685: The Ability to Be Hotter
01 Apr 2026Farewell, Mac Pro.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Happy independence day, John!
- The Great Saunter
- The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
- 🗣️ New ATP Member Special: ATP Tier List: Home Screen Icons
- Follow-up:
- Overcast transcripts
- MacBook Neo
- Tim Cook on the MacBook Neo launch
- New Ice Book? (via Adrian Bengtson)
- Teardown by Framework founder Nirav Patel
- MacBook Neo vs. Chromebooks
- “NFW”, says Henry
- “This could be a breath of fresh air”, says Ari
- “Medium” Core and M5 Pro/Max information from Apple
- Ubiquiti
- What about site-to-site VPN for Marco?
- “Not so fast, my friend” re: Wi-Fi 7 MLO
- Some shadiness from January
- 🪦 RIP, Mac Pro 🪦
- Ask ATP:
- Are we running any iOS apps in macOS? (via Alex Kent)
- How would we balance new shiny vs. familiarity? (via Michael Brescher Jr.)
- Post-show: John and Marco bicker about islands
- Members-only ATP Overtime: 🥚 Update
- 10 February: Delayed to 2027
- 20 February: Smart speaker with a camera?
Sponsored by:
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- Factor: Healthy Eating, Made Easy
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Chapters
- Pre-show
- Special: Home Screen Icons
- Overcast transcript status
- MacBook Neo follow-up
- Neo vs. Chromebooks
- Sponsor: MasterClass
- M5 Pro/Max follow-up
- Ubiquiti roundup
- Sponsor: Factor (code atp50off)
- Farewell, Mac Pro
- Sponsor: Claude
- #askatp: Using any iOS apps on Mac?
- #askatp: If you ran Mac/iOS software
- Ending theme
- What’s “the mainland”?
Pre-show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, do you want to step into the corner with me, the anniversary corner?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because on episode 476 on the 30th of March 2022, do you know what you did, John? No idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You announced your independence. Oh. Four years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John Happy Independence Day. I always forget this is in March. I also forget the total number of years.
⏹️ ▶️ John So thank you for reminding me again. You get fireworks?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we should get fireworks. Can we, can we, we’ll have our editor edit it. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is. Sent with
⏹️ ▶️ John fireworks. There you go. I just gave you the text version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right. Anyway, happy anniversary, John. I’m glad that you are still independent and things are still going
⏹️ ▶️ John Basically sums it up. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are there any learnings, as they say, that you would like to share with us? Ew.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t have any wisdom to impart at this time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m glad I’m still here and making it work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Me as well, and I’m sure I speak for Marco in saying that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you may have to speak for me a lot tonight because I’m a little bit tired, because as I mentioned a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after shows ago, I’m training for this 32 mile Manhattan walk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what that means is taking a lot of long walks. And today’s was the longest so far at 22 miles. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been, and there was like, we’re trying to schedule around like, you know, Easter and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spring break and stuff. And there was really no other time to record the show besides the evening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of me doing a 22 mile walk to start at six in the morning. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the jokes might be a little bit rougher tonight. Sorry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John How many steps is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Today in Pedometer++ I crossed 50,000 steps for the very first time. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a day at Disney World.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pretty much. And by the way, I’m happy to say I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about it yet, but Pedometer++ has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful update coming in the future. I am so pleased with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this app. Like this is our friend underscore David Smith’s app. I know what you think Pedometer Plus Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, is that app that you can install on your phone and see your step count. And it still is that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what it also is, is an amazing walking and hiking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on the Apple Watch. And it shows you like the live walking or running or hiking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever workout on the watch with a great map. It blows away everything else I’ve seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So number one, I would say like, you know, I know our friend underscore David Smith probably won’t be as aggressive as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am about telling you all this, but this app is awesome. And if you walk or run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or hike, and you want something on your Apple watch to show you where you’ve gone and how far you’ve gone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a great app for that. Especially that map view, really, really good. So Pedometer++
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. I will also say that as a little preview, I don’t usually announce future products. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say that a future episode of this podcast, I will be talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another non-Apple smart athletic sports watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I, it just, it did not arrive in time. It arrived three hours after I left my house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, for this walk, but it will, um, hopefully in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future episode, I will have more to report about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You got to do what everyone suggested. And what underscore has done is, Hey, you got two wrists. That’s what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna do. I’m gonna do a walk where I’m gonna have, you know, that on one, like the Apple Watch Ultra on one, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, you know, the new sports watch on the other, and I’ll compare them. And by the way, the Apple Watch Ultra, doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, you know, nine hour long walk with GPS, and you know, full workout sensing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode, but with low power mode, so that always on screen is turned off, lasted the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time with like 40, or no, 60% battery left. So it’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no problem lasting the full 32 miles. Secondly, thirdly, whatever, I’ve lost track.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m tired. Last night I saw this new movie called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The AI Doc or How I Became an Apocalyptomist. It is a bit of a rough name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also has an amazing list of interviewees. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically a documentary that’s just like a series of interviews with very important people in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of AI, including Sam Altman and Dario and Daniela Amadei
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from so Sam Altman, of course, from OpenAI, the Amadeis from Anthropic, which is actually a sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this episode, and a whole bunch of other people from the AI business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also like good AI thinkers and everything. And I really enjoyed it. It’s this is not a sponsorship.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s only in theaters for a reasonably short time. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that like. It’s in theaters? I thought I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was going to think it was on YouTube. I assume it will be in theaters for a a little bit, but I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the kind of thing that eventually you will see on YouTube. But I would suggest if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this business, like the list of people that the filmmaker got to interview is pretty impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think we’re going to be seeing like, you know, clips from this over time and stuff like that. So it’s pretty fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s it. So I watched a movie about AI and then I took a very, very, very long walk and it was pretty Have
Special: Home Screen Icons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we should do the thing that we always forget to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And thank you to John for not only putting in our internal show notes, new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey member special with a yellow background and obnoxious pink foreground color, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the top of the follow-up section, because I often jump over the pre-show section, go straight to the follow-up section,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a second instance of new members special in pink and yellow. Everywhere you go, there I am,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey. It’s a dream come true. But yes, we do have a new member special. John had the genuinely brilliant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea of taking all of the icons from our home screens from whatever episode it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a month or two back that we talked about our home screens. And John put together all the icons at great pain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to do a tier list. So we have ATP tier list home screen icons. John, is there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything you’d like to add about this particular member special?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, as I say at the top of the show, it’s also kind of an excuse for me to try out my vibe coded tier
⏹️ ▶️ John list app. So if you want to see the first outing of that app, you can check it out. There was one one problem that
⏹️ ▶️ John I that happened immediately as soon as we started that I just could not believe but couldn’t deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with in the moment, which was the stupid green pencil icon from zoom overlaying
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of my beautiful clean app. And I was hoping that it wouldn’t appear in the screen capture, but it totally does. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have since we believe we have since solved that problem after finishing the episode, found
⏹️ ▶️ John the setting in zoom, if you go to the zoom website under settings and meetings, turn off the annotation
⏹️ ▶️ John feature, which is what that little pencil is for. So hopefully next time it will not be there. Also, people suggested a feature to
⏹️ ▶️ John be added to my tier list app that will show an enlarged version of the item we’re talking about, which definitely helps when we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about something we want to look at like a logo or an icon. So I’ll make sure I have that the next time we do a tier list,
⏹️ ▶️ John which may not be for a while because we’ve done a bunch of them recently. People also suggested in
⏹️ ▶️ John my tale of woe about how I got these icons. I didn’t mention all of my Tale of Woe. Part of
⏹️ ▶️ John it did involve writing various scripts and web scrapers to try to get icons
⏹️ ▶️ John from the new App Store website, from the old iTunes URLs, from the App Store API
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s available. And I could get lots of icons from there and I could get artwork from there, but they were never
⏹️ ▶️ John right. They didn’t have a transparent background or they were the wrong size or they were weirdly truncated.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also got another suggestion to try device control again. and I was like, I tried that and I got
⏹️ ▶️ John messed up icons, but maybe I have to try it on Tahoe. So if I ever have to do this again, I do have a bunch of new
⏹️ ▶️ John suggestions about where to get stuff from. And speaking of icons, one of the icons that we discussed,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I won’t spoil which one it was, you can watch the episode. One of the icons, we just had a strange feature that we couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out if it was supposed to be like, is the corner of the icon peeling up, which totally used to be a thing in the
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 6 days, by the way, tons of icons did that. You know, they trying to show a page curl and it’s not working
⏹️ ▶️ John and we couldn’t figure it out. Well, silly us, it was the Ukrainian flag
⏹️ ▶️ John because the developer of that app is from Ukraine originally. And we just didn’t pick
⏹️ ▶️ John it up. I’m not sure it helps the icon, but we didn’t figure out what it was because we didn’t have that key piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of additional information. So mystery is solved. It wasn’t a page girl, it was a flag.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it was the colors from a flag to be clear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be, it’s like a flag waving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual flag, I think we would have been a little bit less dense about it, But nevertheless, we missed that reference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And sorry about that. It wasn’t intentional. And we are huge supporters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Ukraine in its invasion by Russia. And I don’t want to minimize that at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. But yeah, we kind of poked at the leg and were like, why is that there? It kind of looks weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why is it blue? And that’s why. And we didn’t know that. Sorry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I kind of feel like a dirt bag now that we know what the story is behind it. But we really, truly didn’t. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our deepest apologies.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the record, I rated that icon higher than these two, setting aside the corner thing, because I just think it’s a good icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I stand by the rating, but I respect the reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, what Marco said. Yes, very well done.
Overcast transcript status
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow up. Marco, do you have anything with regard to overcast transcripts that you would like to discuss?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, working on a few very minor bug fixes. I want to get the version that I have out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, I want to get this out there to all my customers. There’s enough demand for it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even transcripts with some shortcomings are better than not having transcripts at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I intend to release basically this version. I might do one more small bug fix build,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m going to basically release this version probably this week or next.
⏹️ ▶️ John Real time bug report slash confusion. I was using the app on the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe, and I was trying to get to chapters and I could not find them. It just goes right from the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to the transcript. I’m like, I swear chapters should be there. On the phone I can get to the chapters,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for this podcast, which did have chapters, it didn’t show them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s the deal? I will check. I do a few special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases for the iPad layout. And there’s there in certain cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chapters are shown in a sheet instead like a pop-up sheet instead of in line in the scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thingy. And I think that’s the case on the iPad but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get to them I couldn’t figure it out. I might have broken that when adding the transcript pain to that scrolling thing so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will double check that thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also since we’re in the real time feedback portion of the show earlier today I was listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my favorite F1 podcast which is called Mist Apex. I really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoy it. It’s a very good podcast. However, their ads are real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad. They’re, you know, like, they’re not host-read, generally speaking, and they’re really not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. And so, I wanted to skip through them, and they don’t do chapters, and so I was just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bracing myself to mash on the fast-forward button. But then it occurred to me, wait a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a transcript. And I bet I could figure out where the end of the ad was, based on the transcript.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And not only that, but like there was a music bed in this particular ad and there were little musical notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the side of the transcript. I don’t know if that’s you’re doing it deliberate. I don’t know. But it was very, very smart. And so I went,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found the end of the musical notes and then that was the end of the ad. It was perfect. A plus, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes. That’s why those are there. A few people have asked, why are you doing music detection? Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing. When you start using transcripts, they pretty quickly become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way that you navigate the podcast. when something comes up, whether it’s an ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe just like a topic that you wanna skip past or whatever it is, it’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicer in many cases to navigate past it or to go back a little bit or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by looking at the transcript and scrolling quickly. You can kind of skim the text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot faster than you can skim audio. And so you quickly like skim forward, you find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you wanna be and you tap and it seeks there. And the music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes are there because I had that idea during development, I played with it and I liked it a lot, that like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly that a lot of segments are delineated by either quick little blurbs of music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the presence or absence of music suddenly after a while of having it or not having it. So it makes it easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see where those section breaks are. Now, in the future, you know, if I lean more into like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, trying to find automatic chapter marks or automatic topic changes or things like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then there’s more I can do there, of course, But I think regardless, having the music note indicator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helps you kind of see the podcast as you are skimming or looking for something or trying to skip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. It was very well done. And you know, now I feel slightly bad besmirching, Missed Apex. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get it. They had, they had market stinks. You take what you can get, you know, it’s tough,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Listen, it’s, we are all podcast listeners. We, the three of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us also make a decent living from podcast ads and yet. It’s okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can say it’s okay to skip a podcast ad. It’s fine. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t owe the podcaster, us included, you don’t owe us your attention on ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We give you a file, and you can navigate that file and listen to, you can navigate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it however you like, and you can listen to it or not listen to it however you like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We give you the file and the rest is up to you. Yep. Yeah, you don’t have to listen to the ad, just click on
⏹️ ▶️ John the links and buy the products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Preferably with our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use our coupon code ATP probably or something like that.
MacBook Neo follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving along. Is MacBook Neo a hit? Tim Cook on the 20th of March tweeted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey “‘Mac just had its best launch week ever for the first time Mac customers. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love seeing the enthusiasm.”
