The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► I never know where Caleb's gonna jump in, but I presume it'll be around now.

00:00:04 ◼   ► I do feel, I do feel it's very important that wherever we start to show it's my

00:00:08 ◼   ► voice, because I do feel like if it's yours, half, at least half,

00:00:12 ◼   ► that's true.

00:00:13 ◼   ► That's true.

00:00:13 ◼   ► At least half of our listeners are going to be confused and believe that they've

00:00:18 ◼   ► screwed up.

00:00:18 ◼   ► Hostile takeover, John.

00:00:19 ◼   ► Right.

00:00:20 ◼   ► Actually a fairly large segment of them will probably, would, would, if your voice

00:00:24 ◼   ► came first, probably think it was due to a bug in overcast.

00:00:31 ◼   ► It's true.

00:00:31 ◼   ► Um, all right.

00:00:33 ◼   ► So yeah, you can lead in however you would like.

00:00:36 ◼   ► I mean, uh, the airing is a stretch, but, but no, I think I have a little something

00:00:41 ◼   ► to warm us up, but if, however you want to lead in, I'm happy to roll with.

00:00:44 ◼   ► Oh, I figured we're already rolling.

00:00:46 ◼   ► Oh, okay.

00:00:48 ◼   ► Oh, well, here we go.

00:00:49 ◼   ► Well, whatever's in the show is in the show.

00:00:51 ◼   ► Tell me your story.

00:00:51 ◼   ► Okay.

00:00:52 ◼   ► So I was thinking about how, you know, we've known each other, uh, for a fair bit

00:00:57 ◼   ► of time now, probably about 10 years now, I would say, and, and I like to think of

00:01:01 ◼   ► us as friends and, and I was thinking about why is it that, you know, I haven't

00:01:04 ◼   ► been asked to be on the talk show.

00:01:06 ◼   ► And it occurred to me early on when I started following your work, you know, I

00:01:10 ◼   ► remember hearing you talk about the three keys to success, and this is off the top

00:01:13 ◼   ► of my head, so I might be flubbing it, but I believe the three keys to success as a,

00:01:17 ◼   ► as a blogger or an independent person is, and jump in when you're ready, John, fussy

00:01:22 ◼   ► coffee, a clickety keyboard, clickety-clackety keyboard, and just obscenely

00:01:28 ◼   ► carbonated water.

00:01:29 ◼   ► And it occurred to me that I don't personally care for any of those things,

00:01:33 ◼   ► but I thought, you know what?

00:01:34 ◼   ► I don't know if that's the actual issue here.

00:01:37 ◼   ► I think the actual issue here might be that in, in, I haven't had the pleasure of

00:01:42 ◼   ► catching a drink with you or your delightful wife, Amy Jane, in far too long.

00:01:46 ◼   ► But if I recall correctly, you are a gin martini kind of guy.

00:01:49 ◼   ► And I am not.

00:01:51 ◼   ► And I was wondering, John, if this is the crux of the disagreement here.

00:01:54 ◼   ► That's a good opening.

00:01:57 ◼   ► It is.

00:01:57 ◼   ► It's fine.

00:01:58 ◼   ► And in no particular order in, in HTML parlance, it's an unordered list.

00:02:02 ◼   ► Fussy coffee, extremely carbonated water, and a clicky keyboard.

00:02:07 ◼   ► I do enjoy a gin martini.

00:02:09 ◼   ► I think you are misremembering now.

00:02:11 ◼   ► Oh, okay.

00:02:12 ◼   ► So I'm, I'm, I am, I forget how you put it in religious terms.

00:02:17 ◼   ► I'm going to say agnostic, but there's a better word and it's not coming to mind.

00:02:22 ◼   ► But I am the rare person who, who is an aficionado and greatly enjoy a very nice,

00:02:28 ◼   ► very cold martini before a nice meal.

00:02:31 ◼   ► But I will accept both gin and vodka martini.

00:02:36 ◼   ► The, but the issue is that Amy does not care for gin.

00:02:41 ◼   ► And, uh, therefore I just generally let her order first and then I say, I'll have

00:02:48 ◼   ► what she's having so as to avoid any chance of any confusion because I don't care.

00:02:51 ◼   ► Mm hmm.

00:02:53 ◼   ► Now this drives the gin martini people nuts.

00:02:56 ◼   ► You know, the gin martini people are like the Catholics.

00:03:00 ◼   ► Because, no, this is true.

00:03:03 ◼   ► It is true.

00:03:04 ◼   ► It's they're, they're like the Catholics because that was the original.

00:03:08 ◼   ► That's the old school.

00:03:09 ◼   ► They're angrier and you know, they're big thing.

00:03:12 ◼   ► And they're already, the people out there who are listening, who are, who believe

00:03:16 ◼   ► that a martini should only be made with gin will also say that you don't have,

00:03:19 ◼   ► there is no such thing as a quote unquote gin martini, that a martini by definition

00:03:24 ◼   ► is and only made with gin, not vodka.

00:03:28 ◼   ► And that a vodka martini, they won't, they, they won't even, they don't even like it

00:03:32 ◼   ► when you say vodka martini as a separate drink, they like to say that it's called,

00:03:36 ◼   ► I forget, there's a name.

00:03:37 ◼   ► Oh yes.

00:03:38 ◼   ► I know what you're thinking of and I can't remember what it is either now.

00:03:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:41 ◼   ► But from their perspective, it might as well be called a stinky head.

00:03:44 ◼   ► You know, I will, I will enjoy both.

00:03:49 ◼   ► I believe, you know, I'm open-minded.

00:03:51 ◼   ► There is, I hope it's still available.

00:03:53 ◼   ► I will, I'm making a note right now.

00:03:55 ◼   ► I swear to God in the show notes, there is a wonderful, wonderful website called

00:04:00 ◼   ► the martini FAQ FAQ and it is, it's so old school internet.

00:04:07 ◼   ► I know I've linked to it from daring fireball at least once.

00:04:09 ◼   ► I hope it's still online, but it is written by someone who I believe is much

00:04:14 ◼   ► more of a gin martini aficionado than vodka, but he keeps, he's, he has a very

00:04:21 ◼   ► open mind about the whole, the whole thing and gets into also the other religious

00:04:25 ◼   ► aspect of how much, how much vermouth should be put into a martini.

00:04:30 ◼   ► Which your answer is, I'm a Churchill man that you should pick up a bottle of vermouth

00:04:36 ◼   ► and wave it in the direction of Italy.

00:04:38 ◼   ► That is exactly the right answer in my personal opinion.

00:04:43 ◼   ► Just, just get it somewhere near the shaker.

00:04:45 ◼   ► And I am satisfied with that.

00:04:46 ◼   ► You probably know this cause you've been with us and you've met my wife and, but

00:04:51 ◼   ► she, she is, I'm not making this up.

00:04:53 ◼   ► She is a vodka supertaster.

00:04:55 ◼   ► Ah, interesting.

00:04:57 ◼   ► Okay.

00:04:57 ◼   ► So what is her vodka of choice then?

00:04:59 ◼   ► Belvedere and Grey Goose.

00:05:00 ◼   ► She, she, she likes both.

00:05:02 ◼   ► She does not care for yours, which is Tito's.

00:05:05 ◼   ► She does not care for kettle one at all, which she believes tastes Tito's like.

00:05:10 ◼   ► And she also, you know, and what she like, cause you can go somewhere and you'll say,

00:05:17 ◼   ► like, I would like a Belvedere martini up with a twist and it should be made with

00:05:21 ◼   ► Belvedere and then, you know, occasionally at a lesser establishment, they might make

00:05:25 ◼   ► it with, you know, they might just tell the bartender vodka martini and then they

00:05:29 ◼   ► make it with something else.

00:05:31 ◼   ► And she, she she'll take one sip and just say, ah, jet fuel.

00:05:35 ◼   ► See, that's me with gin.

00:05:38 ◼   ► And I was hoping as much as I'm snarking on, on the gin believers, but I was hoping

00:05:43 ◼   ► you could maybe teach me either verbally or the next time we have the pleasure of

00:05:46 ◼   ► being around each other, teach me how to like gin cause it tastes like grass to me.

00:05:51 ◼   ► Like I just, I can't do it.

00:05:52 ◼   ► It's just, I find it so, so gross and I want to be able to like it.

00:05:58 ◼   ► I want to be more ambivalent about the particular kind of martini I'm having.

00:06:02 ◼   ► And so I, I, I have the desire, but I don't yet have the skill to consume a gin

00:06:09 ◼   ► martini and maybe one day I'll get there.

00:06:11 ◼   ► That seems to be the argument.

00:06:13 ◼   ► You know, again, I'm not religious about it.

00:06:15 ◼   ► You know, I have what you like.

00:06:17 ◼   ► Oh, the martini fact is still up.

00:06:18 ◼   ► Thank God.

00:06:19 ◼   ► I will absolutely 100% put this in the show notes.

00:06:22 ◼   ► No, no joke about it because it's so wonderful.

00:06:25 ◼   ► I hesitate even to link it to you now in the chat because you'll, you'll become

00:06:30 ◼   ► consumed by it.

00:06:31 ◼   ► It's so good.

00:06:31 ◼   ► So you'll have to wait.

00:06:33 ◼   ► Oh, but the basic argument from the gin aficionados is that gin, gin is a

00:06:37 ◼   ► flavorful, what would you call it?

00:06:39 ◼   ► A beverage, a spirit, a spirit, a spirit.

00:06:42 ◼   ► That's it.

00:06:43 ◼   ► And vodka deliberately is sort of anti-flavorful, you know, to me, I've

00:06:48 ◼   ► often described a perfect vodka martini as tasting like an ice cold cloud.

00:06:54 ◼   ► Very, very well put.

00:06:56 ◼   ► I agree.

00:06:56 ◼   ► No, I don't know.

00:06:57 ◼   ► I, I, I, I, honestly, the reason you haven't been on the show is I forget, I

00:07:01 ◼   ► forget about you.

00:07:02 ◼   ► No, that's, that's okay.

00:07:03 ◼   ► I, I, I serve that role and I serve it proudly.

00:07:07 ◼   ► So that is no problem at all.

00:07:08 ◼   ► Really.

00:07:08 ◼   ► That was just an excuse to talk about martinis because I feel like we need, we

00:07:12 ◼   ► it's, it's talk show like rules that we talk about something completely

00:07:17 ◼   ► unrelated to tech.

00:07:18 ◼   ► I did go see a baseball game last summer, so we can fulfill the baseball quota.

00:07:22 ◼   ► If you'd like very quickly but I don't have a lot to say about baseball.

00:07:26 ◼   ► So I was trying to find some common ground that we could work through that

00:07:29 ◼   ► isn't tech.

00:07:30 ◼   ► Well, we have so much we could do.

00:07:32 ◼   ► We could do clicky keyboards.

00:07:34 ◼   ► I'm back on my Apple extended keyboard too.

00:07:37 ◼   ► Now you might've seen this.

00:07:39 ◼   ► We're on at least one Slack together, but I haven't been using an external

00:07:43 ◼   ► because we want to talk.

00:07:44 ◼   ► One of the things I'll spoiler here, we're going to talk about the Apple

00:07:46 ◼   ► studio display.

00:07:47 ◼   ► We could get into it.

00:07:49 ◼   ► But one of the other things that I do a kid, I kid about forgetting about you,

00:07:53 ◼   ► but one of the things that I sympathize with is that your vision is less than

00:07:57 ◼   ► perfect.

00:07:57 ◼   ► And oftentimes, you know, and I think Marco, I think as far as pretty good

00:08:04 ◼   ► vision for his age and, and maybe, maybe Syracuse is in the middle, but oftentimes

00:08:08 ◼   ► when talking about things that you can notice visually, et cetera, you know, I

00:08:12 ◼   ► sympathize and that's part of it.

00:08:13 ◼   ► But long story short, I from, I, I always forget about,

00:08:19 ◼   ► I forget, this is one of those things as you get older, the years blur together.

00:08:22 ◼   ► I forget if my iMac 5k was a 2014 or 2015 purchase.

00:08:26 ◼   ► I'm going to say 2015, but from 2015 until like July, 2019, my desktop computer

00:08:35 ◼   ► was an iMac 5k.

00:08:36 ◼   ► So I'm very familiar with the 5k 27 inch, you know, display panel.

00:08:41 ◼   ► And my keyboard was my beloved Apple extended keyboard to hooked up, you know,

00:08:47 ◼   ► the ADB to USB adapter.

00:08:49 ◼   ► I forget what happened first, but at the end of 2019, we had some renovations at

00:08:56 ◼   ► the house, including completely renovating my office, which before renovation was

00:09:02 ◼   ► really just a room with white walls and nothing in it and just a desk in the

00:09:06 ◼   ► corner.

00:09:07 ◼   ► And actually was sort of our depot for a bunch of boxes that we'd never finished

00:09:12 ◼   ► moving when we moved into this place.

00:09:14 ◼   ► It was really, it did not look like an office.

00:09:17 ◼   ► It looked like more like a basement somehow with windows.

00:09:20 ◼   ► But we had a wonderful, we really, it's just a great experience and timed

00:09:24 ◼   ► perfectly before they finished up literally just by coincidence, right before

00:09:29 ◼   ► the unfortunate incidents of early 2020 hit.

00:09:32 ◼   ► But I had to, while they were renovating, pack up everything, get out of my office

00:09:37 ◼   ► so that they could build the nice office that I have now with built in shelves and

00:09:41 ◼   ► a built in desk.

00:09:42 ◼   ► And if you've ever seen me on occasionally on CNBC or some sort of YouTube, like

00:09:50 ◼   ► Renee's YouTube channel or something, there's these nice slatted walls along the

00:09:55 ◼   ► one side or at my annual talk show from WWDC the last two years, which have been

00:09:59 ◼   ► conducted remotely.

00:10:00 ◼   ► It's, in my opinion, very nice looking office, but it had to be done.

00:10:04 ◼   ► So I had to get out.

00:10:04 ◼   ► And so I packed up the iMac 5k.

00:10:06 ◼   ► Well, shortly thereafter, at that point, I had my second retinal detachment in my

00:10:11 ◼   ► other eye from my first one was back in, I believe again, conflating 2014, 2015, I

00:10:18 ◼   ► think 2014 or 2015.

00:10:20 ◼   ► And the other problem I had, this is true, was in my good eye, which did not have a

00:10:26 ◼   ► retinal detachment in August of 2019.

00:10:28 ◼   ► I that's the one that had a retinal detachment years before that was repaired

00:10:33 ◼   ► wonderfully.

00:10:33 ◼   ► And it truly put me into the 99th percentile of recovery from how bad it was.

00:10:39 ◼   ► But I had a cataract.

00:10:42 ◼   ► You've just had a series of hits when it comes to your eyes.

00:10:45 ◼   ► It's, you know, and they're possibly related.

00:10:48 ◼   ► There's some correlation between people who've heard of cataracts at a bizarrely

00:10:52 ◼   ► young age.

00:10:53 ◼   ► Cause cataracts typically are only really a problem for people in this, in their

00:10:57 ◼   ► seventies.

00:10:58 ◼   ► And I was only in my forties.

00:10:59 ◼   ► Long story short, I needed to be very close to a screen to see it.

00:11:02 ◼   ► And so I do, I forget what happened first, me packing up the iMac for the

00:11:07 ◼   ► renovation or having a retinal detachment and in the aftermath of it while

00:11:11 ◼   ► recovering, needing to be pretty close to a screen, like too close to use desktop

00:11:15 ◼   ► display anyway.

00:11:16 ◼   ► So I have been, that's my way of saying due to vision problems and renovations and

00:11:21 ◼   ► then COVID, using a MacBook Pro of some sort as my entire Macintosh since like the

00:11:30 ◼   ► middle of 2019.

00:11:32 ◼   ► In other words, I had no external display, no external keyboard and haven't.

00:11:36 ◼   ► And now my vision has gotten much better and it's, it's, you know, again, I don't

00:11:39 ◼   ► want to go into the details of it, but my combined vision from the two eyes has

00:11:42 ◼   ► really gotten better.

00:11:43 ◼   ► It continues to improve.

00:11:44 ◼   ► It's, it's, and I can definitely use a 27 inch display in front of me and see it

00:11:51 ◼   ► very well.

00:11:52 ◼   ► But I didn't hook my iMac back up like, and that's sort of like a 2021 thing where

00:11:58 ◼   ► my vision got to that point where, Hey, I can actually do this.

00:12:00 ◼   ► Where I noticed it the first time was when I was testing, reviewing the iMac

00:12:05 ◼   ► 24 inch last year.

00:12:06 ◼   ► I was like, Hey crap, I can see this.

00:12:09 ◼   ► This is, this is actually, you know, that was the first, cause I just don't see, I

00:12:13 ◼   ► don't, you know, I don't go anywhere.

00:12:15 ◼   ► It certainly didn't go anywhere during COVID.

00:12:16 ◼   ► So it's like, I, you know, there was a while early on in the COVID time where I

00:12:21 ◼   ► really just needed to be sort of hunched over and being closer to a MacBook screen

00:12:26 ◼   ► to see it clearly.

00:12:27 ◼   ► Then I tested that iMac.

00:12:28 ◼   ► I was like, Hey, if I use these glasses, I can see this just fine.

00:12:32 ◼   ► This is great.

00:12:33 ◼   ► But what was I going to do?

00:12:34 ◼   ► Right?

00:12:34 ◼   ► Now this leads us to the great external display dilemma of Mac users, right?

00:12:39 ◼   ► I didn't want to buy a 24 inch iMac for myself.

00:12:42 ◼   ► I wanted something bigger and better and really didn't want an iMac.

00:12:46 ◼   ► I really wanted to go full on with a MacBook pro as my one and only one true

00:12:51 ◼   ► Mac, and then have standalone desktop display to connect it to.

00:12:56 ◼   ► But what the hell was I going to buy a year ago?

00:12:59 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:13:00 ◼   ► And it was a mess.

00:13:01 ◼   ► It was an absolute mess.

00:13:02 ◼   ► And so my brief history with this was back in 2016 my last, you know, regular

00:13:08 ◼   ► full-time job, I was doing iOS development for a local firm and I wanted to get one

00:13:14 ◼   ► or more external monitors and I wanted something that is considered retina.

00:13:17 ◼   ► And, you know, retina is kind of a marketing term and it means different

00:13:21 ◼   ► things to different people, depending on who you ask.

00:13:23 ◼   ► But generally speaking, you know, in the history is, you know, from what was it?

00:13:28 ◼   ► The iPhone four, where that went and it doubled the pixel density and Apple

00:13:32 ◼   ► said, Oh, look at this retina screen.

00:13:33 ◼   ► And then it came to the MacBook pro and, and eventually to the iMac and, and

00:13:38 ◼   ► well, actually the iMac pro as well.

00:13:39 ◼   ► So it's this idea that you basically get just incredibly, incredibly crisp

00:13:44 ◼   ► displays by having just tremendous amount of resolution in a not

00:13:48 ◼   ► tremendously oversized screen.

00:13:51 ◼   ► And in 2017, I was looking for an external monitor and I started looking at,

00:13:56 ◼   ► okay, well, what's available.

00:13:58 ◼   ► And around the same time, Mark Edwards was looking into the same thing and he

00:14:03 ◼   ► came up with kind of a list of options.

00:14:05 ◼   ► And I went through his list and came to the conclusion that there's basically

00:14:09 ◼   ► in 2017, there were only five options.

00:14:12 ◼   ► And it was the two LG ultra finds a couple of Dells and an LG, just

00:14:18 ◼   ► unremarkable LG 4k monitor.

00:14:19 ◼   ► And what I ended up doing was we tried at work.

00:14:22 ◼   ► We tried to get one of these 5k Dells if memory serves and it arrived

00:14:27 ◼   ► DOA for whatever reason.

00:14:28 ◼   ► And so we said, ah, the heck with it.

00:14:30 ◼   ► It was really expensive anyway.

00:14:31 ◼   ► And so what we got, I ended up with one and then eventually a second, very

00:14:35 ◼   ► unremarkable, it was like 300 bucks.

00:14:37 ◼   ► 4k monitor, the LG 24 UD 58-B rolls right off the tongue.

00:14:42 ◼   ► And so that was 2017, John.

00:14:44 ◼   ► It's a wonderful day, but really it's just delightful.

00:14:47 ◼   ► It's like, it's like, it's like LG outsourced their naming to Sony.

00:14:51 ◼   ► Right.

00:14:52 ◼   ► It's so true.

00:14:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:53 ◼   ► What is it?

00:14:54 ◼   ► The WH 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 or whatever that everyone loves the headphones.

00:14:57 ◼   ► So that was 2017.

00:14:59 ◼   ► And at that point at home, I had either an iMac or nine, I

00:15:01 ◼   ► think it was a regular 5k iMac.

00:15:03 ◼   ► Eventually I got the iMac pro.

00:15:04 ◼   ► And then in roughly November of last year, I decided to go all in on, on Apple

00:15:10 ◼   ► Silicon and I got an M1 max, a 14 inch MacBook pro, which I adore.

00:15:16 ◼   ► I cannot tell you how much I love this thing.

00:15:18 ◼   ► It is just one of the, if not the best computer I've ever owned in my life.

00:15:22 ◼   ► But Hey, I'd like to hook it up to something.

