ▶️ John they take. You know what I mean? Like outside of the gaming realm, there’s not this big race to
⏹️ ▶️ John crank these specs up. The brightness is gonna continue to increase and it’s gonna fall behind the competition probably, but it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive for several years. So I don’t think you need to have a, you know, run out and get this one. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can wait two or three years and it will still be a good monitor in two or three years and it’ll be the same price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think also like you’d have to be concerned, you know, you’re a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many monitors person and this would be like the promotion especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be such that this monitor would make your other ones look bad. So this might not be-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey This part in the middle. Well, that’s the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, the current studio displays in the middle and my LG Ultra Mazes are on either side. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would do a similar trickle down as I would with the Apple TV, where this would go in the center and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey current studio display or the old now studio display would go to one side. And then I would be down to one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG Ultra Maze. But I’m not gonna lie, for a fleeting moment I thought to myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should I get three of these?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco answer was a medium.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You’re like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just saved myself from buying a car. I mean, this- That thought was my second thought,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m just not sure this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is gonna- I would,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you know, we’ll get to this probably in a little while, but like, I would maybe bank some of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a new MacBook Pro in a few, maybe like six months. You know, like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like when- Yeah, the OLED ones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know, you probably want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those. Like when, if that, if those rumors are correct, that those are coming, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, sooner than normal for an upgrade cycle after the ones that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, that is probably something that you’re gonna wanna spend a bunch of money on too. And so if you’re like, you know, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this budget mindset of like, all right, I just saved myself from buying a car. Why don’t you take your family on a vacation?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then in, you know, eight months when there’s amazing MacBook Pros out, go get one of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. All right, so I feel like there was more to talk about here. I mean, how are you two feeling? I know you’re grumbly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, but like, what are you going to do if you ever have to update your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John monitor? Never do it? I’m mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John just feeling protective of my XDR and fear of the red line disease that underscore has because
⏹️ ▶️ John if it dies, my options are now try to find the used one on eBay that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have the same problems or like downsize in monitors. And that’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing computer nerds are used to. Like getting like over time, again, computer nerds are used to their monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John getting bigger. Like I started out with a nine inch screen. Now I have 32 inch. It’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John been a progression only upwards. I don’t think I’ve ever regressed because once you get
⏹️ ▶️ John used to more screen real estate, it’s hard to go back. And because I am a one monitor person, not a multi
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor person, it’s just been my one monitor getting bigger and bigger. I would not wanna go back to 27 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m just sending good vibes to my XDR, say just hang
⏹️ ▶️ John in there, keep going for probably only one more decade when Apple will release a new monitor that’s bigger than 32 inches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the thing. Like when you are a user of something that gets discontinued,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see also the Mac Pro probably pretty soon. God willing. It’s never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good feeling when the only company that makes the product that you use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or can use or want to use stops making it, because that tells you like your needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t matter. Also, your needs can no longer be satisfied with new products. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s never a good place to be. It’s never a good place to feel, and it’s never a good place to have your needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, because what are you gonna do? So in this case, like, you know, the XDR,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not gonna be easy to find a used XDR or a new one in any kind of reasonable condition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within a year, because this was never a high volume product to begin with. It’s not like this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super popular and you’ll be able, you know, if you wanted like a mint, brand new in box,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, MacBook Air from a few years ago, you’ll find them, because they make a ton of MacBook Airs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they sell a ton of MacBook Airs, and people stock them. That’s not the case for something like the Pro Display XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is never a high stocked, high volume product, especially after six years of being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. And so if you want an XDR and you don’t already have one, it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be hard to get one. You know, maybe you might be able to get one this week, maybe, but like, otherwise it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become difficult. And so if your XDR breaks in two years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the hell are you gonna do? Like, what are you gonna do? So the, and the answer is, what do you want? Like, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either get one of the third party ones, which as an Apple user is always gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco provide an inferior experience and an uglier case and an uglier situation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or downsize to this one. So spend $3,500 to have what you will perceive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a monitor that is better in some ways, but worse in some pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant ones. And that’s not a good feeling either. So I just, I hope my XDRs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick around and last. And if I eventually have to replace them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would probably, with a heavy heart, get this monitor. But I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need to anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it would look good and everything. It’s just less pixels. He just wants to get used to the room. Screen space is really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you had bought a Pro Display XDR last week, the one you got was probably manufactured three
⏹️ ▶️ John and a half years ago. Yeah, right. I think they stopped making these ages ago because of the volumes were just so low
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think they were just draining them out slowly but surely. And the used market is like, it’s tough because I think a lot of the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John you would find would be like things that were used in like video editing studios or VFX
⏹️ ▶️ John houses or like other things like that that have essentially been used in a professional environment to get kind of beat
⏹️ ▶️ John up, you know, things that have been in and out of a Pelican case a lot. Cause those are the ones that are going to end up going on the
⏹️ ▶️ John market. Individual people are going to keep them until they die and then they’re going to, you know, get recycled or whatever. Who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John selling working XDRs? It’s like, oh, well, you know, some Hollywood studio had a whole bunch of these and
⏹️ ▶️ John they just swapped in a bunch of new monitors. And so these are now, but those are always beat to hell because they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John treated gently. Like it’s not like, you know, old lady just drove a church on Sundays. It’s really worked
⏹️ ▶️ John hard. And so, yeah, finding, and especially if they have some kind of flaw in them, that like the red line happens after X
⏹️ ▶️ John number of years. If that’s been sitting in a box in a warehouse for three and a half years and you buy it quote unquote new,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could have the exact same, you know, problem with the red line or whatever other components are gonna fail. I don’t wanna say
⏹️ ▶️ John anything too loud. Like mine is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s been problem free,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, hang in there, XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you had to, if your XDRs, both of you died today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marcos, you said you would hold your nose and get a new XDR, John, what would you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John I would thoroughly research the 6K options and see if there are any of them that I could tolerate the appearance
⏹️ ▶️ John of probably. And if there wasn’t, I would get the StudioSpy XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would wait a week, see what John found out about the other 6K options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And then figure something out. Like, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t doubt that there are 6K monitors out there that are really good. It’s just a question of me, like, do I think the case is ugly? And that may
⏹️ ▶️ John seem silly to you, but that’s, That’s, you know, that’s what I like.
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MacBook Air (M5)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, M5 MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The CPU is 10-core, which is for performance, 6 efficiency. All of the cores are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working. The GPU is 8 or 10-core, 10 cores with all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cores working. RAM, 16, 24, 32 gigs. SSD starts at 512. There’s no more 256 option.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One terabyte, two terabyte, or four terabytes, which is new. It also has the N1.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It supports up to two external displays, each of which can be either 6K at 60
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hertz, like your ancient Pro Display XDR, or 4K at 144 Hertz. Or you could go one display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to 8K at 60 Hertz, 5K at 120 Hertz, or 4K at 240 Hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The environment story is same as the M4 we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier. What was that, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John iPad? The same
⏹️ ▶️ John as the MacBook Air M4.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. Thank you. And so anyways, and then new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the environmental stuff is that it’s manufactured with 50% renewable electricity. Pricing $1,100
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for 16 gigs RAM, half terabyte SSD, eight core GPU, which is down $100 from the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a half terabyte SSD, which is stunning. And up $100 from the M4 with 256 gig SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, so this pricing is like, as we’ll see when we get to the Neo, obviously, this was released a day before the Neo, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is definitely leaving room for a lower priced computer below it. So it is cheaper to get
⏹️ ▶️ John into a 512, but you could get into any MacBook Air for $100 less. You just got the crappy 256.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think it’s a reasonable move at the bottom of the pricing end. And we’re not gonna go into this much pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John detail with the other computers, because I feel like once you get up into higher amounts of pricing, it gets more
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult. But this is the low end, well, other than the Neo, this is a lower priced item. And what counts the most is like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John does it take for me to get into one of these? What is the base price? is the base config good? And this
⏹️ ▶️ John base config is $1,100, 16 gigs rank, 512 gig SSD. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good base config, and it’s $100 less than that same config with an M4. So you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John a better SOC, all the other specs are the same, and it’s $100 less. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a good deal. Even if it is, there is no more like $1,000,
⏹️ ▶️ John 999 pricing option for this computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and then RAM upgrades seem to be priced the same as before, to go from 16 to 24 is an additional $200,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go from 24 to 32 is an additional $200. Yep, they held the RAM upgrades,
⏹️ ▶️ John their normal ridiculous prices, although now that RAM is ridiculously increasing, they’re not as ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John as they were. As I said when we discussed this ages ago, like Apple, we don’t know the details of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John deals, but very often they have made deals where they lock
⏹️ ▶️ John in a price for a certain volume of components for a certain period of time, and it is plausible that every
⏹️ ▶️ John computer that we’re talking about today still benefits from a price they locked in before RAM prices
⏹️ ▶️ John went crazy, but that’s not gonna be true forever. They will have to eventually negotiate new deals for
⏹️ ▶️ John new periods of time, for new RAM at new prices. And if the prices haven’t dropped by then,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would expect some changes, not necessarily to those changes to be reflected in the RAM upgrade prices,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for Apple to shift around other things to make sure that they try to maintain margins.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll hear that on their earning calls. We don’t talk about their earning calls, but they always talk about what their margins are. but of course they talk about their like overall
⏹️ ▶️ John margins. They don’t break it down and services are incredibly high margin. Hardware is less
⏹️ ▶️ John so. So when they say, oh, our margins were like 50% or whatever, it doesn’t mean they have 50% margins
⏹️ ▶️ John on their hardware or all their hardware or any specific hardware. It just means overall across
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire things they sell, phones, services, you know, Apple care warranties, like everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John our overall margins were 50%. I’m sure some products have margins that are higher than that. I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John some products have lower ones. and of course services, I’m sure their margins are really high. So it’s hard to back solve to see what
⏹️ ▶️ John they are. But I would imagine that if, you know, next year at this time, if RAM prices
⏹️ ▶️ John have not come back to sanity, we’re going to be looking at products and trying to figure out where Apple buried
⏹️ ▶️ John the massively increased RAM costs. Right now, I’m not even sure Apple is experiencing
⏹️ ▶️ John massively increased RAM costs because of their long term deals and because of when these might have been manufactured. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, looking, looking at the MacBook Air M5, It looks a lot like the MacBook Air M4, updated for
⏹️ ▶️ John with it with the M5 and with some new specs And it’s nice to get to the N1 because again Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks just like a straight-up good upgrade the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air M4 was a great computer the MacBook Air M5 is also a great computer and the price is reasonable.
M5 Pro/Max chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, they’ve also announced the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The M5 Pro and M5 Max are built
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using a new Apple-designed Fusion architecture. The innovative design combines two dies into a single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system on a chip, which includes a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, media engine, unified memory controller, neural
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities. The M5 Pro and Max feature a new 18-core CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey architecture and include six of the highest-performing core design, now called SuperCores,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are the world’s fastest CPU core. Alongside those cores are 12 all new performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cores optimized for power efficient multi-threaded workloads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you please, so okay, so performance cores are now super cores and efficiency cores are now performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores, basically? What? Why?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Come on. The industry leading super core was first introduced as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance cores in M5.
⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t even know it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which also adopts the super core name for all M5 based products. So they’ve retconned the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they’ve just renamed the slow cores, fast cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t though. So here, first of all, just this clarification from Andrew Cunningham from Ars Technica who says that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s spec pages still draw a distinction between the efficiency cores in the M5
⏹️ ▶️ John and the non-super performance cores in the M5 Pro and M5 Max. So basically there’s three kinds of cores from Apple’s marketing
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective. There are super cores, which are essentially the most powerful cores in the M5 line.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are called super cores. That’s, I mean, that’s just a marketing thing. You could have just called them power cores there. Whatever the most powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John cores are inside a line of chips, Apple now calls them super cores in the M5 line and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true across the entire line. Then Apple says that they have a new
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of core, which is the performance core. So in some M5
⏹️ ▶️ John chips, there’s a super core, and then there’s a new kind of core called the performance
⏹️ ▶️ John core, which is not the same as the efficiency cores in the plain Jane M5.
⏹️ ▶️ John So every chip has two kinds of cores, big ones and little ones. It’s actually called big little in our parlance, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The big ones are called super cores in the M5, but the little ones have two different names. Now, does that mean
⏹️ ▶️ John that the little cores in the M5 are different than the little cores in the M5 Pro and M5 Max? Probably,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Probably they’re actually different cores. So having two different names to them makes sense. The
⏹️ ▶️ John names themselves don’t make any sense, but having these three names, power,
⏹️ ▶️ John super, efficiency, and performance, those three names refer
⏹️ ▶️ John to three actual different hardware things. And I think the reason they’re different is as we
⏹️ ▶️ John noted when we talked about the M5 chip, the M5 is not made using what Apple’s calling their
⏹️ ▶️ John fusion architecture. We were talking about it in TSMC terms as a S-O-I-C-M-H
⏹️ ▶️ John siliconon, I forget what it stands for, but it was like hyphen molding horizontal. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John TSMC has a tech where you can take multiple dies and put it onto a thing and make a chip out of it. And we’re talking about how
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s better because you can make a bunch of littler dies and stick them together instead of trying to make one big one. The M5 doesn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. The M5 is all one die. It does not use this chiplet, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Fusion architecture. So the M5 one is different, like physically different,
⏹️ ▶️ John manufactured in a different way than the M5 Pro and M5 Max. So there is a bifurcation in the line.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whole M5 line has these super cores, which fine is a renaming of the most powerful cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the M5 has the efficiency cores that presumably are similar to the efficiency cores in the M4 line,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the M5 Pro and M5 Max have essentially better efficiency cores, which are bigger and
⏹️ ▶️ John more powerful and they’re called performance cores. It’s Apple, they really messed up the naming, but what they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John for is name different things differently. Now, there is an argument to be made
⏹️ ▶️ John that across the M1, M2, and M3, they kept calling them efficiency cores. Obviously, the efficiency cores change.