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, he didn’t say anything about what particular products sold because that information cannot be released in a Tim Cook era.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can read between the lines there and say, yeah, they also released the M5 MacBook Pros, but probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not as many first time Mac customers there. And they released the Neo and yada, yada. This all,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, the, and this and people reporting like, Hey, I went to the Apple store and they, they tell me that the NEOs
⏹️ ▶️ John are sounding like hotcakes or whatever, seems like the product is doing well, let’s say. Yep. Sure does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw one on a coffee shop today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. The, the, the blue one. It looks awesome. Of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it does look very good. All right. Let’s talk about the MacBook NEO, uh, and kind of how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a throwback. Potentially Adrian Bingston writes, listening to you speak about the NEO, it reminded me of the iBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey G3 snow in 2001. It was so good and for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its price. This was before the unibody and it was mostly plastic, but it felt really good in your hand, exactly like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John was describing the feel of the Neo. It was nowhere near being, or excuse me, I as in Adrian, was nowhere near
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being able to afford a PowerBook, so this was my first laptop, and it was good enough to do real work on. I loved it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It even made my girlfriend switch to the Mac. She actually wanted a PC laptop, but there was no comparison.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Either PC laptops were big and freaking ugly, or they were nice and small, but completely unaffordable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the Sony Vios. So switching to the Mac was an economical decision and that was unheard of. I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even go so far as to say that the white iBook, it was the most affordable Mac ever until the launch of the Neo.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think this is the one that we used to call the ice book. Cause it was like a white plastic, but I think it had like a clear
⏹️ ▶️ John outer shell. Like it was white painted on the inside with clear on the outside. If you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, it was very curvy. It was very nice to handle. Obviously it was giant by today’s standards, but you know, 2001,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a long time ago. So that was a good laptop and it gave people, a lot of people a good impression. Now, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that one held up in the long run, like physically speaking, as well as
⏹️ ▶️ John these aluminum ones will because the plastic bodies were creaky. There was the ones that got the yellow staining
⏹️ ▶️ John on them. Some of them could smell weird. Like we have come a long way in material science since then.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for the time, I think a lot of people have a nice impression of this, which was also a small,
⏹️ ▶️ John very rounded, adorable laptop put into a market where it stood out for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there have been at least a couple of teardowns. I think we’ve talked about one or two of them, but there was a new one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done by the Framework company, the founder Nirav Patel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He and a coworker did a MacBook Neo teardown and they compared the MacBook Neo to their own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Framework Laptop 12. Nirav came up with a bunch of tidbits. I also came up with one. Let me start with mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Framework laptop does not do inverted T arrow keys, which is gross. ones that Apple was using for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a while where the up and down are the same height as the left and right, like the combination of up and down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the same height as left and right. I hated that. I don’t like it. Not good.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you first mentioned this, I thought, does it have, because I was thinking like, Oh, no inverted T. Does it have the
⏹️ ▶️ John old style? You guys don’t remember this, but the old style for arrows, uh, arrow keys on Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards for a time in front, certain models.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, the ones where they were all in a line.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, surely it doesn’t have had that, but no, it’s got the before Apple made half size left and right arrow keys.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a phase where Apple was doing full size left and right arrow keys. It’s still in a technically a T shape, but the full size
⏹️ ▶️ John left and right arrow keys made it so you couldn’t feel where the left and right were as easily. Luckily, Apple snapped out of that eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John like so many other things. But framework has gone with the full size ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then for his notes, complaints, etc. He complained,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I agree, by the way, about the maximum hinge angle of the Neo, this drove me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nuts when I first originally got my Polybook that compared to almost any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PC that I’d ever used, Dell, IBM, it didn’t matter, laptops specifically, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually make those displays go 180 degrees, so life flat,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey parallel with the keyboard or even with the keyboard. Whereas most Apple laptops can only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go, I don’t know, like 120 degrees or something like that. And it doesn’t really bother me near as much anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does sometimes, but gosh, it drove me absolutely batty when I first went to the Mac. So Narev was complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just pliably.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder if there is a sort of reliability and quality angle
⏹️ ▶️ John to that, angle, get it. Because like Apple’s, one of the things that makes Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops stand out from the competition, even the very cheapest Neo, is they usually have pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John nice hinges. Like they have the whole thing where you can open it with one finger and the whole laptop won’t lift, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever angle you put it at, It will stay there pretty well, but it’s also not hard to move. It’s just getting that
⏹️ ▶️ John right balance between it’s easy enough to move, but it also stays where you put it. And you can also do one finger
⏹️ ▶️ John opening and there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that goes into range.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Given all of that, maybe part of the mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes that work also means that it can’t open as wide. I hope that’s the case because if there’s deciding
⏹️ ▶️ John that we don’t want it to open as wide, I’ve heard this complaint from a lot of people, even people who’ve only ever
⏹️ ▶️ John used Mac laptops. people sitting in, let’s say, un-ergonomic positions, they just want
⏹️ ▶️ John to open the screen a little bit wider than it can, and they just can’t, like maybe it just needs another, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John five or 10 degrees and it just doesn’t have it. So that’s a potential future enhancement if Apple can figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out how to make the hinge still good, but give a few more degrees of opening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, absolutely. Continuing with the observations from the video, the bottom cover of the Neo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not CNC milled like it is on a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro, at least according to Nirav.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is stamped instead with a little machining added afterwards, making it more flexible and less able to form
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an even seal with the rest of the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, he was suggesting if you go into the Apple store and like pick up a MacBook Neo and look at the seam, like to look
⏹️ ▶️ John at it edge on and look at the seam between the bottom cover and the rest of the case, that especially like in the middle of the seam
⏹️ ▶️ John where there are just clips holding it, that it’s like the gap is not as even and as tight as it is on the ones that have CNC milling. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what the rumors were getting at that were saying like, oh, Apple’s found a new way to make the
⏹️ ▶️ John case that is less expensive. I think the main body of the Neo is still machined But this bottom one
⏹️ ▶️ John is apparently stamped to save money and that makes it a little bit more wibbly-wobbly And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what he was saying. That’s why they had like Screws on all the corners and all the edges, but then they didn’t they
⏹️ ▶️ John have clips on the left and right side in the middle Of the left and right side. I don’t know why I just didn’t put other screws there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said the the Regardless of what they did to save money the construction of it when you pick it up
⏹️ ▶️ John in the hand It still feels very solid which which he acknowledged So I think that’s the main takeaway there, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John found a way to get money out of it without seemingly sacrificing much, except for maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ John fractions of a millimeter in the shut line between the bottom and the top of the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And then additionally, the Framework Laptop 12 Logic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Board is like four times the size of the one on the MacBook Neo, because it’s effectively a phone’s logic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey board. It’s really astonishing to
⏹️ ▶️ John see. Yeah, it’s amazing how you look at that. It’s like, how could they both fit a laptop in the same case,
⏹️ ▶️ John given the massive difference in the size of the logic board. It’s a really interesting, obviously Framework’s whole
⏹️ ▶️ John deal is their stuff is like very serviceable and has lots of swappable parts and you can upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John the memory and change these little modules that you plug into it. It’s like, it’s totally going in a different design direction. It’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive than the Neo by the way. But check out this teardown if you wanna see,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, obviously it’s done by the founder of Framework. So they’re a little bit biased towards Framework, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John is really interesting to see a different way to do a similarly sized and similarly
Neo vs. Chromebooks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about the MacBook Neo via Chromebooks versus Chromebooks, excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. This cracked me up. So let me read both of these bits of feedback back to back, if you’ll permit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Henry writes, I agree that the MacBook Neo will not be an alternative to the Chromebook. The real appeal of Chromebooks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to school districts isn’t cost, it’s device management. Hi, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco In the high
⏹️ ▶️ Casey school I teach at, every student has a Chromebook over 1,901 building. When one quits working or is forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at home, the student goes to the library and checks out another. It takes maybe two minutes. Students can’t go one period without one because all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey curriculum is digital. We have a couple of students who are trained to replace broken screens by salvaging parts. The IT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey department is never involved at all with Chromebooks except for student password resets. IT spends more time managing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my graphic design classroom of 28 iMacs than they spend managing 1,900 Chromebooks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s no way the IT director would ever consider MacBooks, says Henry. Ari writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my wife is on the local school board and was on a budget call. They happen to be approving this year’s one-to-one student laptop purchases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is to say, you know, one laptop per kid. The district uses iPads in kindergarten and first grade,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chromebooks in second through seventh grades, and MacBook Airs in high school. This year’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Air order was about 1,000 units. I mentioned the Neo to my wife, and she asked the head of IT his thoughts on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call. Quote, we’re incredibly excited and have five on order for testing, quote. There were already plans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to consider moving to MacBook Airs for the middle group and replace them every four years. Did AppleCare costs not working out in the district’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey favor? No one will miss those Chromebooks. Even if that doesn’t happen, our district is looking at between $400,000 and $500,000 in cost savings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in summary, Henry says no freaking way that they will go to Chromebooks. And Ari says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re absolutely excuse me. Sorry. No freaking way they would ever go to, uh, the MacBook Neo. And Ari says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re absolutely going to go to the MacBook Neo two different places, but it’s just funny. The, the whiplash of these
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I don’t think they’re in conflict because one is in a school that where they already have Mac books for everybody. And I think Henry’s point
⏹️ ▶️ John stands, which is like, um, I’m not sure how well the Neo would do, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John given the criteria that he is touting for the Chromebook. So the first example is, say you
⏹️ ▶️ John forgot your laptop or something or you need another one, you just go to the library and pick one up. Chromebook, that’s more of like
⏹️ ▶️ John an OS platform thing because you just sign into the Chromebook with your Google ID and all your stuff is there
⏹️ ▶️ John because all your stuff is never there, it’s in the cloud. That, pulling that off, like I don’t think if you forgot
⏹️ ▶️ John your MacBook Neo, went to the library, even if they handed you a new one, could you
⏹️ ▶️ John have it up and running to the point where you could use it for something in time for your class given how
⏹️ ▶️ John long it would take for the Mac to do it’s whatever network boot setup, home directory, configuration, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. You know what I mean? Like having all your stuff there. I’m not sure how people configure MacBooks in school systems,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if it’s a one-to-one type thing, I have to imagine there’s more local stuff, or even if there’s not any local
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see, I don’t know. Like I think a lot of, I mean, my kid only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a MacBook Air in a couple of, in the Fire Island grades, like a couple of elementary school grades, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we’re in a bigger district, it’s all Chromebook, he’s in eighth grade, But even districts that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use MacBook Airs, I think they still just use a whole bunch of web-based tools,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of the time, like for most or all of the work. But you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John log in, right? Do they all log in as like a school account?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, he has like a school Google account and logs into all these weird websites.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but is it individual school Google? I’m saying you gotta type something in the login prompt. You have to log in as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user. Oh, I see what you mean, yeah. I guess I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how they do that. You know what I mean? And it’s like, okay, well, if I just give you a blank one, what’s the user account? And if
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no user account, how long does it take? Even if there’s like a network thing that just sets it up, like you just, it’s single
⏹️ ▶️ John sign on, you enter in your school email address, like the time taken to just set up the home directory or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying it’s gonna take forever, but I just feel like Chromebooks have an advantage here in
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can probably let you do a Google ID, you know, log in with Google type thing to a Chromebook faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than you can do the equivalent on the Mac. I’m guessing people can write in and tell me. The second thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John the repair. And that’s where I think a lot of the teardowns in the Neo come in here. They’re saying like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have students replacing the screens on the Chromebooks because it’s easy enough to do that a student can
⏹️ ▶️ John do it and we have the parts and so on. And here I think Apple has come a long way. So first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John as of several years ago, Apple will supply you with parts and instructions on how to do it for
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of its products, including the Neo. Second, as we’ve covered the other teardowns, the Neo
⏹️ ▶️ John is way easier to take apart than all the other Mac laptops. There’s this stuff glued in there. you don’t have to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, take a heat gun to any part of it and break any seals and do all of those stuff. A
⏹️ ▶️ John student with the appropriate weird, you know, I fix it, pentalobe, whatever things,
⏹️ ▶️ John can in fact take apart a MacBook Neo and replace. Maybe not the screen, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John think all the teardowns were like, well, we don’t know how to get the screen off of the top lid, but if you’ve got the screen and the top lid, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John a student could replace it. So although Chromebooks still have a lead here, I think the Neo is
⏹️ ▶️ John closing the gap by making it feasible to have a bunch of students whose job it is to grab from
⏹️ ▶️ John the bin of spare lids to the NEOs and take
⏹️ ▶️ John a broken screen and put it in the recycle thing and put the new one on. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree with Henry that it’s still not quite the same, but I do think the NEO is actually making some progress in the direction
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Chromebook advantages here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’ll help a lot. And I think whether you side with Henry or Ari on this one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one, I think depends a lot on the supporting infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the laptops themselves. You know, I’m your budget. Yeah, budget, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even then, like, you know, even with the MacBook Neo being about 500 bucks for education, that’s still about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco twice as much as most of those Chromebooks cost those schools. So you’re still looking at a huge price difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, then, you know, like, you know, my kid school again, it’s all Chromebooks and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a whole program. There’s like an insurance program that we buy for damage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know and you know there’s he whenever something happens you know some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the corner of the screen cracks or whatever keys fall off like that weird stuff happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a middle schoolers but like. You know there he brings it into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some place in the school and he gets a loaner and then he gets his original one back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe like a month later you know there’s all this support around it there is service depots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s in school service there’s the insurance. thing that you can buy to get a damage waiver,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s all that stuff around it. And then even setting aside the service and the damage and the price, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s, as you mentioned, John, the software and application and login management. All of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chromebooks are popular in schools for lots of reasons. It isn’t just cost, although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cost is a big one, but all of those management things, like if you are a school that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is all invested in that ecosystem, all of those management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sides of it, they make that very easy on the IT departments. And when you’re running fleets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hundreds or thousands of these for a whole bunch of kids and a whole bunch of teachers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a huge job just to manage those. And so if you have the infrastructure in place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to manage Chromebooks and it works well for you, Apple’s not really gonna be changing a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Neo. But if, as John said earlier, If you already have Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco administration, if you’re already using fleets of MacBook Airs, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Neo is a better situation for you because it costs less and it’s easier to service. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t already have all that in place, this might not move the needle that much.
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M5 Pro/Max follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s talk about the M5 Pro and Macs in their, I guess, medium
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cores. We have a 9to5Mac right up that’s about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an article on the Mac and I website, which is in German. So Johannes Schuster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote and is quoting Anand Shimpi, who is on platform architecture at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple. Apple’s new performance core is a completely custom designed micro architecture. So it differs significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from both the super core and the efficiency core. Furthermore, it manages to surpass the efficiency of the efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s straight from Apple. They’re making a straight up claim for what we’re calling the medium core just because it makes more sense. They’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s actually more efficient than the old efficiency core, which kind of leans towards maybe the M6
⏹️ ▶️ John will use these cores instead of the old efficiency cores, but we’ll see. It remains to be seen if they’re even going to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John chip architecture for the plain no suffix M6. But that’s a bold claim.