00:15:25 ◼   ► So here it is in December of last year, I started surveying the situation again.

00:15:30 ◼   ► And I started looking around and I realized, well, Dell has discontinued

00:15:34 ◼   ► their two reasonable monitors, which leaves us with the aforementioned 24UD58-B,

00:15:41 ◼   ► which is the $300 4k LG, the LG Ultrafine 4k, the LG Ultrafine 5k, and the Pro Display

00:15:48 ◼   ► XDR, which cost as much as my darn computer and that's without a stand.

00:15:52 ◼   ► And so it occurred to me like, this is a mess.

00:15:55 ◼   ► This is an absolute mess.

00:15:57 ◼   ► How is it that Apple is just completely ignoring consumer level needs in this regard?

00:16:04 ◼   ► It just boggled my mind.

00:16:06 ◼   ► And so I wrote a post about it, which you were kind enough to link to.

00:16:09 ◼   ► And as of, you know, three weeks ago or whatever it was four weeks ago before the

00:16:13 ◼   ► most recent event, that was it.

00:16:14 ◼   ► It was a $300 LG, the $700 LG Ultrafine, which depending on who you ask,

00:16:19 ◼   ► doesn't even qualify as a retina.

00:16:20 ◼   ► I believe it does, but there's some nuance there.

00:16:23 ◼   ► The LG Ultrafine, which is what I ended up getting secondhand, which is fine.

00:16:27 ◼   ► And the Pro Display XDR.

00:16:29 ◼   ► And that's it.

00:16:30 ◼   ► That's all you had.

00:16:30 ◼   ► And it was just, it was, it was a disgrace.

00:16:33 ◼   ► I mean, maybe I'm being a bit dramatic, but it was very, very frustrating.

00:16:36 ◼   ► Which one do you, did you just say some people say is retina?

00:16:40 ◼   ► So the LG Ultrafine 4k, there's a bit of a history here.

00:16:44 ◼   ► How big is that?

00:16:45 ◼   ► Is that 27 or 24?

00:16:46 ◼   ► It's 24.

00:16:47 ◼   ► Now, in my personal opinion, with my garbage eyes, I can see if you were to hand

00:16:53 ◼   ► me a 27 inch display and run it at 4k, I can see pixels.

00:16:57 ◼   ► And I'm basically, long story short, my eyes are pretty decent when I use hard

00:17:01 ◼   ► contact lenses, when I don't have contact lenses.

00:17:04 ◼   ► And even if I have Coke bottle glasses, I'm a mess.

00:17:06 ◼   ► But with, with my contacts, I'm pretty good.

00:17:08 ◼   ► And if you hand me a 27 inch 4k, I can tell.

00:17:12 ◼   ► If you hand me a 24 inch 4k, which is what this 24UD58B is, which is what the

00:17:19 ◼   ► LG Ultrafine 4k is now, in my personal estimation, I still classify that as retina.

00:17:24 ◼   ► However, when the Ultrafine 4k first came out, it was only 22 inches.

00:17:28 ◼   ► And the Delta in DPI or PPI between the two, between 22 and 24 inches, if you're,

00:17:35 ◼   ► if it was 22 inches at whatever resolution 4k is, I forget off the top of my head,

00:17:39 ◼   ► it is absolutely over, I think it's 200, 218 or something like that points per inch.

00:17:44 ◼   ► At 24 inches, it's like 190 or something like that.

00:17:48 ◼   ► So strictly speaking, it's just barely below the threshold.

00:17:53 ◼   ► And if you look at my original post from 2017, way at the bottom, I cribbed from

00:17:58 ◼   ► Mark Edwards with his permission, a chart that he made, and you can see down there,

00:18:03 ◼   ► there's that he put good for retina and it's a little green sliver and then good

00:18:07 ◼   ► for non red as an even smaller green sliver.

00:18:09 ◼   ► And in the middle is what he calls the bad zone.

00:18:11 ◼   ► And so at 24 inches, I don't see an example of it here actually, but at 24

00:18:16 ◼   ► inches, oh, there at the very bottom, the Dell P2415Q, which ran 3840 by 2160,

00:18:23 ◼   ► which I believe is normal 4k resolution at 24 inches is 183.6 points per inch.

00:18:28 ◼   ► And so strictly speaking, that's in Mark Edwards' bad zone, but to my

00:18:32 ◼   ► personal opinion, it's sufficient.

00:18:35 ◼   ► It's good enough.

00:18:36 ◼   ► But to be strictly speaking, you know, 200 plus points per inch, you basically

00:18:40 ◼   ► need to get a 27 inch 5k monitor.

00:18:42 ◼   ► That's about the only choice you've got.

00:18:44 ◼   ► And as a Mac user, someone who doesn't ever touch PCs anymore, I want a pixel

00:18:50 ◼   ► doubled, you know, 4 or 5k display because that's what Mac OS is designed to use.

00:18:55 ◼   ► And I know that the PC people, if any of them are listening, are like,

00:18:58 ◼   ► well, what are you talking about?

00:18:59 ◼   ► I can get a 350 inch ultra wide screen, you know, 9 bazillion pixel display,

00:19:04 ◼   ► but oftentimes those humongous, humongous displays actually

00:19:08 ◼   ► aren't very high resolution.

00:19:10 ◼   ► And Mac OS doesn't really, from what I've gathered, handle that terribly well.

00:19:15 ◼   ► With Mac OS, it's basically 1x or 2x and nothing in between.

00:19:18 ◼   ► And, and so if that's your criteria, then there's very little on the market.

00:19:24 ◼   ► Like I said, there's the two LGs, the two LG Ultrafines, the other LG,

00:19:30 ◼   ► which I have one at home now, and the XDR up until the studio display.

00:19:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:35 ◼   ► It's at 24 inches.

00:19:38 ◼   ► I'm with you.

00:19:39 ◼   ► I think it's sort of like just barely in the door should count as retina.

00:19:46 ◼   ► But yeah, 4k at 27 inches is truly in the no person's land for Mac users.

00:19:53 ◼   ► Agreed.

00:19:53 ◼   ► Where it's a hundred, I've got a solver worksheet here that I've, I

00:19:58 ◼   ► knew we were going to talk about this.

00:20:00 ◼   ► It's a hundred and, and, and again, these, these hundreds, you say a hundred,

00:20:03 ◼   ► I say 171 pixels per inch.

00:20:05 ◼   ► It could be 173.

00:20:07 ◼   ► It could be 169 or something like that because it's not exactly like, we know

00:20:12 ◼   ► exactly how many pixels there are, but we don't know if it's really exactly 24

00:20:17 ◼   ► inches diagonal or like 20, 23.75 or 24.2 or something like that.

00:20:23 ◼   ► So like, like my math for Apple's pro display XDR, which is 6k at 32 inches.

00:20:30 ◼   ► My math, you know, quick, you know, solver back of the envelope math says

00:20:36 ◼   ► two 16 pixels per inch and Apple advertises it as two 18, which is what

00:20:41 ◼   ► they say for everybody.

00:20:42 ◼   ► And that probably is not them lying about or exaggerating how many pixels

00:20:47 ◼   ► per inch, because who really cares if it's 216 or two 18, it probably means

00:20:51 ◼   ► that it's really like a 31.9 inch diagonal or something like that.

00:20:57 ◼   ► But, but it turns out two 18 pixels per inch is exactly the same pixels per inch

00:21:03 ◼   ► as a bunch of other Mac retina displays, including the new studio display.

00:21:08 ◼   ► It's by, or I forget if the Mac books come out to there, but it doesn't matter.

00:21:12 ◼   ► It's for the arms, for the distance, the comfortable distance that Apple

00:21:17 ◼   ► thinks people sit in front of a desktop display.

00:21:20 ◼   ► Two 18 is the number they're clearly targeting 192, which would be 4k at 24.

00:21:27 ◼   ► It's like, yeah, it's close.

00:21:29 ◼   ► I think what the effect would be that everything would look a little bigger.

00:21:34 ◼   ► Right?

00:21:34 ◼   ► Like with fewer pixels per inch, you'd get retina resolution, but it would seem

00:21:39 ◼   ► less dense, which, you know, some people might enjoy, but when you go.

00:21:43 ◼   ► 4k at 27, which is where you have more options on the market.

00:21:48 ◼   ► Oh, absolutely.

00:21:49 ◼   ► Because of the PC world, it's only 172 ish pixels per inch, which is really a no,

00:21:56 ◼   ► no person's land between two X at two X retina and the old one X, you know, it's

00:22:03 ◼   ► like, do you run it?

00:22:04 ◼   ► I don't even know what MacOS does.

00:22:06 ◼   ► I guess it runs it as retina and everything looks tiny and you kind of need

00:22:11 ◼   ► to use the scaling options and the scaling options again, that's one of those things

00:22:15 ◼   ► that I can no longer see.

00:22:16 ◼   ► Like when I turn on the scaling options on MacOS, you know, whether it's a Mac book

00:22:22 ◼   ► or whatever, I don't really see it.

00:22:25 ◼   ► I, if I take off my glasses and get close enough to the screen where I have to worry,

00:22:30 ◼   ► you know, that I'm going to like, get some grease from my nose.

00:22:33 ◼   ► Yes.

00:22:34 ◼   ► Yes.

00:22:34 ◼   ► I can totally see, oh, I see this as fakey fake or whatever, but I don't see it, you

00:22:39 ◼   ► know, but I totally remember when my eyes were younger and much better that I would

00:22:44 ◼   ► absolutely be able to see, oh, that's scaled.

00:22:46 ◼   ► That's not actually pixel for pixel.

00:22:48 ◼   ► I can, you know, I could see that.

00:22:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:51 ◼   ► And listening to you, it's, you sound utterly bananas, but I agree with you and

00:22:56 ◼   ► I've lived it.

00:22:56 ◼   ► Like it's, what you're saying is the difference between 150 to 170 points per

00:23:00 ◼   ► inch and 190 to 220 ish.

00:23:03 ◼   ► Like that is really that big a deal.

00:23:05 ◼   ► Really, John?

00:23:06 ◼   ► But it is like, I, when we were doing the survey of monitors, when I was at work, we

00:23:10 ◼   ► got in a couple of 27 inch 4Ks and I took one look at it and admittedly my eyes were

00:23:15 ◼   ► younger at the time, but I took one look at it and was like, uh, nope, nope, nope,

00:23:18 ◼   ► nope, nope, nope.

00:23:19 ◼   ► That's no good.

00:23:19 ◼   ► And I know it sounds utterly bananas to hear the two of us say it, but it really

00:23:25 ◼   ► does make a dramatic, dramatic difference.

00:23:26 ◼   ► And you hit the nail on the head that at 27 inches in 4K, there are a plethora of

00:23:31 ◼   ► options.

00:23:31 ◼   ► There's a gazillion options, but, but to my opinion, 27 inches at 4K, it's just not

00:23:38 ◼   ► enough resolution.

00:23:38 ◼   ► You really, really, really need 5K at that size.

00:23:42 ◼   ► And so whenever I posted, you know, the original post in 2017 and then most

00:23:46 ◼   ► recently in December of last year, I would get a lot of feedback from people saying,

00:23:50 ◼   ► what about, what about, what about, what about?

00:23:51 ◼   ► And it was all, you know, well-intentioned, but I don't think there was a single

00:23:55 ◼   ► monitor available in the United States anyway, that met the criteria.

00:23:59 ◼   ► And I don't think the criteria is that ridiculous.

00:24:03 ◼   ► It's just that PCs don't seem to have the same needs and they don't seem to do as

00:24:09 ◼   ► well in my limited experience with high DPI monitors or at least, or it's very,

00:24:14 ◼   ► it's very inconsistent from what I'm told.

00:24:16 ◼   ► And so it's just not something that PC users tend to care about.

00:24:20 ◼   ► And, you know, the market for a Mac is, or for Macs is much better now than it's

00:24:24 ◼   ► ever been, but there's still a heck of a lot more PCs in the world than Macs.

00:24:27 ◼   ► And, and certainly if you're wanting something that's this fancy, that's this,

00:24:31 ◼   ► you know, high resolution or high DPI, you're probably going to have to spend a

00:24:35 ◼   ► little bit of money.

00:24:36 ◼   ► That's why I still think the sleeper hit of my research is this preposterously

00:24:42 ◼   ► named 24UD58-B because it's only 300 bucks and it's, it's a very "eh" monitor.

00:24:48 ◼   ► Like nothing about it is particularly magnificent, but it gets you what I would

00:24:53 ◼   ► consider to be, you know, retina screen for only 300 bucks because the next best

00:24:58 ◼   ► option, in my personal opinion, as of a couple of weeks ago, is the studio

00:25:02 ◼   ► display. And I skipped deliberately over the slightly cheaper LG Ultrafine 5K

00:25:08 ◼   ► because it's just not great. And we can, we can pull on that thread if you're

00:25:12 ◼   ► interested, but it's just not great.

00:25:13 ◼   ► Well, let's come back to it cause I want to come back, but let's, as good as time

00:25:17 ◼   ► as any to take our first break.

00:25:18 ◼   ► Thank our first sponsor, our good friends at Linode.

00:25:20 ◼   ► Oh man.

00:25:21 ◼   ► Visit linode.com/thetalkshow and see why Linode has been voted the top

00:25:27 ◼   ► infrastructure as a service provider by both G2 and TrustRadius from their

00:25:32 ◼   ► award-winning support, which is offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365

00:25:37 ◼   ► days a year. You want to get support on Christmas? You can get support on

00:25:41 ◼   ► Christmas. You want to get support on the 4th of July? You could do it.

00:25:44 ◼   ► Somebody's there. Every level of user. You could just have one of their nano

00:25:49 ◼   ► accounts, which is like five bucks a month. You get the same top tier support

00:25:54 ◼   ► as people who like enterprise customers who are spending a fortune to get their

00:25:58 ◼   ► great, huge, huge projects hosted at Linode. They've got the ease of use, ease

00:26:02 ◼   ► of setup. It is clear why developers have been trusting Linode for projects,

00:26:06 ◼   ► both big and small since 2003 deploy your entire application stack with

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00:26:15 ◼   ► everything yourself with supported tools like Terraform. They offer the best

00:26:21 ◼   ► price to performance value for all compute instances, including GPUs, as

00:26:25 ◼   ► well as block storage, Kubernetes, and our upcoming bare metal release. Linode

00:26:29 ◼   ► makes cloud computing fast, simple, and affordable, allowing you to focus on

00:26:33 ◼   ► your projects, not your infrastructure. Visit linode.com/talkshow, create a

00:26:37 ◼   ► free account. You can use your Google, your GitHub account, or just use your

00:26:42 ◼   ► email address, but go to that address, linode.com/talkshow. You'll get a

00:26:46 ◼   ► hundred bucks in credit. I host Daring Fireball at Linode, and I just I'm

00:26:52 ◼   ► ahead of time. I'm being, I'm trying to be more responsible as an adult, Casey.

00:26:56 ◼   ► I know I am. Hey, I got my taxes done. I went to my account and I've been going

00:27:01 ◼   ► to the same accountant since I was like busted, broke out of college doing just

00:27:05 ◼   ► minimal freelance work to support my video game habit in the late nineties.

00:27:10 ◼   ► Great accountant here in Philadelphia. I love the guy, but I'm often very late. I

00:27:15 ◼   ► got, I got my taxes done already. He complained to me because when we got to

00:27:20 ◼   ► the, you know, what do I, what, what does the Daring Fireball company pay for

00:27:24 ◼   ► server hosting? He was like, that's it? He literally mentioned that. He was like,

00:27:29 ◼   ► come on. That's delightful. And it is funny to have you visit your accountant

00:27:33 ◼   ► and then all of a sudden you start, you know, you start wishing you were paying

00:27:37 ◼   ► more for hosting. It's like, we can write that off. Oh man. Well, unfortunately, my

00:27:42 ◼   ► accountant is not as big a fan of Linode's pricing as I am. Indeed. The

00:27:46 ◼   ► display, basically, I forget when Apple first said, look, our solution to

00:27:52 ◼   ► external displays is this LG thing that we help them build supposedly uses the

00:27:57 ◼   ► same, certainly has the same specs, the same 27 inch 5k panel as the IMAX, right?

00:28:03 ◼   ► Because that's the thing that has been in this whole desert stretch of Apple not

00:28:10 ◼   ► making their own just external displays for Mac users. And then coming back with

00:28:17 ◼   ► only the $6,000 effectively, right? Because you do really, you don't get any

00:28:23 ◼   ► stand at all, or it's like you have to pay a thousand for the adjustable stand

00:28:26 ◼   ► with the XDR.

00:28:27 ◼   ► Like for five,

00:28:28 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure it's, it's five grand just for the panel and then a thousand

00:28:32 ◼   ► bucks if you want to, to use the official Apple stand. Now you could bring the

00:28:36 ◼   ► world's crummiest, you know, visa, visa, whatever it is, mount to it, but it seems

00:28:40 ◼   ► a little wrong to put this $5,000 beautiful piece of almost art on like the

00:28:44 ◼   ► world's crappiest $20 visa mount.

00:28:47 ◼   ► Pro-standard visa mount adapter sold separately. I guess so. Well, all right.

00:28:55 ◼   ► It is a great display, right? And we'll come back to it. But you know, I'm with

00:29:01 ◼   ► you. And sometimes listening to ATP, I do, I do feel you're a little, you're a

00:29:05 ◼   ► little too stingy. I feel like you're,

00:29:08 ◼   ► you're a little understandable. Oh my God. The visa mount is a, it's $200.

00:29:14 ◼   ► Speaking of stingy, it's $200 for the freaking visa mount. Oh my good gracious.

00:29:18 ◼   ► That is bananas. It really wasn't, it wasn't something I was going to consider

00:29:23 ◼   ► because it's, it's clearly beyond my needs, but it really, you know, an Apple's,

00:29:27 ◼   ► you know, answer even before the XDR though was, look, we worked with LG. We

00:29:30 ◼   ► made this thing that is meant for Mac users. There are on the surface, a lot of

00:29:35 ◼   ► similarities to the studio display. It has the same ports. Right. There's three

00:29:40 ◼   ► USB-C ports, one Thunderbolt, I believe three port, and that's the one you

00:29:46 ◼   ► connect. That's the only connection to drive the display. No HDMI, nothing else.

00:29:52 ◼   ► It's, you know, do you want to use something like that? You know, welcome to

00:29:55 ◼   ► dongle town. And it's supposed to do things like just wake up automatically

00:30:00 ◼   ► when your Mac wakes up, et cetera, and so forth. I remember when I first saw it, I

00:30:05 ◼   ► think it was the event that was in Brooklyn. Remember they held, it was like,

00:30:11 ◼   ► uh, yeah, I was actually there for that one. That was the only one I've been to.

00:30:16 ◼   ► That's right. Yeah. Of course you remember, I remember you, the three of you guys

00:30:20 ◼   ► were seated a couple of rows behind me and Panzareno, me and Panzareno, not

00:30:25 ◼   ► because we're special. Like somehow we just, it wasn't like anybody from Apple

00:30:30 ◼   ► was like, Oh, John Gruber and Matthew Panzareno, let's escort you up front.

00:30:33 ◼   ► Somehow though, you know, and you, you were there. It is like, it, it, it's like

00:30:39 ◼   ► you're waiting and, and it's very nice. And they've got, you know, I don't know,

00:30:42 ◼   ► coffee in Danish and stuff for the people who've been invited and you can

00:30:46 ◼   ► wait. And then the doors open and it's not like a stampede, but it is sort of,

00:30:51 ◼   ► you don't know what to expect because they don't tell you, everybody from the

00:30:55 ◼   ► media who's been invited, you'll be seated on the left and here's what to do.

00:30:59 ◼   ► And you know, there's lots of seats in the middle up front that are all reserved

00:31:03 ◼   ► for VIPs, you know, people from Pixar who, you know, Leon Kritz is here for this

00:31:08 ◼   ► event. Well, guess what? He's getting a real good seat in the second row. You

00:31:11 ◼   ► know, Laureen Powell-Jobs is here. Oh, well guess what? She gets a good seat.

00:31:15 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:31:16 ◼   ► I think she's earned it.

00:31:17 ◼   ► Yeah. It's like, Oh, where do I go? What do I do? What do I get to see? And then

00:31:20 ◼   ► somehow Panzareno and I wound up in like the third row for that one. And, and we

00:31:25 ◼   ► weren't really on the left, but we weren't surrounded by media people. We

00:31:31 ◼   ► were surrounded by Apple retail employees who had been invited. Apparently the deal

00:31:37 ◼   ► was that like, I don't know if they flew people in or if it was just like regional

00:31:42 ◼   ► Northeast stuff, but it was actually somebody from a suburban Philly store who

00:31:46 ◼   ► was right behind us and broke up a chitchat and it was very nice. But

00:31:50 ◼   ► apparently it was like a reward for a very successful Apple retail store

00:31:55 ◼   ► employees. And their managers got to say, Hey, you've been doing a great job.

00:31:59 ◼   ► We've got a couple passes to this event in Brooklyn. You guys can go. And it was,

00:32:04 ◼   ► you know, on the one hand, it was a very nice treat. They, these people were

00:32:08 ◼   ► incredibly enthusiastic. They were so happy to be there. It was amazing. And,

00:32:13 ◼   ► but it was also good for, you could see it from Apple's perspective where it

00:32:16 ◼   ► made it seem like the audience was crazy enthusiastic. You know, it was

00:32:19 ◼   ► like the Beatles were in town. You know, it was, it worked out for everybody.