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 efficiency core is not the same as the M4 efficiency core. We just kept calling them efficiency cores, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we always understood within the context of the M whatever line, these are the efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John cores. Now with the M5 generation, there’s two different kinds of efficiency cores. And as Jason Snell
⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out, every time you talk to an Apple executive for years, and at WWDC, they would say
⏹️ ▶️ John this, like I’ve heard people say this to me in person, literally, you know, this efficiency cores are
⏹️ ▶️ John actually pretty good. It’s like Apple, you name them efficiency cores if you don’t like people calling them that, because they were like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to be on the power cores. Like in every W3C session where that shows you how do you use like core affinity and stuff like that, they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t be afraid to use the efficiency cores. They’re actually really powerful. And people are like, well, no, of course my code is important. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be on the power cores. Like I get where Apple is coming from, but it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t choose the names, Apple. You could have called them, but again, the ARM nomenclature for the first ships
⏹️ ▶️ John that did it is big little, where big is the old lowercase and little is in all caps, I think, which is also funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like it’s a marketing thing with the tech behind it, but they don’t want people to feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re having lesser cores. And as we’ll see when we start looking at what’s in these chips, the renaming
⏹️ ▶️ John also makes sense in the context of what they how they design them. But this is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the most interesting years for the M chips in a long time, not because the M5 line is, you know, super amazing. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Like it’s better than the M4. But like the Pro and Max are just plain manufactured differently.
⏹️ ▶️ John and having the CPU and GPU as like separate dies. I, yeah, Apple didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John release pictures of what this looks like, but as soon as someone gets these and slices it open, I’ll love to see what’s going on inside there. A,
⏹️ ▶️ John it opens up the possibility of something even cooler for the M5 Ultra. So we’ll see if that ever materializes or even anything
⏹️ ▶️ John beyond that. But B, it is a split line. Plain M5 is essentially built
⏹️ ▶️ John differently than the Pro and the Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and what’s really interesting to me, and this is why I, I don’t think we have benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these yet, do we?
⏹️ ▶️ John We do. Well, no, not for the pro and the max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I really am curious to see those once those start coming out on Geekbench and stuff, because what they have done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a dramatic drop in the number of performance cores on the big chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s not what they’re called anymore. Jesus. Yeah, anyway, so the number of the
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s actually, but you can read Apple’s base, like overall performance claims before we get
⏹️ ▶️ John to the specs. So this is what they’re saying, like for the line of chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so CPU up to 30% faster, quote, for pro workloads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the M5 Max has 15% higher multi-threaded performance. The GPUs, up to four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times the peak GPU compute for AI compared to the previous generation, and up to 35% faster,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, for apps using ray tracing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That 4X1 is the biggest number they’ve thrown up. Because otherwise, like 30%, 15%, like it’s a generation, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the M5 is faster than the M4 in the usual amount, which is good, like 30%, 15%. Those are fine numbers for
⏹️ ▶️ John a generation. Four times, that is a big thing, presumably due to
⏹️ ▶️ John improvements in the, I forget what they call it, like the neural whatever crap that they
⏹️ ▶️ John put into their GPU cores in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco previous generation. That’s something like what they
⏹️ ▶️ John called it. Yeah, they put some processing stuff in each GPU core that is useful for doing like machine
⏹️ ▶️ John learning AI stuff. And I guess they improved that in,
⏹️ ▶️ John or I don’t know if they improved it or have more of them, but anyway, Apple is making big claims about the GPU compute
⏹️ ▶️ John performance. And when they say previous generation, they mean like, I’m assuming they mean like the M5 Max versus M4 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s a big number. And that is significant because if you think about where,
⏹️ ▶️ John what kind of CPU or what kind of GPU bound workloads are people doing these days, AI
⏹️ ▶️ John is right up there, local, you know, on machine AI. So, I mean, we’ll have to see what the benchmarks bear out and
⏹️ ▶️ John how realistic that 4X number is, but it is the standout number in everything here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, for the most part, like the regular base model M4 to the regular base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model M5, it was a very similar thing of like, yeah, about 15% faster CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and GPUs got better depending on what you were doing with them with these different accelerators. And so we’re seeing roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same claims here, about 15% faster multi-threaded CPU performance. Okay, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. I mean, again, like the core arrangement is radically different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the number of performance cores, sorry excuse me the number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large cores has has gone substantially down in these higher chips and the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of smaller cores has gone substantially up so it’s it’s a it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a flatter design so to speak like you know the difference between the two cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably has been greatly reduced only benchmarks and use will be able to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us like if that makes a significant difference in either direction but it is curious that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a radically different balance of power, so to speak.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so the M5 Pro, the CPU is 15 core, which is five, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco? Super cores. And 10 performance cores versus the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, which was eight performance, so now there’s five super.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And four- I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these binned counts, it’s driving me nuts. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John well that’s how they sell them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But here’s what comes down
⏹️ ▶️ John to, is what Marco was saying. The old M4 was eight and four, eight big, four little. the
⏹️ ▶️ John new arrangement is five and 10. So it’s pretty much flipped. It used to be double the number of really
⏹️ ▶️ John good ones to the not as good ones. Now it’s the opposite. It went from eight, four to five, 10.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, it’s really just total inversion. And that’s why the naming makes
⏹️ ▶️ John sense because look, when we talk about like power cores versus efficiency cores, like what
⏹️ ▶️ John do we actually mean on the M series chip? What is it about the P cores that makes them powerful? How
⏹️ ▶️ John are they different than the E cores and all the other lines of chips? Well, if you look at the die shot, you can say, well, first of
⏹️ ▶️ John all, I can see that the P cores are literally bigger. Like there are bigger square on the chip. Why are they bigger?
⏹️ ▶️ John What is in that thing that makes them more powerful? And there’s a bunch of answers to that. There could be and
⏹️ ▶️ John probably is more execution units. How many parts of the chip can add numbers together? You can have two
⏹️ ▶️ John adders, three adders, four adders. How many units are there for floating multiplication?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you can literally put more execution units, more things that can mung numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can add more of them because it’s parallel dispatch. Like it’s not just one line through. So that’s a way you can make them bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another way you can make them bigger is you can add more cache, more L1 cache and stuff like that. That
⏹️ ▶️ John takes up die space. That’s what makes the power cores bigger. You can have a more sophisticated branch predictor.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can have all sorts of stuff that makes it make up, take up more room on the chip and more
⏹️ ▶️ John power and more transistors and more parts. That makes it a power core. And then the efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John cores, they have less of that stuff. They take up less room, they take up less power. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the question always is, for a given workload, when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John sending something through like a power core, what if you’re not, don’t have that many floating point multiplications?
⏹️ ▶️ John Those extra floating point multiplication units are just sitting there not being used because most of the workloads you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t doing lots of floating point stuff, so they’re not doing anything useful. And at that point, if you had sent that same load
⏹️ ▶️ John through a quote unquote efficiency core, it would have been just as fast or maybe even faster if maybe the pipeline
⏹️ ▶️ John is shallower or something like that, right? So you never quite know what the trade-offs are of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John should I send this to the bigger core and waste time running through that machinery if it’s not gonna take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of most of the stuff that’s there? And what it looks to me like is in the M5 Pro, and we’ll see in the M5 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, I think what they did is made the smaller cores
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger enough so that it makes more sense to have twice as many of them as the power
⏹️ ▶️ John cores. Before it was twice as many of the big cores as the little, Now it’s twice as many of the little as the
⏹️ ▶️ John big. I think the way they did that, and we’ll have to wait for a die shot to see if this theory bears out, is
⏹️ ▶️ John that they made the little cores big enough to essentially be the best choice for
⏹️ ▶️ John almost everything you do, and only really, really specialize the bigger cores
⏹️ ▶️ John for jobs that are actually gonna use all the machinery they have, that need the more sophisticated branch prediction, that need the deeper
⏹️ ▶️ John pipeline, that need the extra execution units, that need the more L1 cache. And there’s five of them. It’s not like there’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them or something. There’s five of them, there’s plenty. But I mean, and Apple knows this. I bet Apple looks at like
⏹️ ▶️ John workloads of like what do people actually do with Macs? And how can we make that more efficient?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we’ll see, like, especially we’ll see with like the performance, the power numbers, the
⏹️ ▶️ John battery usage and stuff. If they were able to flip this arrangement going from twice
⏹️ ▶️ John as many big to little to twice as many little to big and still get a performance increase,
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think says to me that they have made the correct trade-off because they are presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John using less space. They’re getting more cores. Like so, you know, 15 is more than 12, right? So they got
⏹️ ▶️ John three extra cores, similar power envelope, I would hope, and better
⏹️ ▶️ John performance. So I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt now and say this total inversion of big to little
⏹️ ▶️ John was a smart move and it is suitable. It fits what people do with Macs, like, cause that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing. They have the app store. They know how people use, they have the OS. They
⏹️ ▶️ John make the hardware, they make the silicon. Like their whole deal is we can figure out how best to
⏹️ ▶️ John serve the workloads that people actually use our Macs for and then make a chip that does that better than the previous one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think my major concern here, assuming that they have kept performance good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you need it, which the benchmarks or as the quoted metrics suggest that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably have, we’ll see what happens with the benchmarks. But there was a side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effect that I’m not sure was intentional, but there was a side effect of having the low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power cores be very low power. And that is that, if you recall back in the days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of everyone having these Intel Mac laptops, you would sometimes get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one core being used 100% by some background process,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it was MD worker indexing, Dropbox, like whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chrome’s weird updating things, whatever it was, you would often get a case where some kind of common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on the Mac or common background service would use 100% CPU forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And back on those old laptops, what that would do is make your laptop run hot, have crappy battery life, and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fans kind of running all the time because one thing in the background was using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of CPU and keeping one of the cores really hot. When we moved to Apple Silicon and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had these small low-power cores as one of the options on the chip, macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was very smart about how to dispatch things to them. And one of the things that Mac OS did was, as I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything running in the background would run only on the low power cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A side effect of that is that when you would have one of those like runaway 100% CPUs, which background processes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was only running on these low power cores and they just didn’t, they were so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small and low power that even if you were maxing one out forever, it would have almost no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeable effect on battery life, heat or fan noise. If they make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smaller cores bigger, I hope they’ve somehow accounted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep that still be the effect. Like maybe background processes still get, you know, lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maximum thermal use. Maybe, you know, maybe the background processes still, you know, get their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wattage limit or CPU usage over time. Maybe they’re running at a lower clock speed when they’re in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who knows? There’s all sorts of advanced things they can do with power management now. But I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that effect of limiting the damage done to the user experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by runaway background processes, I hope that is maintained now that the smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores have gotten bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think they’ve gotten bigger maybe in terms of transistor count, but remember this is a shrink as well. So they
⏹️ ▶️ John might not have gotten physically bigger. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco suspect- This is not a shrink.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The next generation is a shrink.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, versus the M3, I guess. I forget if this one, well, we don’t know because
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the new, I don’t know if the process is the same N3 whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John as the M5 because it is the chiplet thing. Is it just the packaging different or are they actually on? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually know. I don’t know if there is like an N3 letter that I don’t know that it applies to the chiplet
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But anyway, we’ll see when they cut the die thing off of them but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. I think the process shrink isn’t coming until the M6 generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not like to two nanometer obviously. These are all three nanometer. I’m just saying, is it N3P versus N3 whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we’ll see, because they do go from four to 10 of these. So I bet they’re still pretty small.
⏹️ ▶️ John And who knows if my theory about them being bulked up to be good for the majority of tests is correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could be that they were already the best for the majority of tests, and they just learned that by like, low, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing real world usage on the M4s. Again, we’ll see when someone slices these chips open and they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John map out like here all the different cores and we can just physically measure them. Do they look about the same size as the old efficiency cores? Are
⏹️ ▶️ John they a little bit bigger? How much bigger? Also, there may be improvements in parts of the efficiency cores that can be
⏹️ ▶️ John turned off. As you said, there’s clock throttling and everything, but like, you know, as we see, the specs
⏹️ ▶️ John say the performance is better. The battery specs say that this performs about the same as the
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 one. So I’m optimistic that, I mean, it’s not gonna be a big, impressive thing. This is just like a
⏹️ ▶️ John transitional phase of like, we have a new tech for building chips. Can we do that
⏹️ ▶️ John tech transition at the same time as maintaining our normal year over year improvements, while
⏹️ ▶️ John also doing this complete inversion of the ratio of our big course to our little cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John And according to everything Apple has released, they’re basically saying they’ve done it. We’ll wait to see what the benchmarks are.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. The GPU is either actually you skip the 18 core one was, this is the interesting thing. These come
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in 15 and 18
⏹️ ▶️ John core. Um, and the 18 core is just with everything enabled, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s six super and 12 performance. And so instead of being like the M four was 10
⏹️ ▶️ John big four little, and this is 6 big, 12 little. Again, total inversion, but the 18
⏹️ ▶️ John cores are the ones with everything working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GPU 16 core or 20 core with enhanced shader core with second generation dynamic caching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and hardware accelerated mesh shading. There is 307
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabits per second memory bandwidth. This will become relevant soon. This is up 12 and a half percent over the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M4 Pro’s 273 gigabits per second. For external displays, you can do three,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each of which can be 6K at 60 Hertz or 4K at 144 Hertz, or you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two in a variety of different combinations. I’m not gonna read out. And it supports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to three external displays over a single Thunderbolt port.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have three 6K displays, if only Apple could have still sold one of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, if only. That would be like what? $20,000 worth of displays? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I guess even my third party ones. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the display support continues to be really good. And the two display support is weird is you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John pick like one of these monitors and then one of these other set of monitors. So it’s like mixing, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John bandwidth is what it is. You’re just slicing and dicing how much bandwidth do you have with display stream compression to just spread.