⏹️ ▶️ John worry about the medium cores not being as efficient as the efficiency cores. They’re actually more efficient claims Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then Doug Brooks, who is Mac product marketing, explained that while the chips do support PCIe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five, they are actually custom designed controllers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Usually Apple doesn’t talk about these things. Like what, you know, what standards does it use or whatever a PCIe
⏹️ ▶️ John five, I think is a standard from like 2019 or something. So there, you know, there are later standards
⏹️ ▶️ John that are still in progress, but in case you’re wondering if Apple’s keeping up with the times, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure. Maybe the M4 and M3 also use PCIe 5, but you just so rarely hear Apple talk about this. And unless
⏹️ ▶️ John you find someone who’s really dug into the chips, it doesn’t come up, especially since it’s not like there’s any PCI
⏹️ ▶️ John slots or anything, but yeah, PCIe 5 is in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then from the write-up on 9to5Mac, we were interested in whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two chips with the Fusion architecture could be combined using UltraFusion to create a single system on a chip consisting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of four dies. that would then be the M5 Ultra. But Apple traditionally doesn’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about upcoming products. Quote, at the moment, we have only announced the M5 Pro and M5 Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was all Shimpy would say. That’s such an Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John from the Mac and I website, by the way. It’s not from the 9 to 5
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Mac thing. So as I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is translated by Google. So forgive us Germans if this is not good. Like literally, I’m just using Google Translate
⏹️ ▶️ John to translate a web page. It’s the best we got. But the and again, the quotes are translated too. Like even though
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think Anon speaks German, These quotes are in German and then translated back to English
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is as close as you’ll ever get anyone from Apple to confirm the m5 ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John or some other m5 ship at the moment We have only announced the m5 pro and m5 max you sure have
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I’m looking forward to something that’s not an m5 pro and m5 max in the Mac studio for WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Really John are you now? We’ll get to it all pro and max chips differ in the number of GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cores memory bandwidth and maximum addressable RAM We got the impression that Apple wanted to gain experience in experimenting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the core account quote We’re not trying to experiment figure things out that way explained shimpy. Ultimately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re not commercial semiconductor manufacturers We develop chips specifically for a particular product generation
⏹️ ▶️ John So many people have said this both officially and off the record this sentiment that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John builds chips for products Apple doesn’t build chips and then figure out what to do with them That’s part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole deal with Apple Silicon is they’re not just building well, we should just have a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a good line of chips, then we’ll figure out what to do with them. It’s like, no, when a chip is designed, it’s for specific
⏹️ ▶️ John products. Now, sometimes it’s easy. It’s like, oh, we’re making the chip for the iPhone. You think we’re going to have an iPhone? We’re totally going to have an iPhone. But even there,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, what features will this iPhone have? What are the requirements of this iPhone? What things do you want us to make better than
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous one? And sometimes it goes awry, as we’ll discuss later. But
⏹️ ▶️ John even we’ve heard things about chips and entire computers that were originally
⏹️ ▶️ John designed and built and planned for a product that never shipped or shipped in a different form and just ended up being
⏹️ ▶️ John repurposed. So, you know, things happen. But this gets back to what we were talking about with
⏹️ ▶️ John the SOIC MH chiplet architecture thing for the M5 Pro and M5 Max, where they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John separate dies for the CPU and GPU. It’s like, well, now that they’ve got this chiplet architecture, they can mix and match
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of stuff. And they’re like, no, that’s not how we do it. Yes, we will mix and match things, but only in the specific
⏹️ ▶️ John ratios, the specific combinations that we know we need for our specific products that we’re planning
⏹️ ▶️ John this for. So again, don’t expect a pop-up menu on the Apple configurator where you get
⏹️ ▶️ John to choose the CPU cores and choose the GPU cores beyond the typical like
⏹️ ▶️ John binning and sliced up into pieces options that we get today.
Ubiquiti roundup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk ubiquity. First of all, half of the internet wrote to ask, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, why not use site-to-site VPN for your swarm in the data center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and your house? And I haven’t spoken to Marco about this, and I don’t know what your answer will be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I wanted to mention that former and, I think, future sponsor, TailScale, which I am freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in love with, one of the great things about TailScale is that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically removes the idea of what network are you on when it comes to connecting to your other devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yes, a site-to-site VPN would fix Marco’s problems, perhaps when he’s at home, but what if he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaves the home? And yes, I’m aware that there’s like Unify’s teleport, which by the way, I have not had a particularly great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience with, but one way or another, what’s great about TailScale is I can be with my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could be out, I could be watching Declan, you know, play football and check
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on something real quick. I could be in an airplane, I could be on another continent, I could be on wifi, on cellular, it doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you’re always connected to your other devices, no matter what the networks are between them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m reckoning that maybe Marco, that’s why you haven’t tried this option, or maybe you’re about to tell me you’ve given up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on tail scale and that site-to-site is the right answer for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is, I actually tried this with the restaurant back about a year ago. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t figure out a way to do it because the way Ubiquiti does those site-to-site bridges,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by default, it basically, it lets you transfer, it lets you tunnel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your traffic through the other place to the internet, but it like totally blocks access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all of your network devices. Casey, you had this issue too, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, I have briefly tried this with the Unify Travel Router,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I am really a big fan of. But my problem with Teleport
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that, I’ve never tried site-to-site VPN, but with Teleport, it’s extremely fickle. Like even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with their own device, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. and it’s considerably less reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than Tailscale is, which is really weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, so I tried Teleport and I tried like various bridging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options about a year ago. I did not have any luck getting them to work to be able to see devices on the local
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network, on the remote local network. So I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can try it again sometime. I would love to not need Tailscale on every machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to be able to access it remotely. But there are other options too. Like for instance, I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like tunnel through, I could like set up tail scale on one machine there and then like tunnel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that one to access the other ones. Like I have other options, but right now this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just easy to do and it’s fine. And I set the tail scale keys on those machines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to expire, which is an important step. I learned that the hard way for the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few machines I set up. Yeah, so anyway, so far the tail scale option is working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine for me. in the future if it doesn’t anymore, then I’ll look at other options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or if there is something that’s really, really easy and that is reliable and flexible, then that’s fine too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the moment, it works fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. All right. We talked, I don’t know, maybe a month or so ago, maybe two, about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MLO. What is that? Multi-link something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that? Multi-link operation, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. Thank you. And how basically it doesn’t work anywhere as per some article that we had talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about several episodes ago. Well, Ubiquity in the last couple of weeks has debuted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new product called Airwire. And their release video, their trailer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, and they do this for both software and hardware, their trailer basically said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody could use MLO, particularly because the clients were always trash. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna have our own wifi client that you then plug into via ethernet, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the literal quote from the video is, the infrastructure was ready, now the clients are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so there’s also a blog post about this, reading from the blog post, nearly every Wi-Fi 7 client today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advertises MLO compatibility, excuse me, capability, yet they only use one link at a time. Instead of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey combining bands through simultaneous multi-radio operation, they simply switch between them. Airwire, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new product, is a plug and play USB-C Wi-Fi 7, oh, I’m sorry, it’s not ethernet, it’s USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Wi-Fi 7 client engineered for true simultaneous multi-radio performance with STR-MLO.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It operates independently on five gigahertz and six gigahertz at the same time, aggregating spectrum instead of alternating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between bands. The result is a real multi gigabit throughput, ultra low latency, and improved connection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Describe this product. It’s kind of like a, I don’t know how you would describe it. It’s bigger than a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like a, you know, maybe four inch three and a half inch by three and a half inch
⏹️ ▶️ John by one inch a USB-C rectangle that you plug in. And it’s got like
⏹️ ▶️ John a lid that kind of opens like a laptop lid and that’s the antenna. And it’s like, it’s basically saying
⏹️ ▶️ John your laptop’s Wi Fi can’t do this. Your Mac’s Wi Fi can’t do this. Whatever you have can’t do this because nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to ship simultaneous MLO Wi Fi seven clients, but we have a box that
⏹️ ▶️ John will do it. Plug this box into your wireless device. Stop using
⏹️ ▶️ John the wireless radio that’s in your device. And instead have your device through the
⏹️ ▶️ John US this USB C connection, use our box and we’ll do the Wi Fi for you. And it’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the clunkiest things I’ve seen since the track balls that would clip onto the side of a laptop really
⏹️ ▶️ John compromises the portability of your portable device. But if you absolutely positively
⏹️ ▶️ John need to have simultaneous MLO, because it’s the only thing that can provide you that extra
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of bandwidth and lower latency that you desire, apparently Ubiquiti will sell you this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Ubiquiti sells a lot of very specialized products. Like if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very specific needs for this kind of thing, Now here’s a product for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Almost no one should buy this because almost no one needs this. But if you do, here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly right. Yeah, I would say this thing looks, and it’s hard to get a good idea of scale, but it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me like the Mac minis that we had up until the most recent release with like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a flap on the top like John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John described. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like an Apple TV actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, yeah, that’s a good, that’s a better analogy. Yeah, I would say that. Anyways, it does look cool, but I agree with Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably not for you or me. Now, a lot of you are probably already firing off emails to us because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we said in the beginning of the show that we stand with Ukraine, and yet we are also talking positively about ubiquity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have gotten this feedback a million and seven times, and so let’s talk about it. On January 27,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is the name of this place? Hunterbrook Media reported, official
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ubiquity distributors appear to have continued supplying Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, sometimes rerouting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shipments through intermediaries in high-diversion-risk countries like Turkey or Kazakhstan, trade records
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show. Some appear to have used intermediates later sanctioned by the US for export control evasions. Ubiquity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey openly admits, quote, we do not have any visibility, quote, over purchases from its distributors, but legal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experts told Hunterbrook that that’s not a viable defense. US export controls and sanctions operate on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a strict liability basis, meaning even unwitting violations are still violations. Ignorance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not really a practical excuse, or rather a legal excuse, a former senior State Department sanctions official told
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hunterbrook. A sanctions compliance lawyer added, you’re doing very little effort. We’re able to determine that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available for purchase by the Russian armed forces. The company’s compliance team should be taking additional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steps to prevent that. This sounds really, really crappy. And it might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really crappy. But there’s a catch, John. You want to tell us about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s a couple of things in the article as well, talking about how Ubiquiti did actually cut off
⏹️ ▶️ John direct sales to Russia when they invaded and all this other stuff or whatever. But here’s the thing. One of the reasons this has been
⏹️ ▶️ John in the notes forever and hasn’t even made it into overtime is because as soon as the story came out, I added it to the document and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I’ll just let that, it didn’t make it in time for a show, but like by next week, I’m sure we’ll have more stories and I can add
⏹️ ▶️ John more links to it. And there just weren’t any. And every time someone brought it up, I would say, where
⏹️ ▶️ John did you hear about this? And they would tell me, and every single source was always pointing
⏹️ ▶️ John back to this Hunterbrook, is it Hunterbrook Media? I gotta look up. Hunterbrook Capital.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hunterbrook Media, I guess, is their media arm, but it’s a capital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John fund. Yeah, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John and like everything pointed back to Hunterbrook. I’m like, there was no corroboration from no other sources from literally every
⏹️ ▶️ John place you saw. There’s YouTube video about it all, but it’s the person for Hunterbrook on the video. There’s a blog post about it, but they’re just linking
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the Hunterbrook. Like other, is there any other source for this? And eventually it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s never apparently there’s never going to be a second source for this. It’s just going to be Hunterbrook. So I figured we should talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John it just in case people want to know about it, because we do talk about ubiquity a lot. But the disclaimer on the actual article
⏹️ ▶️ John that we will link from Hunterbrook says, based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting, Hunterbrook Capital is short
⏹️ ▶️ John on the stock symbol for ubiquity and long a basket of comparable securities
⏹️ ▶️ John at the time of publication. So I forget. I couldn’t look this up by Googling it. I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John find this in our history. But I believe we have talked in the past about a similar situation. Maybe it was also Hunterbrook, where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, some company shorts a stock. And if you short a stock, you
⏹️ ▶️ John make money if that stock price goes down. And you lose potentially unlimited money if the stock price goes up.
⏹️ ▶️ John So some company will short a stock and then post a negative story about that company
⏹️ ▶️ John in the hopes to make the stock go down. And disclaiming it and saying, here’s a big negative story
⏹️ ▶️ John about Ubiquiti. And by the way, just so you know, we make money if the stock price of this company goes
⏹️ ▶️ John down. Which is fine, maybe they’re shorting it because Ubiquiti is doing a terrible thing. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t mean that they’re lying to try to make the stock go down. Maybe they’re saying, hey, we’re shorting it because we know they’re doing a bad thing and we think people
⏹️ ▶️ John will agree with us and that will make the stock go down and then we’ll make money. But the fact that I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John find a single other source that doesn’t eventually lead back to this 100 book media story
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me question this a little bit. Now, I fully believe that, first of all, it’s a fact that Russia
⏹️ ▶️ John is using Ubiquiti stuff, OK? The question is, what is Ubiquiti doing to stop
⏹️ ▶️ John that? Are they doing enough? And again, in the article, you’ll see that they have cut off direct sales to them, and they banned all
⏹️ ▶️ John Russian IPs, and they’ve done a bunch of other stuff. But still, the fact remains Russia is getting these products through
⏹️ ▶️ John intermediaries and resellers and ubiquity is claiming ignorance or whatever. So I’m not sure what to make of it because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not an investigated reporter on the Russia beat. But obviously, as
⏹️ ▶️ John we noted before, we do stand with Ukraine. Russia is terrible. They shouldn’t be getting ubiquity
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. The fact that they are something that ubiquity should stop. But I don’t know how much credence to give this report
⏹️ ▶️ John that ubiquity is a is knowingly acting badly for its own self-interest.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s plausible. Companies do it all the time. But, you know, do with this information what you will. The link will
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the show notes. You can read it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself. Let me add a bit more information here. That’s I think extremely pertinent to this. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a investment firm that has, has taken a short position.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, so that means they make money if the stock goes down. Now, if you do this to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like Apple or Google, it’s going to be hard to make a dent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but ubiquity is different. If you take a look at Ubiquiti’s stock,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty unusual in a few ways. One of the biggest ways is that the founder and CEO
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still owns almost all of the company. There’s very little public stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually issued and there’s not that much liquidity and there’s not that much trading volume because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not that many shares. So if you look at Ubiquiti’s stock price over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last few years, it goes all over the place. It’s easy to manipulate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you were trying to make a bunch of money on a short position, if you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a story out there and the stock dives 20 or 30 percent, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to make a lot more money than if you try to hit a bigger stock that has a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount more trading volume and a huge amount more shares and maybe you only make it go down 1 percent. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanted to manipulate a stock in the tech business, Ubiquiti would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a really interesting choice for that because of the very unusual dynamics of its stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative to other well-known tech companies. So that’s why you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a lot of these kind of weird stories trying to like move the Ubiquiti stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it works and it works pretty effectively compared to most other targets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think stories like this you have to take with a large grain of salt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the Russian military has equipment from Ubiquiti? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone has equipment from Ubiquiti. It’s a very popular company that sells a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge amount of tech and networking gear all over the world. If there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge market of demand for it, and again, this is not saying Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sold it to Russia. This is saying that Ubiquiti is not adequately policing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its third-party sellers to make sure that third-party sellers who buy it from Ubiquiti don’t resell it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Russia. That’s kind of a lot to put on the company, honestly. I mean, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John law. The whole point is that that’s the law. That you don’t get to say, well, we just give it to distributors. What they do with it after is not our problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John The question is, are they doing enough? That’s what it comes down to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and it kind of sounds like they’re doing a reasonably okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job of like doing their diligence and like Not like knowingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sending it that way but like if they sell to somebody and then that person goes and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sells it like you’re never gonna get a hundred percent compliance on that and A product like products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like ubiquity products that have they sell in such high volumes and they sell all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over everywhere where that’s going to be really hard to get 100% compliance on. So given
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem space that this is, and then given that only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this particular media reporting seems to be about this issue, and that the company doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the media reporting stands to make a lot of money by a stock going down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is very volatile and swings in huge amounts based on media reporting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a hard time taking this story super seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I take it seriously, but I just think, like, you don’t know where the cause and effect is. If you’re trying to make money
⏹️ ▶️ John shorting a stock and you find a stock that is, like, as you described, Margo, has high volatility,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would look at that and say, is there any way we can make this stock go down? And one of the ways you can make it go down is revealing
⏹️ ▶️ John true information about a bad thing the company is doing. It doesn’t mean the thing isn’t true. Your motivation for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it is for you to make money, not because you’re just magnanimous and want the world to know about this bad thing. But, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s like doing negative, you know, a research on your political opponent or whatever. You’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it because you want to win the race or whatever, but the information can also be true. So that’s why I say I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what to make of this. Like, the motivations are clearly we’re doing this to make money, and we want the stock to go down, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the reasons we would pick ubiquity is the reasons you say. But all that doesn’t mean that the story is not true.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s why I would hope that I would see some other reporting about it. If this is actually an
⏹️ ▶️ John issue, if ubiquity is uniquely badly policing its distributed network, or one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John worst in the policing as distributor network or something like that, but just no one else picked up this story. No one else wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to, I’ve found no other reporting. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s just that every single person who reported this to me, I always
⏹️ ▶️ John said, what’s your source for this? And they all pointed back to the Hunter book. So that’s why I say,
⏹️ ▶️ John do with it what you will. Decide on your own whether this changes your opinion
⏹️ ▶️ John of Yubikudi or not, but the story is out there and you can read it and it’s from this particular source.
