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475: Shove It Out the Back

 

00:00:00   So my play pop hits of every year took a very dark turn in the past week when we crossed roughly the year 2000.

00:00:09   Oh, are you gonna be that guy? Alright, tell me why it took a dark turn.

00:00:13   It became nearly impossible to listen with my child around.

00:00:19   Oh, okay, I'll allow it. I'll allow it.

00:00:21   Really? Was it foul language?

00:00:22   - Oh my God, like okay, so you know, in the 80s,

00:00:27   I mean, everyone singing love songs in the 80s was a creep

00:00:30   and a stalker and potentially abusive

00:00:32   if you listen to the lyrics.

00:00:33   - Well, there's that.

00:00:34   - You mean in real life or just in the song?

00:00:35   - In the lyrics.

00:00:36   - Yeah, but sometimes that was intentional

00:00:38   on its artistic choice.

00:00:39   - Right, but you know, it was a little bit more coded

00:00:43   and subtle and I feel like you could listen

00:00:45   with an almost 10 year old around

00:00:48   and most of the creepiness would go over their head,

00:00:51   Whereas, when you cross the year 2000 approximately,

00:00:56   F this, F that, constant swearing,

00:00:59   the N word all over the place,

00:01:01   really explicit sexual stuff, it's like wow,

00:01:05   it's like you can't listen.

00:01:07   (laughs)

00:01:08   It's bad.

00:01:09   - It's funny you bring this up.

00:01:10   I'd actually like to slightly pivot if you don't mind

00:01:13   and talk yet again about how much I hate Apple Music

00:01:16   Because I know that there exists in Apple Music

00:01:21   clean versions of many, many, many albums that are explicit.

00:01:26   And maybe there is a way to say from the view of an album,

00:01:31   like an explicit album,

00:01:33   I would like the clean version, please.

00:01:35   And if there is an easy way of doing this,

00:01:38   I will be damned if I know how.

00:01:40   - I believe you mean darned?

00:01:41   - That's, oh yes, yes, that's true.

00:01:43   I would be darned.

00:01:45   - Oh, fork, I made a mistake.

00:01:47   So no, I would be darned if I could find the way to go

00:01:51   from explicit to not explicit.

00:01:52   And the only guidance I've found on this is to go into,

00:01:57   well, actually, let me ask you,

00:01:59   if you want to forbid Apple Music

00:02:01   from playing explicit songs,

00:02:04   where do you think you go to do that?

00:02:06   And I will start with you, Marco.

00:02:07   (laughing)

00:02:09   - Oh, boy.

00:02:10   Okay, so where that should be

00:02:12   is in a settings menu in the music app.

00:02:15   - That is the correct answer,

00:02:16   but that is nowhere near where it is.

00:02:18   - I have two other answers.

00:02:19   I have the answer of where Apple says it should be

00:02:21   and where it actually is.

00:02:23   So where Apple would say it should be

00:02:26   is in the iOS system settings app

00:02:29   in the music section of that.

00:02:31   Now where it probably actually is

00:02:33   is buried in some web view that you have to access

00:02:36   on your Apple iTunes account somewhere.

00:02:40   - Oh no, it gets better.

00:02:41   Wouldn't it be in parental controls?

00:02:43   - So I will award you half credit, Jon.

00:02:45   Also, I did not make it clear, Marco, in your defense

00:02:48   that I was thinking about macOS, not iOS.

00:02:50   So I am not honestly sure where it is in iOS,

00:02:53   but in macOS, it is in screen time

00:02:57   in the content and privacy section

00:03:00   where you can say for stores and apps and content

00:03:03   that somewhere, I'm not looking at it right this second,

00:03:06   but somewhere in there, you can say,

00:03:07   turn on content and privacy restrictions,

00:03:09   and I would like to restrict the following.

00:03:11   In screen time, because when I think about

00:03:15   where I wanna go so I don't hear the F word,

00:03:17   I think about screen time.

00:03:19   That's what I think.

00:03:21   Oh my gosh, it's so preposterous.

00:03:23   - It's a good thing the HomePod sound really good.

00:03:27   Because doing this through Siri,

00:03:30   every day it's an exercise in,

00:03:33   am I the only person ever using Siri?

00:03:36   So often it'll be giving a voice response,

00:03:40   now playing, and then it'll stop itself

00:03:43   and say something like, let me try that again.

00:03:46   - You do that on the podcast too sometimes, that's okay.

00:03:48   - Fair enough, but it crashes mid-sentence seemingly

00:03:51   in some way or fails some way that it has to start

00:03:53   its own sentence again.