⏹️ ▶️ John The point is this is what we’re reading you now is the M5 Pro, remember? Really good display
⏹️ ▶️ John support because the M5 Pro as we noted before, when Apple said the M5 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and the M5 Max feature new 18 core architecture. Guess what? The M5 Pro and the M5 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John are basically the same except for GPU core. So it’s going back to the M1 and M2 generation
⏹️ ▶️ John when the Pro and the Max, the Pro was just the Max with some GPU cores lopped off. Now this is not, I don’t think it’s a lopping
⏹️ ▶️ John off thing. We’ll have to see what, you know, again, cause the whole architecture is different with separate dies inside the package and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. But that’s the upshot that the Pro, this is a good Pro year. If you don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about GPU, the Pro has all the same goods as the Max, essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John modulo binning, and you just have fewer GPUs inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. Yeah, this is a great, I mean, geez, I’ve really been eating some crow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my pro opinions in the last couple of weeks, but this is actually, this is a great year for the pro buyers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in fact, I think if I were buying today and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the amount of RAM I wanted was available in the pro, I would buy the pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, all of it. We’ll get to that when we get to the computers. We’re still just doing the SOCs, but anyway. The Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John it only comes in 18 core. So that’s just market segmentation. They could make it with the 15 core
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, but they don’t. So you get the M5 Max, you get it with everything working. So again, it’s six big cores, 12
⏹️ ▶️ John little ones. There’s no wondering which one you’re gonna get. All the Maxes have everything working. You do get a
⏹️ ▶️ John choice in the GPU. You can get the even bigger, that is the Pro has
⏹️ ▶️ John a 16 core or 20 core GPU. The Max has 32 or 40. Those are your two choices. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the big GPU thing has twice as many cores as the Pro. Again, if you don’t care about GPU, The CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John parts are the same if you get them, like the non-binned ones. So yeah, good year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Memory bandwidth. Memory bandwidth, interestingly, varies based on the number of GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores. I don’t know if it’s related to the GPU cores. It might be, but, because they need
⏹️ ▶️ John to be fed, but it might just be a segmentation. But anyway, the M5 Max, all the CPU cores always work,
⏹️ ▶️ John but when you pick how many working GPU cores you want, if you get the 32 GPU core one, you get 460
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabytes per second, which is 12.2% increase over the similarly bin 32
⏹️ ▶️ John core M4 Max’s GPU. And if you get the 40 core GPU, you get 614 gigabytes, which is again,
⏹️ ▶️ John 12.5% over the 40 core M4 Max’s GPU. So
⏹️ ▶️ John be aware of those differences there. And the display support is just ridiculously good.
⏹️ ▶️ John This this is the only one that says just native display port 2.1 speeds. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John they said display port stuff for the other ones. But anyway, Four displays,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do four 6K displays if Apple sold them, or, you know, two displays,
⏹️ ▶️ John a huge amount of display bandwidth. You won’t have any problem with this. Supports up to four external displays
⏹️ ▶️ John over a single Thunderbolt port. It’s pretty amazing. It’s a pretty beefy GPU for what we’ll,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we will see is a laptop GPU, a good chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is really impressive. I’m not in the market for a new MacBook Pro. And let me tell you, I priced one and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was over $6,000 the way I would probably build it, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the thing that I’m very curious about, and we don’t necessarily need to cover this now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wonder if I would want to pick a max, which is what I’ve had, I had an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M1 max and M3 max right now, would I wanna pick the max for the increased memory bandwidth? And I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John maybe not. No, not for what you do with it, absolutely not. Oh, fair, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well that answers that.
⏹️ ▶️ John why it’s a good year for people who do not care about GPU. This is the year to get the Pro because it’s back at the old days
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re all you’re, all you’re giving up. If you don’t get the bend one is you’re giving up GPU that you weren’t going to use anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Hey, that’s less heat and everything. So it’s, it’s a win.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the real question when with picking me, I guess we’ll get to this maybe a little bit later, but the real question with picking these is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will, how much will this matter for AI stuff in the near future? Like during the lifetime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this laptop, how much will it matter for AI stuff? Cause that’s obviously like a major thing going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on right now. Sorry, everybody. Yes. I’m talking about it. And so, you know, there was a question of like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if I wanted to run local models? What we have seen so far is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while we can run local models on some of the higher end Macs, if we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shove enough RAM into them for a million dollars, that’s not really a mainstream thing. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really a thing that most of us need to do or will do, or will be able to do in a way that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competitive with what the big server side models are able to do for us. Will that change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the course of owning your next laptop if you’re looking to buy one of these. I don’t think anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can really say, but how much are you willing to throw down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thousands of dollars for really high specs that you might end up barely using because what you’re mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using, your big grunt CPU power, is happening in data centers somewhere?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I would bet against it. I mean, there is a possibility, because these companies are highly motivated to reduce
⏹️ ▶️ John the cost of inference. So basically, can we get a way to run models
⏹️ ▶️ John with less power, like less CPU power. They’re highly motivated to do that because it saves them a lot of money,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? If there is a breakthrough in that area, if they say, oh, we’ve found a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John run models that work like our current ones, but use half the RAM or something, like that is the
⏹️ ▶️ John only way that you will get the benefits of like future benefits of running
⏹️ ▶️ John local models. Because right now, unless you already know that you want to run, if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John already running local models, don’t buy a machine for the purposes of running local models. Cause if you
⏹️ ▶️ John buy this machine today, right now, models are just getting bigger and bigger and harder and harder
⏹️ ▶️ John to run locally. If you’re talking about the lead bleeding edge models, if you care about the bleeding edge models,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t run them on your laptop, right? And you have to run them in a server cause you just, a lot of them you just literally can’t run it cause
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not gonna have enough memory. Right? So unless there’s a breakthrough in that, or unless you’re very interested in running
⏹️ ▶️ John small local models, again, you’re probably already doing that. So if you’re not currently
⏹️ ▶️ John running local models, do not buy an M5 Mac pro
⏹️ ▶️ John based on your ability to run local models, because if you’re not already doing it in the future, it’s, you’re just going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be less likely to do it because the models are just going to get bigger and more demanding. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you know, most people probably should be using the bigger models because they’re just more capable and you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to run them yourself. Like they’re so demanding. Like there’s a reason those, you know, those GPUs that they’re running them on costs
⏹️ ▶️ John like 60 grand or whatever. and there’s multiple ones, you don’t wanna be doing that yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unless you’re already doing it. Cause if you’re already doing it, then you know, and what you should probably do is get like an M5 Pro Mac mini or something
⏹️ ▶️ John someday. Cause that’s what you want. It’s like maximum bang for small amount of buck or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, I wouldn’t, like, it’s just, I just feel like we’re at such early stages
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, okay, maybe you can run like some local model today, but in three years, that local model is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be garbage. Like, what do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the M5 Pro and the M5 Max both support memory integrity enforcement, which we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about on and off over the last
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was introduced with the A19 series and the M5, and just clarifying, the whole M5 family supports
⏹️ ▶️ John it, And, and the, everything before that in the M family does not.
MacBook Pro (M5 Pro/Max)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, 14 and 16 inches just as before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The M5 Pro, you can get the 15 core CPU, 16 core GPU with 24 or 48 gigs of RAM. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can get the 18 core CPU, 20 core GPU at 24, 48 or 64 gigs RAM, which is new.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was what forced my hand on the Max in the past is that I always wanted 64 gigs RAM. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I wouldn’t have to, to both of your points earlier. John Gruber pointed out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this means the price for a MacBook Pro with 64 gigs of RAM, if that’s your main concern, hello,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dropped by $800 year over year. Last year, you needed to buy one of the high-end M4 Max chips to get the 64 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s very good news. However, it comes with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an SSD of one, two, or four terabytes, no half terabyte option, which means for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and my fancy lad eight terabytes, I’m back in the M5 Max. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is the thing. Like Apple does have to sort of segment these, Like, you know, again, doing 24 and 48,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, all right, 24, 48 and 64, like the segmentation makes some sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like the SSD is really not particularly related to the SoC in a way that explains the
⏹️ ▶️ John lack of an 8TB, it’s just market segmentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the M5 Max, you can do with the 32 core, do you get 36
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs of RAM and you will like it. For the 40 core, you can do 48, 64 or 128 gigs of RAM. SSD in 2, 4, or 8 terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then between the two of them, all of them share the same screen, which is unchanged for the M4 Pro and Max. 1,000 nits,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to 1,600 peak on HDR, 120 hertz. Nanotexture’s $150. Has the N1 with Wi-Fi 7 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bluetooth 6. Size and weight is unchanged. Port’s unchanged.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Battery is largely unchanged, although slightly different amounts of video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey streaming and wireless web, which is their ridiculous metrics.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and mostly like, so the M5 Pro gives you two more hours of video streaming. So that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s a measurable increase over the M4 Pro, right? So that’s reasonable. M5 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John is down an hour with wireless web and down an hour with video streaming. So that’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the battery sizes are unchanged on these models. The 14 inch is still 72.4 watt hour for both
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, I believe. So it seems like basically a wash, but again, the numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple always gives you with battery is like, We don’t know how you perform these tests. What the heck is wireless web? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what are you doing? So as usual battery testing, well, I’m sure we’ll be all over the place, but it will
⏹️ ▶️ John be instructive to see how these new We can use any chocolate architecture It’s probably the
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong term, but it’s it’s a nice way to visualize more than one die inside the package
⏹️ ▶️ John How will they behave in terms of thermals battery life to Marco’s point? How does the change in
⏹️ ▶️ John ratios of big to little cores affect things? You’re not gonna tell from looking at these battery numbers we’ll have to wait for people to test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then the microphone quotes, voice isolation and wide spectrum microphone modes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for enhanced voice clarity in audio and video calls.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, you skipped over the 16 inch battery. It’s interesting that the 16 inch battery is exactly the same for the M5 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the 16 inch battery is plus two hours on wireless web and plus one hour
⏹️ ▶️ John on video streaming for the Max. I don’t understand, like they didn’t change the battery size at all. So why does the
⏹️ ▶️ John Max and the 14 inch go down an hour and the Max in the 16 inch goes up an hour. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very weird. That just, I don’t quite understand. If they had changed the battery sizes, this would make sense to me, but I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same chip in a 14 inch and a 16 inch laptop and it seems to get different performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the environment story is basically, largely the same as the M4 Pro and Max. However, new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that it’s made with 45% recycled content and manufactured again with 50% renewable electricity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The price for the M5 Pro and M5 Max starts at $1,700 for the 14 inch and $2,700 for the 16 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had to set check that like three times. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John this has to be wrong. I must have the wrong windows open. How can the starting price for the M5 Pro and M5 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John be exactly the same? And the answer is, I think that they’re just like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not apples to apples because they’re, you know, different number of cores are disabled, different amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM, like the base configs are different, but I believe, I mean, triple check me. They
⏹️ ▶️ John both start at $1,700, whichever chip you pick, Pro or Max. That
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco does seem a little bananas to me. On the 16 inch, maybe. On the 14 inch. Are you sure?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause I’m seeing it. Triple check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m seeing it say M5 Pro is from 2349, M5 Max is from 3749. Yeah, it’s 37, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M5 Max dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ramps up everything. Let me
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, maybe I did it wrong. That’s why I doubted myself. I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco double check it right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. because it’s like $1,300 more for the Max.
⏹️ ▶️ John Shop, I’m going to go 14 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As Casey was saying earlier, like they really have restricted a lot of the high memory and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSD configurations to the Max chip. Even like if you want the eight terabyte SSD,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t just get a Max, you have to get like the highest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s just everything is like, you have to really max out the processor to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most RAM at worst.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe I was just clicking on the wrong things. All right, set that aside. That’s not true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, all right, well, do we wanna reboot this whole thing then?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you can leave it in my mistake. Like I swear, I checked it like three times. You know what it is? They’ve changed the product configurator.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a story about this a while, of like how you don’t pick like good, better, best. You just basically go into the configurator.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the way they’ve made like the clicking of like, you know, you have to like pick a color first or we won’t let you pick anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, we won’t let you pick anything else. When you get down to the chip section, they have these sort of collapsing set of round
⏹️ ▶️ John racks. and I think they’ve bamboozled me because when you click on the chip, like there’s another rectangle that appears
⏹️ ▶️ John where you have to pick like the number of cores and stuff. And I just think I got confused, my bad. Anyway, that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John I double check, correct in real time. The Max is super duper expensive, sorry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so yeah, so basically the Max is, as you said, super duper expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the RAM upgrades seem to be priced same as before, same basic story as before. We don’t need to enumerate them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but all the pricing doesn’t really change.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when you go to a higher RAM level, you’re paying the same ridiculous prices you were always paying. They just seem less ridiculous now because
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM prices are really high everywhere. But the point is Apple didn’t actually increase their RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade prices. They were so ridiculous, they were able to absorb the changes or they locked in their prices
⏹️ ▶️ John before and they’re getting exactly the same margins they always did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think what’s interesting about this too is like, you know, Apple historically does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change these prices during the lifetime of that product. So what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, you know, by keeping the prices the same, what they are communicating is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only probably is this a comparable buy now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it was before, and relative to the rest of the market, it’s becoming a better buy, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple seems most likely to expect that they will not have to change this price at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least until the next MacBook Pro comes out. That’s impressive, given the current environment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we always hear that Apple establishes long-term relationships with suppliers and they guarantee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves a certain amount of stock and certain good price terms and everything. But we’ve also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been hearing recently, and I think this is probably true, that Apple is no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the darling customer of some of the big chip fabs and memory suppliers and things because all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these component orders coming in from all the AI companies, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a sudden, the new good customer for TSMC and Nvidia’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying a whole bunch of chips from TSMC and everybody making their own AI accelerators, like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all buying a bunch of chips from PSMC, everyone’s buying a bunch of memory from the memory companies besides Apple now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like Apple is no longer necessarily like the only or the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant customer to the fabs and the component suppliers. So you would think based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all of that, you would think that Apple would not be able to get as good of terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from everybody for their supplies and their pricing and their availability and everything as they are accustomed to getting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So either they still are getting great terms, or they just think like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll be able to weather whatever temporary blip there is. And then, you know, in a few years when things are more calm,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, you know, we will have absorbed it. But that’s, none of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what we expected. We all expected memory prices would go up with the new generation. I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t expect that. I would have bet with Gruber on this.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco job. Because like, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John because like, the long-term contracts, the fact that these products are still well within a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John window of a long-term contract. And if any company on earth has room in its RAM margins
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco RAM increase, it’s Apple. Because their
⏹️ ▶️ John prices have been, like we did the math on it a while ago, it was like 6.5 times
⏹️ ▶️ John market prices or something. Like they had room, they had room in there. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just think these products, this generate, even though they’re being released now, these have been in the
⏹️ ▶️ John pipeline for a while. I just think these don’t, These are, we don’t see a reflection of
⏹️ ▶️ John the changes that you just described, Marco, in these products. And if they do need to, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, with like the OLED models, if they do need to absorb that cost somewhere, I feel like they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John shave the cost somewhere else and leave their RAM prices somewhere. We’ll see. And this is another slightly baffling one. The
⏹️ ▶️ John storage prices have gone down a little bit, which is only baffling because we’re in the weird world of Apple. Like everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John else in the industry, of course storage prices go down year over year because you can get bigger SSDs for less money over time because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how technology progresses, right? Not in Apple land. They just keep the same prices forever and
⏹️ ▶️ John ever. The only reason the prices changes, like eventually one of the sizes falls off the end because it becomes too embarrassing even for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to ship. And that did happen, like they dropped some of the lower configs, but here on the MacBook Pro, M5
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and M5 Mac and MacBook Pros, a config with a one terabyte SSD is now $100 cheaper than it used to be. And
⏹️ ▶️ John going from one to two is $200 cheaper than it used to be. And going from two to four is $200 cheaper than it used to be. also
⏹️ ▶️ John true for the M5 MacBook Pro, not just the M5 Pro, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they adjusted those storage prices as well. So storage prices went down slightly. Again, their storage
⏹️ ▶️ John prices are also ridiculous. And like, you know, going
⏹️ ▶️ John from one terabyte to two terabytes is not a $200 increase in most scenarios,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, we accept those prices because it’s the only, we have no other
⏹️ ▶️ John choice, and it’s nice to see them go down. So as Casey found, if you spend a while on that
⏹️ ▶️ John configurator, clicking on these round racks and watching things collapse and whatever and build the computer of your dreams,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will cost the price of your nightmares, I guess. It’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John work out well for you, especially since Apple does, I mean, they have to have some reasonable number of configs.