00:32:22 ◼   ► Apple got an event where it seemed like the audience was very happy because the

00:32:26 ◼   ► people in the media, some people, you know, they, they either don't clap

00:32:30 ◼   ► because they feel like it's inappropriate as a member of the media to like cheer

00:32:34 ◼   ► and clap for a thing that they're there to objectively observe, or they don't

00:32:39 ◼   ► even think that far. They're just typing their live blog thing, right? Like,

00:32:44 ◼   ► even if they don't have like a personal policy against applauding or something

00:32:48 ◼   ► like that, they, you know, so Apple, you know, wants to get the applause. So

00:32:51 ◼   ► they put in people who are going to do that. Anyway, you were there. They,

00:32:55 ◼   ► remember the hands-on area, they had the LG displays, right?

00:32:58 ◼   ► You know, I can't remember if they had the LG displays. I remember the big

00:33:02 ◼   ► thing for that day was the iPad Pro, because that was when I believe it was

00:33:06 ◼   ► the first of the iPads with Face ID at that point, because this was October

00:33:10 ◼   ► 2018. And the new MacBook Air, if I'm not mistaken, the new Retina MacBook Air,

00:33:16 ◼   ► I think was also that event. I'm not trying to say that the LG Ultra Find

00:33:20 ◼   ► wasn't there. I just, I don't recall one way or the other. I remember the

00:33:24 ◼   ► big haul.

00:33:24 ◼   ► No, it was definitely there because there was some Mac news too, and they,

00:33:28 ◼   ► including, you know, it wasn't even on stage, but like one of the news items

00:33:32 ◼   ► of the day was this 15-inch, I guess at the time was the big size, I almost

00:33:36 ◼   ► said 16, but the 15-inch MacBook Pro got a new build to order option for a

00:33:42 ◼   ► higher-end embedded graphics card, you know. And I remember palling around

00:33:47 ◼   ► the hands-on area with Austin Mann, the photographer, who often does these

00:33:52 ◼   ► amazing, amazing, oh, you know, it makes me sick because he's like, you

00:33:57 ◼   ► know, he's like on safari, you know, somewhere in Africa shooting pictures

00:34:02 ◼   ► of lions with the iPhone 13. And meanwhile, I'm like shooting a picture

00:34:06 ◼   ► of a coffee mug on my desk. Right. Exactly. But we were there and we were

00:34:11 ◼   ► talking and they had light room on display to talk about like the

00:34:16 ◼   ► improvements to something and it was all being shown on these LG displays

00:34:19 ◼   ► and they looked fine, right? I mean, they look, you know, but I just

00:34:23 ◼   ► remember looking at the build quality of them. Like the display itself was

00:34:27 ◼   ► fine and it roughly to my eyes as good as the iMac 5K. I'm sure, I've seen

00:34:33 ◼   ► people say it's actually not as good as the iMac 5K in terms of evenness

00:34:37 ◼   ► from corner to corner, but the thing that I could instantly imagine was

00:34:40 ◼   ► this is sort of like a janky build quality. Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

00:34:47 ◼   ► So I got one of these secondhand, you know, late last year and so I got it

00:34:51 ◼   ► for steel, which is why, perhaps why I'm more enthusiastic and a bit of an

00:34:55 ◼   ► apologist for the ultra fine. It is a masterclass in mediocrity. Like

00:35:00 ◼   ► everything about it is mediocre. The screen, the panel itself is pretty

00:35:04 ◼   ► darn good, but everything around that panel is mediocre on a good day. The

00:35:09 ◼   ► build quality is eh. The stand that it comes with was super wobbly and

00:35:15 ◼   ► I don't think it was properly, you know, counterweighted or sprung or

00:35:19 ◼   ► what have you, so that it always wanted to either rise or fall depending on

00:35:22 ◼   ► how many things I, you know, clamped to the back of it in the USB-C ports.

00:35:26 ◼   ► The speakers are preposterously bad and one of my favorite things about my

00:35:31 ◼   ► beloved LG Ultrafine is that as you volume up between the third volume

00:35:37 ◼   ► notch and the fourth volume notch, the ramp between the third and the fourth,

00:35:41 ◼   ► you know, squares or whatever they are, the volume ramp between the two is

00:35:45 ◼   ► like quadruple. I am being a little hyperbolic, but it's, you know, it goes,

00:35:49 ◼   ► it's kind of a whisper at low and one and two and three and then at four

00:35:53 ◼   ► it's like this. It's ridiculous. It's like it's so much louder between three

00:35:57 ◼   ► and four. And that was, I believe, one of the things that was supposedly

00:36:00 ◼   ► going to come from a firmware update, which I did do and it didn't make a

00:36:04 ◼   ► difference. And speaking of firmware updates, Jon, did you know that it

00:36:07 ◼   ► wasn't until like a month ago that their LG display manager, screen manager,

00:36:11 ◼   ► was able to run on M1 Macs that have been around for what, like a year and

00:36:14 ◼   ► a half now, two years now? So it's, everything about it is mediocre. And I

00:36:19 ◼   ► don't have the visceral like repulsion that it seems Marco does by having a

00:36:24 ◼   ► little tiny understated LG logo on the front. Like would I prefer it to be?

00:36:28 ◼   ► Not there, of course, but I don't find it to be particularly offensive. But it's

00:36:32 ◼   ► just, it was, it's a pretty good panel, but everything around it is just meh on

00:36:38 ◼   ► a good day. And mine, shortly after I got it again, I got it second hand.

00:36:43 ◼   ► Shortly after I got it, the main Thunderbolt connection so that, you know,

00:36:47 ◼   ► USB-C looking, but it's actually a Thunderbolt connection, seemed to

00:36:49 ◼   ► dislodge itself from the inside. And so I needed to ship my monitor all the

00:36:55 ◼   ► way to California. Yeah, all the way to California. And then it sat for a

00:36:59 ◼   ► while, which I mean, it was the holidays and COVID and so on. So I really

00:37:02 ◼   ► shouldn't complain, but it sat for like a month and then eventually came back.

00:37:05 ◼   ► But the whole, I could go on a three hour rant about how awful that repair

00:37:09 ◼   ► process was. And honestly, for that alone, that's, I'm so excited to be able

00:37:15 ◼   ► to have, and mine is coming in a couple of weeks, have an Apple Studio

00:37:18 ◼   ► display. And for no other reason than because if something goes wrong, I put

00:37:22 ◼   ► it in my car and drive 10 minutes. And then I hand it to someone who will

00:37:26 ◼   ► presumably fix it in a fairly timely manner. Like that alone, that the repair

00:37:31 ◼   ► story for those of us who are lucky enough to live close to at least one

00:37:34 ◼   ► Apple store, that repair story is enough to make me more than interested,

00:37:39 ◼   ► let alone everything else that's great about it.

00:37:41 ◼   ► I often think, and I think that this whole saga of external displays

00:37:45 ◼   ► epitomizes it. I often get the feeling that inside Apple, it's not that

00:37:53 ◼   ► they're unaware of the broader computing world in the PC market, that

00:37:57 ◼   ► people who work at Apple are so, it's not an insular thing. It's just that

00:38:03 ◼   ► the sort of people who go to work at Apple and get to the point where

00:38:07 ◼   ► they're successful enough in the company where they can be decision

00:38:10 ◼   ► makers who are involved with like, should we keep making our own

00:38:15 ◼   ► displays? Should we trust it to the third, you know, they're so of a

00:38:21 ◼   ► like-mindedness in their priorities for what matters. Like, what do

00:38:26 ◼   ► people really want? You know? And I think it seems so obvious to people

00:38:30 ◼   ► who are drawn to Apple and Apple platforms that retina for phones, for

00:38:35 ◼   ► tablets, the watch has always been retina, right? The watch is a product

00:38:39 ◼   ► that debuted at a resolution that you can't see pixels unless, you know,

00:38:45 ◼   ► you have incredibly good eyes or a loop or something like that. This is

00:38:49 ◼   ► so obvious, you know, that you would like to, it's like saying, would you

00:38:54 ◼   ► like to be healthy or unhealthy? Well, it's obvious, you know, you would

00:38:59 ◼   ► like to be healthy, right? It's like, would you like a retina display or

00:39:03 ◼   ► not a retina display? Well, obviously you'd like a retina display. And I

00:39:06 ◼   ► kind of feel like that mindset blinded them where they thought, you know,

00:39:10 ◼   ► we can get out of this market, we'll help LG build one as sort of a

00:39:14 ◼   ► reference. And then, you know, the other companies, you know, the Dells

00:39:18 ◼   ► and the ACES and whoever else makes displays will pick up the slack and,

00:39:23 ◼   ► you know, Mac users will have a variety of third party. It's like

00:39:27 ◼   ► printers, right? Apple hasn't made printers for decades now. There's

00:39:31 ◼   ► plenty of printers out there. I still sort of wish they made printers,

00:39:34 ◼   ► frankly. Because printers are so bad. I forget what I did. I turned

00:39:38 ◼   ► something on on my Eero that you would never ever think some option in

00:39:42 ◼   ► the Eero. I forget what the hell it was, but you wouldn't think it would

00:39:45 ◼   ► have anything. All of a sudden my HP printer wouldn't print name. It

00:39:47 ◼   ► wouldn't connect to Wi-Fi anymore. And it was like, what? And it wasn't

00:39:50 ◼   ► like I turned it like, oh, only use, you know, Wi-Fi 6 or whatever the

00:39:55 ◼   ► latest standard is. And my, you know, eight year old laser jet doesn't see

00:39:59 ◼   ► it. It was something else, but it was like, God, I hate this fucking thing.

00:40:02 ◼   ► But anyway, I think that they thought the monitors thing would be like the

00:40:07 ◼   ► printers thing where it's like, ah, you know, there'll be plenty of

00:40:10 ◼   ► options for Mac users to choose from. Well, it turned out they're like, as

00:40:13 ◼   ► you delineated very well, there were like two and really only one, the LG

00:40:20 ◼   ► 27 inch 5K ultra fine, really the one and only Dell had something that was

00:40:26 ◼   ► maybe there. And then they got out of the business. Like, so not only like

00:40:30 ◼   ► the opposite, the opposite of what I think Apple thought would happen,

00:40:34 ◼   ► which is that this is where the industry is going. Look at how great

00:40:37 ◼   ► these displays are. The whole industry is going to go in this direction. We

00:40:40 ◼   ► don't need to make one. And instead they went the opposite direction and

00:40:44 ◼   ► the PC world concluded, Nope, PC users do not want 5K 27 inch displays.

00:40:50 ◼   ► So we won't make them. Yeah. Cause why would we bother for the 15 Apple

00:40:56 ◼   ► nerds that really care about this stuff? And I mean, it kind of makes

00:40:59 ◼   ► sense. Like, you know, if you look at it on the surface of, of the people

00:41:02 ◼   ► that I know, you know, many, many, many of my friends, I'm not talking like

00:41:06 ◼   ► our mutual friends. I'm talking about like regular run of the mill friends

00:41:08 ◼   ► of mine and family members. All a ton of them are on max. In fact, I can

00:41:13 ◼   ► think of very few that are on PCs these days, but very, very few of them

00:41:17 ◼   ► have an external display at all. And the only person I can think of that

00:41:22 ◼   ► cared enough to get the LG ultra fine other than me is my dad. And he

00:41:26 ◼   ► probably did that because he went to Apple's website and was looking for

00:41:30 ◼   ► whatever Apple recommended. Like I don't remember he and I talking about

00:41:34 ◼   ► it before he bought it. I think he just bought it because he figured that

00:41:37 ◼   ► was what Apple advised him to do, which at the time was true.

00:41:40 ◼   ► I'm somewhat familiar with the PC market for this because my son, Jonas,

00:41:44 ◼   ► has a gaming PC, which we got him two years ago, and I helped him spec it

00:41:49 ◼   ► out. He doesn't regret it. And I've asked him and he doesn't, but he's

00:41:54 ◼   ► actually got three displays hooked up to it. Now I forget the model names.

00:41:59 ◼   ► It doesn't matter because they're not of interest, but it's like an Asus

00:42:02 ◼   ► something or another. That's I think like a 24 inch 4k panel, which I

00:42:07 ◼   ► encouraged him to get. I thought you don't want something that's not

00:42:11 ◼   ► retina. You want something vaguely close to retina. But for playing

00:42:14 ◼   ► games, I do think it makes it. He seems to like it because and he's used

00:42:18 ◼   ► to his iPhone and iPad and he has a MacBook that he uses for school.

00:42:23 ◼   ► So he appreciates it when he's actually doing something like reading

00:42:28 ◼   ► something in a web browser on the PC that it's roughly retina. It looks

00:42:33 ◼   ► all right, but it's so super thick. It is crazy. But it probably was a

00:42:38 ◼   ► mistake for a gaming PC that the size wasn't the mistake. It's that the 4k,

00:42:43 ◼   ► you don't want to drive your games at that resolution anyway because you

00:42:46 ◼   ► want frame rate more than anything for gaming. It would never make a good

00:42:55 ◼   ► Mac monitor. It's just in addition to the fact that it is industrial

00:43:00 ◼   ► designed as in the gaming vernacular of like black and like the stand

00:43:06 ◼   ► looks like a claw almost, you know. It's from Asus, I believe, or else his

00:43:11 ◼   ► other monitor is other displays from Asus. One's from Asus, one's from a

00:43:15 ◼   ► company that sounds like Asus. But they're not, they would not make good

00:43:18 ◼   ► Mac displays at all. They're just, they just wouldn't. And it's, I think

00:43:22 ◼   ► that's part of the problem is that some of the people who really, really

00:43:26 ◼   ► care about their displays in the PC market are gamers and their interest

00:43:32 ◼   ► has nothing at all correlated to the interest of a Mac user who wants to

00:43:37 ◼   ► do work, right? It's just an entirely different set of needs. And the PC

00:43:43 ◼   ► world is catering to gamers who, you know, for obvious reasons, because

00:43:47 ◼   ► they're the ones who are willing to spend a premium on a nice product.

00:43:51 ◼   ► And the Mac world, you know, Apple help us, you know, you're our Obi-Wan,

00:43:56 ◼   ► you know, you're our only help.

00:43:57 ◼   ► Right. You're exactly right that the priorities are just very, very

00:44:01 ◼   ► different. And that doesn't make, you know, PC users wrong. It's just

00:44:05 ◼   ► that they're very different priorities. And the other funny thing, you

00:44:07 ◼   ► know, hearing you talk about it, I don't have any particular needs for

00:44:11 ◼   ► like amazing color reproduction. I don't care. Like I'm sure I would

00:44:15 ◼   ► appreciate a, you know, P3 whatever monitor, but I don't care about

00:44:21 ◼   ► perfectly accurate color reproduction. I would prefer in a perfect world

00:44:24 ◼   ► to have like mini LED or OLED or something like that, but I don't really

00:44:27 ◼   ► care that much. And that'll come up in a minute about the studio display.

00:44:31 ◼   ► But, you know, my needs aren't that esoteric. I just want a whole bunch

00:44:34 ◼   ► of pixels in not a whole ton of space, you know, and I don't think that's

00:44:37 ◼   ► too much to ask, but for whatever reason, the market just did not step

00:44:41 ◼   ► up, like you said. And you could argue, you know, that sort of kind of

00:44:44 ◼   ► happened when Apple dropped the airport line, but then we got Eero and Eero.

00:44:49 ◼   ► I mean, I use it. I granted they were comped devices or at least the one

00:44:52 ◼   ► of them was, but I use them really like Eero. And so I feel like the

00:44:58 ◼   ► router world, at least we have a couple of options. Whereas for

00:45:02 ◼   ► displays, it was nothing. And I was looking earlier today, I was curious

00:45:07 ◼   ► because, you know, back many, many Macs ago, I remember lusting after the

00:45:11 ◼   ► Thunderbolt display, which was 27 inches, if I'm not mistaken, but not

00:45:14 ◼   ► retina, you know, it was one X and I was looking it up because I can't

00:45:18 ◼   ► remember when did that go away? And according to Wikipedia, the

00:45:21 ◼   ► Thunderbolt display was discontinued on the 23rd of June in 2016. And the

00:45:27 ◼   ► studio display, my understanding is the first deliveries were the 18th of

00:45:31 ◼   ► March, 2022. John, 299 weeks in one day between those two dates.

00:45:37 ◼   ► Wait, what was the date?

00:45:40 ◼   ► June 23rd, June 23rd of 2016 to March 18th of this year. That's 299 weeks

00:45:45 ◼   ► in a day or 2094 days, five years, nine months and two days of no Apple

00:45:51 ◼   ► monitors except the XDR. But again, I don't count it.

00:45:54 ◼   ► Right. And even if you count the XDR, it was quite a stretch, right?

00:45:58 ◼   ► Because that was still a couple of years.

00:46:00 ◼   ► Yeah, because that was introduced at WWDC 2019, but didn't ship till

00:46:04 ◼   ► later, right?

00:46:06 ◼   ► I think that's right. Yeah. So it was still like three, three and a half

00:46:08 ◼   ► years.

00:46:09 ◼   ► Yeah. So it's good to have them back. I think they needed to. I also feel, I

00:46:14 ◼   ► wonder in broad strokes, it's different than selling an entire product, but I

00:46:20 ◼   ► sort of feel that the mentality I mentioned of, well, of course the whole

00:46:23 ◼   ► world's going to go this way because look at how much better this is, sort

00:46:28 ◼   ► of explains Apple going all in on USB C ports and not USB A so many years

00:46:37 ◼   ► ago. And famously, which we probably will hopefully get to by the end of the

00:46:42 ◼   ► show, your beloved MacBook adorable, which only had one port and it was USB

00:46:46 ◼   ► C. But it's hard to, when they make a device that is so thin like iPads,

00:46:55 ◼   ► where USB A obviously would not fit, people don't complain. But on any

00:47:00 ◼   ► device where theoretically they could squeeze in a USB A port and it doesn't

00:47:05 ◼   ► have one, it's inevitably listed in the cons. I don't want to pick on the

00:47:10 ◼   ► Verge, but I actually do want to pick on the Verge. Right? Like the new M1

00:47:19 ◼   ► Max MacBook Pros, 14 and 16 inch ship. What do you have, the 14 inch?

00:47:24 ◼   ► The 14.

00:47:24 ◼   ► That's what I have too. I love it. It might be the greatest computer I've

00:47:27 ◼   ► ever owned.

00:47:27 ◼   ► I completely agree.

00:47:28 ◼   ► You know, it does not have a USB A port. Could in theory have had one, I

00:47:33 ◼   ► guess, would have fit, size wise. And it's considered a ding or a knock.

00:47:39 ◼   ► But I just think that, you know, more problematically than whether the port

00:47:45 ◼   ► is actually on the device, USB A, is the fact that there were so few USB C

00:47:52 ◼   ► peripherals out there and things that you needed, you would need a dongle

00:47:56 ◼   ► for. And I really just can't help but think that Apple really thought, oh my

00:48:00 ◼   ► God, this USB C, finally a USB C that we actually can like, you know, not be

00:48:04 ◼   ► grossed out by, you know, it works upside down. You don't have to get it

00:48:08 ◼   ► in the right way. It's pretty small. Wow. When the whole, when the rest of

00:48:12 ◼   ► the world sees this, they're going to go bananas for it and everything's

00:48:14 ◼   ► going to go USB C. Well, guess what? Didn't really happen. It's been very

00:48:18 ◼   ► slow. But I think that Apple guessed correctly 24 years ago when they made

00:48:24 ◼   ► the original, famous original iMac and it only had USB A ports and got rid

00:48:30 ◼   ► of all of the Mac's legacy ports, like my beloved ADB port for the keyboard,

00:48:34 ◼   ► just had USB A. And I think they bet that, hey, the whole PC world is going

00:48:39 ◼   ► to go for this USB C or USB just when it was just one USB. Well, except

00:48:45 ◼   ► remember the weird one that you had to plug into the printer? It was like a

00:48:49 ◼   ► different, you know, USB A. USB has always been so fun. But they did, they

00:48:55 ◼   ► bet correctly then. Like it really did not take long for the PC world to be

00:48:59 ◼   ► like, yeah, this USB C is, the USB is way better than serial and whatever

00:49:04 ◼   ► else. Parallel. PC two ports or PS two ports. PS two. Get rid of all this,

00:49:09 ◼   ► go USB. I think Apple thought the same thing was going to happen with

00:49:12 ◼   ► USB C and it didn't. Yeah, and I don't entirely begrudge them, but I think

00:49:17 ◼   ► part of the problem is, is that either Apple or the USB consortium or what

00:49:22 ◼   ► have you, or maybe all the above, they sold us a bill of goods that didn't

00:49:26 ◼   ► really end up getting delivered. Because if you think about what we knew

00:49:28 ◼   ► about USB C and whenever it was that this was becoming a thing, I guess

00:49:32 ◼   ► like 2015, something like that. Whenever the MacBooks started going USB C

00:49:37 ◼   ► and actually, was it the adorable? That was the first one come to think of

00:49:41 ◼   ► it. It might've been the adorable, but it doesn't really matter. One way or

00:49:44 ◼   ► another, when we started going all in on USB C, we, there was kind of only

00:49:48 ◼   ► one USB C. If you think about it, like there was the physical connector and

00:49:52 ◼   ► it was always USB, or at least it, the way I remember it was that way. But

00:49:57 ◼   ► then quickly we started getting Thunderbolt and so in Thunderbolt or

00:50:00 ◼   ► Thunderbolt being transmitted over what appeared to be a USB C cable. And

00:50:05 ◼   ► then it quickly became obvious that all USB C cables, they're all special

00:50:10 ◼   ► little snowflakes. None of them are alike and you can never freaking tell

00:50:15 ◼   ► what's what. And like a couple of the cables that I have around the house

00:50:18 ◼   ► now, a couple of them actually have a number four on them and like a little

00:50:21 ◼   ► Thunderbolt logo. So I know what those are, but the overwhelming majority of

00:50:25 ◼   ► the USB C devices that I have, or that, that, that appear to be USB C in terms

00:50:29 ◼   ► of the physical connection, I have no idea if they're USB C, if they're

00:50:33 ◼   ► Thunderbolt, if they're Thunderbolt 2, 3, 4, or what have you. And especially

00:50:37 ◼   ► when I was rocking the adorable, this was a real pain in the butt because the

00:50:41 ◼   ► adorable only had USB C. It did not have Thunderbolt. And one of the popular

00:50:46 ◼   ► things to do at the time was to get a Thunderbolt dock, which actually I have

00:50:49 ◼   ► just done as well for my new computer, but I couldn't use a Thunderbolt dock.