00:03:55   There's also been a number of years that I'm saying,

00:03:59   I'm saying every morning, play Pop Hits 2005 or whatever.

00:04:02   And sometimes it'll say, "Playing Pop Hits 2006."

00:04:07   It's like, "What? 2006 does not sound like 2005."

00:04:10   Like, it's not like it just misheard me.

00:04:12   And I'll say, "Stop," and I'll say it again,

00:04:14   "Play Pop Hits 2005."

00:04:16   And it'll say, "Now playing Pop Hits 2006."

00:04:20   Now, almost every number gets right.

00:04:23   But maybe one out of 10, it'll just do,

00:04:26   and like, no matter how I say it, it will not do it.

00:04:29   And meanwhile, I can go, you know, fortunately,

00:04:31   You know, when you have like an Amazon cylinder

00:04:33   or something, your possible remedies,

00:04:35   if it's mishearing you, are much fewer.

00:04:38   So at least here, when it fails,

00:04:40   I can go to my phone and just find that,

00:04:42   you know, go to Apple Music, go to the Apple Music app

00:04:44   and do a search and type in pop it, 2005,

00:04:46   and it brings it up and I just hit play and there it is.

00:04:49   And I can, you know, beam it over to the HomePods

00:04:50   and it's fine.

00:04:52   But it fails in such weird ways.

00:04:54   I just, I don't, Siri, oh, oh Apple,

00:04:58   what what what are you doing? See what where is it? What happened? And and can you please

00:05:05   make it unhappy? But anyway, yeah, so Siri issues aside, the home pods still do sound

00:05:09   amazing. And my home pods have, I think, for some reason, stopped dying. Like they used

00:05:18   to I mentioned a couple months back, they were doing that thing where they were it would

00:05:21   like, make a big bass pop. And then like it would restart one of them. That hasn't happened

00:05:26   now in two months maybe? So I don't know if that's if that was somehow avoided in

00:05:31   software I don't know but Siri still Siri but that being said yes this music

00:05:36   experiment is really showing me wow pop music first of all when when we when we

00:05:42   hit the present day our plan is to go back to the beginning of you know 1950

00:05:46   or 1960 and do the same thing but saying rock instead of pop to see like the rock

00:05:52   charts I think are what we actually want to be hearing most of the time. Yeah I

00:05:55   - I was gonna suggest, and I'm kinda surprised

00:05:57   that they were cursing, I was gonna suggest

00:05:58   to ask for sort of the top radio hits,

00:06:01   'cause then you'd get the radio edits,

00:06:02   you know what I mean?

00:06:03   Like, especially for the older times,

00:06:05   like, that's what people cared about,

00:06:06   was what are the top songs on the radio,

00:06:09   and everything on the radio was a cleaned up version.

00:06:12   - Even that, I don't think would actually be what I want,

00:06:15   because issue number two that I keep having,

00:06:17   which I'm sure everyone's had with you streaming apps,

00:06:19   is that many artists have gone back

00:06:21   and re-recorded their old hits

00:06:24   so that they can fully own them or something like that,

00:06:26   or just to remaster them in a more dramatic way.

00:06:29   The problem is that they tarnish the original recordings

00:06:33   in the sense of the streaming services think

00:06:35   that's what you want when you ask for that.

00:06:37   And so for instance, when we blew through the 90s,

00:06:40   every time it wanted to play something off

00:06:42   of the Alanis Morissette album, Jagged Little Pill,

00:06:46   there were like three radio hits off that album.

00:06:47   It was a great album.

00:06:49   Not a single one was the one that we knew.

00:06:51   Not a single one was the original version.

00:06:53   It was all this like more recent version that sounds all different and you know wrong to us iTunes match gone awry, right?

00:06:59   Well, but I don't even own that one. Like I own the original one

00:07:02   I don't know like it's basically it's iTunes match happening within the thing

00:07:05   It's easy. It says you ought to know and it's like oh I can find you ought to know and it finds the

00:07:09   re-recorded version right but it's but like in the playlist of

00:07:12   Top 1996 or whatever hits like yeah, no, it's messed up and we heard there were there were it wasn't just that album

00:07:18   There were a number of albums where we would hear like like Sheryl Crow also recently like we would hear they really wait a minute

00:07:22   This is not the right version you hear within the first note you like because you you know

00:07:27   You know these old songs so well, you've heard them so much like, you know instantly that this is a different recording

00:07:32   This is not the original recording the matches and the buds and the clean and dirty cars, right exactly all about it

00:07:36   Yeah, so anyway, that's so if they if Apple music can't even keep that straight

00:07:40   I have no hopes for like giving us somehow a radio safe version of these songs that I mean

00:07:47   They're so over the top nasty

00:07:50   Like, I can't even imagine there would be a Radio Safe version.