⏹️ ▶️ John They drive you towards stuff like, again, if you get the M5 Max, no, there’s no binned option for you. You get the one with everything
⏹️ ▶️ John enabled and you pay for it and you have no choice. And if you want a larger amount of RAM, tough luck. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get the lower power CPU if you want that extra bit of RAM. You gotta, you know, so that’s just the way it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, I think the configurability of, in particular, the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John is pretty okay. There are a lot of options, but no, there’s not infinite options. You can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as we surmise, like, oh, if this is a chiplet architecture, they can mix and match the CPUs and GPUs. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can mix and match them, but it’s not like it’s gonna be a configurator where you pick how many cores and they manufacture it on demand for you or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. They just picked a bunch of configs they think fit the lineup and they spread them out. and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is reasonable. Maybe the most egregious thing is like limiting of the RAM on the
⏹️ ▶️ John chips with less GPU, but they kind of always do that. But in the grand scheme of things, it is a
⏹️ ▶️ John better year than normal because the Pro chip has the same CPU as the Max chip, as long as you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need that extra RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so if you need or desire an eight terabyte drive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are looking at $6,250. Fun. My goodness. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 64 gigs of RAM for what it’s worth, but yikes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco If I remember right- And to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be clear, like, these, this is like top of the line performance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top of the line everything. Like, you know, this is a laptop, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, this is exactly the kind of thing I use a laptop as a desktop for. Like I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high specced MacBook Pro, you know, mine’s the M3 generation, so two years older than this, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or two generations older than this rather. But if you are trying to have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro, so to speak, this is a really good way to do it for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. And so that’s what we were talking, when you look at what did it cost to spec
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out an iMac Pro or other Mac Pros before they were whatever the heck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the monster there is now, it was always in, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wanted the highest RAM config, the highest processor config, the highest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage config, you were always like, you know, five to $7,000. Like that’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly where that got you. So for what this is getting us, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this pricing is unprecedented and necessarily even unreasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just, this is a very high-end product. And we’re talking about very high-end resource
⏹️ ▶️ Marco levels for what it is.
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MacBook Neo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, we have what we all were expecting, the low-cost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook with a name that we weren’t expecting until yesterday when it was leaked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s okay. It was leaked yesterday. Like I said, there’s an article at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacRumors which we’ll link. Also, Buck points out that Cupertino
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Apple have kind of sort of stolen a name of a Surface. Surface Neo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an unreleased dual touch screen two-in-one PC that was unveiled by Microsoft on October 2nd of 2019. Whoopsie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think at this point, I think they’re allowed to steal a name that’s seven years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old from something that never came out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Usually you see like Apple, you know, for better or for worse, mostly for setting
⏹️ ▶️ John naming trends like Pro and Max, which suddenly appeared on every other thing in the universe, Apple started using, not because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re good names, but just because Apple essentially made them have good values associated with them by naming their
⏹️ ▶️ John products. So then, yeah, but in this case, they’re bringing, Neo is, you know, has been in
⏹️ ▶️ John product names for ages, even, yes, even before the matrix. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John is again, but if this trend catches on and people start calling their products Neo, I think people will attribute
⏹️ ▶️ John it to Apple, but other people have been out there first. It’s just a question of like when Apple does it, it seems cool and people copy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So what So what do we got? A18 Pro, the CPU is six cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two performance, but not super, right? Because it’s only in the M5.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, yep. You know, and everything except for the M5 Pro and Max, the old name still apply.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so two performance, four efficiency. That is not binned. The GPU is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five core, which six core would be unbinned. There is no fan, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The benchmarks with the iPhone 16 Pro Max as a stand-in, pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How would you like to there’s a lot of numbers in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John our show notes here But
⏹️ ▶️ John so like the iPhone 16 Pro is the max is the stand-in because it’s got the same thing It’s got an 18 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and I picked the Pro Max instead of the Pro figuring like it’s the biggest So it’s the closest analog to a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t know there’s more room inside it or whatever So we’ll have to see what the actual benchmarks are because for all we know it is
⏹️ ▶️ John clocked higher has better cooling and that we Don’t know we don’t but the using just a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Max is a stand-in which I think is a reasonable kind of like conservative estimate of how this chip
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to perform in a laptop scenario, assuming they didn’t really screw up the cooling. Here’s what it
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like. Single core CPU is 19% slower than an M5, 30% faster than an M1,
⏹️ ▶️ John and 90% faster than the M2 Ultra and the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the current Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John It is 19% faster in single core than the current $7,000 Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can buy right now at apple.com. This, the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Neo has 19% faster single core performance. That’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it is 2.5 times faster than the single core performance of my Mac Pro because I know you want to know
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Just FYI. Multi-core, it is 1% faster than the M1 or 1%
⏹️ ▶️ John slower. Again, the caveat with a Geekbench store is if you look them up, Geekbench has like a leaderboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and I like pulled from that. But if you look at individual results, they vary all over the place. Cause I don’t know, people are putting their things
⏹️ ▶️ John on ice packs or like, who knows? Like the numbers always vary by a few percent. So don’t like, when I say 1% faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John just assume it’s like it’s a wash. But these are the numbers that I pulled out of the top charts, right? So I have the exact numbers here
⏹️ ▶️ John in the document. But you know, who knows how exact they are because again, it varies. It’s two
⏹️ ▶️ John times slower in multi-core than the M5. It’s 2.5 times slower than the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra and the Mac Pro. So the $7,000 Mac Pro is 2.5 times as fast in multi-core than
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s cheapest phone chip powered laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Costs about as much as one wheel on the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and my Mac Pro is 20% faster in multi-core. So go my Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s ridiculous. GPU wise, it is 2.2% slower than the M1, so I would
⏹️ ▶️ John call that a wash. It is 2.3 times slower than the M5, seven
⏹️ ▶️ John times slower than the M2 Ultra and the current Mac Pro, and four times slower than my
⏹️ ▶️ John Radeon Pro Vega 2. So Jason Stahl has some charts that we’ll link. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can see his numbers are slightly different than mine. Cause again, when you look up Geekbench stuff, there’s lots of individual, there’s you
⏹️ ▶️ John run the Geekbench app and you upload your results to the website and tons of people
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that. You get wildly varying numbers depending on what was going on in their system, what temperature things were, all sorts of variables
⏹️ ▶️ John that are not under your control. But Geekbench does publish like, I don’t know how they do it. They average it or something. They
⏹️ ▶️ John publish like top charts, organized by machine and CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where I was pulling mine from and I don’t know if Jason’s numbers are slightly different, but here’s what it boils down to. This
⏹️ ▶️ John thing for single core is actually better than the M1. And for
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-core and GPU, it’s about the same as the M1. So if you wanna characterize what is it gonna be like
⏹️ ▶️ John to use a Mac with the A18 Pro, the specs say from Geekbench, which again
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a benchmark or whatever, the specs say that it should be roughly like using an M1
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a little bit peppier in single core. And single core does make a difference for people
⏹️ ▶️ John just doing, you know, dorking around on their computer and doing stuff because the, you know, the main thread in your application,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing you’re interacting with, that’s probably, that one single thread is probably gonna be in a power core
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s an interactive thread and all this other stuff. And the, you know, that core,
⏹️ ▶️ John single core performance is faster in the 18 Pro than it is in the M1 by a significant amount. 19% is
⏹️ ▶️ John not like within the range of variability of Geekbench scores. So that’s good. Now, there are
⏹️ ▶️ John some unknowns as we get to more of the specs of here, like, okay, but there’s more to an SoC’s performance
⏹️ ▶️ John than just CPU, GPU, single core, multi-core. Like there’s more to it than that. There’s more of the whole system
⏹️ ▶️ John performance. So we’ll have to wait until somebody gets one of these and starts actually benchmarking it to know because
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone is not a good stand-in in other ways, but just pure CPU benchmarks. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how I would characterize the A18 Pro is, it’s M1-ish.
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM is eight gigs. There’s no choice, no other option. It’s just eight gigs is eight gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta save money somewhere, but like I imagine that the main reason it’s eight gigs is I don’t think the A18
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro can handle more than eight gigs. I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John ever shipped with more than eight gigs. I guess they didn’t modify it. Like, so I’m guessing, I mean, not saying they wouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John gone eight gig anyway, but they did just bump everybody up to 16, including the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air. They bumped up that configuration as well, and not the Walmart one. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this has eight gigs and I don’t think they’re trying to do it to be stingy. I just think like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t do more than that with the A18 Pro. The A19 Pro I think can do 12. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I suspect if you do see a bump in this, like next year or the year after or whatever, next time they make a new
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro in it, I bet it will have 12 and not 16, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, if you’re disappointed about the RAM, I think it is a side effect
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple deciding to make a low cost MacBook and
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially being forced to use one of the chips that already exists. And that chip was never really designed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a Mac chip. So either doesn’t support more than eight gigs or it’s difficult to get it to support
⏹️ ▶️ John more than eight gigs. And that topic will come up in a little bit when we talk about more things. Memory bandwidth, 60 gigs per
⏹️ ▶️ John second, which is one 10th as fast
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco as the top spec in five
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs to characterize that, but it is 12.5% slower than the M1. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it is again, ballpark. How much memory bandwidth does this have? It has M1-ish memory bandwidth, a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John less, a little bit less. SSDs is a real wild card for me in benchmarks, yeah. So it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John to 256 or 512, with some important differences we’ll get through in a second. I don’t know what the SSD speeds
⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna be like, because honestly, I don’t know what the SSD speeds are like in phones. And I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John the A18 Pro’s interface to storage is the bottleneck here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like however fast an A18 Pro can talk to storage, that’s how fast this is gonna go. Even though
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs like any of the M chips are probably designed with faster storage, especially like the modern ones are
⏹️ ▶️ John designed with faster and faster access to storage, whether it’s higher clock speed
⏹️ ▶️ John or wider buses or both, we’ll have to see what the SSD performance is like
⏹️ ▶️ John on the A18 Pro, because I don’t know how to like handicap that. So like, if your workload
⏹️ ▶️ John depends a lot on, you know, big sequential reads of high bandwidth stuff, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it won’t perform like an M1 for you. But if it doesn’t need to do that and it’s just like CPU bound,
⏹️ ▶️ John it should perform kind of like an M1 to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that if you know what RAM is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you know what memory bandwidth is, and if you know what SSD performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, this is probably not a computer that’s really targeted at you, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. When you look at this is an iPhone chip performing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very competitively, in certain ways, very competitively.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In certain ways, of course, it’s restricted and lower. But that really says a lot about the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPhone can do a lot here. If the power that we’re carrying in our pockets every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day is enough to run like a somewhat competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like entire laptop, that’s amazing. It’s also kind of amazing to think like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you like, you know, build and run from Xcode on this computer to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the phone that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re running it on is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John than the computer you’re building it with. Well, keep in mind that if you buy one of the new displays, either one,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has a more powerful SOC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the studio display has an A19 and the studio display XDR has an A19 Pro and this is an A18 Pro. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, if you buy this and attach it to one of those external monitors, which it will drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, your monitor has a better… I wonder if it has more RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco too. Yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could buy like seven of these for the cost of one of those monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, that is definitely true. All right. So size-wise, if you were hoping for the return of
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook One, and yes, many people point that the MacBook Neo is an anagram of MacBook One. A,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t have one port, which we’ll get to in a little bit, but B, this is not any ridiculously skinny laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is essentially MacBook Air-sized. It is actually 1.5 millimeters thicker than the
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air, and it is six millimeters less wide and eight millimeters less
⏹️ ▶️ John deep, but it is actually thicker. So it is not a skinny little thing. It is not a wedge. It is not smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John than the Mac. Just, again, think of this as essentially MacBook Air-sized, a little bit smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John The weight is exactly the same as the MacBook Air. So if you wanted a two pound thing, this ain’t it. It’s 2.7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, I have some questions about the weight. Because, okay, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly the same size computer as the MacBook Air. It’s a little bit smaller. Yeah, a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco barely smaller. It is thicker, yeah, so it’s a roughly a MacBook Air 13 inch sized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer. It is exactly the same weight as the MacBook Air. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of the same types of things in it as a MacBook Air, except it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much smaller battery and batteries are heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why is it the same weight?
⏹️ ▶️ John My guess, here’s my guess. One of the rumors that they talked about this, Apple alluded to it
⏹️ ▶️ John vaguely in their video, is that they have come up with a less expensive way to make a aluminum unibody
⏹️ ▶️ John chassis. And it’s possible that less expensive way does not remove all
⏹️ ▶️ John the material that could be removed to the most efficient weight, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess. Oh, so like thicker aluminum,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically. Yeah, like, because like when you’re, the more expensive one, like, you know, there’s a bunch of aluminum there that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not serving a role structurally, and removing every ounce of that may require more machining and precision
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. And whatever the new technique is, I don’t remember the details of the rumors, or this is just rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, they’ve found a way to make a unibody aluminum construction for less
⏹️ ▶️ John money than like the M1 MacBook Air. That’s my only guess. Because you’re right, the battery is less. That’s a pretty good guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John The display, no notch, which I like. Like I feel like that’s an advantage over the MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s because they have big bezels around the screen. Like that’s what it comes down to, but you know, no notch. If you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like the notch, just don’t have one. It’s a 13 inch IPS LCD, as opposed,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the MacBook Air is 13.6 inches. The resolution, it’s 219 pixels per inch.