00:50:53 ◼   ► I could only use a USB C dock and, and there weren't many of them and they

00:50:57 ◼   ► were worse. And so I think the part of the problem, part of the slow adoption

00:51:02 ◼   ► is that not all, not all USB C is created alike. Whereas if you think about

00:51:07 ◼   ► the, the original USB days, when it really was one universal serial bus,

00:51:12 ◼   ► you didn't really have to think about that. If they physically connected,

00:51:14 ◼   ► that's all that mattered. But if I take two different cables that appear that,

00:51:19 ◼   ► that physically have the same ends, but have very different guts, I may or

00:51:23 ◼   ► may not be able to see anything on the screen in front of me, all because of

00:51:26 ◼   ► the guts. It has nothing to do with the physical, any properties at all. It's

00:51:29 ◼   ► just the guts and it's infuriating. It's absolutely infuriating.

00:51:32 ◼   ► I remember a couple of years ago, I was doing a review of some new MacBook and

00:51:37 ◼   ► I was like, you know what, I'm not going to set this one up from scratch. Let's,

00:51:40 ◼   ► let's try the migration assistant and let me get all of, you know, as much of

00:51:46 ◼   ► my regular setup over here on this new thing and I'll actually use it. And I

00:51:51 ◼   ► did the migration, I thought over Thunderbolt, cause I knew both machines

00:51:54 ◼   ► had Thunderbolt and it was like, you know, estimated time, 20 days.

00:51:59 ◼   ► And I was like, what, how, what? It was seriously like days or something. It

00:52:05 ◼   ► was like, I, I have, I'm supposed to have this review done in a week. What,

00:52:09 ◼   ► what I can't spend, what is going on? And it was, it was a total, I was using

00:52:14 ◼   ► a USB-C cable, even though it was connected between two Thunderbolt parts

00:52:18 ◼   ► ports. And I was like, Oh, that's it. Stop, stop. Let me cancel. Let me wipe

00:52:22 ◼   ► this machine. Start over. All right. Do I have a necessary Thunderbolt cable?

00:52:27 ◼   ► Hmm. I can't seem to find one. I may not have one. Damn. Where did I put it?

00:52:31 ◼   ► You know what? I'll go buy one. How much are you?

00:52:34 ◼   ► Well, it's so cheap, John. It's so cheap. Don't worry. You can buy them

00:52:37 ◼   ► like a chiclet. You know, it's no problem at all.

00:52:40 ◼   ► So I had like two of these moments, like within, you know, very short period

00:52:43 ◼   ► of like, you know, like if I were a cartoon character, my eyes bugged out

00:52:47 ◼   ► on my head. Where, where one, it was how long it was going to take over

00:52:51 ◼   ► USB-C between sensible Thunderbolt ports. And then to find out how much,

00:52:56 ◼   ► like a one foot Thunderbolt cable costs. It's like 40, 50 bucks. Isn't it

00:53:00 ◼   ► something like that? And it's like, like an 18 inch cable, you know, like

00:53:06 ◼   ► one of the knocks people have against the Apple studio displays that the

00:53:09 ◼   ► included cable, which is very, very nice. It's, it's this new Apple cable

00:53:14 ◼   ► style that they've started shipping with the braided material.

00:53:17 ◼   ► Very, very nice material premium, but it is, it is like one meter, maybe

00:53:22 ◼   ► less if anything, or it's a meter literally from like metal tip to metal

00:53:26 ◼   ► tip. It's not like a meter of cable. It is very small. So you can't, if

00:53:30 ◼   ► you're, you know, whatever Mac you're connecting to your studio display,

00:53:33 ◼   ► if you're going to use that cable, it can't be too far away from the

00:53:36 ◼   ► display. I mean, a meter's not bad, but like the two meter cable is like,

00:53:40 ◼   ► it's seriously like 180 bucks or something. I think.

00:53:43 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. And I'm looking at the Thunderbolt three USB-C cable,

00:53:47 ◼   ► eight tenths of a meter is 40 bucks. And I did the same thing. I forget

00:53:50 ◼   ► what the occasion was for me doing this, but I had the exact same moment

00:53:54 ◼   ► and I was like, well, shit, I guess I'm going to the Apple store. $40.

00:53:57 ◼   ► Seriously? $40. And I mean, again, like if you think about it, if you

00:54:02 ◼   ► stop and think, and you realize all the technology in there, like it does

00:54:04 ◼   ► make sense. And I saw a tweet a while ago. I don't think I'll be able to

00:54:07 ◼   ► dig it up for the show notes, but somebody had talked about how the,

00:54:10 ◼   ► the two or three meter, $150 Thunderbolt cable apparently has like a

00:54:13 ◼   ► lot of really trick technology in it. But, but at a glance, I, I didn't

00:54:18 ◼   ► appreciate, and I'm a nerd. Like I do sort of kind of this stuff for a

00:54:21 ◼   ► living. And I didn't appreciate the fact that I had to pay 40 bucks for

00:54:24 ◼   ► less than a meter of cable, much less 150 bucks for, you know, the one or

00:54:27 ◼   ► two meters or whatever it is. That makes, that makes sense though, that

00:54:30 ◼   ► it's only eight tenths of a meter. Cause it does it, it, I didn't measure

00:54:34 ◼   ► it, but it feels less than a meter. I don't know. I have like an intuitive

00:54:37 ◼   ► sense of three feet equals a meter. I know, you know, I can put my hands

00:54:42 ◼   ► out in a pretty good guess. It's like, this feels less than that. And it's

00:54:45 ◼   ► long enough for me, even though I keep my desk is such that I need to, I, I

00:54:49 ◼   ► like to have the MacBook on the left. So it has to stretch a little bit

00:54:54 ◼   ► further because from it, from, from your viewers perspective, the ports

00:54:58 ◼   ► are on the right behind the studio display. So it's a little bit of a,

00:55:03 ◼   ► it, the cable where I put my MacBook next to it is pretty much stretched

00:55:07 ◼   ► completely, but without any stress it, it couldn't be any shorter or I'd

00:55:12 ◼   ► have to move the MacBook closer than I would like it to be, or figure out a

00:55:16 ◼   ► way to put the MacBook on the other side. But it is funny though, as a lay

00:55:19 ◼   ► person, cause it's true too, like at my age where it's like, I know

00:55:22 ◼   ► computers, I grew up, you know, you know, understanding how computers

00:55:26 ◼   ► work. How, how, how could this two meter cable be so expensive? All

00:55:30 ◼   ► you're doing is shooting electrons across, you know, right. It's, it's

00:55:34 ◼   ► all just copper wire with electrons shooting across. And it's like, and

00:55:36 ◼   ► then you start reading about how Thunderbolt cables working. You're

00:55:39 ◼   ► like, Oh, it's, it's like a computer in there.

00:55:42 ◼   ► Yeah. And it's a Thunderbolt four pro cable, three meters, $160 coming

00:55:47 ◼   ► soon. Coming soon. That's the best part. You can't even get the damn

00:55:52 ◼   ► thing. Holy Jamolis. All right. Let's take another break here. Let's take

00:55:55 ◼   ► another break. Give thanks to our next sponsor is our good friends at

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00:58:01 ◼   ► that promo code, the talk show. Have they sponsored ATP remote or...

00:58:05 ◼   ► You know, I don't think so. I think it's forthcoming if I remember correctly.

00:58:09 ◼   ► I'm always confused. I might be lying to you.

00:58:10 ◼   ► I, you know, I tell you, I think I've said this to Marco on the show too.

00:58:13 ◼   ► Sometimes it's like, I listen, I'm listening to ATP and I think, why aren't

00:58:17 ◼   ► they sponsoring my show? They'd be perfect.

00:58:20 ◼   ► This coming week, remote is sponsoring ATP.

00:58:22 ◼   ► Well then, if people are here for the Casey instead of the Gruber, it's

00:58:27 ◼   ► probably remote.com/ATP. Feel free to try that one out if you want.

00:58:33 ◼   ► That is accurate. I would never say that on your show, but that is

00:58:36 ◼   ► hypothetically anything.

00:58:37 ◼   ► Oh, I'm generous with the promo codes.

00:58:41 ◼   ► Are you generous with your review units though? Because I'm not getting a

00:58:46 ◼   ► Apple Studio display for another couple of weeks and I will be happy to take

00:58:49 ◼   ► yours off your hands until then.

00:58:51 ◼   ► You know what? It is funny because they ship it and, you know, and they're,

00:58:54 ◼   ► they're never banging on the doors, you know, to get review unit sent back.

00:59:00 ◼   ► But they ship it with a, you know, a pre-printed FedEx label to send it back.

00:59:06 ◼   ► And it's like this, this review unit is through, I think for these, they said

00:59:10 ◼   ► September, which is nice. It's longer than usual. I feel bad. I'm going to

00:59:15 ◼   ► order one. Here's my person, you know, before we get into the details of it,

00:59:18 ◼   ► my personal situation, I'm a hundred percent going to buy one because this

00:59:21 ◼   ► is the display I've been waiting for. And overall, camera aside, I'm extremely,

00:59:27 ◼   ► extremely happy with it. It's like, yeah, this is what I want. I love it.

00:59:30 ◼   ► But what I want to do is I want to see the nano texture glass in person. It's

00:59:34 ◼   ► a $300 upgrade. I do not want to buy, just buy it and wait and get it, even

00:59:39 ◼   ► though I probably should, but I hate, I just hate sending anything back to

00:59:44 ◼   ► anyone. I hate it. I don't know why.

00:59:45 ◼   ► Yep, same, same.

00:59:46 ◼   ► I don't know. I'll just, I'll just, just, I'll just, if I, if I bought the

00:59:50 ◼   ► nano texture glass, I would just like, I don't know, put it under my desk and

00:59:53 ◼   ► buy a glossy one. Even though, like, I don't want to spend $5,000 on a Pro

00:59:59 ◼   ► Display XDR, but I'll blow $5,000 by buying, you know, I'll buy the $2,000

01:00:06 ◼   ► nano texture one and then just say, ah, give me the other one. But anyway, I

01:00:10 ◼   ► want to see it.

01:00:10 ◼   ► Anything to avoid returning one. That's all that matters.

01:00:12 ◼   ► I do want to see it in person. My review unit is the standard glossy one, which

01:00:17 ◼   ► it does have a very, very nice anti-reflective coating. But my, as, as,

01:00:22 ◼   ► you know, you see from my example photos, you know, in my review or any other

01:00:27 ◼   ► time I occasionally shoot those videos in my office, I do have lots of windows,

01:00:32 ◼   ► which I love. And it's one of the reasons we, you know, we, we bought this

01:00:36 ◼   ► house. I love the windows. I love the light, but windows and glare are, you

01:00:43 ◼   ► know, go hand in hand. It's not bad. But, you know, there's a window over my

01:00:48 ◼   ► shoulder that at certain times of the year, at certain times of the day, it's

01:00:52 ◼   ► right on the display. So I feel like I'm at least a maybe on the nano texture

01:00:56 ◼   ► glass, but it seems like the nano texture with the XDR has very mixed reviews

01:01:04 ◼   ► from people who thought, oh, I would like to have matte, but then they get the

01:01:09 ◼   ► nano texture and you're like, I don't know. I don't like this.

01:01:11 ◼   ► - Yeah. I have heard a lot of the same and I can't cite any particular person

01:01:15 ◼   ► that has said this to me, but I feel like I've heard a lot of the same rumblings.

01:01:19 ◼   ► So the nano texture is, is kind of a mixed bag.

01:01:21 ◼   ► - Our friend Luke had one. Remember he sent, he sent his back. He was like,

01:01:25 ◼   ► ah, F this. And he was very surprised. Well, then the problem with it is, and

01:01:29 ◼   ► again, I am not at the least bit sour that Apple didn't send me both as a

01:01:34 ◼   ► review unit. That's the last thing I need. All right. I'm one person, right?

01:01:39 ◼   ► So like the Verge, the Verge got, I'm friends with Nilay, the Verge got two M1

01:01:44 ◼   ► max studios with the max and the ultra, and they got both of the displays,

01:01:49 ◼   ► nano texture or not, but the Verge has multi, you know, a big staff.

01:01:53 ◼   ► That's the last thing I needed was more stuff to review. So, and, and I would,

01:01:58 ◼   ► I would actually, as a reviewer talking to my audience, I'd rather have the one

01:02:02 ◼   ► that most people are going to buy, which is the default. So I'm glad I am.

01:02:05 ◼   ► It's just no sour grapes or, you know, petulance about it. The downside though,

01:02:10 ◼   ► is that the nano, this is the big downside is that the nano texture models

01:02:14 ◼   ► are not on display in most Apple stores. I asked, I asked Apple during my review

01:02:20 ◼   ► period, will, you know, will they be on display in stores? And the, the initial

01:02:24 ◼   ► answer was they, they will be on display in select Apple stores. And I wrote

01:02:31 ◼   ► back and I said, okay, that's good to know, but how do I know if my Apple

01:02:35 ◼   ► store has been selected? And are you in New York or San Francisco or LA?

01:02:40 ◼   ► That's what you need to know. Yeah. So, the answer I got was you keep,

01:02:45 ◼   ► you know, and there's no way online to tell, unfortunately you can't, you

01:02:49 ◼   ► know, and I don't blame them. It's only so many things they can put on the

01:02:52 ◼   ► website of apple.com and being able to query specifically, you know, which

01:02:59 ◼   ► products are on display at this store is a weird thing to want from Apple, but

01:03:06 ◼   ► I kind of wish they did. What you can do of course is call your local Apple

01:03:10 ◼   ► store and a friendly Apple store representative will be able to answer

01:03:14 ◼   ► you. But the answer is probably no, that they don't have nano texture. For

01:03:18 ◼   ► me, living here in Philadelphia, we have a store right here in center city,

01:03:22 ◼   ► Philadelphia, which is literally blocks away from me. It is, it would be

01:03:28 ◼   ► preposterous even in pouring down rain, maybe in pouring down rain, I would

01:03:34 ◼   ► take an Uber or something, but it is easy walking distance. It would be

01:03:37 ◼   ► walking distance, maybe not to buy, Hmm. Would I walk home with a studio

01:03:43 ◼   ► display? That's the question. I walk, you walk there and then you take an

01:03:47 ◼   ► Uber back. Yeah. I, I, well, I use, if I were going to buy something like

01:03:52 ◼   ► that, I'd get it shipped to me. Oh, you know what you can do? You can always

01:03:54 ◼   ► get the courier service. That's right. That's true. Yeah. They have courier

01:03:57 ◼   ► service, which I've used to buy stupid things. Like when I've needed a

01:04:00 ◼   ► cable and because I live here in center city, Philadelphia, I can usually

01:04:04 ◼   ► get them within like two hours, which is amazing. They do not, they are not

01:04:08 ◼   ► going to have the nano texture one on display. We have a King of Prussia

01:04:12 ◼   ► mall, which is somewhat famous as a mall. It is one of the largest has

01:04:18 ◼   ► been for decades, one of the largest shopping malls in the country. King of

01:04:21 ◼   ► Prussia is a suburb of Philly. It's about 15 miles as the crow flies, which

01:04:26 ◼   ► isn't bad and used to be before Apple opened a center city, Philadelphia

01:04:31 ◼   ► store. It was the closest Apple store. One of the closest to, for people who

01:04:35 ◼   ► live in the city here. The other one would be Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which

01:04:38 ◼   ► is right across the bridge. Very easy drive, but like the King of

01:04:42 ◼   ► Prussia mall Apple store is the one that's the one I waited at in 2007 to

01:04:46 ◼   ► get my first iPhone. When you had, remember that when you, you actually,

01:04:51 ◼   ► there was no way to pre-order. You just went in the morning and sat there all

01:04:55 ◼   ► day. And then they went on sale at like 6 PM or something like that. That's

01:04:58 ◼   ► the King of Prussia. The problem with the King of Prussia as a

01:05:01 ◼   ► Philadelphia is it is 15 miles, but it is the longest 15 miles imaginable.

01:05:10 ◼   ► It is, you have to take what we are, our beloved Schuylkill Expressway, which

01:05:15 ◼   ► if there's no traffic, like if I, I guarantee you, if I tried to make the

01:05:19 ◼   ► drive from my house to the King of Prussia mall at two in the morning, I

01:05:23 ◼   ► could do it in 15 minutes. Easy. Probably less the way the speeds I drive

01:05:28 ◼   ► at, but you know, at normal times of the day, it could be an hour. It is

01:05:33 ◼   ► very bad traffic, but anyway, I will go there. I will check it out before I

01:05:36 ◼   ► decide what to order, but it's sort of like, I kind of have to gear myself up

01:05:40 ◼   ► for it. It's an all day affair, unfortunately. Did you call them yet? Do

01:05:46 ◼   ► you know that they will have a display model? I cheated and Apple PR

01:05:50 ◼   ► confirmed for me that the King of Prussia. That's allowed. I haven't been

01:05:54 ◼   ► there in a long time. I mean, guess what? We're at the point now coming

01:05:58 ◼   ► out of COVID where I keep forgetting. Like we're doing more normal stuff and

01:06:04 ◼   ► I'm like, why is it that I haven't been to the King of Prussia mall and in

01:06:07 ◼   ► recent memory? And I'm like, Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah. There was like two

01:06:11 ◼   ► years where I hardly left the house. That's it. Yeah. There you go. Yeah.

01:06:16 ◼   ► But the King of Prussia mall, I recently underwent a big renovation.

01:06:19 ◼   ► They used to be two malls that were right next. They called it one mall,

01:06:22 ◼   ► but there were like two actual structures and like a parking lot

01:06:26 ◼   ► between them and a walkway. And it was, you know, very, you know,

01:06:30 ◼   ► sufficiently close that they, it wasn't ridiculous to call it one big mall,

01:06:34 ◼   ► even though you had to go outside to get between the two, but they renovated

01:06:38 ◼   ► and added a stretch in between the two to keep it all indoors. And that

01:06:44 ◼   ► new stretch is where they put all of the super premium brands, like the

01:06:49 ◼   ► Tiffany, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, you name ultra luxury fashion brand. They're

01:06:56 ◼   ► in this new stretch that's between what used to be the two malls. And you'd

01:07:00 ◼   ► think, well, that's probably where the Apple store is now too. But instead,

01:07:04 ◼   ► I think what they did, if I'm recalling correctly, cause I've only been there

01:07:07 ◼   ► once since the renovation is it seems like what they did is they sort of,

01:07:12 ◼   ► like Apple took a spot in one of the two malls close to that throughway,

01:07:18 ◼   ► but they moved from like their original location where they'd been since like

01:07:22 ◼   ► the early two thousands when they first opened to this new one as sort of a,

01:07:27 ◼   ► I'm betting it was like a fascinating negotiation of real estate, of mall real

01:07:32 ◼   ► estate where they're like, Apple is like, we'd like to be in this new section,

01:07:35 ◼   ► you know, like next to Tiffany. And they're like, yeah, but we'd kind of

01:07:38 ◼   ► like to have some really good brands elsewhere, like anchoring. What about

01:07:42 ◼   ► this huge, huge spot here? And they're like, oh yeah, well, we'll do that, but

01:07:47 ◼   ► we'll pay you nothing or something. Right. You know how Apple negotiated.