00:07:54   Yeah, I don't know.

00:07:55   I'm trying so hard to like Apple Music.

00:07:58   And what is it that Merlin says constantly?

00:08:00   Like I use this more than the people who make the service or I care about the service more

00:08:03   than the people who make it or whatever.

00:08:06   And it's so true.

00:08:07   Like, I don't even feel like my needs from Apple Music are particularly esoteric or odd

00:08:12   or interesting.

00:08:14   But now that I have small children that are at least slightly aware of the lyrics in which,

00:08:19   of the songs in which we were listening,

00:08:22   I want to be able to say, can I have only clean music?

00:08:26   And perhaps, can I have only clean music

00:08:28   for this listening session, or--

00:08:29   - Or on this output device, like the HomePod in the kitchen.

00:08:32   Maybe that shouldn't be playing swear words.

00:08:34   (laughs)

00:08:35   - Yeah, exactly.

00:08:36   - I don't mind them in my headphones

00:08:37   if I'm walking somewhere, but you know.

00:08:39   - No, I couldn't agree more.

00:08:40   And again, I haven't really played much

00:08:42   with doing this on iOS, but on macOS,

00:08:46   it is nigh impossible to go from the explicit version

00:08:49   an album to the clean version of an album. And if there is an obvious way that I'm missing,

00:08:54   please reach out via Twitter or something because I would love to have a cheat code

00:08:57   or heck, I would even take a stupid shortcut to do this if that's what it takes. But for

00:09:02   the life of me, I don't know how to be fair. I don't recall if this is a thing that you

00:09:08   can do on Spotify or not. So maybe, maybe on Spotify it's just as bad. I it's only been

00:09:12   very, very recently that I found myself wanting to listen to like, I don't know, a little

00:09:16   Little Nas X or something like that, or The Weeknd and being like, "Ooh, yeah,

00:09:20   there's some not so great, uh,

00:09:23   colorful expletives in these lyrics." And so I haven't really tried this on

00:09:27   Spotify either,

00:09:28   but I feel like there's gotta be an easier way on Spotify than going into

00:09:32   screen time in order to change your content preferences.

00:09:36   I mean, this goes back to the data model we talked about before,

00:09:38   like the idea that like there is an abstract idea of a song and that the song

00:09:42   may have been recorded multiple times and that if it was recorded multiple times,

00:09:46   there are different attributes of the different recordings,

00:09:47   including which one was the first one,

00:09:49   which one was on the, you know,

00:09:51   which one was on an album versus a single version,

00:09:53   'cause sometimes those are different,

00:09:54   and also explicit and clean,

00:09:56   and like your data model has to express

00:09:57   all those different ideas,

00:09:58   including I think what the hardest one is to realize

00:10:01   that this song that appears on an album, on a single,

00:10:04   on another album, on a best of,

00:10:06   that that is the same song,

00:10:07   but just different recordings, right?

00:10:09   And then from within them,

00:10:10   deciding which one is the canonical one,

00:10:13   how many of them are clean, how many of them are explicit,

00:10:15   And then once you have all that data in the data model,

00:10:17   then the final step is somewhere in your playback application,

00:10:20   you have to give access to that metadata by saying,

00:10:24   you know, "Hey, Dingus, play me the clean version of the song.

00:10:27   Hey, Dingus, play me the original version of the song,

00:10:29   the album version of this song."

00:10:31   And if it doesn't know and says,

00:10:33   "This song appears on two albums, album A and album B.

00:10:36   Which one would you like to hear?"

00:10:37   I feel like this is an eminently solvable problem without AI.

00:10:40   Just plain old, straight-up, reasonable data model,

00:10:43   reasonable voice commands, you could get it done.

00:10:44   But when you describe this, Mark,

00:10:46   it makes you think that Apple doesn't even

00:10:47   have this in the data model.

00:10:49   And if you can't do it in Spotify,

00:10:50   maybe Spotify has it in the data model,

00:10:51   but doesn't have it in the interface.

00:10:53   - Well, all I can tell you is that the early 2000s

00:10:56   were terrible for pop music.

00:10:58   Like a noticeable turn towards like,

00:11:02   this isn't just not for me,

00:11:04   this is just not as good as what came before it.

00:11:07   It's clear as day.