⏹️ ▶️ John The resolution is actually less than the MacBook Air. it’s 2408 by 1506 versus 2560 by 1664.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is also, by the way, significantly less than the iPhone 16
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this SOC came from.
⏹️ ▶️ John The iPhone 16 Pro, remember the iPhone 16 Pro Max is 3X instead of 2X. The iPhone 16 Pro Max is 2868 by 1320 at 460 PPI.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you’re worried like, how is this phone chip gonna drive
⏹️ ▶️ John the display? It has so many pixels. Don’t worry about it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey phone that it came from
⏹️ ▶️ John has more pixels. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s 500 nits. It’s only sRGB. So no P3, no true tone, no ambient light
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor the ports This is where the a 19 18 Pro comes
⏹️ ▶️ John in again It has one USB 3 that does 10 gigabits per second for charging and display port
⏹️ ▶️ John But I can do one display at 4 I guess I can’t do a 6k There’s one external display at 4k at 60 so couldn’t do the
⏹️ ▶️ John 6k display But it can do the 4k display can’t do the 5k display either which is a bummer anyway And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the other port thank God it has more than one so it is not a MacBook one the other port which is also USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ John is USB 2 at 480 megabits per second. And why, why the hell does it have a USB 3
⏹️ ▶️ John port and a USB 2 port? Because that I think is what the A18
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro can support. I think Gruber mentioned this in one of his things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he said in his piece that he actually asked somebody in Apple PR and they basically said like, it was really hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even get that port
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. They could, like, in other words, saying like, normally they expect to have one port, it’s a phone chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have one port in the phone, right? Just to get the second USB port at all I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they probably had to add like another USB controller somewhere to the board and wire it in and that was a pain
⏹️ ▶️ John And so yes Apple did this to themselves But that like again when the a18 Pro was made
⏹️ ▶️ John there I don’t think there was any expectation that this ship would appear in a Mac It is ill-suited to be in a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the peripheral stuff. And so it is disappointing I mean come on USB to
⏹️ ▶️ John like what century is this? It’s ridiculous But would you rather only have one port? I sure as hell wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John so there is the good port the quote-unquote good port Which is get only only USB 3 at 10
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabits and then there is the horrendously slow port But it’s still better to have two ports because there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John magsafe These two ports are it what you know charge in one of them connect a peripheral in another
⏹️ ▶️ John when The a19 or a20 or whatever powered version of the MacBook Neo comes out
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll bet these changes are less bad or I’m hoping in the future Apple says, okay if this product
⏹️ ▶️ John is a hit We need to make chips that we know will work in this This is a disappointing technical thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not because Apple is being mean to you or being cheap I just think they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a way to do this Because this was never designed to be a Mac chip and people think that manifests
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh, it’s never done to be Mac chip It’s performance will be bad. It’s not the performance It’s stuff like this like how many ports
⏹️ ▶️ John can you support how many external displays because those are not important things for a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that has one hole in the bottom of it and generally doesn’t spend a lot of time hooked up to external displays. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it is what it is. Headphone port, it does have that. Doesn’t support high impedance headphones like the
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air does. Again, no MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also the headphone port placement is a little odd. It’s really far down. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very close to your wrists.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I want to see what the inside of this thing looks like. I mean, the speakers are weird too. The speakers are side firing and they’re towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they’re also, yeah, they’re right there too. It’s yeah, so I really, I think what we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing here with some of these decisions is like, Apple went all out designing this from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scratch to be significantly less money. And there’s all this stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case design that we don’t even really think about as like possible ways to save weight because we don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to manufacture this kind of stuff. But there’s all sorts of little details like this that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like different or missing or a little bit off and it all adds up. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if the side firing speakers like, cause if you’re gonna like, if you’re gonna save money on the
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers, maybe use fewer speakers, lower quality speakers, but having them be side firing and towards you to
⏹️ ▶️ John like sort of bounce off the surface. Like I feel like the placement is very intentional to essentially make the
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers sound better. Like if we’re gonna use these speakers and we’re gonna put them in this laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually shooting them out of the sides from the front is the best way to do it. Because if we had put them like
⏹️ ▶️ John facing up and bouncing off the screen or whatever, they wouldn’t sound as good. Like I’m guessing this is very
⏹️ ▶️ John intentional and is actually the best place to put these speakers which are presumably less expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers. Yeah, I mean, we’ll see. Cause like, I got out my old M2 MacBook Air here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m pretty sure it’s fire speakers at the screen hinge. Right? Like out of the screen hinge towards the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like one of the major differences between the MacBook Air and the 14
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch MacBook Pro is the much better speakers you get in the MacBook Pro. it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it’s such a difference. And I wonder, like, are the, like, from the reviewers that were there at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s event today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You can’t hear anything in that room. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but so far the impression is the speakers are decent, you know, like, for what they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think the comparison is like, compared to the speakers you would get in a similarly placed PC laptop, they’re better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I wonder if maybe, because like, if you think about the, the arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside of these, maybe that’s one of the things they were able to do with a smaller battery, is move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the speakers into the wrist rest. because before, the battery would be under that entire palm
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, the batteries are pretty, the speakers are pretty skinny. Like in the iFixit teardowns, like even the MacBook Pro, they’re skinny. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, we’ll have to wait to see when people tear this down. But what I’m guessing is like, again, because I don’t think there’s, the room is that
⏹️ ▶️ John tight in there because they did make the battery smaller. I’m guessing this layout is very intentional and other positions would
⏹️ ▶️ John be worse. But again, external displays is just one at 4K, display part 1.4. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber says, if you plug in an external display and you put it in the wrong USB port, you
⏹️ ▶️ John get a software notification telling you to plug it in the other one. Because basically, say you’ve got a 4K display and you’re gonna plug it in. The two ports
⏹️ ▶️ John are not the same. You cannot plug a 4K display into USB 2.0 port, right? So if you do plug it in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS says, yeah, that’s not the right one. Put it in the other one. I don’t think they’re labeled in any way.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just, they look identical. It’s just one of them is the fast one and one of them is the slow one. Connectivity,
⏹️ ▶️ John this does not get the N1. It has Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 6, so the standards are
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. It’s not Wi-Fi 7, but whatever. But it is Bluetooth 6. I think they use a MediaTek
⏹️ ▶️ John chip or something. It’s not Apple’s M1 in there. Again, saving money, because whatever chip they use is presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper than the M1. The camera is 1080, no center stage or desk view. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ John no indicator light on the camera. It’s a little green light that turns on next to the camera when the camera’s
⏹️ ▶️ John recording. Instead, they’re just relying entirely on the software thing, the little, you know, FaceTime ish
⏹️ ▶️ John icon that appears in your menu bar when it’s going on. That’s a weird one to cut. I don’t know what the security
⏹️ ▶️ John implications of that because they used to brag about how there’s no way in software you can disable the green light.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, there’s definitely a way in software where you can disable the thing in the menu bar. I would presume
⏹️ ▶️ John although maybe system integrity protection and all sorts of stuff prevents tries to stop that, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sound again, dual speakers, dual mic array instead of three three mics from the MacBook Air. Does not support
⏹️ ▶️ John spatial audio with dynamic head tracking on AirPods, which is fine with me because I hate that feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was gonna say, can I turn that off like universally across all of my devices?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I wish, I always turn it
⏹️ ▶️ John off. The battery, as Marco said, is 36.5, which is 32% smaller than the MacBook Air’s 53.8.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that is a big, because again, this is the same size computer and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially a third less battery in it. So that is big. And why is there a third less battery
⏹️ ▶️ John in it? A, because it seems like they could for power, and B, smaller batteries cost less money. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what it comes down to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if the theory about like a thicker case is correct, maybe they actually just didn’t have room for a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’ll see. If it’s thicker, it could be like millimeters, but we’ll see what it looks like when they tear it down.
⏹️ ▶️ John Up to 16 hours of video streaming, which is 11% less than the MacBook Air, and up to 11
⏹️ ▶️ John hours of wireless web, which is 26% less than the MacBook Air. So it does
⏹️ ▶️ John take a battery life hit in exchange for that one third smaller battery, but the battery life still
⏹️ ▶️ John seems acceptable. So 16 hours for video streaming and 11 hours for wireless web, it is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, if you were hoping this was gonna be either an ultra thin laptop or a laptop that had insane
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life because it uses a phone chip, neither one of those things are true. What is true is it doesn’t cost a lot of money, which we’ll get to
⏹️ ▶️ John in a bit. Charging, it comes with a 20 watt charger, which should tell you, don’t expect fast
⏹️ ▶️ John charging of this because it doesn’t support it. So that 20 watt charger will supply, I’m assuming will supply
⏹️ ▶️ John power to this thing as fast as it is willing to take it So don’t bother trying to get a higher wattage charger.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like it’s not gonna charge it any faster and cost savings No keyboard backlight
⏹️ ▶️ John no touch ID on the model of the base model If you want touch ID you have to check
⏹️ ▶️ John the only option you have aside from color Which we’ll get to in a little bit, which is 512 gig SSD so
⏹️ ▶️ John if you get the two for the base model 256 gig SSD no touch ID and
⏹️ ▶️ John And as Apple says lock and wake your screen and power your laptop on and off with the lock key You know where the touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ John key is on the keyboard now There’s just a regular key there with a lock on it and as many people pointed out if you’re buying
⏹️ ▶️ John these for schools For example touch ID is pointless in schools for the most part unless it’s a one-to-one program and even then
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the kids Are gonna register their fingerprints or whatever So it is not unreasonable to lock touch ID as someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s sitting in front of a computer that Right now that does not have touch ID. I tell you it is possible to use a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John without touch ID. It does work Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey miserable though.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know Anyway for if you want the basis of base models the 256
⏹️ ▶️ John gig version of this MacBook Neo You do not get touch ID why
⏹️ ▶️ John because it saves money The trackpad it is not a haptic trackpad the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John actually moves. So we’re going back in time
⏹️ ▶️ John You can still supposedly according to Apple click anywhere on its surface, I’m not sure how that works I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John video of people pressing it It does indeed move like like in the olden days when the track pads used to move
⏹️ ▶️ John when you press them and like on a Lot of PC laptops. They still move Does it just doesn’t move like a diving
⏹️ ▶️ John board? Does it move like a trampoline? Does it move like an elevator? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how it moves We’ll have to wait for people to get these to you know, review them I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John seen people say that it also doesn’t support force touch. I’m not sure what they mean Do they just mean that it is a physically moving trackpad?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or do they mean like the thing where you press hard and it knows that you’re pressing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey harder? Yeah, I think that’s what they mean is that you can’t press through, you know how, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well you’re not a trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco person. You can still do that on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac. I thought that ended years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey ago. I thought they got rid of that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, no, no, no. On a Mac, that’s absolutely still
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. It’s like where you get, what do you, what is that bound to by default? Is it like dictionary lookup or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. On words it’s a dictionary lookup. I forget what it is in other places, but yes, I’m doing it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John this, this don’t have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so the colors silver blush citrus indigo their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey color-coordinated keyboard and feet Jason who is by his own admission
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relatively colorblind says bluish excuse me blush is pink enough that even I a person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a hard time seeing pinks can tell you it’s pink indigo sort of like the MacBook Air’s midnight color lightened up a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few notches and citrus is a bright yellow gold that nobody’s going to mistake for some other Apple laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think this is a pretty nice looking color setup for this like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super bold It’s not super varied I think they should have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even more Like made an even bigger statement and not even offered it in silver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I should have just been only colors
⏹️ ▶️ John got all for a silver one Do you like I think they I think what they missed out on is
⏹️ ▶️ John there there’s no green That’s my disappointment, but you know the colors are visible to the naked
⏹️ ▶️ John eye even from a colorblind person So we have to say thumbs up on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of funny like if you configure the like if you go into like the MacBook compare specs page on there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the website and you set up like a MacBook Neo a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the three like you know it like and you put it in Price order it almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like you have them in the reverse order for how nice these computers are It’s like, you know, if you look at like cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the really, really cheap car model of a model line is like only available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in white. Right. And then like, you know, you go a little bit higher and it’s like, OK, you can get a few more colors here. And like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to like the luxury cars, you get a lot of color options there. The MacBook lineup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the opposite. Like the nicer the Mac computer is, the fewer color options
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Maybe they’ll learn the the iPhone 16 Pro orange lesson, but not for these. because that was, it would be too late to learn
⏹️ ▶️ John for these, but yeah. And the color-coordinated keyboards and feet, like it’s kind of hard to tell in the
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures because as people point out, like white balance adjusting of your eyes wise, you’re like, well, all the keyboards are white, aren’t they?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they’re not. The pink laptop has a pink keyboard. The citrus or yellowish citrus laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John has a citrus keyboard. It’s easier to tell on the Indigo one because that’s very dark and you can see that it has a darker keyboard. But
⏹️ ▶️ John and also the rubber feet that are on the bottom, they’re not black. All the rubber feet on the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pros are
⏹️ ▶️ John black. These are color-coordinated. So they match. So that’s a nice touch. That’s where some of
⏹️ ▶️ John the money went. And as Jason Snell points out, the Apple logo on the back of the screen is not a shiny
⏹️ ▶️ John logo, but it’s like embossed, like inset. And the shiny logos, the way those are done,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple talks about this a lot in their videos, I believe even for the MacBook Air, are
⏹️ ▶️ John they cut out an Apple logo shape, and then they sort of inset, like wood inlay,
⏹️ ▶️ John a different material, that shiny thing, is inlaid into there. And they have to make it, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a wood inlay. You have to exactly match the hole to the thing you’re putting in the hole. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s seamless. So you don’t see a gap around any part of it. Oh my God. And that’s hard to do. And they do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s how they make that. Yeah. I don’t know if I knew that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I, I, I don’t know if they do that in all the models or just some of them, but I remember they had a video about it. Cause what they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do, like they’re, you know, obviously when you manufacture things, there are variances. So what they do is they punch out the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple logo shape holes and then they have the shiny app logos that are going to them and there’s variability and and
⏹️ ▶️ John they essentially have to match up pairs, like, okay, this hole exactly matches this particular
⏹️ ▶️ John logo. You know, like, cause that’s what you have to do cause there are tolerances and they want them to fit exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not like you’re, you know, so you just have, you get a very, you get a distribution curve of the holes and you get a distribution
⏹️ ▶️ John curve of the inserts and then you just match them up. And that is time consuming and expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want to save money on a laptop? Don’t do that. Just carve away a little bit of material
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s your Apple logo. And that’s why these are not shiny, but are instead inset. I would assume that is a
⏹️ ▶️ John cost-saving measure and not so much the cost of the shiny insert, but the cost of like the time and
⏹️ ▶️ John labor to do that expensive. And it’s computer control, like the matching. It’s not humans like holding it up and trying to put it in or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like that’s expensive. So that’s where they save some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money here. I wanted to quickly note that the four minute announcement video for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, I thought was really fun and really well done. It’s worth four minutes of your time to watch. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it shows all the different colors really well and the way they like edited it with the VFX
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and stuff. I thought it was really cool, so you should check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Environment on this one, 60% recycled content, the highest percentage of any Apple product,
⏹️ ▶️ John 90% recycled aluminum, 100% recycled cobalt in the battery, 45% renewable energy across the supply
⏹️ ▶️ John chain. And as we alluded to before, price, 599 for the 256 no Touch ID model or 499 for education.