01:07:50 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

01:07:51 ◼   ► So, but they have, it is, it is, it is like a, it has long been one of the

01:07:57 ◼   ► quote unquote select Apple stores. So I will go out there and see it before

01:08:00 ◼   ► I make my own purchasing decision, even though I'm very worried because the

01:08:05 ◼   ► lighting inside Apple stores is not like the lighting in my office because

01:08:11 ◼   ► it's not daylight. It is this super diffuse, beautiful lighting. And in fact,

01:08:16 ◼   ► I thought that when you sent me the screenshot yesterday, you went to an

01:08:19 ◼   ► Apple store to see the, the studio display. Right. That's right. And you

01:08:23 ◼   ► look pretty good from the camera because the lighting is so diffused and very

01:08:28 ◼   ► nice in an Apple store. So I'm still, I'm a little concerned that I'll go to

01:08:31 ◼   ► the Apple store, look at the nano texture and think, yes, this is what I

01:08:35 ◼   ► want and then buy it and then put it in my office and it'll look totally

01:08:38 ◼   ► different. And I'll be like,

01:08:39 ◼   ► Oh, here, here's what we'll do. I will go return it on your behalf. If you'll

01:08:43 ◼   ► take me to hop, sing, because that's something I don't know if we're gonna

01:08:46 ◼   ► have the time to talk about today, but I am very mad at myself that I never

01:08:50 ◼   ► made the track up to Philly for like coca love or anything and go to hop sing.

01:08:53 ◼   ► So I will, I will trade you one very socially awkward return in favor of

01:08:58 ◼   ► getting me in the door. If that works for you, I will take you there. The,

01:09:02 ◼   ► the things I've heard about nano texture from the XDR people are, and

01:09:06 ◼   ► actually I think, cause Neil, I told me that some of the verge staffers

01:09:10 ◼   ► really liked the nano texture, like their photographers. And so they really

01:09:13 ◼   ► like it, but that the problem is that it's a real bitch to clean. If, yeah,

01:09:18 ◼   ► I've heard the same. If somebody touches it, like you get like one

01:09:21 ◼   ► thumbprint on the damn thing and it's like a grease spot that you cannot get

01:09:27 ◼   ► off. And it does, you know, the nice thing is that it does ship with Apple's

01:09:30 ◼   ► $19 polishing cloth. So you get that free, really. It's like getting a free

01:09:36 ◼   ► $19 polishing cloth. Yeah. I bought the polishing cloth, the standalone one,

01:09:41 ◼   ► just because I had to, uh, it ships and it's so funny. It, it, it, the

01:09:46 ◼   ► packaging, you know how they, they, they, the Apple packaging, the

01:09:51 ◼   ► instructions have very few words. They're sort of like Lego instructions,

01:09:55 ◼   ► you know, like Lego and Ikea where they're sort of pictograms that just

01:09:59 ◼   ► show you what to do instead of explaining it. So they don't, they can

01:10:02 ◼   ► just ship the same thing worldwide. They tell you not to use the side with

01:10:08 ◼   ► the Apple logo on it. Oh, I did not know that. Yeah. But I don't know why

01:10:12 ◼   ► Jonas and I looked at it and we're like, honest to God, you can touch it.

01:10:16 ◼   ► You can look at it. You can feel it. It doesn't look like there's any

01:10:19 ◼   ► difference, but they, there's like a little circle with a line through it.

01:10:21 ◼   ► Like don't use the side with the Apple logo, use the other side and go in a

01:10:24 ◼   ► circular motion. And it's funny cause I don't have colleagues, you know, I, if

01:10:29 ◼   ► anybody can get this display to never be touched by human fingers, it's

01:10:35 ◼   ► probably me. I mean, you'd have to be like a genuine hermit, you know, to,

01:10:39 ◼   ► to make it, but it could happen. You're right. You never know. Right. And

01:10:45 ◼   ► it's like, I'm, I'm an anti touch the screen person period, but you know,

01:10:50 ◼   ► and I can be a little, Hey, Hey, what are you doing? You know? Yep. Yep.

01:10:54 ◼   ► But if I get the nano texture, it's going to have to be like, I'm going to

01:10:57 ◼   ► have to put like red, red tape on the ground. Or do you like some sort of

01:11:01 ◼   ► like infrared beam? Like what was the movie with Catherine Zeta Jones and

01:11:05 ◼   ► Sean Connery and trap mint? Is that it? Where she goes like dancing through the

01:11:09 ◼   ► through the laser beam maze, you know what I'm saying? You're going to put

01:11:12 ◼   ► like a laser beam maze in front of the screen or some sort of proximity

01:11:16 ◼   ► alarm or something. Yeah. You know, I got it. So I'm looking at the the

01:11:19 ◼   ► buy page for the studio display and it is clearly not popular at all because

01:11:25 ◼   ► I tell you what, the only thing you can get in less than quote eight to 10

01:11:29 ◼   ► weeks is the tilt adjustable stand. If you go, so it's in height, adjustable

01:11:34 ◼   ► eight to 10 weeks, you're not even telling you like a month. It's just

01:11:36 ◼   ► eight to 10 weeks. These amount adapter eight to 10 weeks. I mean, obviously

01:11:39 ◼   ► everyone, it's not just you and me that are waiting for a cold glass in

01:11:43 ◼   ► hell. Like everyone is interested in this. It seems cause I know it's, you

01:11:46 ◼   ► know, supply chain and blah, blah, blah. But still, I got to imagine if

01:11:50 ◼   ► anyone would get their supply chain squared away for a new product, it

01:11:53 ◼   ► would be Apple. And from the looks of it, these things are sold out for

01:11:57 ◼   ► forever. Yeah. And I combination maybe of pent up demand and supply.

01:12:02 ◼   ► Yeah, fair enough. Shame problems. I don't know. Anyway, talking about the

01:12:05 ◼   ► display itself, I, I, I, I'm very happy with my review from a week ago, but

01:12:13 ◼   ► I'll tell you, I was nervous because I've spent so much time bitching about

01:12:18 ◼   ► the camera and it's, and it's not nervousness like, oh, you know, you're

01:12:25 ◼   ► not supposed to give bad reviews to Apple products. It's just like, am I

01:12:29 ◼   ► nuts? Right. It's not, it's not any sort of like, you know, feeling that

01:12:33 ◼   ► I'm not supposed to say bad that I love it. You know, in theory, it's

01:12:36 ◼   ► like, you know, anybody who wants to accuse me of being a Homer for Apple

01:12:40 ◼   ► products, it's like the best thing to happen is, you know, get one that you

01:12:43 ◼   ► don't like and then tell people about why. But the camera thing in

01:12:47 ◼   ► particular was making me feel like gaslit. Like, am I nuts? Am I, you

01:12:52 ◼   ► know, and you know, it's, I did commiserate with Nilay and Joanna. I

01:12:59 ◼   ► forget who reached out to whom first. I forget if it was me. I think I

01:13:04 ◼   ► reached out to Nilay and say, hey, do you have this thing? And, you know,

01:13:07 ◼   ► and then we did like a three person FaceTime, it just the three of us and

01:13:12 ◼   ► we're all, we were all like on the same page. Like I'm sort of thinking

01:13:15 ◼   ► this camera is really makes me look, looks, it's bad quality period. It's

01:13:20 ◼   ► fuzzy, it's noisy and really does a bad number on skin tones across the

01:13:26 ◼   ► board. And we're all looking at each other like, yeah, we look terrible.

01:13:30 ◼   ► And then I was like, well, wait a second, you know, input magazine, Ray

01:13:34 ◼   ► Wong at input got Apple to confirm first that it's the same front facing

01:13:39 ◼   ► camera as the new iPad Air, which in turn is the same front facing camera

01:13:43 ◼   ► that's been in the iPad Pro for a year. Basically, one way to think about

01:13:47 ◼   ► it is that so far, every Apple device that supports center stage uses the

01:13:52 ◼   ► same camera hardware and ultra wide, I think 12 megapixel, but who cares

01:13:56 ◼   ► what the ultra wide field of view front facing camera. And I was like, I've

01:14:02 ◼   ► got the iPad Air right here. I'm doing a review of that too here. I'm getting

01:14:06 ◼   ► off. I'm going to hop back on with the iPad Air. And I did on the same call.

01:14:10 ◼   ► And I was like, do I look better? And I was like, I think I look better in

01:14:13 ◼   ► my preview. And they're like, oh, you look, you look way better. You look

01:14:16 ◼   ► way. And we're like this. Yeah, this is crazy. And I'm like, all right, I'm

01:14:20 ◼   ► going to get off and go back to the studio display. Do I look worse?

01:14:22 ◼   ► Yes, you look now you look, you look sick.

01:14:25 ◼   ► Yeah. So I went to the Apple store yesterday, like you had said, and I had

01:14:32 ◼   ► read all the reviews. I'd read yours. I'd seen the verges review and I'd seen

01:14:35 ◼   ► Joanna's really good video where she did like kind of a play on March

01:14:39 ◼   ► Madness, which I mean, her video work is so good. It's infuriating how good

01:14:42 ◼   ► it is. She is basically everything.

01:14:44 ◼   ► You know, she won an Emmy.

01:14:45 ◼   ► I did not know that. Did she really?

01:14:47 ◼   ► Yeah, she won an Emmy for the thing about the thing last year about how to plan

01:14:52 ◼   ► for your eventual death. Yeah, she'll never let me forget it. Emmy award-winning

01:15:00 ◼   ► Joanna Stern.

01:15:00 ◼   ► Emmy award-winning, that's right. But no, she is so impossibly good at what she

01:15:03 ◼   ► does. And anyways, so I went to the Apple store and I'm playing around the

01:15:07 ◼   ► display and leaving the camera side just very briefly, like the panel looks

01:15:11 ◼   ► great. And of course, you know, I'm trying to think of ways in which I can

01:15:16 ◼   ► try to exercise this display that's not connected to a machine that I can

01:15:21 ◼   ► only retrospect. I should have just brought my computer and connected it.

01:15:23 ◼   ► It just occurred to me just now, but nevertheless, you know, it's connected

01:15:26 ◼   ► to a M1 Mac's Mac studio and I'm trying to think of things that I can do to

01:15:31 ◼   ► kind of exercise the display and show what it's made of. And I looked at the

01:15:35 ◼   ► photos that the canned photos and the photos app on Apple's display Mac. And

01:15:40 ◼   ► of course, they're all gorgeous. And this display looks phenomenal. I ended

01:15:44 ◼   ► up logging into my own Plex server, you know, from the web and playing a

01:15:49 ◼   ► little bit of Hamilton in 4k and they looked great. You know, it looked

01:15:55 ◼   ► phenomenal. And then I opened up Photo Booth to take a picture of myself just

01:16:00 ◼   ► to see, well, first of all, to verify that center stage does not work in

01:16:03 ◼   ► Photo Booth, which I was pretty sure was going to be the case, but

01:16:06 ◼   ► nevertheless, I wanted to see. And then I took a picture of myself and I

01:16:09 ◼   ► uploaded it to my Synology at home so I could look at it later. And when I

01:16:13 ◼   ► was looking at it in the Apple store, it looked fine. Like I wouldn't say it

01:16:18 ◼   ► was great, but it looked fine. But then I was walking out of the mall and I

01:16:21 ◼   ► was looking at it on my phone and I started zooming in and I'm like, "Oh,

01:16:24 ◼   ► oh, this is not that fine at all. This is actually not great." It's really

01:16:30 ◼   ► not a fantastic picture. And in particular, a lot of the fine details,

01:16:35 ◼   ► like the wrinkles in my forehead, for example, I feel like they're very, very

01:16:39 ◼   ► fuzzy. Like everything just seems fuzzier than I would expect. It very

01:16:42 ◼   ► much looks like the 720p front-facing cameras that were on Apple laptops

01:16:46 ◼   ► for 18 frickin' years. And it looks kind of like that. And based on my gut,

01:16:53 ◼   ► I'm inclined to believe that when Apple says, "Oh, it's software, it's

01:16:57 ◼   ► software, it's software," that it probably is. Like, I assume that to be

01:17:01 ◼   ► true, but golly, for right now, it does not look great. It really doesn't.

01:17:06 ◼   ► Tom: It was such a weird saga, publishing the review, and then hearing from,

01:17:12 ◼   ► you know, and all of my interaction up to the point of publishing was through

01:17:16 ◼   ► Apple PR. And Apple PR, when you're dealing with them as a reviewer, is not

01:17:20 ◼   ► a faceless organization. I know people there, and the people who I was

01:17:25 ◼   ► communicating with are people who I've known for years there. It's not just

01:17:29 ◼   ► like, you know, as a reviewer, you're not just sending email to applepr@apple.com

01:17:34 ◼   ► and getting a response from somebody you don't know. You know, there was—

01:17:38 ◼   ► it was unusual, because usually if you're as a reviewer, you encounter a

01:17:44 ◼   ► problem and you let them know. And, you know, and I don't know—I can't speak

01:17:49 ◼   ► for everybody who reviews products, but I—and Neelay and Joanna and I were

01:17:53 ◼   ► both—the three of us were talking about it, that all three of us are of a

01:17:56 ◼   ► similar mindset, where we don't want to surprise anybody, you know, we don't

01:18:01 ◼   ► want to surprise Apple. We tell them, you know, and when they ask, you know,

01:18:05 ◼   ► like halfway through the week of reviewing, "What are your thoughts?" I'm

01:18:09 ◼   ► always very honest, you know, positive or negative, you know, like, "Here's

01:18:13 ◼   ► what I think so far," you know, and there's negative stuff comes up from

01:18:16 ◼   ► time to time. And, you know, I told them about the camera and I sent them

01:18:19 ◼   ► images. I was like, "Look," you know, and here's the same—in the same

01:18:22 ◼   ► lighting, you know, similar to the ones I published, although the ones I had

01:18:26 ◼   ► originally was unshowered. There was—funny backstory is the ones I did

01:18:30 ◼   ► publish when the sunlight was literally hitting me in the face, and it was

01:18:35 ◼   ► like—and my first thought was, "Well, of course my face is blown out in this

01:18:39 ◼   ► sunlight because it's bright sunlight right on my face," and I thought, "Well,

01:18:42 ◼   ► wait, let me see what this iPad Air does with the exact same camera," and

01:18:45 ◼   ► exposed my face perfectly. And literally 15 seconds later, but I looked

01:18:51 ◼   ► terrible, and I was like, "Oh my God, the sun—I got it—I don't know what

01:18:54 ◼   ► the weather's going to be like for the next two days." It ended up being

01:18:57 ◼   ► overcast from the next days until the reviews came out, so I had to, like,

01:19:01 ◼   ► quick scram—like, run to get a shower, you know, like—

01:19:04 ◼   ► Steven: See, the life of a reviewer is hard, John.

01:19:07 ◼   ► It's not just free stuff.

01:19:08 ◼   ► John: I know. It's like—because we just watched the Home Alone movies

01:19:11 ◼   ► over Christmas, and I'm reminded. It's like when they, you know, realized the

01:19:14 ◼   ► alarm clock was busted and they're late for the airport. It's like, I'm

01:19:17 ◼   ► like—I'm like literally like, "Out of my way!" and "I'm getting a shower. I

01:19:21 ◼   ► need to take a photo before the sunlight passes," you know, and it was. It's

01:19:25 ◼   ► actually, you know, it was like aerobic exercise. No, but I told them, and

01:19:29 ◼   ► then they were like, "Oh, yeah, there is some—you know, we definitely see

01:19:31 ◼   ► it. That's not right. Let me get back to you." But the "Let me get back to

01:19:35 ◼   ► you" part took much longer than usual, and then they got back to us, you

01:19:38 ◼   ► know, pretty late before the reviews with a very similar statement, you

01:19:43 ◼   ► know, that, you know, "We've identified some problems, and a future

01:19:46 ◼   ► software fix will improve it," something like that. Then I published,

01:19:50 ◼   ► and I started hearing from some of my sources who are unofficial, you

01:19:53 ◼   ► know, just people inside Apple who read the site, and some of them, you

01:19:57 ◼   ► know, it's like, you know, one of the very lucky things of my career and

01:20:02 ◼   ► having been doing this for long enough is that I've, you know, there's a

01:20:06 ◼   ► level of trust and certain people who I know, and, you know, guess what? I

01:20:10 ◼   ► wound up communicating with people who've used the studio display inside

01:20:17 ◼   ► Apple while it's being developed at certain stages. They're like, "Yeah,

01:20:21 ◼   ► mine doesn't look like that, but mine's running like a dev build of the

01:20:26 ◼   ► firmware, you know, it's not up to date," and that something, something

01:20:30 ◼   ► happened late in the game. I still don't know detail. I cannot—there's no

01:20:34 ◼   ► backstory, you know, no betrayal of trust or spilling any guts. I don't

01:20:39 ◼   ► know the details of what in the hell happened, and I realize how crazy this

01:20:43 ◼   ► is, right? So I wrote an update and said, "What I've heard from little

01:20:47 ◼   ► birdies who are familiar with the matter is that some kind of bug was

01:20:51 ◼   ► introduced late in the game, and part of the miscommunication between,

01:20:56 ◼   ► like, the reviewers and Apple PR is that they weren't even seeing it

01:20:59 ◼   ► because they might have been using very late prototypes that they—I

01:21:02 ◼   ► don't know this for sure, I could be wrong—but I believe that they were

01:21:05 ◼   ► running very late prototypes that they thought were truly commensurate

01:21:09 ◼   ► with what will be the actual shipping ones but aren't and have somewhat

01:21:14 ◼   ► better, to some degree better image quality out of the camera. But what

01:21:17 ◼   ► I've been told is that it should be at least as good as the iPad Air and

01:21:21 ◼   ► current iPad Pros, and it's not. And nobody—it doesn't—that's one of the

01:21:25 ◼   ► weird things and one of the things that made me, like, such a relief is

01:21:28 ◼   ► it's not like some of the reviewers are saying the camera's not that

01:21:31 ◼   ► great and others are saying, "Ah, it's just as good as the iPad," and it's

01:21:35 ◼   ► like, "No, everybody agrees it's not as good as an iPad," and it's kind of

01:21:39 ◼   ► weird that Apple confirmed it's the same camera hardware because they

01:21:42 ◼   ► usually don't confirm stuff like that, right? Like, I fix it, and I

01:21:47 ◼   ► fix it, we'll take it apart and prove that it's the same component two

01:21:51 ◼   ► days later, but they still won't tell you. Or famously, with RAM,

01:21:56 ◼   ► they'll never ever—until recently, they would never ever tell you how

01:21:59 ◼   ► much RAM was in an iPhone. They're like, "Ah, we don't talk about that,"

01:22:02 ◼   ► and it's like, "Well, somebody's going to take it apart or run, you

01:22:05 ◼   ► know, run one of those utilities." You have apps in the App Store that

01:22:09 ◼   ► will tell you how much—

01:22:10 ◼   ► Jared: How much is this hard?

01:22:12 ◼   ► Steven: —how much memories on this system, but they will not confirm it.

01:22:15 ◼   ► Jared; It's the worst kept-state secret ever.

01:22:17 ◼   ► Steven; So, my basic take on the camera is, as it stands, it is truly

01:22:23 ◼   ► subpar. I mean, it is poor. It is a poor camera that it seems

01:22:27 ◼   ► inexplicably bad with skin tones and sharpness and noise and low

01:22:32 ◼   ► light and sunlight, you know, bright sunlight and low light at night,

01:22:38 ◼   ► bad. It clearly does not produce as good an image quality as the iPad

01:22:43 ◼   ► Air and iPad Pro front-facing camera, not the rear-facing camera, but

01:22:47 ◼   ► I've been told that it, through firmware updates, that something

01:22:51 ◼   ► could be fixed and that it would—it probably won't match the iPad Air

01:22:56 ◼   ► exactly because I think they're doing some different stuff, and I don't

01:22:59 ◼   ► know this for sure, that makes sense where you're at a different

01:23:04 ◼   ► distance from the studio display than you typically are from an iPad,

01:23:08 ◼   ► right? It's, for me, my comfortable distance from a desktop display is

01:23:12 ◼   ► roughly arm's length, like with my palm up, like giving the famous,

01:23:16 ◼   ► you know, like telling somebody to stop. That's about how far I sit

01:23:20 ◼   ► from a display. Nobody holds their iPad at arm's length distance,

01:23:25 ◼   ► right? Well, I shouldn't say nobody because we talked about vision

01:23:28 ◼   ► problems. Somebody somewhere has a vision problem where their perfect

01:23:31 ◼   ► distance is arm's length, so let's acknowledge that, but typical

01:23:35 ◼   ► iPad distance is closer. So, I think they're doing something different

01:23:38 ◼   ► with the cropping, with the ultra-wide for center stage, where it may

01:23:42 ◼   ► not be the exact same image, but the image quality should be the same.

01:23:47 ◼   ► I believe that. Why not?

01:23:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it surely will get better, and I'm looking at your post

01:23:55 ◼   ► again, and not the first batch of shots when you were in sunlight, but

01:23:58 ◼   ► the second batch of shots where you're being artificially lit.

01:24:01 ◼   ► Right.

01:24:02 ◼   ► Like, if you look at the first shot, you can see a couple of wrinkles,

01:24:05 ◼   ► normal wrinkles in your forehead. You can make out some hair in, you

01:24:08 ◼   ► know, the hair in your beard to some degree, and then you look at the

01:24:11 ◼   ► studio display shot, and the whiter portion of your beard is like a blob.

01:24:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:24:16 ◼   ► Your shirt loses any semblance of, like, weave or anything to it. It's

01:24:20 ◼   ► almost like you put on a sheet, and it's a different color blue, by the

01:24:23 ◼   ► way, even though it's the exact same shirt. Like, it's so abundantly

01:24:27 ◼   ► obvious the differences between the two, and by the way, the second

01:24:30 ◼   ► shot of you with the sheet that is cut like a shirt rather than a shirt.