00:11:09   - I'm not sure if people who are, you know,

00:11:11   a couple of years older than you would agree with that.

00:11:14   I think a couple years younger than me would be more likely.

00:11:16   - Oh, younger, sorry, not older, younger, sorry.

00:11:17   I went the wrong direction.

00:11:18   - Oh, God, and normally, whatever playlist

00:11:20   we pick for the day, like today we're on 2006, I believe,

00:11:23   whatever playlist we pick for the day,

00:11:24   we do it mostly during breakfast,

00:11:26   and then Adam's off to school,

00:11:27   and then when I'm making lunch,

00:11:29   I'll go over and tap the top of the HomePod so it resumes,

00:11:31   and I'll hear, I'll keep playing it,

00:11:32   and then maybe later, if we're making dinner,

00:11:34   I'll tap it again and play it for another half hour then.

00:11:37   So usually I'll go through,

00:11:39   that'll be what we're listening to out loud

00:11:41   all that whole day.

00:11:43   And since the 2000 crossover, this has been the only time

00:11:46   where we've been just not able to continue.

00:11:48   Like after breakfast, we'll be like,

00:11:51   we'll start at lunch, like, you know what,

00:11:52   let me just play some Almond Brothers.

00:11:54   I can't deal with this dirty, horrible stuff anymore.

00:11:57   - All right, so real-time follow-up.

00:11:59   I opened up Spotify on the desktop,

00:12:01   and I searched for Montero by Little Nas X,

00:12:03   which is, by the way, it's a phenomenal album.

00:12:06   If I say that a modern, reasonably well-liked album is good,

00:12:12   does that have the same effect as a top gear host

00:12:14   buying a car?

00:12:15   Like did I just instantly make this deeply uncool

00:12:18   by saying I enjoy it?

00:12:19   I think I did.

00:12:19   - Oh yes.

00:12:20   - Well sorry Lil Nas X, but anyway.

00:12:21   - Yeah 'cause now you're 40.

00:12:23   - Right, I know, it's terrible.

00:12:24   - That's the boundary.

00:12:25   I have only mere months until--

00:12:27   - Until you make things uncool?

00:12:29   - I have no clue, that's not the boundary

00:12:30   for this particular case.

00:12:32   - I think I crossed the boundary when I was 16.

00:12:33   (laughing)

00:12:36   - So earlier today I was looking at the show notes

00:12:40   and I was scrolling through the follow-up section

00:12:43   and that was seven hours ago and I'm still scrolling.

00:12:46   - I believe it's called Doom Scrolling.

00:12:49   - After page 34, it became Doom Scrolling for sure.

00:12:52   But in the defense of one Mr. John Syracuse,

00:12:58   there is a lot to talk about with regard to the Mac Studio

00:13:00   and the Mac Studio Display.

00:13:03   To be clear, my studio display is not here

00:13:05   and is not going to be here for another couple weeks.

00:13:07   Woe is me.

00:13:09   John, did we cover what you have or have not purchased?

00:13:12   I don't recall.

00:13:12   - We covered what I planned to purchase,

00:13:16   but the shipping dates are way out in the future,

00:13:18   so we should just not bother to even ask me about this

00:13:21   until like May or June.

00:13:23   I know nothing is coming to my house anytime soon.

00:13:25   - I will say, in the intervening time

00:13:27   between last episode and this one,

00:13:29   in-store availability opened up,

00:13:31   and there are some configurations that you can get in store.

00:13:34   The monitor is actually not that hard to find in store

00:13:37   in a lot of places,

00:13:38   and even the Max Studio computer,

00:13:41   you can get the base model, of course,

00:13:43   the two base models are in stock frequently

00:13:45   in a lot of places, and then if you bump up

00:13:48   the higher model to a few spec tiers here and there,

00:13:52   some of those combinations are also available

00:13:54   in person sometimes.

00:13:55   - Well what if I wanna get the 32 gigabyte version

00:13:56   of the monitor, do they have that in stock?

00:13:59   - Nice, you're jumping ahead.

00:14:01   Alright, so anyway, we've seen a lot of tear downs

00:14:04   fly by of the Max Studio, this is the Max Studio section

00:14:07   of the podcast, and one of the first things

00:14:09   that set our corner of the internet aflame

00:14:13   was that the Mac Studio has two SSD slots,

00:14:17   and in many configurations, one of them is empty.

00:14:21   So it's expandable, and you can add more, right?

00:14:25   Right, right, right?