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Farewell, Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Without further ado, John, it’s a sad day. Reading from nine to five Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has confirmed to nine to five Mac that the Mac pro is being discontinued. It is being removed from Apple’s website
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as of Thursday, March 26th. Apple has also confirmed to nine to five Mac that it has no plans to offer future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac pro hardware. I’m sorry for your loss.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s nice that we just recorded an episode before this came out where I basically said, I can’t believe they
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t killed it yet. What are they waiting for? Well, they were just waiting for us to drop the episode, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, a lot of people will write again, and when people write in and say, you know, I wonder what John thinks of this. I do
⏹️ ▶️ John wonder if they’re like, you know, only a sporadic listener of ATP, because God, we’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John this topic so much. And if you had listened to every episode and had not tuned out like Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I mentioned the Mac Pro, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t. I feel like you would know how I feel about this and how I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John about it is what I said on last episode, like the machine has been effectively dead for a long time, like especially
⏹️ ▶️ John with the, you know, the past few milestones that happened when it was like we were waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, news and rumors or whatever. And I think it was an episode a while back where I was like, notice how there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John rumors at all about anything having to do with the Mac Pro. And sure enough, whenever the events came along, there was in fact nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with the Mac Pro. And it’s like, well, that’s it. It’s over. Like they upgraded the studio to the M3 Ultra, which itself was
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. Did they upgrade the Mac Pro to it? No, they did not. Well, maybe they’ll do it the next event. No, they didn’t. It’s like, well, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s dead it’s done like this is not what you do to a machine that’s a going concern and then it became ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ John embarrassing I made the snarky toot about the the Neo being faster in single core than the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro because it’s just so old and expensive and of course the price has never changed and you know it just needed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be put out of its misery Apple you know Apple was clearly no longer making this product and I
⏹️ ▶️ John would much rather see it put out of its misery and discontinued immediately rather than
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for the Mac Studio to to replace it and saying this new M5 Ultra Mac Studio replaces the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not even waiting until then. Why wait? There’s no point. So it’s gone and buried.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you wanna hear me talk about the Mac Pro in the more positive sense, not the M2 Ultra one, because it’s hard to say anything positive about
⏹️ ▶️ John that one, but the 2019 Mac Pro, the one that I’m actually using, I’ll put a link in the
⏹️ ▶️ John notes to an episode one, two, three of the last detail on Relay with
⏹️ ▶️ John Dan and Tom and I was their guest and you’re supposed to talk about like an item that means something to you, design wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I chose the 2019 Mac Pro and talked about it at length. If you’re wondering why I like this
⏹️ ▶️ John machine, obviously it’s from a design perspective, but, uh, take a listen to that episode. If you want to hear
⏹️ ▶️ John me, uh, think on a better days when the Mac Pro 2019 Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John was a really amazing machine when it was released, that was in 2019, in 2026 now,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the M2 Ultra one was really never a very good machine. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John and people ask what are my plans? Obviously, again, if you listen to the show, you know, my plans, my plans are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to get a, uh, an M something max studio, most likely assuming I can stomach the Ram and storage
⏹️ ▶️ John costs, which that’s not the max studios fault. That’s AI’s fault, but you know, it is what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s my fault for waiting too long. Presumably, although I’m, I’m glad I waited because not that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want an M four max, but I wanted to wait until the, you know, until all the possibilities
⏹️ ▶️ John had foreclosed and now they have everything. Everything has for this. There’s gonna be no Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple says there’s not gonna be one. And by the way, don’t wait for a new one because that’s not happening either. They’re really making
⏹️ ▶️ John sure you know that this is an X product. Unlike for example, like I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Gruber gave this example, like the weird thing where they stopped selling the big HomePod and it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s it. The big HomePod is dead. And then a little bit later they introduced a new big HomePod. It’s like, what? I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John this was a dead product. It was just dead for a little while. But Apple wants you to know but this is not a HomePod situation. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is a dead, dead situation, as in we have no plans for another one. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s gonna be a new Mac Pro at next year’s WWDC or something like that. Just forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple doesn’t often tell you they’re definitely not gonna make another thing. Like, I think the only one I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think of is when they, a couple of years ago, gave a statement to some press saying that they were not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make any more bigger iMacs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember that? Yeah, yeah. That was like, don’t wait for a 27-inch one this 24 inch one is out like we’re not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, these statements are like we have no plans, which
⏹️ ▶️ John means they currently have no plans in five years. There could be plans. But, you know, the only thing is it’s not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a home pod situation. We’re not discontinuing this because we ran out of stock before WBC. That’s not the situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And again, it’s shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone who’s watching Apple or listening to this program
⏹️ ▶️ John because the product was so incredibly dead. I mean, obviously, as soon as they didn’t put the M3 ultra in
⏹️ ▶️ John it, to even continue the farce of it being a Mac Studio in a bigger case, they didn’t even continue that. That was
⏹️ ▶️ John just, you know, so clearly this has been dead for a long time. The only thing I have to say retrospectively about it is, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, again, a repeat of things I’ve said in the past, but people don’t listen to every episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac Pro is essentially the only failure of Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John because the job of Apple Silicon was to replace, you know, Intel processors with Apple processors
⏹️ ▶️ John in all of Apple’s products. and they did do that eventually, to great effect in every single
⏹️ ▶️ John product, to amazing effect in every product, except one, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro. And it’s not because Apple had a difference of opinion and said, well, we don’t need a big computer
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Mac Pro. They planned to make a chip for the Mac Pro, but they could not
⏹️ ▶️ John do it economically. There was, at least the M1 plan for like the M1,
⏹️ ▶️ John like big, giant, mega.
⏹️ ▶️ John the quad. Two of which were stuck together chip. There was diagrams of it. There was things leaked from Apple or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. I’m not sure how far extended past that. German says in 2022, they canned their final
⏹️ ▶️ John plan for like a quad processor or whatever. But it’s a thing that they wanted to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they could not do it. And there’s a million reasons why. Like you’re not gonna sell a lot of them. It’s very expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, yada. Like it makes sense, but it is the one failure. And lots of people are saying, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that was a different era. Nobody needs expandable RAM or internal storage or slots. all those things
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, we don’t need those anymore. Setting aside whether there’s really zero
⏹️ ▶️ John use for slots. I mean, part of that is Apple’s decision to not support third-party GPUs, but setting that aside, especially in the AI
⏹️ ▶️ John age, I would argue that potentially having a giant case stocked with a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of Nvidia GPUs for doing AI stuff would actually be a useful thing, but Apple doesn’t get along with Nvidia anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Set the slots aside entirely. Just within the realm of
⏹️ ▶️ John is there any room in Apple’s product line for something that is not something more powerful than Mac Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve always said, and I continue to say, absolutely yes, and here’s why. Right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have great examples of applications that run on Macs that we wish would go
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, that we wish had more capability. Local models, local AI
⏹️ ▶️ John models. Yeah, you can gang together a bunch of Mac Studios, but basically local models will
⏹️ ▶️ John use every ounce of computation and memory you could possibly throw at
⏹️ ▶️ John them. The Mac Studio is great, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a plus-size Mac mini. It’s not that big. With the
⏹️ ▶️ John new SLIC-MH chiplet architecture, where Apple can do separate dies
⏹️ ▶️ John and put them into things, they’re now able to make chips that are bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John than they used to when they would take the M-whatever Macs, which was close
⏹️ ▶️ John to the, what, the reticle limit, close to the biggest chip that they could possibly make. And they would take two
⏹️ ▶️ John of those and combine them and call it an Ultra. And it’s like, well, there’s no point, if the Ultra fits in the
⏹️ ▶️ John studio, there’s no point in ever having anything other than the studio because that’s the biggest chip
⏹️ ▶️ John we can make. But now, with the CPU and GPU at least being separate,
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU can be as big as an M4 Max or whatever, the GPU can be as big as an M4 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can combine two of those and now you’ve got a monster chip, but guess what? You cannot put that
⏹️ ▶️ John monster chip inside a Mac Studio because it can’t dissipate the heat. So
⏹️ ▶️ John why does Apple still need something, whether it’s a Mac Pro or whatever, something bigger than the Mac Studio?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they’re leaving computation on the table. They can
⏹️ ▶️ John make, it is possible with the current technology we’ve seen in the M5 Pro and Macs, to make a chip that is too
⏹️ ▶️ John hot to fit in the Mac Studio. Now, obviously if they ship a chip in the Mac Studio, it’s not gonna be too hot to fit in the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio, but they’re also not going to plan and design and build the chip that would be too hot, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John could. You could make it bigger, faster, hotter. Why would you make it bigger and hotter? Because it will do more
⏹️ ▶️ John computation. Like, it will be faster. It will have, you could put more
⏹️ ▶️ John memory on it. Like, you need a bigger case that can dissipate more heat
⏹️ ▶️ John just for the CPU, GPU stuff in their current plans. No slots, no third-party GPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John no expandable memory. No, none of that. just basically something bigger than the Mac Studio. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is my argument. Maybe I’ll write a post about it someday, but probably not, cause I’m old and tired.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the case for a true Mac Pro successor, they did, they made it. The 2019 Mac Pro was amazing. It fulfilled everything that
⏹️ ▶️ John it needed to fulfill, but that was a different era. In the current era, there is still a place
⏹️ ▶️ John for a Mac that is more powerful than the Mac Studio, because the Mac Studio, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got its own little thermal corner, and it has amazing capacity, and it can cool basically the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John chip Apple could make, with like the M3 Ultra, but now I believe Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John clearly the capability to make a chip that is more powerful, but too hot to fit in the Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ John and where are they gonna put that? That’s why I think I will still be lobbying for
⏹️ ▶️ John and dreaming and hoping for that Apple should make a Mac that has more cooling
⏹️ ▶️ John capacity than the Mac Studio so they can put a bigger chip in it that wouldn’t fit in the Mac Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll also separately believe that the role of slots is still potentially good or whatever, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nebulous. But the heat capacity thing is not nebulous. That’s why the old
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Ultra Mac Pro was so ridiculous because we know that chip fits in the studio. You can buy it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John studio and yet they’re putting it in this cavernous case with massive cooling. It was just a complete waste. So
⏹️ ▶️ John fingers crossed for, let’s say seven years from now, we’ll report back here
⏹️ ▶️ John and see if Apple has made a bigger Mac than the Mac Studio. The rumor we had was that there was no
⏹️ ▶️ John plans for a larger chip than the Ultra until at least the M7 generation, but that was a
⏹️ ▶️ John vague rumor and it was a long time ago, so I’m not holding my breath for that, but yeah. RIP Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, it was already dead in all but name, now it is dead dead. It is clarifying for purchasers,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is clarifying for me, and yet, that still remains the one glaring failure, not
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe glaring, glaring to me. The one glaring to me failure of Apple Silicon is they could not figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out how to make a replacement for the biggest, fastest, hottest chip that would require a big
⏹️ ▶️ John case to cool. They tried, they failed. It’s not a big deal to anyone except for me, but I still think
⏹️ ▶️ John they should shoot for that star.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is it that you think, you mentioned AI, you know, processing and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff like that. Is there anything else that you can think of that would require just that much memory, that much compute?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, obviously gaming. I mean, I know people don’t care about that and Apple’s gaming performance is amazing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming will also use all the transistors you can throw at it. Like, you know, well, the frame rate is good, but
⏹️ ▶️ John could it be better? Yes, it can always just, especially GPUs, they’re so embarrassingly parallel and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be another applicant. Not that Apple’s gonna make an $8,000 computer to play games on or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s an easy one. But no, the AI thing is just such a no-brainer now because
⏹️ ▶️ John we are in such an early part of that curve where the models that everyone wants to use literally
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t run on anything, even on a desktop, they can’t run. They only run on $60,000 Nvidia
⏹️ ▶️ John rack mount things and probably multiple ones of those given how many tokens they use. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a place where we haven’t been for so long, where there is a thing we want to do in computing
⏹️ ▶️ John that cannot fit on your desk. And AI is currently that. It cannot fit on your desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess it could if you spent a few hundred grand and put a rack there, but like it doesn’t fit
⏹️ ▶️ John in a normal desktop computer of any reasonable size and dimension. And it’s gonna be a while before we catch up with
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And why do we ever need to do that? Why wouldn’t we just always run it on the server? because local has advantages,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously. Like, you know, setting aside all the privacy and other stuff like that, being able to do stuff locally
⏹️ ▶️ John is advantageous for multiple reasons, which is why we never fully converted to thin clients where everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the data center. So, yeah, gaming and I guess AI. And
⏹️ ▶️ John saying AI is like, oh, that’s just one use case. It’s like a million use cases. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not a narrow use case. This is, we don’t even know what the full possibility space is of this
⏹️ ▶️ John technology until it starts to level off a bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s like saying servers. Well, servers can do a lot actually. There’s a lot of different, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. Yeah, I think the Mac Pro, you know, for Apple killing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it now, it’s kind of like when they killed the iPod, like not that many years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like by the time they killed the iPod, it had really effectively been dead for a pretty long
⏹️ ▶️ John And yet it was still a useful product for DJs and you can’t even say that about the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, but you know, the Mac Pro, I’m sure the Mac Pro had like five or six customers. I’m sure there were people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who filled it up with the sound processing cards, like which was about the only reason to have it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the arc of the Mac Pro, I assert that the last good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro was 16 years ago, the 2010 Mac Pro. Oh, 2019 was
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. What are you talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s why it wasn’t. Okay, so let me go back a minute.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This product from 2008, the first Mac Pro, which was basically the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel version of the Power Mac G5, that was a great, the Power Mac G5,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had some flaws, but it was a great line of computers. When the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition happened, the 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, those were the four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro models that were unique. There was the update in 2012, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is how we got our first Favicon with the new badge over the Mac Pro, because it wasn’t really an update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was just like, they just raised the minimum spec and added one more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top-end configuration option for the family that they already had been using for two years, because Intel released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one more little tiny model up top. But it was not really a new Mac Pro, not really even a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed bump, because the components were all the same, just a different selection of them. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you had four unique Mac Pros in that old cheese grater case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was every couple of years, Intel would release a new series of the Westmere Xeons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess that was one of them. The new series of the workstation grade Xeons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about every 18 months. And that’s when we get Mac Pros. And they were great. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were extremely capable. They were very competitive with other options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time. Like you could, if you bought like an 06 or 08 Mac Pro, like my first one was the 08 one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that 08 Mac Pro not only outperformed everything else on the market for the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user in 08, in every way, in single thread it would at least match it and multi-thread it would destroy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And you’d have GPU advantages, you would have huge amounts of potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM and storage. The RAM was ECC and everything was more reliable, like huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons to have the Mac Pro in those years. And it was reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price competitive, like it wasn’t cheap. a decent one might cost you like 2,500 to $3,500 back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in those times. And that was reasonably competitive with high-end desktops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and high-end laptops of the time. And then that would be relevant. That would be like a well-performing computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most people, five years maybe, for John, 25 years. A little