⏹️ ▶️ John for education and for the one with Touch ID and a 512 gig SSD, it’s 699.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those prices are lower than some people expected, but like when we have that big long session, like where
⏹️ ▶️ John can you remove price from this thing? They removed it every possible place they could. Places
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t even think of, like did you think removing the indicator light from the camera? Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John that saves money because you don’t have to deal with that circuitry, you don’t have another light. Removing Touch ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John but only from some of the models, I don’t think we would have guessed that, but in hindsight it makes some sense because in some contexts
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need Touch ID or you don’t want it or it’s not important. Yeah, they just removed
⏹️ ▶️ John it everywhere. Like no backlight on the keyboards, like just everything they could, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John just they didn’t just get it from one big place. Cause again, like the SoC, like how much cheaper are we talking about this? Or how much cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John is an A18 Pro than an M1? I don’t know, 30 bucks cheaper? Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that much cheaper. You need to get the costs from everywhere and they got it from
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere. And I think unlike the 16E, the cost they removed here, I think they did a good job
⏹️ ▶️ John of spreading that around such that there is no one aspect of this that where you say
⏹️ ▶️ John like, this makes it a garbage laptop. The closest I would come to say is the one that may be regretful is
⏹️ ▶️ John the trackpad. And maybe that saved them a lot of money, but that really feels like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple probably was like, oh, I wish we didn’t have to do this because you know that the niceness of the trackpads is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the defining characteristics of an Apple laptop. It just feels so nice, it works so well. And it’s not like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they haven’t always had haptic ones, but this is kind of like the 32 to 27 inch regression. It’s like, we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to go back in time a little bit to a day when we didn’t have haptic trackpads, which means
⏹️ ▶️ John that again, when you click on it, it opens up a little gap and maybe a crumb from your scone falls onto the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco goes, like, you know what I mean? Like having it not move
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually a pretty big boon. I’m, you know, I do wonder how many people are going to be taking these apart and finding
⏹️ ▶️ John crumbs in that part of the computer. I mean, I bet they’re used to finding them on the keyboard, They’re gonna be under the trackpad too because it opens
⏹️ ▶️ John up a little crack when you click it or whatever That’s the only thing I can really fault these things on and obviously the limitations
⏹️ ▶️ John inherent in the a18 Pro Which I’m not gonna say is an Apple’s fault because they made this computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not Apple making poor Decisions about what to put into a product. It’s Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John of the past Not having the foresight to realize they needed a chip to go into a low-end
⏹️ ▶️ John Laptop right but that it is what it is. So be aware that some of the limitations of this
⏹️ ▶️ John are are to blame on the A18 Pro, and there’s nothing Apple can really do about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John short of not rolling out this computer until it has an A19 or A20 or something with fewer limitations.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think this is pretty good, but I don’t know, what do you guys think?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think this is a really solid computer for people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who don’t care about computers. And I think that comes across very dismissive, and I don’t mean it that way at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For us, for the three of us, and for probably anyone listening to the show, We care a lot about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computers. We want nice computers. We want fast computers. And this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those things, and that’s okay. And I think, like you had said, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of the trade-offs I made, I think make a lot of sense. It would bum me out to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have this computer as a primary computer, but I tell you what, as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downstairs computer, which is currently an M2 iPad Pro for me, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would fit the bill pretty nicely. and if you price out a modern iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with keyboard, because for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I would want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, it’s like two or three times the price, well, I guess you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John have to have.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could have one of these in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each room. Right, I mean, you wouldn’t have to have an iPad Pro, to be fair, but to have an iPad with a nice keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a cantilevered keyboard, the keyboard alone is like 400 bucks. Somebody said this on MassDot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, 350, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous, it’s like, yeah, an iPad keyboard is 350 bucks, and this. Whole-ass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer is 600 bucks. I mean, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I believe that, and I think it was at the bottom of Gruber’s post too. Just like, what you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this shows how bad of a value the iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard are
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Well, the iPad Pro is actually not that bad of a deal because it has a really good, it’s just over-provisioned. It has a really
⏹️ ▶️ John good screen, it has a powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair, less so on the iPad Pro, much more so on the Magic Keyboard. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Magic Keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John The keyboard is definitely like, yeah, that’s hard to justify. I think that, I do wonder why those cost so much. Maybe it’s like low
⏹️ ▶️ John volumes or whatever, but yeah, that doesn’t have a lot of computing power in the keyboard and it’s just a plastic. And then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even like they’re super durable because at various times the iPad keyboards have like fallen apart after several years. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a tough product. So here’s the real comparison to think about this because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is rolling out this line of low cost laptops in fun colors. They’re trying to go down market. We feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John we can feel the laptop at a lower price that is still a good product and here it is. It’s called the Neo.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about the Neo versus the Walmart M1 MacBook Air, which they have
⏹️ ▶️ John been selling for many years now. It’s a MacBook Air, they sell through Walmart for $650. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just the M1 MacBook Air as it existed. They just, you know, they gave it to Walmart to sell when they stopped sort of selling it themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here are some comparisons. Here are the ways in which the Neo is better than the M1 MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is 30% faster in single core and about the same in multi-core and GPU. It has a hundred
⏹️ ▶️ John nit brighter screen. It has one hour better battery life. It has iPhone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi 6E instead of six. It has Bluetooth six instead of five. Its camera is 1080
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of 720. It is $50 cheaper than the Walmart one for the 256 gig model.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can actually buy it and it’s in stock. Those are the Neo advantages. What are the M1 MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air advantages? Also, I’d say you can buy the Neo anywhere because Apple will sell it directly to you. Yeah, you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy it at Walmart, but like even at Walmart, sometimes it’s not always in stock. I don’t know what the future
⏹️ ▶️ John of the M1 MacBook Air is. I think maybe they’re just gonna sell through them because Walmart will be selling the Neo. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t imagine the M1 MacBook Air sticks around after this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they just sell through them. But anyway, here are the M1 MacBook Air advantages over the Neo. M1 MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air has Touch ID on every model. It supports P3 color. It has True Tone with an
⏹️ ▶️ John ambient light sensor. Its screen is 0.3 inches bigger diagonally and it has about a half a million more
⏹️ ▶️ John pixels than the Neo. It has two Thunderbolt 4 USB 4 ports,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is indeed a Mac. It has a three microarray instead of two.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has a little light on the camera. It has a haptic track pad and has a backlit keyboard. So you really
⏹️ ▶️ John see that like the MacBook Air was never designed to be the Walmart
⏹️ ▶️ John bargain-basin model. It’s just that they took what was essentially the best MacBook Air that they
⏹️ ▶️ John had ever introduced when the M1 came out, and they just kept selling it forever because it was just
⏹️ ▶️ John so darn good. but like it’s like when Casey goes shopping for used cars. If you wanna buy a new
⏹️ ▶️ John car for $45,000, it’s not going to have all the same features as a massively
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco EV for multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John years old. And you can tell, like when you look at the M1 MacBook Air, like, oh, this wasn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ John bargain computer when it was new, it just is now. And it was always designed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a Mac. Again, the biggest thing is like two Thunderbolt 4 ports versus USB 3
⏹️ ▶️ John and USB 2, that is a big difference in terms of bandwidth and usability if you
⏹️ ▶️ John care about the ports. P3, why would this have P3 color? Is it a Walmart laptop? Well, it wasn’t always a Walmart
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop. When it was introduced, having P3 color was table stakes for what was then the highest-end MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John ever made. Same thing with Touch ID, it’s across all the models. But time marches on, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why the Neo has a better camera than this thing does, right? And the Neo is $50
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper if you care about that. Neo has better Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The Neo has better battery life, a brighter screen, faster single
⏹️ ▶️ John core SoC. So like, it’s not a slam dunk in either direction. It depends on what of those things you care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and by the way, I should list this as a pro in the Neo. It comes in fun colors and the MacBook Air does not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I think one thing to not underestimate is when the MacBook Air went from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 to the M2 generation, it had a case redesign.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the MacBook Air M2 and forward case feels fantastic. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delightful to pick up and hold. I think it is a huge tactile upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from, an aesthetic upgrade from the M1 family.
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of like the wedge. Like I see arguments for both. Cause I do have, I have, you know, we have M, we have the new,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a, my son has an M2 MacBook Air, my daughter has an M4. So I’m very familiar with the new case, but I also have an M1
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air. So like, I don’t know if I would put it as a pro in either one. If you like one case better
⏹️ ▶️ John than another, then be aware that there is that difference. But I do kind of like the wedge in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be clear, and you know, the Neo is not identical to the MacBook Air case. It is a little bit thicker, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so. Yeah, it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit there. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like. But it’s roughly, it’s similar. It’s very similar. The
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest difference is like, it’s 13 inch screen versus 13.6. So if you can imagine what difference that would make in a case, like it
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, it is slightly thicker, but not as long and not as wide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like, but I do think like the M1 MacBook Air, it looked old,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it felt old, it was old. And I always had that kind of, that question in my mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, how long, first of all, how long are they gonna be selling this? And then second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could you tell someone, go buy this five-year-old computer, what if they stop supporting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the OS next year on it? I was always worried about that kind of thing, where this is now a current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco production model, it’s a new model.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s a thing that people worry about with the A18 Pro as well. Obviously, it’s a concern with the M1,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially since the M1 doesn’t have all the more advanced neural engines and various other things and GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores and crap like that, but people are worried already about the A18 Pro. They’re like how long will Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS support the a18 Pro because even though it is a newly introduced computer It is
⏹️ ▶️ John an older chip and it’s not really designed to be a Mac chips Like what is the longevity look like like
⏹️ ▶️ John not that it’s gonna ever get too slow But like is there gonna be like two versions of Mac OS for now from now? They’re gonna be like, oh, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t you know, you can’t use the a18 Pro with that I don’t know that’s kind of up to Apple how
⏹️ ▶️ John long they want to support this but it is also a concern on the m1 So the reason I think it’s not a slam
⏹️ ▶️ John dunk is like I said the the m1 is your used your used luxury car It’s massively depreciated. It’s super
⏹️ ▶️ John old. It’s no longer state-of-the-art But when it was new it had more nice stuff and it still does
⏹️ ▶️ John have more stuff I was kind of shocked when I look this up Did the neo has one hour better battery life because I
⏹️ ▶️ John always think of the m1 is having amazing battery life But these are these are just by Apple’s measures. I don’t know accurate they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the m1 is also again. It’s a five-year-old chip to five-year-old process
⏹️ ▶️ John several processes all what is it seven nanometer if I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, whatever it is, it’s not the latest and greatest in that way. And so, and of course, you’ve had many efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gains in both the physical design of the chip and also like the, you know, cleverness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the chip. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the efficiency of the cores is higher now too. So, honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s awesome, even though this is not for me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, by the way, for anybody out there thinking like, should I get this instead of a MacBook Air for my like, you know, messing around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer? The only thing I would say is like, there’s a lot of little, little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, lacks of niceties that I think you might notice if you are accustomed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to other Macs. This is definitely a slam dunk for people who are coming from PCs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you’re coming from other Macs, the lack of certain things, like if you’ve always had backlit keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you suddenly don’t, like that kind of thing. But honestly, I think one of the most significant like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of paper cuts that you might face in real life is the lack of the ambient light sensor. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that means, you open this thing up no matter where you are and boom, it blasts you with whatever your screen setting was when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were in a brighter light. So I think that you’re gonna be constantly riding that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen brightness thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually might be the biggest paper cut for people in real use. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think overall, when you compare this to PCs in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the similar price range, people keep saying this is Apple trying to take on Chromebooks. I don’t think that’s significant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chromebooks don’t cost $600. No, and if you’re going to try to tackle Chromebooks in schools,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are like $200 computers. They’re garbage. They’re disposable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the appeal of schools getting Chromebooks is largely about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost. But there’s also other factors like management. Integration with
⏹️ ▶️ John Google’s classroom crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s a lot of other factors that schools like and rely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and are very compelling for them that Apple is never going to match. So it is partly about cost, not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple, to be fair, Apple is not mentioning education in the marketing for this product anywhere that I’ve seen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they have education pricing for all their computers. Like just because they mentioned it’s $500 to education. Like their videos are not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we see children, every child will have one of these. No, they’re just trying to sell it to consumers. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell it to students, like directly, or to their parents. Like the people who go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco school will buy this or have this bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them, but not by the school. The school is gonna keep doing whatever the school was doing before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure, like when our kid was, when we were living on Fire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Island year round during some of the COVID lockdowns, the Fire Island school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was very well funded. And so every kid there got a MacBook Air. So if you were like the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of school that was already buying Macs for students, I’m sure many of those will switch to these because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot cheaper. That’s great. If, you know, for schools that were already buying the $200 Chromebooks, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to these. But anyway, overall, I think this looks like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is going to be very significant. This will significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expand the Mac’s market share over time. You know, the Walmart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 was an experiment, I think. And as we’ve discussed, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was never designed to be a super cheap, That was designed to be a medium cheap computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was never designed to be a super cheap computer. This is now designed for that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much like the approach, this is a total shift in strategy. This is very much like the approach Apple took with the iPhone 17E
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus the old SEs which were like regular iPhones that were kind of cut down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after the fact with medium age and medium sophistication parts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when the 16E came out, that was like the first iPhone was designed from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scratch to be less expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John 5C would like to raise its hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was barely a change from the base model, you know, five. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, yeah, wasn’t it just a five with a plastic case? Like that was the only change. It wasn’t just a five