00:14:26   - This is why more people should be familiar

00:14:29   with the Mac Pro, because anyone who has a 2019 Mac Pro

00:14:32   saw that and they're like, oh, yeah,

00:14:33   it's just like in the Mac Pro, right?

00:14:34   and if you're not familiar, if you look inside your Mac Pro,

00:14:37   it's got the similar kinds of slots,

00:14:39   and if you get a Mac Pro with,

00:14:40   depending on how much storage you get

00:14:42   from Apple and the Mac Pro,

00:14:44   you know, the slots may be filled

00:14:45   or filled with different sizes of things.

00:14:47   It looks like you have multiple SSDs,

00:14:49   but as you know, when you buy a Mac Pro,

00:14:50   you just get one quote unquote internal SSD,

00:14:52   which may be made up of multiple chips.

00:14:55   So I think, what is my Mac Pro?

00:14:56   I think I have a four gig, four gig, four terabyte SSD,

00:14:58   and I think it's like two, two terabyte modules

00:15:01   stuck in the little slots.

00:15:03   So yeah, when you look inside the Mac Studio,

00:15:05   looks kinda like that, very similar looking slots,

00:15:06   very similar looking stuff in there.

00:15:08   But the mistake people were making is thinking,

00:15:10   is not being familiar with the Mac Pro and thinking,

00:15:12   oh, those are slots where I can buy an SSD from Amazon

00:15:14   and shove it in there.

00:15:16   And I think physically you might be able to,

00:15:19   but that's just not the way the Mac Studio

00:15:21   or the Mac Pro works.

00:15:23   The way it works is you're basically just sticking

00:15:26   raw NAND chips in there, not really,

00:15:28   we'll get to the details in a second,

00:15:30   but the storage controller is on the SOC,

00:15:33   or in the case of my Mac Pro,

00:15:34   like somewhere else on the motherboard.

00:15:36   And unlike when you buy like a stick,

00:15:40   like an NVMe stick or whatever, an M.2 stick,

00:15:43   that has the NAND and also the controller to work with it.

00:15:46   Like it's a complete drive basically.

00:15:49   Whereas in the Mac Pro and in the Mac Studio,

00:15:52   the drive is made up of these NAND modules,

00:15:55   which on laptops are soldered to the motherboard,

00:15:57   but in these ones are in little slots,

00:15:59   Driven by the storage controller that is in my case in the tea chute ship or in the Apple silicon things inside the system on

00:16:06   a chip

00:16:07   So you need both of those things to work and so it's not like you can buy an SSD and shove it in there

00:16:11   They have them why do they have two slots? Well if you get like the 8

00:16:13   Terabyte config they probably put a 4 and a 4 right if you get a 4 they might do a 2 and a 2

00:16:18   If you just get a 2 they might put a single 2 in like they can fill them as needed

00:16:22   So it's not all that exotic or weird, but if you expect it to be

00:16:29   place where you put a drive it's not think of it as like it's like they

00:16:32   soldered it to the board but it's not soldered that's what it's like because

00:16:35   if they were soldered to the board you're like can I rip those chips off

00:16:37   there and and buy a drive from Amazon it's like what do you mean that drive

00:16:40   right now here's some more interesting details about this that Hector Martin

00:16:43   posted to Twitter and he does a bunch of porting of Linux to Apple silicon and so

00:16:49   I figure he knows about these details because he's actually trying to get an

00:16:52   OS up and running on it so I trust more or less that this is at least close to

00:16:56   the truth, here's what he said.

00:16:58   He says, about the Mac Studios things,

00:17:00   quote unquote SSD slots, which is not really what they are.

00:17:04   If you wanna play around with those storage modules

00:17:06   in a studio, you should know that one,

00:17:07   you definitely need to do a full DFU erase.

00:17:10   What does DFU stand for, device firmware update?

00:17:13   Yeah. - Device follow up.

00:17:15   - Yeah, exactly. (laughing)

00:17:16   And two, if you populate both slots,

00:17:18   they definitely need to be the same size

00:17:20   and they might need to be the same vendor.

00:17:22   So the reason why you need to do a DFU erase

00:17:25   is like, why can't I just, like, if I,

00:17:26   if one of those modules breaks,

00:17:27   can I just take another one off and shove it in there?

00:17:29   There's a bunch of reasons for that.

00:17:31   One is that everything on those things is encrypted

00:17:33   with a key that's managed by the storage controller.

00:17:37   So, first of all, if you take those things out

00:17:40   of one Mac Studio and put them in another Mac Studio,

00:17:41   they won't work because they're encrypted with a key

00:17:43   that that other Mac Studio doesn't have.