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in my 2008 Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John was I used for a little bit over 10 years. Sure, like, so those computers, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time they existed, They were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competitive, they were reasonably priced, they were extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capable for a huge variety of what Mac users needed and wanted to do, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remained competitive for years after they were out. Look at what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened after that. So, 2012 wasn’t a real update, 2013, the trashcan. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trashcan was almost none of those things. Apple redesigned it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take away almost all of its advantages. It was no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonably priced. It was no longer as capable because almost immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after it was released, it lost single-threaded performance, or maybe even it already was. Multi-threaded performance was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good for a little while, except until it died from thermal problems with GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU performance was, again, okay for a little while, but it didn’t remain competitive for very long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was way less expandable and way more expensive. So they shrunk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them by their own choices. The market for professional workstations was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still a healthy market back then, but by Apple’s own choices with the trashcan redesign,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they shrunk its market. And then they also pushed the price way up. Then what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then nothing happened for a while. The iMac Pro was good. That was kind of a one-off. We’re not talking about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. The next Mac Pro was the 2019 one. Yes, six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years later. So they neglected this market for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six years. So during that time, there were no Macs with expansion slots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like go ahead, try to kill the market as best you can. Then in 2019, they released John’s current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro, the Intel 2019 Mac Pro, the last Intel one. It started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at, what was it, $6,000, John? something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so they designed a computer that starts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at $6,000. So you’ve already, this was something that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the previous tower version started at like $2,700 or $3,000 and you’ve now doubled the entry price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Skyrocketing this market way up, like you are losing so many people from that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of the GPUs you could buy were also pretty expensive. So, you know, you’re really pushing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price here. So you’ve, now you’re limiting it really to extreme high-end buyers only.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No hobbyists are gonna buy it. No power users are gonna buy it. Like no one like John, who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly wants to use it regular ways, but wants to play games with good GPUs. Like none of those people are gonna buy it except John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, so they shrunk the market so far down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less than a year before the Apple Silicon transition. And of course they would have known that when they released it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what they did was through their own choices and their own,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some ways negligence, in some ways just mistakes, they kept shrinking the market for this product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massively by their own choice. Now, what was also happening in that time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the market for professional desktops was itself shrinking, not just from Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but from everybody as more people were moving their work to laptops. And as Apple was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing a lot of that high-end computing market, anything that was using NVIDIA’s CUDA, that all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved off of Apple platforms. A lot of high-end video editing was moving off of Apple platforms. Apple was losing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the high-end pro markets already for other reasons. Then Apple Silicon happens. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Apple did was design this amazing architecture that serves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much everything below that need amazingly well. We have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing phones all the way up to amazing workstation class laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Mac Studio, which is like a pretty great overall, you know, asterisks here and there, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty great overall computer, except look at the performance of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Ultra chips versus the Mac chips. It doesn’t scale up that well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It scales up basically only in some of the GPU compute benchmarks, like the Metal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and OpenCL. Those scale up, nothing else really does. And part of the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Silicon architecture also is you don’t get upgradable RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have to buy it all up front. And of course, then that means you have to pay Apple’s prices. So it’s again, so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM, super expensive, cannot be upgraded ever down the road. Neither can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most, neither can the SSDs in any of these products. So you have total lack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of upgradability, everything being expensive up front and limitations on the capacities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these things compared to where they were before when they were socketed. So what Apple did with the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Silicon transition was lop off the high end of the market in either performance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price or limitations. So and so you have, you know, John’s 2019 Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, then less than a year later, the Apple Silicon transition begins. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro M2 Ultra generation, which, as John was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just not useful. It was like, what is the market for this? If you cut off GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expansion, and it’s still insanely expensive compared to everything else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no longer GPU expansion, no longer RAM expansion, they just kept cutting off markets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reducing the selling proposition, increasing the pricing on everything, on everybody trying to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for whatever they did need it for, just cutting off markets one by one. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI is happening, and Apple is just nowhere in that business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe they’ll get there, but they are currently nowhere. So by Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own failings and decisions and directions, they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing great in every single other part of the Mac hardware lineup. The Mac hardware lineup is awesome,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the Mac Pro, they just kept cutting off limbs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And some of those were inevitable in the long run. A lot of them weren’t. A lot of them were just bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco execution or greedy pricing decisions from them, and they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kept cutting off and cutting off and cutting off. So yeah, it’s dead now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the last good Mac Pro was the 2010 Mac Pro 16 years ago. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think everything you said supports that. The 2019 was the last good Mac Pro, clearly. I know it was a shame
⏹️ ▶️ John that it got Apple Silicon, but when it was released, there was no Apple Silicon. So we can only,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though Apple knew that it was coming, whatever, At 29, 2019, Mac Pro was released. It was an amazing Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now granted, the price was higher, as you noted. It was not as economical as it was, but I think that’s a,
⏹️ ▶️ John as the 2008 one, but I think that’s just a sign of the times and that Apple realized we have to move up market because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where, that’s where the people who are gonna be able to afford this computer that we wanna make exist,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other users are better served by our lower end stuff. You know, at that point, you could do Final
⏹️ ▶️ John Cut on an Intel laptop still, even though it wasn’t as good as it is an Apple Silicon. So they went up market with it, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. You can go up market with a high-end computer, but the 2019 Mac Pro is what they promised to
⏹️ ▶️ John that 2017 Mac round table. So we’re gonna make a modular Mac Pro that’s our biggest, baddest computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John How long will it be before Apple ever makes another computer with the capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ John of the 2019 Mac Pro, just in terms of RAM? It could hold 1.5 terabytes of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John Granted, it was slow RAM, not like today’s super fast RAM, but it was 2019. Massive RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John capacity. How long has it been or was it? I’m not even sure, I’ll have to look up the stats
⏹️ ▶️ John on this. Before there was ever a Mac that could contain as much GPU processing power as
⏹️ ▶️ John the 2019 Mac Pro, which I believe could hold four AMD GPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John two dual cards in it. It was so long before that was bested by any Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John things. I have to look up the stats to see how close it is to being competitive with the M3 Ultra, which is the current
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, wasn’t it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think it was recent.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to look up, but like, the thing is like, well, what am I gonna do with all those GPUs? What the hell’s the point of that? I can’t play games on it. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John game that’s gonna run on four AMD GPUs. Again, what could I
⏹️ ▶️ John do with a box filled with GPUs in today’s age? I can think of some things you can do with it
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t gaming, you know? And their whole relationship with Nvidia and how they messed that up, as you noted, is a thing. But like the 2019
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro, when it was released, was, had capabilities that were
⏹️ ▶️ John so far above any other Mac in terms of what it could do and what you could stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John inside it. Because remember back then you could put in, you know, graphics cards, you could buy
⏹️ ▶️ John them from Apple, you can put in third party ones, you could expand the storage, you could expand the RAM, all inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the big giant tower case, like it fulfilled the promise of that. And again, listen to the
⏹️ ▶️ John episode of the last detail here, we talk about how I love the design of this thing. And yeah, it did go up
⏹️ ▶️ John market from the 2018. But 2018 was in an era when power users would would buy desktops.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by 2019, we were no longer in an era where power users were even interested in desktops. It was more of like
⏹️ ▶️ John a home thing. So who’s gonna be interested in an ultra powerful thing like this? People for whom a $6,000 starting
⏹️ ▶️ John price is not a big deal, right? That’s the market they were going after and the 2019 Mac Pro hit it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we were just off into the wilderness and how long will it be before,
⏹️ ▶️ John at this rate, how long will it be before any Mac can hold 1.5 terabytes of RAM? And again, I know it’s faster RAM these
⏹️ ▶️ John days, yada yada, but like, you know, how long will it be before you can add
⏹️ ▶️ John as much GPU capability like relative to its time, like in 2019, the amount of GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John you can fit in here, scale that linearly with, you know, today’s standards.
⏹️ ▶️ John What Apple is doing with the GPUs is amazing, but it is non-expandable and you
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot like, you know, how many watts of heat of GPUs could you put inside this? If you have
⏹️ ▶️ John that many watts of heat in a Mac today, Just think of the GPUs, the Apple designed
⏹️ ▶️ John first party GPU you could put in there if you had a case that could dissipate it and a GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John that was designed to be in that case that could dissipate it. So I will defend 2019 Mac Pro forever. I love the 2008 Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I used it for a decade. Like I love that computer. It was amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was from a different time. The 2019 Mac Pro fulfilled the promise that Apple made in the 2017 Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John round table. It’s just, you know, it got run over by Apple Silicon. Like it is what
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. Like I wouldn’t want Apple Silicon to have been delayed for the honor of the 2019 Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they released what they said they were gonna do and they did a really, really good job of it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then we’re back in the wilderness. And speaking of the trashcan, by the way, lots of people make this comparison. In some ways
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s unfair and in some ways it is entirely fair and shows how times have changed. The Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John is the trashcan, right? It’s got its own little thermal corner. It’s got no expansion.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all in one tiny little thing. It doesn’t fulfill the same needs as 2008 Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was fine when it had a bigger sibling next to it or when Apple was pretending they were still interested in that
⏹️ ▶️ John market. But now they’re basically saying like, the Mac Studio is the highest end desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re ever gonna need. It’s like saying the trash can is the highest end desktop we’re ever gonna need. And the market
⏹️ ▶️ John said no to the trash can. The market said, Apple, we don’t like your trash can. It’s bad. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not able to update it. You need to do something about that. At least Apple’s able to update the Mac Studio. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the market will not push back against the Mac Studio the same way they did about the trash can, because we’re in a different time
⏹️ ▶️ John now. So, and as you noted, Apple has so thoroughly abandoned and screwed over the market
⏹️ ▶️ John that would buy a $7,000 expandable computer that it will be a long time before they’re receptive
⏹️ ▶️ John to anything that Apple introduces. But I still say, essentially a bigger Mac Studio, I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it has to be a tower, but like for the people who would buy a Mac Studio, would you buy one that
⏹️ ▶️ John has two times computation capability that is also twice as large, a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, yes, they would say, give me twice as much Ram, give me twice as much GPU, give me twice as much CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John so I can run my local models that are twice as big. Um, or whatever, whatever, you know, future computations
⏹️ ▶️ John we need. I don’t think Apple has anything like that planned, but that’s what I’m looking forward to sometime before I die.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, to build on something you said earlier, uh, you know, what if you had the ability to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hotter? What if you had the ability to use more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco power? Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we all want that, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about it. But I think there is an interesting thought exercise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we may or may not ever get to experience or see the end of, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the A series of chips, I think we can all agree, were designed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the start to be power efficient. Like that was, if not the priority, it was certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely high on the list. And to extrapolate from what John was saying earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what if there was a chip where perhaps power efficiency just wasn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if it was on the priority list at all, it was way, way, way further down. And what would that look like? How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible could that be? Because these Apple chips, you know, the, the, the H series chips, the M series
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chips, they’re incredible, incredibly fast and incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power efficient. Imagine what it would be like if they took the, the, the gloves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off and said, you know what, we’re just going to use as much power as we need.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the wrong way to look at it though, because I think you still wanna make the most power-efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John thing possible, because think of how much more computation you can do within a given
⏹️ ▶️ John power envelope. That’s the beauty of the Ultra, and even the Max for that matter. The computation
⏹️ ▶️ John that is done in like the M-whatever Max chips CPU and GPU compared to the
⏹️ ▶️ John heat that is dissipated is amazing when you compare it to a standalone Intel or AMD
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU and a standalone AMD or Nvidia GPU, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the total amount of heat dissipated by like those discrete components versus the total amount that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s chips dissipate to do the same job, like that’s miraculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s why I’m saying like, that’s you’ve done it Apple, you have chips that use very little
⏹️ ▶️ John power and do this amazing computation. You’re able to put in its thing the size of the Mac Studio, something
⏹️ ▶️ John that competes with stuff that requires a giant tower case. Imagine what you could do
⏹️ ▶️ John exact same trick and just put twice as much in and make it twice as hot. Like I don’t want them to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John throw power to the side. I want them to use their power efficiency to say, this means we can put more GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores in. This means we can add, because I mean, maybe some more CPU cores, so maybe they’ve used too
⏹️ ▶️ John many, although Threadripper would say there’s still room for more CPU cores. But there’s always room for more GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores. Like there’s always room for that. And so take advantage of this amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John technology you have, especially with the chiplets. Because before you could say, well, that’s all well and good but they’re already making
⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest possible chip they can because they do combine CPU. Because it’s an SoC, they’re already
⏹️ ▶️ John at the limit but now they’re not at the limit anymore. At the very least, the limit should have just doubled because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing separate dies for the CPU and GPU. So fingers crossed for the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I agree with you, Casey, that I think they could do great things but I think the reason they can do great things
⏹️ ▶️ John is because they’re never going to ignore power efficiency. And that’s an advantage that lets you put more stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in before you run out of like whatever the maximum wattage is for a tower computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, for your outlet in your North American 15 amp circuit. Yeah, and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not even close to that. Like the studio dissipates so little heat. Like it’s so tiny, it
⏹️ ▶️ John does have fans, but it’s so tiny and so quiet, and dissipates so little heat. And it’s like, it’s competing
⏹️ ▶️ John with like these giant PC towers with a thousand fans and 900 watt power supply or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and keep in mind, to kind of expand on that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being willing to be less efficient is not the limiting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factor here. It is total power use. Because what gates the performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of modern processors is basically how much power are you allowed to consume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how much heat can you get away from the chip as quickly as possible so the chip can continue generating that much heat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so efficiency always will lead to better performance. I think the bigger issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Apple’s limitation here is architectural. That as I was saying earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple Silicon, it scales up really well through the whole low end of the performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line and well into the mid range and well into what most people would consider a high end. But once you start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to go past some of these upper limits, Again, look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at benchmarks of the M3 Ultra versus the M3 Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and certainly versus the M4 Max, which came out at the same time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Ultra is not very competitive unless you have very specific workloads. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even those, even the GPU workloads that scale the best for the M3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultra, the M4 Max comes very close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the actual need for the M3 Ultra is very, very small. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main reason to buy it is that it raises other limits like the RAM limit. Although, I don’t know if you’ve looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently at Mac Studio availability and shipping times. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t even get the high RAM ones. And you know why, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you currently try to spec a 128 gig Mac Studio, it says pick up Wednesday,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco August 26th. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like that makes perfect sense because as we said, like, you know, Apple does