01:24:34 ◼   ► It very much matches my experience in the Apple store with the

01:24:37 ◼   ► artificial light there, you know, where your forehead is kind of, like,

01:24:40 ◼   ► is flattened, your beard is kind of, like, been, I don't know,

01:24:45 ◼   ► unsharpened, de-sharpened, and your shirt, you can't see the weave at

01:24:48 ◼   ► all, and that very much looks like the image that I took of myself at

01:24:51 ◼   ► the Apple store. And I got to imagine, you know, like I said, mine is

01:24:55 ◼   ► shipping in a week or two. I would assume, based on zero insider

01:25:00 ◼   ► knowledge, that by around the time mine comes in, I bet you will see

01:25:04 ◼   ► at least a first crack at a fix at this, because I can't imagine that

01:25:06 ◼   ► they're happy about this PR at all.

01:25:08 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Yeah, and I think that part of the bad feeling about it

01:25:12 ◼   ► is that first impressions are so important, and they're so hard to

01:25:15 ◼   ► shake, and so I think the ultimate story will play out like this, that

01:25:20 ◼   ► they will ship some sort of firmware update. I think the firmware

01:25:23 ◼   ► update will improve image quality to be somewhat, or mostly, or fairly

01:25:29 ◼   ► said commensurate with the iPad front-pacing cameras on the Air and

01:25:32 ◼   ► Pro. I think center stage is going to improve, and my complaints about

01:25:36 ◼   ► center stage, where I called it off center stage, because if I turn my

01:25:40 ◼   ► head to the side and come back, I'm off center, and then three or four

01:25:43 ◼   ► seconds later, literally, like, I'm not exaggerating, it's like four

01:25:46 ◼   ► seconds, and then it sheepishly repans to put me in the center again,

01:25:51 ◼   ► like, "Oops, sorry, I forgot we were moved." I've since learned some

01:25:55 ◼   ► more about what they were thinking there and why it does that, and it's

01:25:58 ◼   ► sort of, it's like what I was doing, which I wasn't trying to trick it,

01:26:04 ◼   ► I literally, well, it's good, you know, you're the one on the show, but

01:26:07 ◼   ► to avoid KC-ing myself, I tend to keep my, any beverages I'm drinking

01:26:14 ◼   ► off to the side, and I have an L-shaped desk, it's over to the right,

01:26:19 ◼   ► and so while I was FaceTiming my son as a test, I went over to get a

01:26:23 ◼   ► drink of a beverage, turned my head to the side, and moved to the side,

01:26:27 ◼   ► and then came back, and now I'm off center, and I'm like, "Whoa!"

01:26:30 ◼   ► I, it wasn't like I was trying to trick it out. I never ran into that

01:26:35 ◼   ► with center stage on an iPad, there seems to be no way to fool it,

01:26:38 ◼   ► similarly. It seems like it's a feature, not a bug, though, in that

01:26:42 ◼   ► it's sort of like an anti-, what they thought was an anti-fidget feature,

01:26:46 ◼   ► like for somebody who is, like, you're in a long Zoom meeting for work,

01:26:51 ◼   ► an hour-long meeting, and you're there, and, you know, you might slouch

01:26:54 ◼   ► a little, you just, you know, you get a little restless in your chair,

01:26:57 ◼   ► it's, it's, Face, it, the center stage algorithm is different on the

01:27:01 ◼   ► studio display than on the iPads, by choice, for reasons that I think

01:27:06 ◼   ► are good, but I think that they didn't, that there are things people

01:27:10 ◼   ► do in front of the camera, like turn your head to the side, that they

01:27:13 ◼   ► didn't anticipate, and I, I, that's clearly a software that they could

01:27:16 ◼   ► fix, right? Because they could, they could just delete all of the center

01:27:21 ◼   ► stage code and just put the iPad code in, and it would do the same thing

01:27:24 ◼   ► the iPad does, right? So, I'm sure that's fixable. I think it'll happen,

01:27:28 ◼   ► but I, I still think in my, in my gut, I expect a better camera than the

01:27:35 ◼   ► iPad front-facing camera. I, I, because it's, it's a $1600 display, it is

01:27:40 ◼   ► three-quarters of an inch thick, and I just attribute some of the, eh, not

01:27:46 ◼   ► bad for a front-facing camera, overall quality of iPad Pros and the iPad Air

01:27:50 ◼   ► to, well, look at how thin this thing is, right? And, and the rear-facing

01:27:54 ◼   ► camera sticks out, well, the front-facing camera isn't going to stick out

01:27:58 ◼   ► on an Apple device, so of course the image quality is a little less, but

01:28:02 ◼   ► the studio display has all the thickness in the world for a webcam,

01:28:06 ◼   ► you know? So, I kind of feel like, I, I still feel like even when they do

01:28:11 ◼   ► quote-unquote "fix" the image quality, I'm still going to be mildly

01:28:16 ◼   ► disappointed with it, I, compared to what I think they could have built

01:28:20 ◼   ► into this thickness display for a $1600 display and up without center

01:28:27 ◼   ► stage. I, I just don't personally, eh, you know, maybe other people do,

01:28:31 ◼   ► maybe I'm the wrong market, I just don't see when I'm going to use this

01:28:34 ◼   ► where I really want center stage. Well, so I think there's a few things

01:28:38 ◼   ► to unpack there, and I think some of it is that the studio display has

01:28:44 ◼   ► some really, really weird price anchoring going on around it, right?

01:28:48 ◼   ► Because the LG Ultrafine, the 5K one, is $1300, I believe, and honestly,

01:28:53 ◼   ► I don't personally perceive it as a $1300 monitor. I think at best it's a

01:28:58 ◼   ► $1000 monitor, and I think more realistically it should probably, can

01:29:02 ◼   ► maybe be even a little bit cheaper than that, because as I said earlier,

01:29:06 ◼   ► you know, everything about it is an exercise in mediocrity, and so when

01:29:10 ◼   ► you compare yourself to the LG 5K, and MKVHD did a really good video on

01:29:15 ◼   ► whether or not the studio display is a good deal, and the thesis of his

01:29:20 ◼   ► video was, you know, it depends on what you're after, and this is what

01:29:23 ◼   ► you and I were talking about earlier, you know, if you're a PC user, no,

01:29:25 ◼   ► it's a terrible deal, but if you're a Mac user who has a particular set

01:29:28 ◼   ► of priorities, then yeah, it's actually a pretty good deal. Why is it a

01:29:31 ◼   ► pretty good deal? Because it's only $300-ish more than the, than the

01:29:35 ◼   ► LG Ultrafine, but then if you consider the fact that I personally believe

01:29:41 ◼   ► that the LG Ultrafine is kind of drastically overpriced, then you start

01:29:45 ◼   ► thinking about, well, for a $1600 monitor, you know, shouldn't you have

01:29:50 ◼   ► a better webcam? And then you end up exactly where you were saying, John,

01:29:52 ◼   ► like, it seems like you should be able to do better for $1600. And I feel

01:29:59 ◼   ► like I understand why Apple went the way of using known hardware and

01:30:05 ◼   ► presumably a lot of known software. I mean, it's since come out that this

01:30:09 ◼   ► thing is basically running iOS or not exactly iOS, but very, very similar

01:30:14 ◼   ► to iOS in a, what was it, an A13 in the screen or something like that?

01:30:17 ◼   ► Well, I think, I think it is iOS. It's just that they've, you know,

01:30:21 ◼   ► retrofitted it to just do what they, what they want to do. But like,

01:30:25 ◼   ► literally the build number is, is exactly the same as 15.4.

01:30:29 ◼   ► Right. Exactly. But, but, you know, I think one, one thing that I was

01:30:34 ◼   ► really excited when I was watching the presentation, I was really excited

01:30:38 ◼   ► for Center Stage. And, and I think the reason that I'm super excited for

01:30:42 ◼   ► Center Stage is because I have a slightly different use case than you do.

01:30:45 ◼   ► And if you think about it, if I was going to get on a FaceTime call with

01:30:48 ◼   ► like my parents or my grandparents or something like that, it's not just me

01:30:52 ◼   ► or me and Aaron who will mostly stay still and mostly either be in the

01:30:56 ◼   ► shot or not. And that's something that as grownups, we can manage. But I

01:31:00 ◼   ► have a seven year old and a four year old, and they will be running in and

01:31:04 ◼   ► out of the shot and running around and so on and so forth. And so I think

01:31:09 ◼   ► in that case, for, if you consider using this as like a family phone call

01:31:14 ◼   ► device, then I think Center Stage could potentially make a lot of sense,

01:31:18 ◼   ► but it also worries me a little bit that perhaps Center Stage as set up in

01:31:23 ◼   ► the studio display is going to be a little lethargic for the needs of a

01:31:28 ◼   ► parent of a seven year old and a four year old, you know? And I understand

01:31:31 ◼   ► what you're saying about, well, if you're in a zoom call and you're just,

01:31:33 ◼   ► you know, rocking a teeny bit, you don't want to be, have the distraction

01:31:36 ◼   ► of the pseudo-cameraman rocking back and forth as well. That's not my life,

01:31:41 ◼   ► you know? And in the same way that you kind of sort of don't have colleagues,

01:31:44 ◼   ► I kind of sort of don't have colleagues, you know, Marco and John and Mike

01:31:48 ◼   ► accepted in many ways I'm by myself and I don't often find myself on video

01:31:52 ◼   ► calls. And so if I were to find myself on a video call for me, that would

01:31:56 ◼   ► be like a social thing, like a family thing. And in that case, that would be

01:32:02 ◼   ► very useful to have Center Stage. So it's hard as with all things, when

01:32:05 ◼   ► you're at Apple scale, like who do you emphasize or who do you really

01:32:09 ◼   ► consider to be your core user? You know, what user story is the story that

01:32:14 ◼   ► you really latch onto? And there's no right answer. And since Apple is

01:32:17 ◼   ► allergic to settings, you know, it's not like I can flip back and forth

01:32:19 ◼   ► between the John Gruber algorithm and the Casey Liss algorithm, you know?

01:32:22 ◼   ► So you just got to do the best with what you got. But I think it, I really

01:32:26 ◼   ► think the software is going to get better. I could make an argument, we

01:32:29 ◼   ► talked about this on this week's ATP, I can make an argument that maybe

01:32:32 ◼   ► there's a little too much software in the display. But on the flip side of

01:32:36 ◼   ► that, I'm saying that from the privileged position of having a brand

01:32:41 ◼   ► new MacBook Pro. You know, one of the great things about this display is

01:32:44 ◼   ► that Center Stage and all those things that are unique to Apple Silicon

01:32:49 ◼   ► can be run on an Intel-powered MacBook or MacBook Pro. And that's really

01:32:54 ◼   ► awesome and something that I don't think I've given Apple enough credit

01:32:58 ◼   ► for because I don't really care. I don't have any Intel devices around.

01:33:03 ◼   ► Well, I guess Erin's adorable. I pass that down to her, but you know,

01:33:06 ◼   ► she's not ever going to plug into the display. So I don't have any Intel

01:33:09 ◼   ► devices around anymore. So I don't really care that it's backwards

01:33:12 ◼   ► compatible. But that is a very unusual thing for Apple to do and just be

01:33:16 ◼   ► that cognizant in that forthcoming, for lack of a better word, with older

01:33:21 ◼   ► devices and saying, you know what, we've got you covered. We'll put the

01:33:24 ◼   ► Silicon in the display rather than you needing to have it on the thing the

01:33:27 ◼   ► display is connected to.

01:33:28 ◼   ► Yeah, that's definitely possible. I mean, and you know, I ran it. This is

01:33:32 ◼   ► the other weird thing. I did run it on, did I mention this in my review? I

01:33:37 ◼   ► think I did. Maybe in a footnote. Yeah, in a footnote that I initially

01:33:41 ◼   ► hooked it up to my MacBook Pro, which is running macOS 12.2, which is

01:33:45 ◼   ► officially unsupported, but more or less just runs it like a dumb display.

01:33:49 ◼   ► Like you can hook it up to a PC, you know, you just don't get Center Stage,

01:33:53 ◼   ► but you still, you know, your PC connected by Thunderbolt will see a

01:33:56 ◼   ► webcam, it'll hear the microphones, it'll, you know, play sound. I swear to

01:34:00 ◼   ► God, I got better image quality, even though I did. There was something

01:34:04 ◼   ► else, there's something else involved, something with the Center Stage part

01:34:08 ◼   ► of it, right? And I think that's, it's not, I was like, is it because the M1

01:34:13 ◼   ► in my Mac was using, it was something, something, I think it's something to

01:34:17 ◼   ► do with Center Stage. And by plugging it into a Mac that didn't have 12.3

01:34:22 ◼   ► yet and Center Stage wasn't there, image quality was definitely a little

01:34:25 ◼   ► better. There's no question in my mind, a little, not, but not like, still

01:34:29 ◼   ► not like iPad quality, which is to me where the bar should be set. I get it

01:34:33 ◼   ► though, I totally get your, and it always comes back to this with Apple

01:34:37 ◼   ► products, where Apple does not make everything, right? They, here's what

01:34:41 ◼   ► we're going to make, you know, and Tim Cook's famous, you can spread our

01:34:44 ◼   ► entire product line on a table. Well, now they need like a really big table,

01:34:49 ◼   ► but, but still the mindset is still there. They don't make everything and

01:34:55 ◼   ► okay, they made an option for nano texture, you know, which is, you know,

01:34:59 ◼   ► I'm glad it exists whether I end up buying it or not. That speaks, you know,

01:35:02 ◼   ► that's an option they didn't have to build. It is interesting to me that

01:35:06 ◼   ► with the Pro Display XDR, nano texture is an extra thousand dollars and it's

01:35:10 ◼   ► only, only $300. Like I said, some weird price anchoring on this thing.

01:35:16 ◼   ► But I totally get it though, that this display, because they've discontinued

01:35:20 ◼   ► the 27-inch iMac, that this display is the 27-inch display solution for

01:35:27 ◼   ► anybody and everybody in the Mac world who wants a 27-inch display. And I

01:35:31 ◼   ► totally, totally know firsthand from my own family, you know, that there are

01:35:35 ◼   ► lots and lots of families who have a 27-inch iMac as their family room

01:35:40 ◼   ► computer and want to do things like you said, like call, let's call the

01:35:44 ◼   ► grandparents on FaceTime. Come on over kids, you know, and you know, they

01:35:48 ◼   ► live across the state or across the country even and you know, it's

01:35:52 ◼   ► somebody's birthday and let's get everybody in here. And center stage,

01:35:55 ◼   ► in theory, should be way better than not having center stage in that

01:35:59 ◼   ► scenario. And this monitor is supposed to fit that need. And somebody like

01:36:04 ◼   ► me who's literally only using it for work and no longer has little kids,

01:36:08 ◼   ► you know, I don't need that. I totally acknowledge that, that, you know,

01:36:11 ◼   ► this isn't designed necessarily for my exact needs, but I get it. If you're

01:36:14 ◼   ► going to do it one way, maybe doing the center stage thing is a good

01:36:19 ◼   ► solution. I get it.

01:36:19 ◼   ► CURTIS LYON And actually that makes me think of a question I've wanted to

01:36:23 ◼   ► talk to you about. Do you begrudge the death of the 27-inch iMac? Because I

01:36:30 ◼   ► think if you look at Apple's lineup right now, that's a pretty big hole

01:36:35 ◼   ► that they left. But, and I think the biggest, the hole is predominantly,

01:36:40 ◼   ► what if you don't want a laptop, but you want like an M1 Max, or potentially,

01:36:45 ◼   ► I guess, an M1 Ultra, but particularly an M1 Max, or you maybe are backed

01:36:48 ◼   ► into an M1 Max because you want more than 16 gigs of RAM or what have you,

01:36:52 ◼   ► then you really don't have a good answer for that right now. But I don't

01:36:57 ◼   ► find this to be too alarming because I've got to imagine that there's going

01:37:01 ◼   ► to be a new Mac Mini sooner rather than later that either will have an M2

01:37:05 ◼   ► that supports more than 16 gigs of RAM, or maybe they'll offer an M1 Max or

01:37:09 ◼   ► something like that. So I really feel like this hole in the lineup for a

01:37:13 ◼   ► 27-inch computer that's pseudo-professional, I think it's going to get

01:37:19 ◼   ► filled real soon. I think it'll be filled by a beefier Mac Mini. And if you

01:37:23 ◼   ► leave aside the fact that this hypothetical forthcoming Mac Mini in

01:37:27 ◼   ► Studio Display Combo, it isn't all-in-one, which our mutual friend

01:37:32 ◼   ► John Siracusa was very perturbed about, but leaving aside that it's not

01:37:35 ◼   ► all-in-one, I feel like a slightly better Mac Mini as paired with the

01:37:38 ◼   ► Studio Display pretty nicely fills the hole left by the 27-inch iMac. But

01:37:44 ◼   ► I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Am I missing the boat? I mean,

01:37:48 ◼   ► again, today it's kind of crummy, but tomorrow, figuratively speaking, I've

01:37:52 ◼   ► got to imagine this hole will be filled, no? Well, I think that this is a

01:37:57 ◼   ► better lineup. And you're putting both of us in dangerous territory because

01:38:02 ◼   ► the people who really want Apple to make an all-in-one 27-inch iMac

01:38:07 ◼   ► really, really want it. I mean, they're probably gin-martini

01:38:11 ◼   ► drinkers as well. It must be. They're angry, you know, not

01:38:15 ◼   ► angry, but they're adamant. Again, in a hypothetical world app

01:38:20 ◼   ► where Apple makes everything it could make, they would make

01:38:23 ◼   ► both a 27-inch iMac right now with MacBook Pro guts, right?

01:38:33 ◼   ► The 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro guts where you could get

01:38:37 ◼   ► the, you know, what are the options? You get a regular M1 or an M1 Max.

01:38:42 ◼   ► Oh, God. You know, for podcasting, the Max name is so terrible.

01:38:46 ◼   ► So bad. It's so bad. It looks fine, so when you're reading it, it always reads like

01:38:50 ◼   ► maximum. Yeah, sure. But when you're saying it on a podcast, it always sounds like

01:38:54 ◼   ► you're pluralizing Mac. I wish they hadn't done that. But

01:38:59 ◼   ► anyway, yeah, so something like that where it scales exactly like the MacBook Pro

01:39:04 ◼   ► lines, MacBook Pro 14 and 16-inch guts in a 27-inch iMac where the range

01:39:10 ◼   ► would go from lower price with a regular M1 and only 16 gigs of RAM to an M1 Max

01:39:16 ◼   ► with up to 64 gigs of RAM and all the performance.

01:39:20 ◼   ► It would be great if they made that in addition to the studio display.

01:39:24 ◼   ► Totally. And, you know, I know firsthand, you don't have to write to me

01:39:28 ◼   ► again. I get it. I've heard from you. No, no, and I'm not complaining. I love getting

01:39:32 ◼   ► you. I love getting email from you because I did. It helps me know what people

01:39:35 ◼   ► want. I know that you're out there and I know that that's what you would want. But

01:39:38 ◼   ► if they're only going to make one and for many, many years, as we talked

01:39:42 ◼   ► earlier on the show, the one was the 27-inch iMac, which was not a solution if

01:39:46 ◼   ► you wanted a desktop display for a MacBook, right? And it took out target

01:39:50 ◼   ► display mode for reasons. And it seemed foolish anyway. I mean, we used to, you

01:39:56 ◼   ► know, I know everybody with a podcast has made jokes that I would buy a

01:40:00 ◼   ► 27-inch iMac and use it as a display if I could, but I can't. And just ignore

01:40:06 ◼   ► the Mac inside. We're sort of doing that now where we're ignoring the A13

01:40:12 ◼   ► computer that's inside, right? There is sort of a, what could be a Mac inside,

01:40:17 ◼   ► right? The Mac dev units last summer or two summers ago were A12Xs. So there's

01:40:22 ◼   ► an A13 in this son of a bitch, you know? It kind of is. But if they were only

01:40:29 ◼   ► going to do one or the other, this clearly is the way. And it's, you know,

01:40:35 ◼   ► it's a modular way of thinking. And all in one, well, define all in one. I

01:40:41 ◼   ► really need to write this as a follow-up on Daring Fireball because even the

01:40:46 ◼   ► 24-inch iMac, okay, that's all in one, right? Just do that, but 27 inches. Well,

01:40:52 ◼   ► it's not all in one though, because it has a really big external power brick.

01:41:00 ◼   ► And literally the size, it's almost exactly the size and weight of an Apple

01:41:05 ◼   ► TV 4K. You know, I've put one, I've stacked one on top of it. It's almost

01:41:10 ◼   ► the exact same footprint. I didn't get my scale out, but putting one in one

01:41:15 ◼   ► hand and one in the other. It's about the same. So it's, you know, what would

01:41:20 ◼   ► be the difference if they shrunk the Mac Mini to the size of Apple TV 4K and

01:41:27 ◼   ► using that to power an external display? Well, that's the exact same thing that

01:41:31 ◼   ► the 24-inch iMac is, right? The Apple Studio display, remarkably, in my

01:41:36 ◼   ► opinion, has no power brick. It is just a cable that comes out of the back.