00:17:45   Like, this is part of the security structure of the Mac.

00:17:47   It's done on purpose, right?

00:17:48   And second thing is, if you take one of them out

00:17:50   and put another one, it's like taking, you know,

00:17:52   half of the soldered NAND off of the motherboard

00:17:55   of your power book, power book, your MacBook, right?

00:17:58   That's not gonna work, right?

00:18:00   Think of them as one drive just split up into pieces

00:18:02   in the same way that you have multiple flash chips

00:18:05   on the motherboard of a MacBook Pro.

00:18:07   Again, these are the same.

00:18:09   They're not like individual things

00:18:10   even though you can pull them out separately.

00:18:12   So Hector continues, not sure if the top level controller

00:18:15   cares about mismatched NAND vendors,

00:18:17   just pointing it out since it might.

00:18:19   Apple sources its raw flash from different vendors.

00:18:21   You can find the module level controller firmware for each kind and the restore RAM disks.

00:18:26   And then you post a screenshot of a bunch of files on diskies, .bin files, that have

00:18:30   names like Samsung, MLC, 3D, SanDisk, ITLC, and that's like multi-level, QLC, MLC, I forget

00:18:41   what the acronym is for.

00:18:42   Cells?

00:18:43   Yeah, it's like how many bits they write to each cell, and the more you add, the more

00:18:50   tricky it is to do, and the cheaper it is.

00:18:53   It's got all these different things

00:18:55   for high NIC, SanDisk.

00:18:58   And every one of these things is like what

00:19:01   he's calling the module level firmware controllers.

00:19:05   And so Apple, if you stick NAND in that matches

00:19:09   one of these things, this is the little bit

00:19:10   of firmware that will run on that NAND to do the job.

00:19:14   Actor continues, if you populate a config that Apple would ship,

00:19:17   I'd expect it to work given a full erase.

00:19:20   And by the way, a reason a full erase works is

00:19:22   when you do do FU and erase them entirely,

00:19:23   it just wipes everything that's on them

00:19:25   and puts new data on them with the security key

00:19:27   that's in the SOC, right?

00:19:29   If you try to do something weird,

00:19:31   chances are it won't work.

00:19:33   To clarify, the above firmwares are for Apple's

00:19:35   raw NAND controller bridge,

00:19:37   which is embedded on package with the raw NAND flash.

00:19:39   That's its Ashiba Samsung Hynix bit.

00:19:41   The top level SSD controller is separate, right?

00:19:44   So these are the little bit of controller firmware

00:19:47   that runs on the little module with the flash chips in it.

00:19:50   It's not like the quote unquote SSD controller,

00:19:53   which in Apple Silicon is in the system on a chip thing.

00:19:56   The raw NAND controllers are called S3E, S4E,

00:19:59   which are ARM32 and run Apple MSPS firmware,

00:20:03   and S5E, which is Apple custom ARM64 core

00:20:07   running Apple MSF firmware based on RTKit.

00:20:10   The top of the SSD controller is embedded in the M1SOC

00:20:13   and is ANS2 and runs Apple storage firmware.

00:20:15   So these are all tiny little ARM chips

00:20:17   that are running their own little firmware thing

00:20:19   needs to do their tiny little job.

00:20:21   And so as Hector points out,

00:20:23   yes, Apple puts freaking ARM 64 inside each flash chip

00:20:26   in your machine these days, that's how they roll.

00:20:28   There's also at least 12 of those ARM 64 mini cores

00:20:31   inside the M1 Macs.

00:20:33   It has more ARM 64 coprocessor cores

00:20:35   than ARM 64 main processor cores.

00:20:38   One of those is ANS2, the Apple storage controller thing.

00:20:41   So like in the little module with the NAND chips on it,

00:20:47   There's a little tiny ARM processor

00:20:50   that's job is to just manage those NAND things,

00:20:52   but it's not a drive controller

00:20:53   because the SSD drive controller

00:20:54   that makes all that NAND appear as a single drive

00:20:57   to the OS and everything, that's in the SoC.

00:20:59   And that's another little ARM mini core

00:21:02   alongside apparently 11 other little ARM mini cores

00:21:06   in the M1 Mac's SoC that do various jobs

00:21:08   inside the larger chip.

00:21:09   Obviously those cores are not like computation cores

00:21:11   to run your stuff, they're just little things to run.

00:21:13   That's why they call it a system on a chip.

00:21:15   It's not just a CPU with a bunch of, you know,

00:21:19   execution units and registers and stuff.