⏹️ ▶️ John component deals for locked in the price for a long period of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s an advantage to them at the early stages of this terrible RAM crisis. But I can
⏹️ ▶️ John bet you they are not pre-purchasing and locking in purchases for the whatever 128
⏹️ ▶️ John gig RAM modules for the Mac Studio. That’s more of a like if anyone orders this, we’ll get it built. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John guess what? Now they can’t get that stuff because like they don’t keep they don’t you know, when they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John selling like the laptops or whatever, they’re like, yeah, we’re gonna pre-order X number of million of these, cause we know that’s how many you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna sell. How many Max RAM, Max Studios do they even sell? So like, ah, when those orders
⏹️ ▶️ John come in, we’ll just buy them at the market price at the time. Oops, now the market price is insane.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you can’t even get those things, so yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, cause you can get like the 128 gig MacBook Pro, the new MacBook Pros, you can get those like next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, cause they probably pre-ordered and have a deal for those, but not for the Max Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, but like when you look at the scaling up of Apple Silicon, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way they’ve designed the architecture with unified memory and everything being like part of why it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast. There’s a lot of integration here. A lot of the controllers are on the die with the processor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s there’s a lot of integration of all the different components that if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern PC architecture, there’s a lot less of that. Like some things have moved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco onto the processor that used to be separate chips like there to be something called the North Bridge and the South Bridge. And like I don’t I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t been paying too much attention at PC architecture recently, but
⏹️ ▶️ John on the PC side there, they’re starting to look a lot more like Apple Silicon these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like stuff does like over time, like more stuff from what used to be called the North Bridge moved into the processor and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But like as you scale up the performance of these architectures, integration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets you a lot of wins. But the problem is the more stuff you integrate into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main S.O.C. or the main CPU die, the less like expansion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to to like broaden with some of the horizons here unless you make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of different parts of the whole bunch of different processors that have a whole bunch of different controllers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrated into them. And so like you will see that like on high end data center CPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re not going to see it from Apple. You’re not going to see them make 12 different types of chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, they might have like variants here and there. there anyway, so the Apple Silicon architecture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great for the bottom 90% of what people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need, but for that top 10% of the market that needs like again, what if you need the 1.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabytes of RAM that the old Mac pro supported? You still, even, even before this current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM shortage, the max studio maxed out at five, 12, a third of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s years after the 29, 29, that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was, you know, again, that’s seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago and until a few weeks ago the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco highest you could get on a Mac studio was a third of its RAM ceiling and that’s because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco architecture is different like because to put that much RAM in Apple silicon you need you need a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole bunch of the Apple silicon chips fuse together and because they have all the controllers built in like there’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the level of integration they have it just it’s again it’s different architectural decisions it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic for all the computers that all the rest of us use but it it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precludes them from offering these very high configurations and I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the architecture scales well. So I don’t even think that if they did like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the quad max chip, I don’t even think that would be competitive. I think I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why they didn’t end up shipping that was probably partly because it would cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. But I bet also I bet it just wasn’t worth it for enough people. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet they learned that when they scale things up, it didn’t scale up enough to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be worth that cost to any buyers. I bet that’s the real reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I don’t think you’re saying like, oh, the Apple Silicon architecture can’t scale up or whatever. Everything you cited
⏹️ ▶️ John for the problems with scaling linearly and stuff, that’s all to do with the fusion architecture, where they take two maxes and stick them
⏹️ ▶️ John together and that right. And that is their problem with scaling. The first time they did that, they screwed something up with
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU and that didn’t even scale linearly. And then they fixed that. But like that architecture of saying we don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John build And we either don’t want to or can’t build a chip this big on a single die, because we’re at the
⏹️ ▶️ John reticle limit or whatever. So we’re going to take two of these other things to your point, two of these other chips that we already have to build for
⏹️ ▶️ John our laptops, and we’re not going to do a whole separate chip, but we’re just going to take two of the laptop chips. And we also designed in
⏹️ ▶️ John a way for them to talk to each other with this, you know, fusion architecture where they stick to each other end to end,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like our old shirt says with the two maxes flipped over and stuck together.
⏹️ ▶️ John That architecture does not scale well, but that’s not Apple Silicon, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon Interposer or Fusion architecture thing. I think we’re beyond that
⏹️ ▶️ John now, as evidenced by the chiplet architecture on the M5 Pro and M5 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I’m not saying what Apple is going to do, but if they wanted to, they could
⏹️ ▶️ John totally abandon the Silicon Interposer 2 Max’s stuck-together architecture and just build
⏹️ ▶️ John a big dedicated CPU on its own die with no GPUs and a big dedicated GPU on its own die
⏹️ ▶️ John with no CPUs and make them both at the radical limit and stick them on a chip and there’s your M5
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra. I would love for them to do that. I don’t think they’re going to, but I would love for them to do that. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is still Apple Silicon. So there’s nothing inherent in Apple Silicon that says you have to do that end to end thing. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is the linear scaling barrier. That is the thing that is cost, cost tons of money, but doesn’t give you the
⏹️ ▶️ John bang for your buck. So I think the runway is clear for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John do something better, especially with like two nanometer or whatever they end up going to in like the M6 or M, I forget when that’s gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the next process shrink with the Chipolte architecture, freeze them up to
⏹️ ▶️ John leave behind the ultra, the what has been the ultra architecture, which is taking two maxes and sticking
⏹️ ▶️ John them together. Because I think that is a cost savings and it’s been cool, but it has essentially run its
⏹️ ▶️ John course. It was never as good as it could have been, but it was a reasonable compromise to get something
⏹️ ▶️ John out better. And by the way, one of the other big advantages of the Ultra has, which you see in some of these reviews is, and we don’t talk about that much
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not in the world we’re in, but it has twice as many media units. And lots of people who do like these,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, benchmarks of like, oh, I’m exporting from Final Cut. And like, huh, no matter which M chip I
⏹️ ▶️ John use, it exports from Final Cut at like the same speed or like the Pro versus the Max. Why is it the same speed? Because that’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John happening on the stupid media engine. And the only way to get it to go faster is get the Ultra because it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John double the amount of that stuff because it’s two Maxes stuck together. And lo and behold, it goes twice as fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, if you built a dedicated high-end chip, maybe you’d put four media engines in it. You know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean? Like you’d make different decisions, but to your point, it’s like, are they ever going to,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it ever going to be economically feasible to make anything custom for the Mac Studio or is
⏹️ ▶️ John even the Mac Studio stuck with, you just get the leftovers from what the laptops use. And maybe we
⏹️ ▶️ John can stick two Max’s together and you should be happy with what you get, happy with your non-linear scaling, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better than a Max. It is, and people will pay for it if you want something better than a Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s our Ultra. But that’s not the promised land of this, you know, of performance. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I do hope, especially with the Mac Pro gone for good now, that they have some better
⏹️ ▶️ John plans for the studio. Because I do, and I, you know, the Silicon Interposer thing with the two Maxes end to end,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s also not particularly power efficient. And there’s a bunch of stuff, we’ve talked about it, there’s a bunch of stuff on
⏹️ ▶️ John those chips that is, you don’t need twice as many of those, but you get them because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s two maxes, right? It would be better if you could consolidate the parts that are in common and yada, yada. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I’m hoping for. And I don’t think it’s a limitation on Apple Silicon. It’s just a limitation of the cost-saving
⏹️ ▶️ John approach they have been using for the Ultra since the M1 Ultra. And I agree with you that the
⏹️ ▶️ John quad one that they abandoned, they abandoned it for a reason, not just for the hell of it. They wanted to do it, they tried to do it, they had visions
⏹️ ▶️ John of putting it together, but like if the scaling on two of them was bad, the scaling
⏹️ ▶️ John on four would be even worse and the cost would be even higher. And yes, it would have been faster than an
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra, but it wouldn’t have been twice as fast as an Ultra. And so it’s a point of diminishing returns. So basically they couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John pull it off. They couldn’t deliver what the 2019 Mac Pro delivered, which is something that has a
⏹️ ▶️ John big multiple of the capability of its contemporary Macs. They just couldn’t do it in a
⏹️ ▶️ John feasible way. And so far they haven’t been able to. So fingers crossed that the M5 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John is, if it’s not, if it’s still two M5 Maxes stuck together, that’ll still be the most powerful chip that Apple makes.
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll still be really good. And we’ll check the benchmarks and see, is the scaling better than it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s still not linear. But you know, I need something to hope for. So I’m here, I’m out here hoping that
⏹️ ▶️ John the M5 Ultra will not simply be two M5 Macs stuck together, but I would not put money on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when do you think you’re buying a new computer then? Depends on
⏹️ ▶️ John how much the eight terabyte SSD costs. As soon as they introduce the,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna try to get like a friends and family discount from Apple, from folks that I know who work there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes the Friends and Family Discount is not available immediately, like you can’t pre-order with
⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever. So it might be a while after the M5, whatever, Mac Studios
⏹️ ▶️ John come out, I have to wait around until they show up with the Friends and Family Discount. But when that happens,
⏹️ ▶️ John I will buy one. And will I get the Macs? Which would be fine for me. Will I get
⏹️ ▶️ John the Ultra if such a thing exists? We’ll talk about that on the show, I’m sure. But that’s the plan. M5
⏹️ ▶️ John something Mac studio appearing on my desk whenever I can,
⏹️ ▶️ John whenever I can order it and assuming I can afford the eight terabyte SSD because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s honestly, I mean, look, it’s not a coincidence that I made an app that saves disk space. I am pressing
⏹️ ▶️ John up real hard against the four terabyte limit on my SSD. I use my app a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like I use it to
⏹️ ▶️ John save disk space. I need more disk space. and the next size up that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John offers is eight and it’s gonna cost so much money. Yes it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can confirm, been there.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m planning for. And I think months and months ago, I’ve said I’m planning on getting
⏹️ ▶️ John an M something Mac studio cause I had no faith that the Mac Pro was gonna come out and lo and behold, that is the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you expect to miss about the physical parts of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro? Like, cause you have your time machine drive internal to the Mac Pro, don’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ John I sure do, yeah. I have my super duper clone and like internal storage is for sure the thing I’m gonna miss which sounds silly because my internal
⏹️ ▶️ John storage is incredibly slow. Like it’s not, it’s like it’s connected to SATA for crying out loud, but they are SSDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the trouble-free nature of internal storage and internal buses, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna miss that the most because it’s not like I’m getting the amazing performance out of it. It’s not like I can’t, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all inside the box. I don’t have any wires hanging out. They never like unmount weirdly or do weird
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. They don’t have their own power supplies. My end, I have an internal time machine SSD and I have an
⏹️ ▶️ John internal SuperDuper clone, which, and they’re SSDs, and they’re slow, but
⏹️ ▶️ John having that inside the case is something that I will miss. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a niche market or whatever, but I really do wish there were better external storage options,
⏹️ ▶️ John because when I get my MacStudio, I’m gonna wanna have an SSD Time Machine drive, and I’m gonna wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John have an SSD SuperDuper bootable clone drive. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I can go try to buy those and buy a Thunderbolt enclosure or something and put
⏹️ ▶️ John a NVMe. I said, it’s a whole bunch of, you know, computer nerd
⏹️ ▶️ John hobbyist stuff that I’m actually not that interested in having, you know, bought bare spinning hard drives
⏹️ ▶️ John and put them into enclosures since the days of like the, you know, classic Mac. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve done that a lot. I would just prefer to have reliable, trouble-free
⏹️ ▶️ John storage that I can use for this. I mean, hell, I’ll probably, oh, I can’t. I always I’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ John take those SSDs out of this Mac Pro and use it, but I can’t because I have an eight terabyte SSD. It’s not going to fit on my four terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John backup drive, but Oh, that’s going to cost me even more money
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey after I buy apples, eight terabyte prices, then I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy, then I have to pay actual market prices for non Apple storage to get my,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, time machine drive and my clone drive. I might even have to buy a spinning disk for my Synology to fit the backup. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is going to be an expensive year and I may have to space. I may have to space this out a bit. Uh, we’ll see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you spent $11 billion on the Mac that you’re using to speak to us right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seven years ago. Well, I’m just saying, given that you spent as much as a freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And half of that price was the monitor that I’m still going to use. Mm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hmm. All right. Well, I’ll snark aside. I am sorry for you. I’m glad for you that you have an answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it is, as you mentioned, Apple style to just kind of let this thing fade into the night as it had been doing. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m glad you have an answer, but I’m sorry it’s not the answer you wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ John I already have the answer. Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the very previous
⏹️ ▶️ John episode, we had the answers. No one was confused about what was going on with the Mac Pro. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was just a question of what are they waiting for? And they were, yeah, they were waiting for us to post that
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#askatp: Using any iOS apps on Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alex Kent writes, you occasionally remind me that running iOS apps on macOS is a thing. I was excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this capability before it shipped. Years later, I find zero iOS apps that I regularly run on macOS. I can partly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blame the allow this app to run on macOS checkbox in App Store Connect that apparently most corporate developers disable out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of habit. But I’m also not sure that the experience of running iOS apps on macOS beats using the corresponding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey web app or picking up my phone. What iOS apps do you find useful to run on macOS? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I echo a lot of what Alex is saying here. I was pretty excited about the thought of doing such things when it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, you know, uh, the, the sparkle in Apple’s eye. But in reality,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I almost never use this. And for a lot of things I would reach for iPhone mirroring before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would reach for, you know, installing an app on my Mac. Um, that being said, the only thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can think of off hand is channels, which does have a web app, but it’s mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about management. It’s not really about consumption. And if there was any weak part of channels,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a former sponsor and a friend of mine is one of the co-founders. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there’s a weak spot about channels, it’s that the web user interface, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the purposes of consumption, is really not great. And so I’ve installed the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app on my Mac and use it every great once in a while. I don’t think there’s any easy way for me to tell. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there what other apps I have installed? So I don’t even know. I can’t think of any others off the top of my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you might have Overcast installed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I did use that all the time. And then I mostly just used my phone, either with the phone speakers, God awful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as that is, or occasionally via iPhone mirroring. That’s a good point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one of those ideas that when Apple Silicon first came around and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was one of the features of it, I thought this is gonna be really useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, I think the combination of so many apps opting out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And also, if you actually use iOS apps on Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that useful, it’s not that great. If it patches a need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that otherwise you would not be able to serve. So for instance, my Overcast app runs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way. I personally don’t really use it because I don’t listen to podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my Mac, but more people than I expected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it, significantly more than I expected. I never would have guessed it would have the user experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it has. But it’s still not like the majority of the user base or not even close. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, most people don’t use it. But it does have some utility. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you actually like try to use iOS apps on the Mac, they don’t work that well. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a weird experience. The lots of things are just worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about them or clunky or don’t fit the platform or don’t quite work the way you expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to work. Because when you design apps for iOS, you’re designing for touch on a totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different platform. It just, it doesn’t translate as directly and as well as I think people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it to. I don’t even use like the iPhone mirroring thing that they added last year. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even use that because I find that to be too clunky and I’d rather just pick up my phone out of my pocket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, use it that way. These are features that to me, like I will use in a pinch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t have that many pinches.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t run any iPad apps on my Mac because I can’t run iPad apps. No, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I mean, obviously I do have Apple Silicon Macs here and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the only one, I think the only iPad app I have knowingly installed is Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was actually to work on, to correctly file