⏹️ ▶️ John with a plastic case, but the plastic case is the whole phone. Like it really was significant redesign for a cheaper phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, anyway, so this is a significant strategy shift.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shift, this is a significant product that they really, they weren’t just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to make this thing a few hundred bucks cheaper than they are. We were all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of us pundits and people, we were like, well we want it to be like $500 or $600, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no way it’ll be that cheap. It’ll be $700 or $800. And no, it’s $600. That’s great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s $500 through the educational discount, and over time I’m sure we’ll see these put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on sale here and there, 50 bucks off. Oh, this weekend Costco has it for 100 bucks off. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna see that kind of stuff. That’s amazing. And this is going to expand the market share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Macs. And for people who would never have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco considered a Mac when it was $1,000, $1,100, many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of them will consider it at $600 or on sale on Black Friday at $500. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be a real thing over time. And this right now, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the most expensive it will ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, over time, I guess inflation will eventually push this price up, but like right now it’s $600 to start.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Over time, we’ll probably see this, see them like push a little further down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is what we’ve seen on the low end iPad as well. Like, you know, it starts out at a certain price and then like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it fluctuates here and there with updates, but over time it tends to be pushed a little bit downward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is great news for people like us who love the Mac. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this means they’re gonna sell a lot more Macs. Especially when you compare this to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we were saying earlier, like an iPad with a keyboard. It’s a no-brainer, this is a way better option for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people, most of the time. This is what many people will choose. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, and the Walmart one was kind of like Apple kind of like dumping old stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quietly through some other brand. Like they didn’t want to touch it, like brand wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They didn’t want people to know about it really. They just were kind of quietly dumping the stuff over here. Well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, Apple’s owning it. Whatever the sales of the Walmart M1 MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were, which were probably not terrible, but whatever those sales were, it’s gonna be much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more now, because now it’s gonna be available through every Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retailer, like all their resellers, all of Apple’s own stores,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and direct channels, their website, like they’re gonna be promoting it. Like the M1 MacBook Air, the Apple never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promoted. Apple like wanted that as quiet as possible. This, they are loudly promoting. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people are going to see this. They’re making a splash. The colors are making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a splash. Yeah, I might pick a few different ones, but hey, you know what? I’m proud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them for doing colors on the Mac that you can actually see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is great news. I’m very happy to see this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is the start of something very, very good for the low end of the Mac line. The only other thing I’ll say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I wish they would do a Mac mini like this, like a really, really cheap Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not quite as mainstream a product. Like as a lot of, Jason has been pointing this out, like the Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ John had previously held the crown for the cheapest Mac in terms of absolute dollar numbers, not adjusted
⏹️ ▶️ John for inflation that Apple has ever sold. But the Mac mini, if you buy it, you can’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John use it. You have to buy, it doesn’t even come with a mouse a keyboard, let alone a screen. Like it is not a complete system.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even though the Mac mini was the champ, I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like 499 was the lowest it ever was. Just selfishly, like, you know, so many people buy Mac minis for, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roles like file servers or, you know, more recently running AI agents or whatever. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of people who like, if your Mac mini ran an iPhone chip, it’d be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you want it to come in colors too? Yes, why not? Give me a weird mustard
⏹️ ▶️ John Because people put their Mac minis where they’re not even visible. Right, exactly. I feel like the Neo
⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple stores, I feel like the impression that it’s going to give is, first
⏹️ ▶️ John of all, I believe it will be perceived as the smallest laptop, because people don’t notice a thickness
⏹️ ▶️ John change of one and a half millimeters, but they do notice length and width wise. And I know we’re like, oh, it’s a small
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, 13 inch versus 13.6, but that makes the laptop physically smaller. And if you’re the
⏹️ ▶️ John type of person who’s like, I don’t want a laptop to take up a lot of space
⏹️ ▶️ John in my life. Like you’re in the market for something like the Neo anyway, cause you’re like, I’m not a computer person. I want something
⏹️ ▶️ John small that fits in my backpack. Oh, and they come in fun colors. It’ll, it will so clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John be the most attractive to you product in the store. Cause you’re like, why would anybody buy these other computers? They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger, they’re uglier. And God, have you seen the prices? It doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone buy one? It’s like going into
⏹️ ▶️ John a car lot and seeing a cute pink convertible. And that one costs less than
⏹️ ▶️ John all the other cars and all the other cars are giant silver four-door sedans. You’re like, why would anyone buy one of those?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s a cute pink convertible. And like, well, you don’t understand the cute pink convertible has a crappy engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, it doesn’t have a lot of space in the trunk. And it’s like, what are you talking about? I don’t know what any of that stuff means.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just me and like my backpack and I want to go off to school. And this is half the price
⏹️ ▶️ John of, I guess it should be a giant silver SUV or something or whatever. Like for the people who are in the market for this,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like they’re like, oh, I guess I have to guess this one because it’s a cheap. it’s gonna be the one they want the most
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, because it fits their desires the most. Like that’s the thing that, you know, computers don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, can you imagine someone not only not caring about computer specs, but
⏹️ ▶️ John finding them a detriment and not understanding what anyone would ever pay for that. Like, I just want it
⏹️ ▶️ John to be small and cute and do the stuff that I needed to do. And if you sit there and explain to them, like the differences
⏹️ ▶️ John that we just went through, like here are the things that are different between the Neo and the M4 MacBook Air, and you went through
⏹️ ▶️ John all those things their eyes would just glaze over. Like, especially if, as you said, Marco, if they’re coming from the PC,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, they don’t, like, even though there is a difference with the haptic trackpad and like the ambient light sensor,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re not used to having a haptic trackpad and an Apple quality haptic trackpad and ambient light sensor on their
⏹️ ▶️ John PC laptops, they don’t know what they’re missing. And so you explaining it to them is not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be convincing. Now, I do feel like if they eventually, you know, this is the great thing about the Neo and the
⏹️ ▶️ John great thing about Chromebooks for Google. If you get kids using a Neo when they’re younger,
⏹️ ▶️ John as they become older professionals and maybe like, you know, this is my third Apple laptop. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll try one of those MacBook Airs. They’re gonna notice, oh, no, this trackpad is actually a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John nicer. And they won’t know what an ambient light sensor is, but like, oh, this one doesn’t blast my eyes out. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like getting a bigger screen, you become more accustomed to the better thing, but people could
⏹️ ▶️ John spend years just using the Neo and be perfectly satisfied with it until and unless
⏹️ ▶️ John their needs change or their budgets change. So I think this is going to be an extremely successful product, assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John there are no, you know, no gates, I guess, like trackpad gate, where all the trackpads
⏹️ ▶️ John break because Apple’s not used to making ones that move or like some crap like that. Like that’s always a wild card out there. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, going down, like I think the M1 MacBook Air Walmart has probably been really successful Apple, which
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of verified their like desire to do this like, OK, we can actually sell this. Let’s do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That’s as you said, Marco, let’s own it. And they are, and I think this will be, I think so. We’ll sell incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John well. And people are asking like, who is this? Who can use this? I think pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ John any student can use this in less as part of your like college major or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to run demanding local stuff. I was thinking about this for my kids. My daughter could use this in
⏹️ ▶️ John her school. She hasn’t actually picked a major yet, but she’s probably going to be. Some major that wouldn’t require
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of computing power. My son was a computer science major and as part of his classes, he had to run VMs
⏹️ ▶️ John on his local machine and with an eight gig machine. If you’re running like a Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John VM plus running a bunch of Python stuff locally, maybe you’re pushing it. Maybe not. Maybe it would be fine. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John him having an M2 MacBook Air, I think with more RAM, I think did benefit him in his major. I say
⏹️ ▶️ John he couldn’t use it, but I’m saying the M4 M2 MacBook Air was a better fit for his needs. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only because he was a computer science major doing computer science crap on his computer. Pretty much anyone else. Can
⏹️ ▶️ John you write four years worth of papers on this? Yes. Can you browse the web forever on this? Yes Can you do all your email?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah like it will do all those things because you remember when you’re thinking about this don’t think of it as like oh it’s a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John With the phone chip just thinking of it as the m1 MacBook Air which used to be The best most
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful MacBook Air available and people bought it and loved it and are still buying it today all
⏹️ ▶️ John these years later So think of it like that Don’t think of it like oh, how can I ever use a laptop with the phone chip?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I think, you know, and this is, this is the beauty of this, you know, when you see those cost curves, like how much things cost
⏹️ ▶️ John over the past, like several decades, it’s usually shown to show you the healthcare line. Like it’s inflation
⏹️ ▶️ John adjusted dollars, like percentage of your annually annual income. Like, how, what is, how’s the relative price of these things change
⏹️ ▶️ John college and healthcare in our stupid country are going straight up like a rocket. It’s terrible. Like not again,
⏹️ ▶️ John not an absolute values, but in terms of like how much does it cost relative to how much people make, but the cost
⏹️ ▶️ John of TVs has gone through the floor. Because back when my parents were
⏹️ ▶️ John young, buying a TV was like buying a new car. And now it’s like, whatever, like I’ll get one, I’ll impulse
⏹️ ▶️ John buy one at Costco. Because you can get a pretty big flat screen TV for a couple hundred bucks, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And computing power is like that. And Apple has been slow and reluctant
⏹️ ▶️ John to leverage that. But what’s happening slowly but surely is, and we’ve seen it with smartphones,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the amount of compute needed to do
⏹️ ▶️ John basic web browsing and word processing has just been getting cheaper and cheaper because the demands
⏹️ ▶️ John of basic web browsing and word processing, although especially web browsing, has increased. It has not increased
⏹️ ▶️ John as fast as computing power has increased. And I would argue for basic word processing and even image
⏹️ ▶️ John editing, that is kind of flatlined in that most people never need to do any
⏹️ ▶️ John more sophisticated image editing, setting aside AI stuff, which is a whole other thing, than they can do on
⏹️ ▶️ John any recent laptop. And the same thing with text editing. Like, you’re typing and spell checking. That’s not really changing
⏹️ ▶️ John that much, despite software being sloppier, right? So it behooves
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and any company to say, as Gruber was pointing out, Apple used to claim,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think they were correct, they could not make a laptop that met their quality standards at a price point that was competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John with the lowest end of the PC market. They still can’t, but the low end of the PC market has gone so
⏹️ ▶️ John far down that there is now room below the MacBook Air for another computer. And I would say that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Apple of old that was more premium might say, oh, the Neo
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t quite meet our quality standards. But like, you could see someone arguing saying, yeah, but it’s really close, right? And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still nicer with a PC laptop, so we should ship it. And so there’s no one there to say, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m never gonna ship a Mac without an ambient light sensor and a haptic trackpad now that those things exist. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, whoever that was who was doing that, whether it was Steve Jobs or somebody else, they’re no longer at Apple. Current, today’s Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is correctly, I think, deciding to take advantage of essentially the dividend of computing
⏹️ ▶️ John power outpacing a lot of common tasks and go down market with the Mac. And I think they’re gonna sell a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. I think it’s a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think even beyond that, like, you know, the framing of it as like, you know, can people get away with just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a phone chip for their computer? Like, I think the world has changed a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in recent years. And one of the realities that many people like us maybe fail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see or appreciate fully, is that for most people, their phone is their main computer, or their primary,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or their best computer, or their most used computer. And might have more pixels than this computer anyway. Right, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what computing has become these days is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what can people do on their phones. And instead of thinking about this as a cut down computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with settling for a phone chip, think of it as a phone with a keyboard, trackpad, and big screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s great. and a giant battery. Yeah, exactly. And that’s going to be wonderful, because that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually is what most people need and use. And then also, with things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving so much into cloud-based AI computing, powering all the, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cutting-edge stuff is right now, we’re back in the era of thin clients. We’re back in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era of the local computing power being a lot less relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it used to be, or at least maybe like where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exciting things are in computing right now are not happening with a lot of local resource processing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because no one has a local computer with that much RAM. Like you can’t have like hundreds of gigs of RAM or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the compute needed to do the current hot thing, which is AI, that just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John exist. Doesn’t exist on a desktop, doesn’t exist in a laptop, certainly doesn’t, like it’s just not feasible.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are lots of useful local models and Apple does run them and they do useful things, but the bleeding edge
⏹️ ▶️ John is so outside the realm of a battery-powered laptop currently that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all server-side. And your point about thin clients is true, although I did see a thread recently of
⏹️ ▶️ John someone describing how the Clawed terminal command line application works and showing
⏹️ ▶️ John the resource usage of it. In theory, there’s no reason
⏹️ ▶️ John that a thin client that uses a terminal input that just has a text, you know, cursor-style text display, that
⏹️ ▶️ John should be able to be incredibly thin because it’s just like, I send text to the server, I get text back. If the server’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing all the work, I should be both fast and low resource usage. But the stats
⏹️ ▶️ John they showed were not low because they had found this very convoluted way to do a command line application.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they’re not using the, well, maybe they are using the Cursus library, but they’re like, they’re running a React
⏹️ ▶️ John app behind the scene and rendering to a 2D backing
⏹️ ▶️ John and pixel diffing it, and then like sending like, you know, a terminal escape sequences
⏹️ ▶️ John to like, Anyway, the point is they were showing like gigs of memory usage for what is essentially a Node.js
⏹️ ▶️ John app or whatever language it’s written in that just sends HTTP requests to a server
⏹️ ▶️ John and gets responses and spits them. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’ve all used it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a text, it’s a terminal application. It is not a GUI and yet it
⏹️ ▶️ John uses huge resources. So while in theory and technically you are correct, I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John current software practices are taking full advantage of the thinness of the client right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but what most people’s experience with AI is a web browser.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re going to chatgpt.com and are using their other browser-based things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they’re not using coding agents or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or they’re like, even people who will be using coding agents, oh, by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, Xcodes coding agent support does not work with 8 gigs of RAM, as Steve Troutensmith pointed out
⏹️ ▶️ John But the command line, cloud executable or code executable does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you can run the Codex app also. Codex has a GUI app, which I’ve actually been using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it does pretty much what the Xcode thing does, but I think honestly a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. Anyway, so I think this is great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not the 12-inch MacBook replacement that nerds like us were kind of wishing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, but also that was never really rumored for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John release. This was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always rumored to be a lower cost, 13-inch MacBook of some kind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they delivered possibly, none of us have this thing yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sure looks like they delivered really well on that product brief. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think it’s gonna be good for Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John One more thing. So this is also a cost saving thing, obviously, because
⏹️ ▶️ John everything is about cost saving with this thing, but there’s two options, 256 or 512. Like those are your
⏹️ ▶️ John only choice, and color. There’s color and 256 or 512. And obviously that saves
⏹️ ▶️ John costs because you don’t need to make lots of variety of these, although Apple does have to make the colors and whatever ratios,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to kind of guess about that. But the really important thing about that is someone who doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care about computer specs now does not have a million decisions to make to buy this.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just pick the color they want and then there’s the cheap one and the expensive one. Even if they don’t know the differences between
⏹️ ▶️ John the cheap one and the expensive one, if they don’t care, they’re gonna get the cheap one. Like there’s literally one choice besides
⏹️ ▶️ John color and that choice is $100 difference. And I think people can just pick that based like,
⏹️ ▶️ John So if they say, why is this $100 more? You start talking about it and they’re like, oh, nevermind, I’ll just have the other one. Or they’re like, oh, I like
⏹️ ▶️ John the touch thing. I guess I have to get the marks, but that’s it. Those are the only options on this computer, which is incredibly smart.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if Apple didn’t do it for these reasons and they just did it for cost, it is going to make this
⏹️ ▶️ John computer the easiest Mac to buy because you have to make fewer decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You put together the $600 family of iPhone device, or excuse me, of Apple devices. The iPhone 17E is $600.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPad Air with M4 is $600 and the MacBook Neo is $600.