00:21:21   There's other entire other little processes

00:21:23   and they're doing their things, right?

00:21:24   And finally, Hector has one final tweet

00:21:26   about like why Apple does this

00:21:28   and what's the deal with their stuff.

00:21:29   Apple's NVMe implementation is largely faster, lower power,

00:21:32   and has special encryption modes,

00:21:33   including features for per file key selection

00:21:36   not available to standard NVMe SSDs.

00:21:38   Apple goes custom because they wanna do things better

00:21:40   than the competition in certain ways.

00:21:41   So if you go through the Apple's big security papers,

00:21:44   you can see how they have per file encryption keys,

00:21:48   which is a feature basically inherited from the iPhone

00:21:50   for an extra amount of security.

00:21:52   And you can't do that without sort of complete understanding

00:21:55   of the whole storage stack

00:21:56   because NAND doesn't know about files

00:21:59   and the SSD controller doesn't know about keys

00:22:02   for individual files,

00:22:02   but making all this stuff work together,

00:22:04   lets them have not just encryption keys for the whole drive,

00:22:06   but also per file encryption keys as well.

00:22:09   So it's actually fairly complicated and fairly cool,

00:22:11   but it also explains after seeing all this

00:22:13   and getting a headache, I get why I can't buy something

00:22:16   from Amazon and plug it in, 'cause it's the wrong thing.

00:22:19   Like an Amazon thing is an actual commercial drive

00:22:22   or whatever, I keep saying Amazon,

00:22:23   but it has the storage controller, NAND,

00:22:27   everything all in one, and it presents an interface

00:22:30   as a drive to the host computer,

00:22:31   and that's not how the MacStudio or the MacPro work at all.

00:22:35   - It's wild, it's really wild, but yeah,

00:22:37   it seems like there, 'cause I watched a couple of videos,

00:22:42   forget who it was, but somebody posted a video about, "Oh, let me take one Mac Studio and

00:22:47   take the, you know, dismantle both, sorry, take two Mac Studio hosts, dismantle them

00:22:52   both and try to swap chips back and forth between them." And they concluded, "Oh, this

00:22:56   must be something that Apple is doing to, you know, try to fight against right to repair

00:23:01   and blah, blah, blah," which on the surface is a reasonable explanation if you don't know

00:23:05   any better. But as soon as you dig into this a little bit, you realize, no, no, no, this

00:23:09   has nothing to do with right to repair,

00:23:11   even though it is a kind of crummy offshoot,

00:23:12   that it's a little harder to do this on your own.

00:23:16   But nevertheless, what it's really about

00:23:17   is just making as good a system as they possibly can,

00:23:19   like you said.

00:23:20   - Yeah, and it's physical security,

00:23:22   which historically has been almost nonexistent.

00:23:24   If you have physical access,

00:23:25   it was very easy to get complete access.

00:23:27   Now Apple makes it much, just like with iPhones,

00:23:29   much, much harder.

00:23:30   Even when you have physical access to an iPhone,

00:23:31   it is non-trivial to break into it.

00:23:33   And the max transition to Apple Silicon,

00:23:36   or actually even being with the T2,

00:23:38   That's what they've been trying to do with Macs.

00:23:39   And what it means is you get things like,

00:23:41   what do you mean my storage is cryptographically

00:23:43   locked to my computer?

00:23:44   It's like, yeah.

00:23:45   I mean, you can erase it.

00:23:46   You can go into DFU mode and erase it,

00:23:48   but then you lose all the data on it, right?

00:23:49   You can't-- in the old days, you could rip a hard drive out

00:23:52   of one PC, stick it into another PC,

00:23:54   and voila, you've got everything, right?

00:23:56   Can't do that on modern Macs.

00:23:57   And that's a good thing.

00:23:58   Well, the drivers would never boot, right?

00:23:59   You'd have to like, rainfall windows on it.

00:24:01   All right.

00:24:01   Let's just say a Mac.

00:24:02   You could take a hard drive out of one Mac

00:24:03   and connect it to another, and you would see the contents

00:24:06   really easily. Yeah. No, and to be, you know, to I think characterize Apple's motives here,

00:24:12   I don't think when Apple does things that make it harder to upgrade or repair your computer

00:24:17   or phone or whatever, I don't think they're doing it too, you know, maliciously. I don't

00:24:22   think they're doing it because thinking like, oh, if we, if we make this one change, nobody

00:24:26   will be able to buy cheap SSDs and put them in here or nobody will be able to repair this

00:24:29   thing on their own or whatever. I don't think that's what it is. I think they just don't

00:24:34   prioritize people self-upgrading and self-repairing enough.