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s bugs because they had a bunch of bugs related to the APIs I was using in Switch Class when it came
⏹️ ▶️ John to iPad apps. Like if you asked to get the icon for an iPad app, their
⏹️ ▶️ John API would vend you a dimmed icon with like the circle with a line through it, buster
⏹️ ▶️ John over it, which is not great. It’s not really what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they fixed that bug thankfully, but it was a bug like that for like a year and a half and I had to work around it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was also some weird stuff with like the way the notification thing that Switch Glass
⏹️ ▶️ John uses to say like, when an app is launched, tell me, and when an app exits, tell me. Because of whatever weird way that
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad apps are handled on macOS, the notifications for those apps launching and quitting
⏹️ ▶️ John were different and caught, like the timings were different and different events came at different things, so I had to work around that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I have Overcast installed, is essentially to debug my App Switcher app
⏹️ ▶️ John when it comes to iPad apps. if I had an Apple Silicon Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I will eventually, and we were back in time, one of the things that I would
⏹️ ▶️ John have looked forward to using on it is let’s say, Statusboard by Panic, a discontinued app that I have since
⏹️ ▶️ John vibe-coded replacement of on the web. So I don’t need that anymore, but I would absolutely use that. And that’s a perfect use
⏹️ ▶️ John case because as Marco said, like iOS apps or iPad apps on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about not behaving like a Mac app. They just absolutely do not behave like a Mac, because they’re not, they’re not, it makes sense,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, and they also don’t behave like an iOS app. Like if you’re like an iOS developer and you’ve used the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simulator, you might think the Mac apps would behave like they do in the simulator. They don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t even let you do the option thing to use the virtual pinchy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Yeah, it’s even, because of course, like that would be a little bit weird too so it’s even different from the simulator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are so many little things that are different and the supporting APIs and the way they behave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is also different. So you have things like background downloads and back on refresh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and push notifications in services, different kinds of extensions, lots of like AirPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of stuff that either doesn’t work on the Mac at all or works very differently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Context menus, another great example. Pull to refresh, like there are so many things on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just don’t work the right way as they do in iOS or are absent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or don’t work at all or have bugs or crash if you try to use them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and Apple could do things to make those APIs better so that they will behave better when they’re running
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac. But like, things like status board are ideal because it’s essentially like a big widget. It’s mostly read
⏹️ ▶️ John only. It’s an app that didn’t exist on the Mac at all. And there used to be no web version of it before I had my thing
⏹️ ▶️ John slapped together. And so I would, I absolutely would run status board on my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John as an iPad app and just had it up there as a little dashboard of stuff. Just like the old, just like I used to run dashboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the type of app that I would do. Like if there was some kind of app, if there was a social media
⏹️ ▶️ John app that didn’t have a native Mac version, Maybe I would use that, but I vastly prefer to just have like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, ivory on Mac as opposed to, you know, iPhone mirroring ivory on my phone or stuff like that. But like that’s, that’s where I’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John using it. It’s like you said, it’s gap filling. This isn’t available on the Mac and using
⏹️ ▶️ John it, uh, using the iPad version, you know, or the phone version mirrored is better
⏹️ ▶️ John than nothing. And there are apps where that is true. A status board totally would have been the case before I had the web version.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah. And developers not opting into it. It’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there’s a million incentives for them not to do it and Apple didn’t really make it attractive for them to do it. Like there was,
⏹️ ▶️ John there were plenty of sticks and not a lot of carrots for doing that. And so I don’t really blame developers for
⏹️ ▶️ John not checking that box, but you know, it is what it is. And this is the argument for like, you know, these are separate platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John with separate strengths and being able to use them, use any app anywhere is convenient,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t suddenly make the platforms the same. They’re just not like fundamentally, one is a touch-based thing that you carry around with you
⏹️ ▶️ John and one uses a much more precise pointer on bigger screens and yada, yada, like those
⏹️ ▶️ John differences will never go away. If there was a grand unification and there was one Apple OS, those platform
⏹️ ▶️ John differences would still exist. And that one Apple OS would have to handle
⏹️ ▶️ John those platform differences. One Apple OS can’t be like, oh, it’s a big phone everywhere. That’s not gonna work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My reminder app that I occasionally remember to work on that I’m using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You should put a reminder for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. I use it constantly, but you know, so anyway, So I’m having it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m having, this is my vibe code of reminder app, I’m having it be cross-compiled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Swift UI, there it compiles on Mac and it compiles on iOS. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of the things that I have had the AI do for me is customize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the behavior between the two and have it behave differently and look differently and have different controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the Mac version and the iOS version, because they’re just different. They’re like, one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I added the other day was like a swipe to snooze or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swipe the other way to delete on iOS on the row of the reminder. Standard iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swipe actions. And on the Mac, of course, it dutifully added that on the Mac where it makes no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense because you never want to swipe your mouse over a table row
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac and have it swipe to delete accidentally. You never want that on the Mac. That’s the wrong thing on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac and it’s easy to accidentally do and hard to intentionally do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me that you are a mouse user without telling me you’re a mouse user, because I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a trackpad or touchpad, whatever it’s called, user, I don’t have any problems with doing swiping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, lucky you. But anyway, on the Mac, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a useful, or that is not like the standard correct metaphor for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actions. On the Mac, the standard correct metaphor for quick actions on an item is usually a a context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco menu, keyboard shortcuts, or visible controls. And so I’m having different, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac, I have the right click menu to do those same actions. Or at some point I might add keyboard controls.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you develop software and you develop interfaces differently for these two platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they work differently. So anything that tries to run the same code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same app, with the same interface, or almost the same interface, on both of those platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna result in mediocrity. And that’s what this is. It’s a well-intentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system that doesn’t work very well, and therefore isn’t that compelling most of the time.
#askatp: If you ran Mac/iOS software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally tonight, Michael Brescher Jr. writes, if you were in charge of the Mac and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone software teams, how would you all balance new features needed to keep up with the industry with keeping design native
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to people who have used the Mac for over 30 years? Like John also, would y’all move to a one and a half or two year cycle for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the OS? This is a tough thing, right? It’s in, this is what makes engineering so fun and so challenging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is figuring out the right balance. And I don’t know. I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like for me, if things are new, that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately bother me. So as a silly example of this, um, Volvo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just released for Aaron’s car, a new version of the infotainment software that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aggressively rejiggers where everything is on screen. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in some ways, I think that these, these, uh, the rearranged deck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chairs are an improvement, right? And it’s for the best, but I can tell you for Aaron, it’s been very frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because she as the primary driver of that car will mash on a particular portion of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giant touchscreen in the center dash in order to see her like backup camera, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now that button somewhere else and that’s frustrating for her. And I get that a liquid glass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pissed off most of the community. And I don’t, I mostly don’t agree with that. I mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think liquid glass is actually pretty good. Um, But it certainly made everyone upset and it definitely moved things around.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I don’t necessarily think new is bad. And I’m kind of of the opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like actually a great example of this, God help me, I’m gonna get so much email, please email someone else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey icons, the icons in the menu bar, like I don’t think they’re particularly additive, but I am not deeply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morally offended by them like it seems most of our peers are. That doesn’t make me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right for the record. I’m just telling you my personal opinions about it. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think that new is necessarily bad. Where it becomes frustrating to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is not a particularly hot take, is new for the sake of new. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Michael is touching on that. You know, new features needed to keep up with the industry. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a great example of that is let’s AI all the things. And I think there’s appropriate times for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI and there’s inappropriate times for AI. And do I really need what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even remember what the stupid thing is called was like something playground
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what’s the image
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playground I couldn’t even remember the darn thing because I’ve used it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco twice but it’s here but it’s here baby I cannot I have dismissed image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playground is here 48 times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you see where I’m going with this right is that I don’t think adding just because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re keeping up with the Joneses is necessarily the right idea in Apple in the past had usually been very good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, yes, that’s wonderful for you, but we don’t need that. It’s not additive for our users, not helpful for our users.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m kind of meandering around the question rather than answering it, because I don’t, I think every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decision would be different. It would, it would have to be on a case by case basis, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally Apple’s thrust to move forward isn’t by itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unhealthy. I think the problem is that sometimes there’s a little too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much new shiny and not enough improvement of what was already there. And I think what makes it even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more aggressive or worse is when the new shiny is just for the sake of new shiny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than actually additive. But I don’t know, maybe that’s a non-answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think the big challenge here is like if we’re in charge of the Mac and iPhone software teams
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re trying to figure out keeping up new features to keep up with the industry, are we talking about 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, five years ago or now? right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hot new stuff, admittedly you’re right Casey, like keeping up with with hot new stuff is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be wasteful and it can be misguided, but right now the hot new thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is AI integration and AI based features and that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter what you think of AI there’s there are three things that that are real.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number Number one, it’s not going away. Number two, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as bad as you think it is. And number three, it is not as good as you think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a really, really big deal, despite all of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamics going on. It’s here. It’s going to define and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco direct a huge amount of what we use computers for, what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do, what we can do. a big deal. It’s a very disruptive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and promising area of technology. And so right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to figure out like, hey, how do we add new features to like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Finder? That is something that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should occasionally be considering, but like if you’re the head of Mac and iPhone software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of thing is the last thing you should be considering. Whether we put icons in the menu items.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a terrible design decision to have them there, especially the way they’re you know, the choices they’ve made, etc. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not a good use of anyone’s focus right now. There’s huge shifts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening in the tech industry. There will be huge shifts happening for the next, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of years. This is a, you know, no matter what you think of AI, it is going to be as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disruptive as things like the internet. mobile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is on that level of the amount of disruption that this is going to cause to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our business and many other businesses. When the internet first came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if a leading computer company maybe spent a lot of time doing a lot of other features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things that didn’t matter as much and maybe missed the internet, that could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem. They might have to like really scramble and catch up later. Let’s say maybe that same company,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little while later, missed mobile. And mobile was exploding,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smartphone revolution was exploding, and they just weren’t in that game, and stumbled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around for a while, and kind of never got in that game, and it reshaped their business forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they missed out on that entire thing. That’s Apple right now with AI. Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco missed the main part of it so far. They’re scrambling, we’ll see where they get,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but right now, that needs to be their focus. And we can debate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all we want about the crappy Tahoe redesign they did to Mac OS, which they did, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it needs attention. But if you’re the head of software, that kind of thing is not what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should be paying a lot of attention to right now. Because the entire industry has this massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earthquake shaking it all up, and you’re worried about whether your corner radius should be smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not. No, that’s not your job. Delegate that to the designers. Hopefully they have better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leadership now, and they have better heads on their shoulders, and hopefully they’ll fix this problem, but your job as the head of software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs to be, what do we do to embrace AI, to make good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features with this, to keep ourselves competitive, and to move our platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward in the actual real modern place that we find ourselves,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hopefully can catch up soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I would concentrate quite that much on the AI stuff, especially considering how badly Apple is doing there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this is one of those things where it’s like it would have been better if 10 years ago they had struck a better balance between
⏹️ ▶️ John new features and keeping up with industry trends because that would put you in a better position. And I would argue that
⏹️ ▶️ John paying attention to the plumbing, especially on the Mac, but even on the iPhone or whatever, like really just
⏹️ ▶️ John polishing up the basic functionality release after release is super essential in a
⏹️ ▶️ John world where you’re going to drop in a bunch of agentic AI, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the cleaner you can provide interfaces to your functionality, like that you have stuff that it’s works, it’s proven,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s reliable, putting, you know, allowing AIs to start controlling that or having
⏹️ ▶️ John access to it. Like, you know, for example, what Apple has done with security, like they weren’t doing it for AI,
⏹️ ▶️ John but having a good security architecture allows them, you know, potentially, cause we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they’re actually gonna do, but in theory, puts Apple in a good position to
⏹️ ▶️ John have AI features integrated with the phone in a way that is privacy preserving. Let’s say they didn’t do anything with privacy
⏹️ ▶️ John And then AI came along and they said, oh, well, we should really just concentrate on AI now. It’s like, no, you should have been concentrating over the past 20
⏹️ ▶️ John years on privacy stuff because if you want this, you know, unreliable LLM things to control
⏹️ ▶️ John any aspect of the phone, you need to have a good privacy architecture in place. And they do, thankfully,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s that same philosophy, I think, is what they should be doing over all their platforms, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John it behooves you to maintain and polish and improve the basic architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John because whatever the next thing is, it will be easier to integrate it