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a tiny phone, a medium-sized tablet, and a kind of small laptop, all
⏹️ ▶️ John cost the same price. And as a testament to Apple’s, you know, sort of spreading
⏹️ ▶️ John their products across the entire range of shapes and sizes of costs, and also a testament
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple finally bringing the Mac down, not to the lowest of the low, because the plain iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John is cheaper than the iPad Air, obviously, and the iPhone 17E, I don’t think is the cheapest phone because you can still buy like older
⏹️ ▶️ John models for less maybe, but like if you have $600 to spend, you can get a phone, an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John or a Mac. And all of those products that we’ve listed here are all newly released this week
⏹️ ▶️ John and are all pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Factor, Delete.me and Masterclass. And thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perks of ATP membership is overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have one additional bonus topic. It runs about 15, 20 minutes, sorry John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s extra topics, extra things that we couldn’t get to in our regular outline. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week and over time we’re talking about Apple’s new video podcast support in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Podcasts, which is, I think, pretty interesting for those of us in the podcast business, or people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who listen to podcasts or watch podcasts, which is probably most of you. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can tune in, hbutfm slash join to hear over time and get all of our other membership perks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much for listening everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to. ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪
Breaking containment
⏹️ ▶️ John So this was late breaking, right before we recorded. I had
⏹️ ▶️ John a post break containment. Do you know what that phrase means? Like go viral?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, get outside your like normal audience would be how I would take it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So there’s two phrases here. One is break containment, which is what Casey basically said, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you’re on social media or a blog or whatever. It’s some kind of platform
⏹️ ▶️ John where you publish things that are visible to the world. And breaking containment means you
⏹️ ▶️ John publish something, a blog post, a toot on Mastodon, whatever, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it got passed around outside the normal circle of people who watch your stuff. So if you’re on social media,
⏹️ ▶️ John like on Mastodon, you have people who follow you and they see the things that you toot. Breaking containment
⏹️ ▶️ John means enough people retooted it or whatever, that now people who have no idea who you are and do not
⏹️ ▶️ John follow you and don’t know anything about you start to see this post because it was popular enough
⏹️ ▶️ John and doesn’t take much. this wasn’t a very popular post. It was like barely more popular than my average post, but it was just
⏹️ ▶️ John popular enough. Like if you did the graph of this, it’s like breaking containment. Yeah, you ever see those graphs of like, who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John connected to who in a social network? There’s like these little clusters, like little cities where it’s like, well, here’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John these people and they’re mostly connected to each other, but then there are these bridges to these other circles to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t know what MassDown looked like, but like the Linux people over here and the Apple people over here and like whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever groups they’re divided up into the people in the US here and then the Europeans here and then like the soccer fans
⏹️ ▶️ John here and then like just all these different little circles. And it only takes like the right few people
⏹️ ▶️ John to like retoot something to cross from one of those clusters to another, that all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of people who don’t normally see your stuff are seeing your stuff. And then the second phrase is
⏹️ ▶️ John context collapse, which will link to the Wikipedia page for the specifically the definition and social media,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, um, I gotta look at the Wikipedia. My definition of it is like, It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the same as breaking containment in that You’re writing something with the expectation
⏹️ ▶️ John that The audience that’s seeing it like you you think you know what audience you’re speaking to
⏹️ ▶️ John But when something breaks containment, it’s not actually true Let’s see what
⏹️ ▶️ John we can see from the Wikipedia page You know their
⏹️ ▶️ John definition is not great anyway, we’ll link to it and you can look it up But basically what it comes down to is people are
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing your stuff and they don’t have the context that the normal people who follow you do. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t know who you are. They don’t know that you’re on a podcast where you just talked about the thing that you tooted about or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. They don’t know that you’re an Apple fan. They don’t know that you live in the United States. They don’t know your
⏹️ ▶️ John political persuasion or whatever. All they see is the thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote that arrives into their world. And so I experienced both of these just before we came to the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was for this toot that I did. I mean, I mostly spend my time
⏹️ ▶️ John at Mastodon, but I do occasionally also post things to BlueSky just to see what the difference is. And often I usually
⏹️ ▶️ John have to edit it because BlueSky’s limit is lower than my Mastodon server. So I have to squish things down a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit. But like the post was what I just said in the program. That was the A18
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and the MacBook Neo is 19% faster than the M2 Ultra and the Mac Pro in single core performance and
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Neo is 600 bucks. the Mac Pro, which is still for sale is $7,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyone who listens to the show or knows me gets that toot, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, isn’t it absurd? They’re still selling the Mac Pro with an M2 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, but they’re still selling it for $7,000 when the MacBook Neo, the super
⏹️ ▶️ John duper low cost, cheapest Mac, blah, blah, blah, is 19%
⏹️ ▶️ John faster in single core than the Mac Pro. This is a post of me
⏹️ ▶️ John slamming the Mac. What I’m trying to do is shame Apple into canceling the Mac Pro because it’s embarrassing at this point. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco doesn’t stop. Oh, is that what
⏹️ ▶️ John you want? Yes. Stops, like they need to poop or get off the pot, as they say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it says, are we doing this or are we not? Because it’s like when the trash can was still
⏹️ ▶️ John there. It’s like, I do want a new Mac Pro, but at a certain point, it’s just embarrassing. You got to stop selling the trash can for the
⏹️ ▶️ John same price that you sold it for. And Apple’s like, nope, we’re gonna sell it till the day it gets replaced
⏹️ ▶️ John or something else happens. So anyway, you know, my audience saw this and was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, John complaining about the Mac Pro again. It is kind of embarrassing that it’s still got the M2 Ultra and it
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, I’m usually making fun of my Intel Mac Pro, which is, you know, horrendously slow by modern standards, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the current Mac Pro that you can buy at apple.com today.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re still selling it with a straight face. And the MacBook Neo is statistically significantly
⏹️ ▶️ John faster in single core. Now, as I said, in the specs of the show, or smaller, slower and multi-core than
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 Ultra GPU. It is way slower than the M2 Ultra. The M2 Ultra has way more memory bandwidth.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M2 Mac Pro can be filled with way more RAM, yada, yada, yada. But any like, I don’t have to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John this to quote unquote, my audience on Mastodon, because they all know my attitude towards the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John They all know what the point of this post was. They all know it’s meant in jest, how isn’t this funny, is served to think
⏹️ ▶️ John about these types of things. No one who follows me, They’re aware
⏹️ ▶️ John of the situation with the Mac Pro and my opinion on it. And to the extent that they care about the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, it’s probably only as a proxy through me because they never think about it otherwise, because why would they?
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s the two. But when something breaks containment and has context collapse, people
⏹️ ▶️ John start responding to it in ways that you will find puzzling. First one that I found
⏹️ ▶️ John puzzling for a while, I was like, did I make a mistake or something? I got a couple of people
⏹️ ▶️ John replying, telling me, oh, you got the price wrong, it’s $1,700. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John What? And like the first time someone did it, I’m like, I just sent them the link to the MacBook Neo. It was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the product just came out. They don’t, you know, you’re not, if you’re not like a Mac person, you don’t know that the MacBook Neo came out today.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would you, right? But like, I did say MacBook Neo. I’m like, did I spell it incorrectly? No, I spelled
⏹️ ▶️ John it correctly in the post. It’s in there two times. But like, if you read fast, you see MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John three letter word, you think MacBook Pro. So, and then it happened again, and
⏹️ ▶️ John someone said, the MacBook Pro is $1,700, dude, look. You got the price totally wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what you’re talking about. Like, MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People just think that MacBook Neo was like you just saying like the new MacBook?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know. Like, is it just, you know, it’s an anagram of MacBook One, but it looks a lot like PRO.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey letter and a two
⏹️ ▶️ John long case letter. So, there’s that. So then you’re like, That’s how you can tell something is broken containment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Could it be like a translation thing? Like if like if something auto translated it as the new MacBook?
⏹️ ▶️ John These were also English speakers as far as but like that’s breaking containment. Like people who follow me probably knew
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Neo came out today. People who have no idea who I am or anything about Apple or anything
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have no idea what the MacBook Neo came out an hour ago. How would they know? Right. Second thing is context collapse,
⏹️ ▶️ John where a bunch of people were real angry, thinking that what I was saying is you should buy a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Neo instead of a Mac Pro because it’s more powerful. Like as if this post was like bragging
⏹️ ▶️ John about how powerful the MacBook Neo is. It’s the opposite. I’m using the
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Neo to show how pathetic the Mac Pro is. I mean, again, you both get
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Like that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco point of the
⏹️ ▶️ John post is, the MacBook Pro is embarrassing. What I’m not saying is the MacBook Neo
⏹️ ▶️ John just came out and it’s more powerful than the Apple’s most
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco powerful computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John A, Apple’s most powerful computer is not the Mac Pro and B, no way in hell am I saying that, But context
⏹️ ▶️ John collapses, you need a lot of context to take this post in the way that I meant it. You need to know
⏹️ ▶️ John my deal, that I’m on an Apple podcast, you need to know my Mac Pro enthusiasm, which you would never guess, because
⏹️ ▶️ John who is a Mac Pro enthusiast, right? You need to know so much about me before you can interpret this toot the right
⏹️ ▶️ John way. And lots of people were complaining about both of these things, both
⏹️ ▶️ John breaking containment, which is a little bit more modern phrase, and context collapse in the good old, bad old days of Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was a problem for people who actually had popular posts. Like mine was not popular, it got like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is it like, I don’t know, 100 retuits. But the people who get like 100,000 retuits, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that basically destroyed, we used to destroy Twitter for you. Because once people who have
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea who you are seeing it and there’s thousands of them, everyone’s gonna be mad about everything. So in this
⏹️ ▶️ John case, like the number of people who were so mad about this, first of all, people would not believe that it’s 19%
⏹️ ▶️ John faster in single core, but then they would say like, well, it’s certainly, you know, got to be slower in multi-core.
⏹️ ▶️ John I made the mistake of responding to one person and saying that it is actually similar to the M one and multi-core. And they got super angry about that too.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like, but that’s not the, I’m not, you know, that’s not the point of the post. So anyway, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John this was a good short instructive after show to just let people,
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are not familiar with this phenomenon, which is probably young people, like this is a thing that can happen
⏹️ ▶️ John to anybody. If something you write online or post online, some Instagram thing or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John breaks containment out of your little circle, you’ll know it because you’ll start to get replies from people
⏹️ ▶️ John that are different than what you’ve been seeing. Not necessarily worse or more hostile, but just like that
⏹️ ▶️ John seem confusing to you because they evidence a misunderstanding of your deal. And it’s because they don’t know what your deal is because
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have any context. Yeah, and so that’s this thing that still
⏹️ ▶️ John happens. I’m so not used to it happening to me. Like this is why I talk about the cross-posting to Mastodon and Bluestype. The
⏹️ ▶️ John reason I do that is I try to gauge like, where do I get more like
⏹️ ▶️ John people actually responding to my stuff? Like, where is my audience actually?
⏹️ ▶️ John I prefer Mastodon. I primarily use Mastodon. It’s the horse I’m backing. I like it
⏹️ ▶️ John the best. I like the clients the best. I like everything about it. But I’m always like, well, Blue Sky is like 10 bazillion times
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger and lots of people seem to like it over there. And I do read stuff over there. What is it like if I post over there? And I
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell you from my tiny weird audience, Mastodon is still where my people are. I get the most engagement
⏹️ ▶️ John from Mastodon. I get the most good info from Mastodon. I get the most replies. People understand my deal on Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where my people are. But Mastodon is a tiny little backwater compared to the size of Blue Sky or Threads or
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously X, which I’m not going near. But yeah, I do post it over there just to
⏹️ ▶️ John check and just to see if people are going to engage with things and what kind of things work
⏹️ ▶️ John in different places. But yeah, breaking containment, it’s still a danger. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still a thing that can happen. And it’s still, for me, usually not particularly fun, but it’s also not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John dangerous. That would have been much worse for me if I was anyone other than, you know, an old white dude in tech.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because Breaking Containment for me is just people making snarky replies versus people like coming to my house to kill me or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So thank goodness for that. But yeah, that was my afternoon and it was a