01:41:42 ◼   ► It's just a regular cable that goes in the wall. And then you can plug a

01:41:45 ◼   ► MacBook in and get 96-watt charging out of it with no brick. So define what's

01:41:52 ◼   ► all in one, right? Like, so if you have a Mac Mini and you connect it to this

01:41:58 ◼   ► display, you've got one thing. Okay, the Mac Mini, at least the one we know

01:42:02 ◼   ► so far with the M1, is bigger than the 24-inch iMac's power brick. But it is

01:42:10 ◼   ► a brick and it is external. Either way, you've got a thing external to the

01:42:16 ◼   ► display on your desk. You know? See, I totally agree with you, but then,

01:42:21 ◼   ► channeling my inner John Siracusa, then the argument would be, well, they never

01:42:24 ◼   ► used a brick on prior 27-inch devices, so obviously they wouldn't this time.

01:42:28 ◼   ► Duh. Yeah, but they were a lot thicker, you know? I agree. No, I'm right there

01:42:33 ◼   ► with you. I'm right there with you. They were like, it's edge-to-edge thin,

01:42:37 ◼   ► it's so thin, and it was, you know, and I get it, I like that my 5K iMac

01:42:42 ◼   ► bulbous sort of pregnant back, I like the way that it, I think it's worth it

01:42:46 ◼   ► to make it taper to the edges, but the middle of the thing was, you know, it

01:42:50 ◼   ► was not all in one thickness thin, and that's what Apple wants to make. So

01:42:55 ◼   ► again, you could say, well, you don't need the brick, you could just put a

01:42:58 ◼   ► big box on the back of the thing, but now you're talking about a thing Apple

01:43:02 ◼   ► doesn't want to make, right? They don't want to put a box on the back of the

01:43:04 ◼   ► thing, and this modularity really solves the biggest problem. If, again, they

01:43:10 ◼   ► could make both, both the 27-inch iMac and this display, but 80% at least, I

01:43:15 ◼   ► mean, Apple doesn't break it down, but, you know, common sense tells you most

01:43:19 ◼   ► people buy MacBooks. Some little birdie info that I'm privy to says it was at

01:43:25 ◼   ► least 80% in 2021, and that Apple expects that number to continue going up

01:43:30 ◼   ► towards more than 80% of MacBooks in 2022. They expect, or max total, they

01:43:36 ◼   ► expect to be MacBooks of some sort. Even though their desktop game is better

01:43:41 ◼   ► than it has been in memory, that's just the way the world is going, and now

01:43:46 ◼   ► they have a display that can plug into any MacBook, it's great, and if you do

01:43:51 ◼   ► really want a desktop, you don't want to plug a MacBook in, you want to plug a

01:43:54 ◼   ► desktop in, the modularity of this is phenomenal, and I think it's only going

01:43:59 ◼   ► to be even better once the M2 Mac Minis come out, which I think, I don't know

01:44:05 ◼   ► that they're going to go lower in price, but it should fill in some of the gaps

01:44:10 ◼   ► in the middle of, well, I want a Mac Mini, but I actually, you know, I want

01:44:15 ◼   ► like 64 gigs of RAM.

01:44:16 ◼   ► Trenton Larkin Exactly.

01:44:17 ◼   ► Dave King They'll have that, and then you can buy it, and yes, it's not all in

01:44:21 ◼   ► one, but you've just got one thing, one box, and I am, nobody talks about it,

01:44:30 ◼   ► but I feel like there have been two stories with Apple's Apple Silicon Macs.

01:44:35 ◼   ► There was the first round in 2020 at the end where they put the M1 chips into

01:44:41 ◼   ► exactly the same chassis as their Intel ones, and I've talked to people at

01:44:48 ◼   ► Apple, this was done for multiple reasons, but one of them was secrecy, that

01:44:52 ◼   ► they did not want, you know, anybody, their competitors or Intel to know that,

01:44:59 ◼   ► you know, and no, everybody knew that, it seems, you know, for years, we were

01:45:02 ◼   ► all, you know, it was like half of all of our podcasts, when is Apple going to

01:45:06 ◼   ► move from Intel to Apple Silicon, right?

01:45:08 ◼   ► Trenton Larkin Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:08 ◼   ► Dave King Look at these, look at these as Geekbench numbers, these bananas, my

01:45:11 ◼   ► phone gets a higher score, but they wanted to keep it secret inside the

01:45:15 ◼   ► company, and the best way to keep it secret was to keep the hardware

01:45:19 ◼   ► completely unchanged to the maximum level, except for the silicon

01:45:26 ◼   ► architecture and the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the Mac Mini,

01:45:33 ◼   ► what else was there? Did they do the M1? Was there an old-looking 16-inch?

01:45:38 ◼   ► Yeah, there must have been, right?

01:45:39 ◼   ► Trenton Larkin I think that's right, yeah.

01:45:40 ◼   ► Dave King They all looked exactly the same, and then,

01:45:43 ◼   ► starting with the iMac, 24-inch iMac last year, we started seeing the first

01:45:47 ◼   ► Mac hardware designed from the ground up around Apple Silicon, and guess what?

01:45:52 ◼   ► It's really impressive, right?

01:45:54 ◼   ► Trenton Larkin Who'd have thunk it?

01:45:55 ◼   ► Dave King It's crazy thin, like, you could not build

01:45:59 ◼   ► the 24-inch iMac out of Intel Silicon, you couldn't do it, and I think that the

01:46:05 ◼   ► 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros that you and I have now, 14-inch, obviously,

01:46:11 ◼   ► those could be Intel, because, you know, they actually got thicker and heavier,

01:46:15 ◼   ► because they sort of went, like, more, "Let's give Pros Pro features."

01:46:19 ◼   ► So I feel like that throws people off, but I feel like at the consumer level,

01:46:24 ◼   ► the iMac shows the way, and that they want to make crazy thin, light, small things that they

01:46:30 ◼   ► couldn't build before. And so, the next round of consumer MacBooks, whether they—I don't know if

01:46:37 ◼   ► they're going to call it MacBook Air anymore—I really think they're going to get rid of the

01:46:41 ◼   ► 13-inch MacBook Pro branding, because I think that they've clarified, "Pro? Okay, we really mean Pro.

01:46:48 ◼   ► Pro means Pro." And, you know, maybe they'll call, like, the higher-end 13-inch MacBook,

01:46:56 ◼   ► you know, that is, you know, like, what the two-port 13-inch Pro was. Maybe they'll call

01:47:00 ◼   ► it the MacBook Studio, right? They've introduced this—

01:47:03 ◼   ► Trenton Larkin Oh, that'd be interesting.

01:47:04 ◼   ► Dave King They've introduced this new word "studio"

01:47:06 ◼   ► that sort of occupies the prosumer space, you know? I don't know, that's just a spitball

01:47:11 ◼   ► I—names never, ever, ever leak to me, so I—if there actually is a MacBook Studio, it's truly a

01:47:17 ◼   ► guess on my part. But I would expect the new MacBook Air to be, like, the 12-inch adorable,

01:47:22 ◼   ► super, super thin, crazy thin. This is insane. It's insane how thin this thing is.

01:47:27 ◼   ► Trenton Larkin Yeah, and I loved that computer so much. So,

01:47:31 ◼   ► at the time in which I bought the 12-inch MacBook, which I call the MacBook Adorable, that's the—like

01:47:35 ◼   ► you said earlier, that's the one USB-C port and a headphone jack. That's literally all the

01:47:39 ◼   ► connectivity it had—physical connectivity it had. I bought that when I was—when I had a 27-inch

01:47:44 ◼   ► iMac, and that was my—the Adorable was my iPad and my portable computer. Because at the time,

01:47:51 ◼   ► I'd kind of fallen out of love with the iPad. I tend to kind of fall in and out of love with

01:47:56 ◼   ► iPad for whatever reason. But one way or another, I had used that as my satellite computer. And

01:48:02 ◼   ► it was a fortune. It was like $3,000 or something like that. It was not particularly well-specced.

01:48:07 ◼   ► It was dog-slow. And I loved it. Gosh, did I love that computer. I like this—I love this 14-inch

01:48:15 ◼   ► MacBook Pro more because it has basically no compromises. But the 12-inch MacBook—and

01:48:22 ◼   ► my understanding is, what was the 11-inch PowerBook? Do I have that right?

01:48:26 ◼   ► Dave Vega No, there was 11-inch MacBook Air. And there was a 12-inch PowerBook

01:48:30 ◼   ► many, many, many, many years before. Trenton Larkin

01:48:33 ◼   ► Okay, so all of these are cut from a similar cloth, right? Like, let's get maximum portability,

01:48:39 ◼   ► everything else be damned. Ports be damned, battery life, anything else. Speed, doesn't matter. We

01:48:44 ◼   ► don't care. We want something super crazy portable. And that's what that thing was. And I could put

01:48:49 ◼   ► that thing in like a bag or a backpack. I think once or twice I might have asked Aaron to carry

01:48:55 ◼   ► it in a purse for some reason or another. Like, it was preposterously thin and preposterously great.

01:49:00 ◼   ► And if you didn't mind waiting an hour to accomplish anything. And she still uses that as

01:49:06 ◼   ► her primary computer because Aaron's computing needs are extremely small these days. I was

01:49:10 ◼   ► listening to you talking about how Amy Jane is mostly on an iPad, and about the only reason she

01:49:14 ◼   ► uses a computer computer is for, you know, writing her own email or something. And I feel like with

01:49:19 ◼   ► Aaron, it's a very similar thing. And so anyways, I loved that MacBook, MacBook Adorable, but that

01:49:25 ◼   ► was the definition of compromise. You know, it was compromised top to bottom. And I can't help but

01:49:31 ◼   ► wonder what would it look like if it wasn't nothing but compromise? Like it surely wouldn't be as

01:49:37 ◼   ► powerful as a 14-inch MacBook Pro. But what if it was in the ballpark? What if it was close?

01:49:43 ◼   ► Trenton Larkin Well, it just forget about all of the Max and Ultra chips, right? Just think just

01:49:49 ◼   ► the M2, right? Or just the M1, right? Like the thing that it's fascinating to me, and I think

01:49:56 ◼   ► it just speaks to the interest in the iPhone and the fact that they have to make 100 million of

01:50:01 ◼   ► them a quarter or more, you know, that the iPhone, I mean, that the iPhone industrial designs tend to

01:50:09 ◼   ► always leak, right? And there's sort of a strong consensus about what the iPhone 14 is going to

01:50:14 ◼   ► look like already, you know, instead of a notch, it's going to have like a sort of oval hole punch,

01:50:19 ◼   ► but the same size, blah, blah, blah. But it's fascinating to me that like the Mac stuff has

01:50:24 ◼   ► not been leaking. Nobody knew what the iMac 24-inch was going to look like, right? And it

01:50:30 ◼   ► was there. It was a lot of fun that, hey, it's in these colors. It's crazy thin. This is, you know,

01:50:36 ◼   ► it was a lot of fun that it was a surprise. The 14 and 16-inch MacBooks, we knew they were coming,

01:50:41 ◼   ► but nobody knew what they were going to look like. Like, they were surprised. And we've got all these

01:50:45 ◼   ► rumors about upcoming M2 consumer MacBooks, you know, from Mark Gurman and Ming-Chi Kuo and other

01:50:52 ◼   ► people. And, you know, I don't doubt any of them. I think they're all right. But they don't know what

01:50:56 ◼   ► they're called, right? When they say, like when Gurman says, you know, that he expects MacBook Air

01:51:01 ◼   ► later this year, he has no idea if it's actually going to be called MacBook Air. That's the sort

01:51:06 ◼   ► of thing that does not come from those sources. And look at the studio. The studio is the same

01:51:11 ◼   ► thing, right? Because we didn't know if it was a squat Mac Pro or a tall Mac Mini or where it would

01:51:15 ◼   ► end up and it was the same story. Yeah, yeah. And he had that to some degree, right? Like,

01:51:19 ◼   ► he was right about it, but he didn't have like a description of it. I think it's fascinating that

01:51:26 ◼   ► people seem to be, a lot of people seem to be expecting like an M2 MacBook Air to look just like

01:51:31 ◼   ► the MacBook Air today. I don't think that, I think there's zero chance of that. None, because the

01:51:36 ◼   ► whole reason the MacBook Air looks the way it does is it was designed around Intel thermals. And the

01:51:41 ◼   ► current M1 MacBook Air is based on that design for Intel thermals and capabilities and for ease of

01:51:51 ◼   ► introduction and secrecy and whatever other reasons. They just did the first round by putting

01:51:55 ◼   ► the M1 into that design. Now we can see what they could design from the ground up. And I would

01:52:00 ◼   ► expect it to look as different from a MacBook Air as the 24-inch iMac looks from all previous iMacs.

01:52:06 ◼   ► Like, shockingly thin. And the other thing that we know, because they made the 12-inch MacBook,

01:52:12 ◼   ► aka adorable, or no adjective, whatever you want to call it, we know they want to make crazy thin,

01:52:20 ◼   ► small, light Macs, right? Like MacBooks. And because they've got the M1 in the iPad Pro and

01:52:28 ◼   ► now the iPad Air, we know it can run without any cooling at all and never get warm to the touch

01:52:35 ◼   ► in a crazy thin device that's super lightweight.

01:52:38 ◼   ► Yeah. And I think you're exactly right that they're surely going to change the industrial

01:52:43 ◼   ► design and surely the requirements will be quite a bit different. And, you know, I think right now

01:52:50 ◼   ► we're still very clearly in a transition. And yes, that's obvious. But what I mean is, you know,

01:52:55 ◼   ► what you were saying about the industrial design being a holdover for the MacBook Air and the

01:52:59 ◼   ► 13-inch MacBook Pro. I mean, it's exactly right. And additionally, the M1, while a phenomenal chip,

01:53:04 ◼   ► the M1, no adjective, it does have some somewhat severe constraints, most particularly the 16 gigs

01:53:11 ◼   ► of RAM. And now in a lot of use cases, and perhaps most, if not almost all use cases,

01:53:16 ◼   ► 16 gigs of RAM is fine. I was looking just yesterday or the day before, I run i-STAT

01:53:22 ◼   ► menus on my Macs because I kind of like to keep track of nerdy things like that.

01:53:27 ◼   ► And it does a really good job keeping a historical graph of certain things, including memory use.

01:53:31 ◼   ► And I was looking at it and I have a 64 gig, 14-inch MacBook Pro, if you will. And I don't

01:53:37 ◼   ► think I've ever crossed over half of my memory. You know, I've never gone over like 32 gigs of

01:53:43 ◼   ► usage. And so even me as a software developer, and granted there are other things that are much

01:53:47 ◼   ► more taxing, but as a person who lives in Xcode, I don't probably need more than 32 gigs of RAM.

01:53:54 ◼   ► And so this is what I'm saying. Like all the people that I speak to that are really grumpy

01:53:59 ◼   ► about the lack of a real prosume desktop, because they argue that the studio is too much and the

01:54:05 ◼   ► Mini is too little, and they're looking for the Goldilocks in the middle. I feel like the Air

01:54:10 ◼   ► and the 13-inch Pro, if it persists, are kind of in a similar boat as the Mac Mini, where I feel

01:54:15 ◼   ► like, yeah, today you're right. They're kind of hamstrung a little bit. But be it because the M1

01:54:22 ◼   ► Max arrives in them, or as you said, Jon, and I think that's more likely, the M2 arrives in these

01:54:26 ◼   ► devices. Even leaving aside the industrial design, I think that there'll be far fewer compromises,

01:54:32 ◼   ► and they'll be much more appealing to much more people. And that I think will close some of the

01:54:38 ◼   ► holes, some of which are gaping, in the lineup. And I think that if people can just be patient

01:54:43 ◼   ► for another 6 to 12 months, based just on gut, based on no insider information, I really think

01:54:48 ◼   ► this lineup, whether or not it has a quote-unquote "all-in-one" 27-inch answer, I think the lineup

01:54:54 ◼   ► broadly though will cover darn near everything from the $1,000 MacBook Air that will probably

01:55:00 ◼   ► be preposterously fast, all the way through the forthcoming Mac Pro, which will probably be

01:55:04 ◼   ► preposterously fast and preposterously expensive, and everywhere in between.

01:55:08 ◼   ► Yeah, and crazy thin. I just think people are gonna be blown away by how thin the Air is. And

01:55:12 ◼   ► I have no inside birdie information on this at all. I just know what Apple likes to build. They

01:55:18 ◼   ► like to build things crazy. And I really think it's been a clarifying series of years of them

01:55:24 ◼   ► reinvesting in putting the Pro and Pro on the MacBook. So, okay, let's make them more different.

01:55:31 ◼   ► Like that 13-inch MacBook Pro with two ports, it epitomizes their sort of muddling of the consumer

01:55:39 ◼   ► and Pro lineups. They call it a MacBook Pro, but it's only got two ports, and it always had less

01:55:44 ◼   ► fewer features. It didn't have the beloved touch bar. I think that product branding has got to be

01:55:50 ◼   ► gone. I think it's gone. And then you just, you know, like there's no confusion on the iPhone side

01:55:56 ◼   ► between iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro, right? The Pros are made of a different material,

01:56:02 ◼   ► and they have three cameras instead of two cameras, and they cost a lot more. Just bring

01:56:07 ◼   ► that same clarity to the MacBook branding and, you know, have an Air and maybe just bring back

01:56:13 ◼   ► the plain old MacBook. I don't know what they'll do branding-wise, but just make it really clear

01:56:17 ◼   ► and say, "Okay, these 14, 16-inch Pro models, lots of ports, all the power, max chips. You can get up

01:56:23 ◼   ► to 64 gigs of RAM. If you want the power, there you go. Have at it $2,000 and up. And here's our

01:56:30 ◼   ► consumer ones. Crazy thin, right? Crazy thin, crazy light. You know, doesn't have the power,

01:56:37 ◼   ► but starts at $1,000. And don't—the thing I'm—you know, who knows? Maybe they'll ship the M2

01:56:43 ◼   ► Mac Mini, and it will literally be the same footprint. The Mac Mini we know and love,

01:56:48 ◼   ► it's just now it's got the M2. Maybe it'll come in space gray again and whatever. But don't sleep

01:56:54 ◼   ► on that as something that could potentially shrink, right? Like they could totally make it

01:57:00 ◼   ► like the Mac Nano. Because think about it, like the A15 in the iPhone is super powerful chip.

01:57:08 ◼   ► It's single core is, I guess, better than, you know, the M1 series. Look at how small the iPhone

01:57:15 ◼   ► 13 Mini is, and it has a battery and a display. Like, I really think that—I think Apple Silicon

01:57:23 ◼   ► chips at the non-Max, non-Ultra—okay, it's not two of them together, it's not four of them

01:57:30 ◼   ► together or something like that. It's just one, which is plenty powerful enough for most people,

01:57:36 ◼   ► are so crazy small that like the Mac Mini could now be defined entirely by the ports. Like,

01:57:43 ◼   ► what ports do we want to put in the back? And that defines the shape. Not the thermals,

01:57:48 ◼   ► not the chip, just the ports. And if I'm right, again, pure spitball, and the Mac Mini becomes

01:57:57 ◼   ► the Mac Nano, even if they don't rebrand it, but if it shrinks, then the complaints about the

01:58:02 ◼   ► studio display not being all in one go, to me, go away. If they can shrink the Mac Mini to be the

01:58:08 ◼   ► size of the brick on the iMac 24, then what's the complaint about? I mean, I guess price, if it's a

01:58:15 ◼   ► $1600 display plus a $700 to start Mac Mini, you're at $2300 already, and that's more than the base

01:58:24 ◼   ► price of the old 27-inch iMac? I don't know. But, so maybe it's, you know, but there's inflation,

01:58:30 ◼   ► and you know, it's Apple, what are we going to do, complain? It's Apple. Anyway, let me take a break

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02:00:01 ◼   ► So, hey, let's, we're at the two-hour mark, but I wanted to talk about your, you know, this is the

02:00:06 ◼   ► reason I invited you, one of the reasons I invited you on. I know you had strong opinions about the

02:00:09 ◼   ► displays, but no, but I want to turn this into, I want to do more on this show and get people on

02:00:14 ◼   ► when they have something to promote, right? It's, you know, and you've got a new app that I think is

02:00:19 ◼   ► very clever and that you've been, to me, underselling on your own podcast, ATP. Tell my

02:00:26 ◼   ► audience about your app. Sure. So I've written an app and released it to the app store called

02:00:30 ◼   ► Masquer Aid, and it's, it's the two words, masquer and aid mashed together, but it's a play on,

02:00:36 ◼   ► you know, masquer aid, if you will. Anyways, the idea of the app is let's say you have a photograph,

02:00:41 ◼   ► but you want to obscure maybe a face or maybe an object or something like that. You want to obscure

02:00:46 ◼   ► part of the photo. And what masquer aid lets you do is you can load up this photo in the app,

02:00:52 ◼   ► and it will help you put emoji on top of the photo. And then something that I've been terrible

02:00:56 ◼   ► about publicizing is that it'll automatically strip all the metadata off the photo as well.

02:01:00 ◼   ► So lens information, location information, more importantly than anything else I'd argue.