⏹️ ▶️ John into your stack if you’re not building on a house of cards, if you didn’t neglect privacy for 20 years, if you didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say, neglect the Finder for the entire history of Mac OS X, it would be way easier to hook up an AI
⏹️ ▶️ John into that if it wasn’t like this terrible, fragile house of cards that’s buggy and nobody likes anymore. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can’t go back in time and fix that, but like, to answer Michael’s question, like the balance between like new features
⏹️ ▶️ John and keeping up with the industry, every one of my like Apple report cards I’ve ever done, I’ve said that Apple is not correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ John not striking the right balance between essentially maintenance stuff, like, you know, taking existing features and eliminating bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John and improving the design and new features that continues to be the case. It is exacerbated by what Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John said, which is like, Oh, guess what? There’s a bunch of really new stuff that you should get on right now. It’s a lot easier
⏹️ ▶️ John to strike that balance when you’re kind of in a quiet period. When you’re not, that’s when you’re, you know, all those chickens come home to roots
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, we totally should have been keeping Mac, you know, more ship shape for all those years,
⏹️ ▶️ John because now we’re going to try to hook up this agent stuff to it and it’s just, it’s, you know, it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Setting aside, that’s probably not what apps problem is. Their problem seems to be just with the basic AI stuff or whatever. But, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I would, I would, you know, this is the type of thing where like, if you keep making a mistake in one direction,
⏹️ ▶️ John you keep overcooking something. Just try to undercook it. Just try to undercook it once, like go
⏹️ ▶️ John in the other direction because people like correct for it and they’re like, oh, we’re doing too far to a,
⏹️ ▶️ John we need to go to B and they go like slightly less far to a, and it’s like, can you make them? can you at least make
⏹️ ▶️ John a mistake in the other direction? And you know, the mistake in the other direction of being like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Snow Leopard, no new features or whatever, let’s actually do this as a marketing push. And that was kind of a one time thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think they need to massively correct currently, in the direction of shoring up
⏹️ ▶️ John existing functionality, which is exactly the opposite of a market was saying is like, you just got to ignore stuff because you’re behind that AI. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think those two things are not mutually exclusive. And that gets to the second point here, which is, would
⏹️ ▶️ John you change to a one to five or two year cycle or whatever. I have said for years and continue to say, based on my 25
⏹️ ▶️ John years experience in the software industry and releasing products on schedules and deadlines, that it is
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely possible to have annual releases by smartly
⏹️ ▶️ John choosing what goes in those releases or not. You can stagger them, you can have two year plans, three year plans, it’s not like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can only do things that fit in one year. No, this is a scheduling possibility. You can have things
⏹️ ▶️ John take three years to come to fruition and still release on a yearly schedule. It’s just a question
⏹️ ▶️ John of being smart about picking what’s in it and what’s not. Apple’s problem is not the annual schedule. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is their inability to correctly pick stuff that will fit in a year. That’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s always been their problem. And that is, you know, that’s most organizations problem. Like I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how many times I’ve had this exact discussion in my jobby jobs about like deadlines and schedules and what
⏹️ ▶️ John can fit and resources available or whatever. Like it’s like Casey was saying, it’s a trade off. It’s like we have this
⏹️ ▶️ John many people, we have this much money, We have this much time we have these people and who have these skills like it’s not you know Everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not just fungible right you have this set of people and this set of skills and this set of resources and this time
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever What can you fit? Can you get X by this date? Can you get Y by that date if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have something out by this date? What can what can you fit in? Don’t be ambitious
⏹️ ▶️ John and say we’re gonna be done by this date and we’re gonna have all the stuff You know like you’re not gonna have all
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff So you have to start to cut things. And Apple has been really, really bad. And I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like worse over the past several years at figuring out what can we actually
⏹️ ▶️ John fit into an annual release? And instead, they just like the overstuff it. Then they trickle stuff out over
⏹️ ▶️ John the course of the next year, which bleeds into which pulls resources and people who should be working on the next year’s release. They’re too
⏹️ ▶️ John busy releasing the rest of this year’s release, which trickles out over the year. That’s their problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Their problem is one of, you know, it’s not just them. It’s every everyone has difficulty of like estimating
⏹️ ▶️ John software projects and figuring out what will fit it within a schedule So I don’t think it’s the annualness
⏹️ ▶️ John of it If you did a two-year they would do the exact same mistake They would just do it over two years and it would be even bigger disaster or three years
⏹️ ▶️ John or four years. So That’s the challenge. I would not Necessarily like I think a Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John could use to two-year cycle But it wouldn’t remove the problem because their problem is if given a finite period
⏹️ ▶️ John of time choose features that you’ll be able to be done with by the end of that cycle,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple is not very good at that. And nobody is, it’s a difficult problem, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is frustrating to see Apple continue to have difficulty getting that
⏹️ ▶️ John done. And like I said, the only time they didn’t have this problem was when they didn’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John regular cadence whatsoever, which generally is a sign of an unhealthy organization. If you’re like, well, we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John build to a deadline, it’s just done when it’s done. Nice work if you can get it, but that’s usually
⏹️ ▶️ John not the real world. Usually you can’t just have that luxury. In the early Mac OS 10 days, it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re working on another version of Mac OS, but we’re doing a lot of other things too, and it’ll be done when it’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple was smaller then, and people were paying less attention, and it wasn’t that big of a deal. And the phone pulled
⏹️ ▶️ John resources off of the Mac, and Mac OS releases would take 18 months, 16 months, 13 months, like whatever, whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s done, whenever it’s ready, no big deal. but that is not the sign of an efficient,
⏹️ ▶️ John effective organization. We can’t build to a schedule. We just do stuff and when
⏹️ ▶️ John we finish it, we release it. That is a little bit too touchy-feely for whatever trillion dollar corporation.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think it behooves Apple to continue to try to get better at actually
⏹️ ▶️ John hitting deadlines with a set of realistic features that you can finish, not just barely
⏹️ ▶️ John finish so it barely works, but finish to a degree of quality that you would be proud of within the allotted
⏹️ ▶️ John time and being honest with yourself about what you can actually do, if only.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Masterclass, Factor, and Claude. And thanks to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the many perks of ATP membership is our weekly bonus topic, ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime. This week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about, we have an update to the egg. What is happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Johnny Ives’ OpenAI product or products. Updates to that in overtime, join to listen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco https://www.hpt.fm.com/.join. Thank you so much, everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John you can find the show notes at ATP.FM
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long
What’s “the mainland”?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a historical contention between Marco and I about naming things on Long
⏹️ ▶️ John is one particular naming thing that he’s been doing for years that has just been bothering
⏹️ ▶️ John me. And he did it again in this show, and I figured we didn’t have to show. So let me see if I can convince him to stop doing this. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John my God. I know the argument will probably be that this is not just a you thing. This is just a common
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and you’re just doing what other people do. And so you’re fitting in with the culture and yada, yada. And in general, I am a descriptivist,
⏹️ ▶️ John not a prescriptivist, but I feel like this one, maybe I can convince you. Oh, I can’t wait.
⏹️ ▶️ John You always talk about going over to the mainland. Yes. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the definition of the word mainland, reading from Merriam-Webster here, is,
⏹️ ▶️ John a continent or the main part of a continent distinguished from an offshore island or
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes from a cape or peninsula. Well guess what? Long Island is not a
⏹️ ▶️ John continent or the main part of a continent. It is in fact an offshore island, thus the name and the surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ John of it by water. So you’re not going to the mainland, you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John another different island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one of those things that is technically correct,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the per- Again, yeah, you’re right, descriptive is-
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, here’s my first question. Do other people say mainland or is this just a you thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone on Fire Island, when referring to Long Island-
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not shocked. Those people have no idea what’s going on over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow. Most, okay. Most Long Islanders don’t even know Fire Island is there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ve never even been there.
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you talking about? Everybody on Long Island knows about Fire Island. It’s just not an
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey obscure thing. Slow down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. Slow down. I don’t have a horse in the- On Long Island? Would you relax for a second? I actually don’t have a horse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this race, but let’s just remind ourselves that your whole oeuvre with regard to Long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Island is 30 years out of date, 40 years out
⏹️ ▶️ John of date. Sure, but I will, let me assure you that most people on Long Island don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John Fire Island exists is false. Most people on Long Island absolutely know Fire Island exists
⏹️ ▶️ John and I will wager that most people on Long Island have been to Fire Island. Not only do they
⏹️ ▶️ John know it exists, they’ve been there, but it’s not that far away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And here’s why. Because Long Island, which partly undermines your point here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really big. Really big. It’s just long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey of lots, it’s all, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, that’s the main dimension in which it is big, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey really big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first of all, like everyone on Fire Island refers to Long Island as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mainland. Well, they’re all wrong. I think I would love for you, why don’t you come to Fire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Island and tell everyone they’re wrong and see what they
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’ll just take the dictionary definition and print it out at the ferry terminal, I’ll just have it there. And just
⏹️ ▶️ John FYI, mainland is not the correct term for another island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, technically, North America is an island.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, North America is not an island. It’s just a really big one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t Pangea really an island because it’s surrounded by water? The answer to that is no. Yeah. It’s not. Continent
⏹️ ▶️ John has a definition. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all about relative scale. What’s a continent if not a giant island? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not how this language works. I’m sorry. I can go descriptivist with you, but there’s a reason
⏹️ ▶️ John we have the word continent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is Australia an island? No, it’s-
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, what about New Zealand? I don’t, well, isn’t that crazy? It’s like a Robot or Not episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s a definition, depends on the size of things, that a very small thing is like a pebble in the water is
⏹️ ▶️ John not an island, but then like, Pangaea is not an island, but something in between is an island? How does
⏹️ ▶️ John that work? That’s just the nature of the language we use to describe things, and all I’m saying is mainland
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, I think everyone in Fire Island is just using the wrong word,
⏹️ ▶️ John understand that it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey cultural thing, and they all like to
⏹️ ▶️ John say the mainland is just they just happen to pick the wrong word because they don’t have another word. It would be interesting to see if like someone from Hawaii
⏹️ ▶️ John could tell me whether they use mainland to refer to like the big island or whatever. Probably not, because they do call it the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco island. But the size differences between the Hawaii
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John islands. Well, the big
⏹️ ▶️ John island Hawaii compared to those little tiny ones, it’s probably a similar size difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I mean, they use the term the big island because that’s more descriptive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t actually know anything about Hawaii, so I can’t comment on, but it’s similar in
⏹️ ▶️ John nature And that when you’re going from some tiny little speck to something that’s massively larger and you call that the mainland.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, obviously people in Hawaii have like, you know, the continental United States to refer to as the mainland. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to say that in addition to all the other things that you do nomenclature wise related to Fire Island,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey referring to
⏹️ ▶️ John Long Island as the mainland is nonsensical and I hate it. But apparently it’s everyone in Fire Island,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you were on Long Island and you referred to the mainland,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nobody would have any idea what you were talking about. No one on Long Island refers to the mainland.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it doesn’t make sense in that context.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re making my point for me. I’m not making my point. I’m just saying that no one uses mainland on Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t use some other incorrect term instead. Oh my god, John. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I was saying, it’s not a thing that gets referred to. We could talk about Manhattan, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also an island. Right, and nobody in Manhattan would ever say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if they were going to New Jersey, I’m going to the mainland.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like they would never say that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s true, they wouldn’t. And yet it would be the right term if they chose to do that, it would be correct. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally earlier today walked from Manhattan to New Jersey, I walked to the mainland, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No one said it. You could have
⏹️ ▶️ John said that correctly in that instance, but you didn’t because it’s not a thing that’s done. But if you did say it, it would be correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that is a continent, or the main part of a continent and distinguished from an offshore island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god. Yeah, next time I’ll pull all the bike guests that are whizzing past me to see, hey, are we going to the mainland? Where are you going?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it the mainland over there?
⏹️ ▶️ John They would be confused, but you would say, technically, I’m using the right word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the thing that cracks me up most about John’s ownership of Long Island is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you haven’t been able to claim any ownership of Long Island
⏹️ ▶️ John When you grow up there, that’s the claim. The claim is growing up there makes all the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. But like, maybe it’s unfair because I moved so much when I was growing up and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was only ever in a place for like two, maybe, maybe four years at a time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. You don’t feel like you have an ownership of place like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. But to me, like I don’t own the podunk little town in Western Connecticut that I grew up in. Not in a literal sense. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John Connecticut doesn’t have any culture. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, all right. Now you’re New York is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John showing. Except for
⏹️ ▶️ John rich people in Greenwich who consider themselves New Yorkers. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean the whole left side of the state thinks they’re New
⏹️ ▶️ Marco York. Casey, in the last 36 hours, I have stepped foot on all four of these places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fire Island, Long Island, Manhattan, and the mainland. And John’s still going to override
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, it’s so true. It’s funny to me how devoutly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, in particular, you believe in this balls to bones, and yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so unequivocally outdated information. Now, it may still be accurate,
⏹️ ▶️ John definition of mainland is not an outdated information. This is a definition in the dictionary. Like maybe they’ll change the
⏹️ ▶️ John definition someday. Maybe we’ll say, you know, the existing definition and also Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that doesn’t currently say that. So keep working on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, what my point is that the colloquial usage may be wildly different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. Now may not be maybe the same as when you were.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying it was any different when I was there. I’m saying if it was like that when I was there was also wrong because it’s not the definition
⏹️ ▶️ John of the word and if they’re working on changing the definition they got more work to do because it hasn’t happened yet
⏹️ ▶️ John that literally figuratively people are doing better that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey got in the dictionary
⏹️ ▶️ John literally can also mean figuratively
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can you imagine they got the opposite definition in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there yet mainland is not
⏹️ ▶️ John budging so far so like bi-weekly
⏹️ ▶️ John bi-weekly i think what happened before we were all born but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way i for the record i’m aware that new zealand is actually two islands i just i i didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even have time to go back and correct it then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are so many times on this show that I know, and it’s not just me, that I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that, you know, we either, I misspoke or one of us misspoke or perhaps spoke in a not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accurate way. And I can hear the of all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conversation has moved on and it’s, and then what ends up happening because it’s me is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget to come back and be like, oh, by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the way, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John insert it at the end. That helps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, either way, uh, it’s just, this happens all the time and there’s so many times that I’m like, Oh, I got to make sure I say blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah, blah. And then one of the great parts of being on the show is that I get to listen to the show as it’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so sometimes the conversation will move on and I’ve completely lost the plot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on with regard to going back and filling in whatever blank we need to fill in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco will occasionally move those things back. If I say, Oh yeah, like, Oh, I forgot to say during this section, he’ll put it back
⏹️ ▶️ John in that section, which saves me a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, real time follow up, New Zealand is like a million islands. It turns out