02:01:05 ◼   ► And so this way it can, it's a really fast and easy way to help you obscure or occlude things

02:01:12 ◼   ► that you don't want shown before you share this photo to say Instagram or Twitter or something

02:01:16 ◼   ► like that. And the genesis for this was, you know, as I'd mentioned earlier, I have a seven-year-old

02:01:21 ◼   ► and a four-year-old and my son, the elder, when he was four, you know, and I know this has been

02:01:26 ◼   ► a couple of years for you, John, but at some point you look down and you realize, holy shit,

02:01:31 ◼   ► that's like a person now. You know, that's not just a little lump. That's not just a toddler.

02:01:35 ◼   ► That's like a full-on person. And for me and Declan, my son, it was about four years old

02:01:40 ◼   ► that I looked at him and realized, whoa, whoa, he's a real life person now. And so, you know,

02:01:46 ◼   ► as first-time parents and we had a lot of trouble getting pregnant. So we, of course, you know,

02:01:50 ◼   ► overshared as all first-time parents do regardless. We overshared pictures of Declan and then later

02:01:55 ◼   ► Michaela, my daughter, when she was born. But it occurred to me when he was about four that,

02:02:00 ◼   ► you know, he doesn't understand consent and he doesn't understand, you know, if I ask him,

02:02:04 ◼   ► hey, can I put this on the internet? He's going to be like, yeah, sure, dad, whatever.

02:02:06 ◼   ► But what if in five years and 10 years and 15 years or something like that, what if,

02:02:11 ◼   ► you know, some friend of his or foe even goes looking for dirt on Declan and finds some like

02:02:18 ◼   ► super compromising photo that I've taken, or maybe a photo that I didn't think was compromising,

02:02:22 ◼   ► but he somehow finds to be compromising or, you know, times change and maybe something that we

02:02:28 ◼   ► think is okay now, we may not think is okay in a year or 10 years or whatnot. And so for me,

02:02:33 ◼   ► what I wanted to do was to put an emoji over my kids' faces. So I could share a picture of maybe

02:02:39 ◼   ► me or maybe Aaron and me and the kids. And you can do this using Instagram stories, but it's kind of

02:02:45 ◼   ► a real pain in the ass. And it only goes to Instagram stories and it's, yeah, it only goes

02:02:50 ◼   ► to Instagram stories, or I guess you can save it to your camera roll, but you know, it's, it's just,

02:02:53 ◼   ► it's, it's a nightmare. And using Instagram, I, again, I, I get it that Instagram has the feature,

02:03:00 ◼   ► but I don't think you need to even belabor the point using Instagram as an image editor for

02:03:05 ◼   ► something other than posting to Instagram is ridiculous. Yeah, exactly. And so I, I wanted

02:03:11 ◼   ► a way to do this quickly and easily. And it occurred to me, I had one of those just epiphany

02:03:15 ◼   ► moments where I thought, well, wait a second, like a couple of years ago at WWDC, I swear,

02:03:21 ◼   ► I sat through a vision related presentation where they talked about face detection. There's got to

02:03:28 ◼   ► be something I can do with this. And so, you know, long story shorter, what, what masquerade will do

02:03:33 ◼   ► is when you load an image into masquerade, it will automatically use, you know, Apple's machine

02:03:37 ◼   ► learning models to detect where faces are within the image. And we'll just slap an emoji over any

02:03:44 ◼   ► face that it finds. And then if it's maybe a grownup or someone you don't want to, you know,

02:03:48 ◼   ► hide their face, it makes it, you know, masquerade makes it super easy to just remove what you don't

02:03:52 ◼   ► want or add more if you need to. But the idea is if I was to take a picture of my family of four,

02:03:57 ◼   ► you know, it will masquerade, we'll load it up, it'll put the four emoji on, and then I will just

02:04:01 ◼   ► remove the one for me, the one from Aaron. And then I can send it off to Instagram or Twitter,

02:04:05 ◼   ► wherever lickety split. And so I am of the mind, I guess, you know, kind of the Unix mindset of,

02:04:10 ◼   ► you know, do one thing, do it well and do it fast. And that's, that's what masquerade is designed to

02:04:14 ◼   ► do. It's, you know, it's funny, too, I just, I will belabor the point of Instagram. The other

02:04:19 ◼   ► thing, too, is fundamentally, whatever you want to use masquerade for, it's, it almost certainly

02:04:24 ◼   ► revolves around privacy, to some degree. I mean, I guess the only thing you could use it for,

02:04:29 ◼   ► and people probably are, is it might be used for comedic purposes that have nothing to do with

02:04:34 ◼   ► privacy, to put a funny emoji over somebody's face or put the emoji over, you know, anywhere else,

02:04:39 ◼   ► you know, you can add the emoji to make it look like a fart is, you know, the poof emoji to make

02:04:44 ◼   ► it look like a fart is coming out. It's probably the number one thing people are using the app for.

02:04:48 ◼   ► Michael O'Brien Yeah, I saw a lot of

02:04:49 ◼   ► pig noses on dog snouts, which I found quite delightful, actually.

02:04:53 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Yeah. But all right, comedy aside, it's about privacy. And once you're talking about

02:04:58 ◼   ► privacy, the idea of using Instagram's tools because they're free is ridiculous, right? Like,

02:05:04 ◼   ► you know, no matter what you think about Instagram, privacy is, does not come to mind. So it's, it's

02:05:10 ◼   ► really clever. And you, I'm a little bit behind on ATP. I didn't listen to the entirety of the most

02:05:15 ◼   ► recent show. I don't know if you talked about Masquerade some more. But at least a week ago,

02:05:18 ◼   ► you guys, you did some follow up and you heard from listeners of the show and other people who

02:05:23 ◼   ► became aware of Masquerade already, who had use cases you had never, you didn't even think of.

02:05:28 ◼   ► I thought the one, the one to me, I remember listening, it's one of those things where I

02:05:32 ◼   ► actually could tell you exactly where I was. I was running errands in Philadelphia. And I have a

02:05:37 ◼   ► weird memory like this. I remember where I was when you said it. I was at Broad and Walnut Street in

02:05:43 ◼   ► Philadelphia on the east side of the street. And you said you were talking about like grade school

02:05:50 ◼   ► teachers taking pictures of their classroom. And I was like, oh, bingo. And because the thing is,

02:05:56 ◼   ► the machine learning part of it is super fast and accurate, right? So teacher wants to take

02:06:04 ◼   ► a picture for whatever reason, field trip, right? It's a field trip and the teacher wants to share

02:06:08 ◼   ► a picture of the class on a trip. And, you know, again, my kid is a senior in high school now.

02:06:15 ◼   ► I'm past this, but apparently it's now a thing where like, you know, you have like a second or

02:06:19 ◼   ► a third grader and there's like a social media, what would you call it? Release, release, release

02:06:25 ◼   ► form. You don't know if you have it or whatever. Who wants to deal with it? Maybe, you know, 15 out

02:06:29 ◼   ► of 25 kids in your class have them and 10 don't and you don't know who they are, whatever. And

02:06:34 ◼   ► even if you just were like, ah, I just want to put the emoji over every kid's face. Well, if you use

02:06:38 ◼   ► like a traditional tool and you've got like a snapshot of like 18 kids on a field trip, it's

02:06:43 ◼   ► like, here's one, here's two. You use masquerade. Seriously, I'm not just saying this because you're

02:06:48 ◼   ► a guest. You use it, you open up that image and boom, you get a little haptic feedback,

02:06:52 ◼   ► which I love, which is one of my favorite little features. You get a little, little,

02:06:55 ◼   ► I'm not imagining that, right? There's a little haptic feedback when you...

02:06:58 ◼   ► I don't know if it does unload. I don't think it does unload, but as soon as you like go to

02:07:02 ◼   ► manipulate anything, it absolutely will. Yeah. And boom, it just finds all the faces, puts an

02:07:07 ◼   ► emoji on them and it's done, right? Like, so instead of sitting there and like, oh, well,

02:07:12 ◼   ► if I spend like three minutes, I can put like, I can cover up the face of all these kids,

02:07:16 ◼   ► dot, dot, dot. You just opened it up, boom, all the faces are covered. You can pick the emoji.

02:07:21 ◼   ► Really clever. And like any good computer thing, computers especially, it's always the unintended

02:07:28 ◼   ► use cases that become the reason it becomes successful, right? You know, it's like, so you're

02:07:33 ◼   ► thinking I'm a dad, I've got young kids, I'd like to share these pictures, but you know, you said

02:07:39 ◼   ► it well, you know, that you'd like to respect their future wishes and you don't know what they

02:07:43 ◼   ► are. You built it for that. But the school teacher scenario, that's fascinating. You had a couple

02:07:48 ◼   ► other examples too. I've heard a bunch. The most popular one I think I've heard is foster parents.

02:07:53 ◼   ► And so my very limited understanding of foster parenting is that in most places it is illegal,

02:08:01 ◼   ► if not certainly frowned upon, but generally illegal to post an image of a foster child's face

02:08:06 ◼   ► on social media, on social media. Right. And so, so you are legally compelled as a foster parent,

02:08:13 ◼   ► who's doing, you know, such an incredible thing. And I've got to imagine, and forgive me if my,

02:08:17 ◼   ► you know, language is wrong here, but these kids must feel like part of your family. And I guess

02:08:21 ◼   ► they are part of your family if not forever, but certainly for the time that they're with you.

02:08:25 ◼   ► And so, so yeah, you, you want to share your family with your friends and other family,

02:08:30 ◼   ► you know, you're, you want to share your immediate family with your extended family

02:08:33 ◼   ► and you're legally compelled not to put their faces on Facebook or Instagram or what have you.

02:08:39 ◼   ► And so a lot of foster parents reached out and said, Oh my God, I've been waiting for this my

02:08:42 ◼   ► entire life. Like I had, I had no idea that we could make this so easy. And that was extremely

02:08:47 ◼   ► rewarding. I had a person reach out who I don't believe they were a photographer, but I believe

02:08:52 ◼   ► associated with photographers, they were in some sort of news organization that was covering what's

02:08:56 ◼   ► going on in Ukraine. And they said, you know, this would be extremely useful for us for

02:09:00 ◼   ► covering what's going on with war efforts, what's going on with protests. And, you know, because

02:09:05 ◼   ► obviously, especially if you're covering protests in Russia, where, you know, the people who are

02:09:10 ◼   ► protesting or taking considerable personal risks by expressing their opinions to say the least.

02:09:16 ◼   ► Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Much more so than we've ever had to deal with here, even during

02:09:19 ◼   ► questionable administrations. And so it makes a lot of sense to, to obscure their faces and

02:09:25 ◼   ► similarly like Ukrainian soldiers, if you will, or whatever the case may be. And then there are

02:09:30 ◼   ► other silly ones though. And I know you and I agree very strongly that, that Disney world is

02:09:35 ◼   ► a wonderful place to vacation. And so somebody sent me a photo of both of them sitting, I think

02:09:40 ◼   ► it was in front of the people mover, which is my personal favorite ride at Disney. They, they sent

02:09:43 ◼   ► a photo of their family, but all the like bystanders were, were covered with emoji, which I

02:09:48 ◼   ► thought was very cool. But my favorite of these with regard to theme parks was somebody who took

02:09:52 ◼   ► the on-ride photo from splash mountain and scared all the other faces. I think with like the screamy

02:09:59 ◼   ► like Van Gogh or no, I forget who it is. The starry night, screamy guy. And I think there was

02:10:03 ◼   ► a bunch of screaming people and then just their family was left. So you could see them. And I

02:10:08 ◼   ► really loved that. That those are my, I think my favorites, the most unexpected though was I've had

02:10:15 ◼   ► a handful of boudoir photographers reach out and say, you know, sometimes some of our pictures are

02:10:21 ◼   ► not safe for work and we might need to let's say use the eggplant or peach emojis strategically,

02:10:28 ◼   ► or perhaps, you know, they people, maybe they just want their heads covered and it's not as,

02:10:32 ◼   ► not quite as risque as I'm painting it. But that was, that was something I didn't quite expect to

02:10:36 ◼   ► read. And it got, there were even some more risque versions than that, that I won't necessarily share

02:10:40 ◼   ► right now, but those were, those were quite eyeopening. And certainly I'm not complaining,

02:10:44 ◼   ► but it's certainly not the use case I had set out for when I wrote the app.

02:10:48 ◼   ► But that's really a sign of strength of a good idea that it's used in ways you didn't expect.

02:10:53 ◼   ► My favorite story about that is BB Edit. BB Edit started in 1991, I think was the first version.

02:11:00 ◼   ► And it's sort of infamous where version 1.0 was only like, I think the only people who used it

02:11:06 ◼   ► worked at Think Technologies with Rich Siegel. And the first version he released publicly was like

02:11:12 ◼   ► 2.0. But anytime there's somebody who's like, I've been using it since 1.0. And Rich can say like,

02:11:17 ◼   ► well, you didn't work with me. So no, but I know what you mean. And I appreciate your long-term use

02:11:22 ◼   ► of the product. You know, it's 92, 93, and it was a smash hit in the shareware world. And then,

02:11:28 ◼   ► you know, all of a sudden the World Wide Web becomes a thing circa like 1994. And they start

02:11:32 ◼   ► getting all this email. And they had a plugin API and somebody, I think his name was Craig somebody,

02:11:37 ◼   ► but made like a really, at the time, very good plugin for HTML where you got like this palette

02:11:43 ◼   ► full of all the most popular tags. And then you could just select text, hit a button and surround

02:11:48 ◼   ► the text with the tags. Or if it was like the image tag, it would prompt for the image URL.

02:11:53 ◼   ► You know, it just made it, it's just a convenience thing for writing HTML. And that they got all

02:11:57 ◼   ► these emails from people like, oh my God, BBA is the greatest thing ever for HTML. And like the

02:12:02 ◼   ► first answers were like, hey, that's great to hear. What's HTML? You know, it was a very quick

02:12:10 ◼   ► process. I mean, the web exploded in popularity and, you know, Rich and Patrick Woolsey, his

02:12:15 ◼   ► longtime colleague, you know, and co-founder, you know, it quickly went from what's HTML to,

02:12:19 ◼   ► oh, okay, I get it. And now I can see why BBA is good for it, but it wasn't designed for it at all.

02:12:25 ◼   ► And, you know, it became, for a long time, it was known, BBA was best known as an HTML editor

02:12:31 ◼   ► and hadn't really changed except having a plugin for it. Same thing with Masquerade, right? Like,

02:12:36 ◼   ► you did not think that it was going to be used to cover up adult photography, you know?

02:12:42 ◼   ► So, automatically it uses machine learning to identify faces and will put the emoji of your

02:12:56 ◼   ► choice over all the faces. And then you can pinch to zoom them to make them bigger or smaller

02:13:02 ◼   ► or drag them around. But it also, it will let you add emoji to an image and cover up anything

02:13:07 ◼   ► that you want. So, if you want to secure something in a photo with an emoji to cover it up,

02:13:12 ◼   ► it's super easy to do. It's not just for faces.

02:13:14 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. And I actually have been kicking around the idea of having some sort of switch

02:13:20 ◼   ► where if you find yourself not particularly interested in covering faces, that I won't even

02:13:25 ◼   ► bother trying, you know, and maybe there would be a button you could hit after the fact, you know,

02:13:29 ◼   ► if you would like to cover faces. Just a quick point of clarification, though. The free version,

02:13:34 ◼   ► which is a very standard emoji, like the very bog-standard smiley face, it's a one-time $3 an

02:13:38 ◼   ► app purchase to get basically all the other emoji. And then, and that's that. I don't currently have

02:13:43 ◼   ► any intentions of adding any other sort of in-app purchase. You know, never say never,

02:13:46 ◼   ► but that's not currently my intention. But no, it's, I think it's a pretty, if I'm allowed to

02:13:51 ◼   ► say, I think it's a pretty good app. I think it's pretty well done. And this is my third independent

02:13:54 ◼   ► app that I've released the App Store. And I think, far and away, this is the best of the three. And

02:13:58 ◼   ► I think it does the job and it does it well. And like I said, I'm not terribly interested for me

02:14:03 ◼   ► in writing an app that's the sort of thing where you stay in it for hours. Like, that's just not

02:14:07 ◼   ► where my skill set is. I'm much more skillful at writing something that you get in, you get out,

02:14:13 ◼   ► and you've accomplished what you want to accomplish. And that's very much what Masquerade

02:14:17 ◼   ► is designed to be. And I really think that even if you're not a parent, even if you're not going

02:14:22 ◼   ► to theme parks, even if you're not protesting, I really think for almost anyone, there's got to be

02:14:27 ◼   ► an occasion where, like you said, Jon, you would want to obscure or otherwise hide a part of an

02:14:32 ◼   ► app. And for someone who fancies himself an emoji aficionado, I think that using an emoji or two or

02:14:37 ◼   ► ten or whatever is a fun way to do it. Even leaving aside comedy as the point, just using emoji to

02:14:44 ◼   ► obscure something, I think is a fun approach. And I find that much more entertaining and interesting

02:14:50 ◼   ► than, say, a blur or something like that. Yeah, I did not mean to imply that the free version

02:14:56 ◼   ► includes all the emoji. But come on, three bucks in my audience? Come on, everybody out there,

02:15:01 ◼   ► get this app, pay for it. Three bucks one time, not three bucks a month. Three bucks? It's too cheap.

02:15:06 ◼   ► Too cheap. I can make it more if you want, Jon. I'll crank it up to five or ten.

02:15:10 ◼   ► But I also think, you know, it's always—and you and I are friends, you know, both you,

02:15:14 ◼   ► you're actually making independent apps, you and I are friends with a bunch of people—it's

02:15:18 ◼   ► always sort of a tricky thing, like where do you draw the line on what's included for free

02:15:24 ◼   ► and what do you get people to pay for? Our mutual friend Daniel Jalkett just issued an

02:15:29 ◼   ► update to his Fast Scripts utility for the Mac, which adds regular expression support to

02:15:35 ◼   ► AppleScript, which it sounds like something that was made just for me. AppleScript, Mac,

02:15:40 ◼   ► and regular expressions? Yeah, that's, you know, the Jon Gruper feature. But I didn't even ask him

02:15:45 ◼   ► for it, but I did beta test it. But like he, you know, even he was torn. He's like, "Ah, should it

02:15:49 ◼   ► be for the pay version or free?" And I was like, "I sort of, you know, I don't want to—I would love

02:15:54 ◼   ► you to make as much money as possible with Fast Scripts, but I sort of think it should be free."

02:15:58 ◼   ► And he's like, "Yeah, it should." Because otherwise people who want something free from

02:16:01 ◼   ► AppleScript are going to do the whole, "Well, I could just use do shell script and write a temp

02:16:06 ◼   ► file and call out to sed or pearl or grep or whatever the hell you're using on the command

02:16:10 ◼   ► line." And you've got this—whatever you think of AppleScript—using Fast Scripts to just say,

02:16:16 ◼   ► "Search this for that," where that is the pattern, as opposed to quoted form of this to do shell

02:16:23 ◼   ► script and writing a temp—it's a mess. But what the hoops people will go through to do it for free,

02:16:29 ◼   ► don't—never underestimate. But I think that in this case, it is, to me,

02:16:36 ◼   ► brilliant because you can do all the features with the one default emoji, and that one default emoji

02:16:43 ◼   ► is the emoji, right? Like if you were going to reduce the entire emoji set to one, it would be

02:16:48 ◼   ► the default smiley face, right? And you could see how it works, see how it scales, see how it

02:16:53 ◼   ► identifies faces, see how it lets you move it wherever you want. And the, "Oh, but I would love

02:16:59 ◼   ► to use the eggplant," or whatever, the peach, you know, whatever else, or, you know, any of the other,

02:17:05 ◼   ► what, 100 faces and various skin tones and the gender identities and all—I mean, you know,

02:17:12 ◼   ► you probably even know the answer to this. How many emoji are there? I mean—

02:17:15 ◼   ► [Cameron] So if you include skin tones, which I don't have in Masquerade right now because it's a

02:17:20 ◼   ► really tricky UI problem to solve, like obviously the right way to do it is to do what Apple's done,

02:17:24 ◼   ► but that gets really complicated really quickly.

02:17:26 ◼   ► [

02:17:27 ◼   ► [Cameron] Yeah, exactly. But I'm certainly—it's on the to-do list for sure, but I don't want to

02:17:31 ◼   ► oversell and bait and switch or anything. But to answer your question, I believe the full list of

02:17:36 ◼   ► Unicode emoji off the top of my head, I think it's like 6,000 where every, you know, every different

02:17:40 ◼   ► skin tone is a different listing and so on. [

02:17:44 ◼   ► People have choices.

02:17:45 ◼   ► [

02:17:45 ◼   ► [

02:17:46 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think I whittle—even taking away skin tones, I think I whittle it down to like 2,500,

02:17:51 ◼   ► I believe. I might have that wrong, but it's something like that.

02:17:54 ◼   ► [

02:17:54 ◼   ► Yeah. But it's, you know, people can imagine what it would be like to be able to use whichever their

02:17:58 ◼   ► favorite emoji are, and it's three bucks. And again, brilliant. And again, I think the price

02:18:03 ◼   ► should be higher, to be honest. I do, I do. I think three bucks is too little, but it's a bargain. So

02:18:07 ◼   ► anybody who's out there thinking, "Well, Gruber's nuts. He spends money like a drunken sailor,"

02:18:12 ◼   ► you know, go buy it for three bucks before I can talk Casey into upping the price. But I love,

02:18:17 ◼   ► too, that it's not like, "Oh, well, you buy the object pack for a dollar."