00:24:38   Like, they don't design for it,

00:24:39   they don't think enough about it,

00:24:41   or they don't care enough about it,

00:24:42   or they let other factors override it.

00:24:44   So if they're able to make something

00:24:46   that they think is better, or that legitimately is better,

00:24:50   in a way that makes it harder to repair or upgrade,

00:24:53   they will choose that almost every time,

00:24:55   because it is a lower priority for them

00:24:58   to accommodate repairs and upgrades later.

00:25:01   Now, that's certainly worth debating

00:25:04   whether that should be their priority,

00:25:05   but that's, I think, where it's coming from,

00:25:07   not any intentions of malice.

00:25:10   - Well, as part of the product brief, really,

00:25:11   because to give an example, the Mac Pro is the one Mac,

00:25:15   I would say, that is designed to make things

00:25:17   upgradable and swappable.

00:25:19   There's numbered instructions with text and stuff

00:25:22   inside the thing telling you how to add and remove cards,

00:25:25   telling you how to add and remove RAM.

00:25:27   It is explicitly made to have parts

00:25:32   on the inside of it upgraded and changed.

00:25:34   Just not the SSDs, which are basically exactly like this

00:25:38   and non-upgradable, but you can add a PCIe card

00:25:40   and put as many SSDs as you want in there.

00:25:42   And you could add, you know, seven PCIe cards

00:25:45   with SSDs all over them.

00:25:46   You can swap in and out hard drives.

00:25:48   You can access all the RAM

00:25:49   because they're on little chips that you can take in and out

00:25:51   and they have instructions on how to do it.

00:25:53   Pretty much no other Mac is like that anymore,

00:25:55   including the Mac Studio,

00:25:56   which as we've seen from the tear downs

00:25:58   and maybe we'll discuss in a little bit,

00:25:59   doesn't even have user accessible screws.

00:26:01   you have to peel off the rubber foot on the bottom,

00:26:03   you can get to the screws to let you open it, right?

00:26:06   Whereas my computer has a giant handle on the top

00:26:09   that you lift up and twist, right?

00:26:11   It's very different, but this is the only Mac

00:26:13   that has, as part of its design,

00:26:16   make this thing user accessible and expandable, right?

00:26:19   Every other Mac is like,

00:26:20   that's not part of the requirements, right?

00:26:22   And so when, like you said, Marco,

00:26:23   when it comes like, oh, we can make the SSD

00:26:26   faster and lower power by soldering it to the motherboard,

00:26:28   do it, oh, we can make the RAM faster

00:26:30   By putting it all on one big system on chip, do it.

00:26:32   Because it doesn't violate any of the requirements,

00:26:34   because the requirements of the system are not,

00:26:36   like, let the user be able to upgrade the components.

00:26:39   (upbeat music)

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00:28:38   - Now moving on to the depressing part of the podcast

00:28:46   for one Mr. John Syracuse.

00:28:48   You know, it's like you were talking about 2000s songs

00:28:52   and hits, tear John's heart into pieces.

00:28:56   The Max Studio is currently his last resort.

00:28:59   But hey, this is bad news, John.

00:29:02   - So bad.

00:29:03   - Oh, because if you look at the graph,

00:29:04   it will unbreak my heart, do what I did.

00:29:06   - Oh, well done, well done.

00:29:08   That was probably late '90s, wasn't it?

00:29:11   That's a great time to ask that.

00:29:12   - I know, I'm so bad with yours.

00:29:13   - Oh, well done, I am very proud of all three of us.

00:29:16   Look at us go.

00:29:17   God, we're so proud.

00:29:18   The songs I was complaining about were nothing like that.

00:29:21   (laughing)

00:29:23   - Ah, anyway, all right, so Mac Studio cooling and fan noise.

00:29:27   I heard your heart shattering into a trillion pieces, Jon.

00:29:31   At least that's the way it was,

00:29:33   but it seems you've glued yourself back together.

00:29:35   How do you wanna handle this?

00:29:36   Do you want me to start walking through this?

00:29:37   Do you wanna take this?

00:29:39   - I think I can take this.

00:29:40   So to start, I remember reading Jason Snell's review.

00:29:43   It was one of the first ones I reviewed,

00:29:44   and he's like, "Ah, it does make fan noise all the time.

00:29:47   "The fans are always running.

00:29:48   you hear them and it's noisier than I expected, right?

00:29:50   And I think probably the next thing I saw after that

00:29:52   was one of the Max Tech YouTube videos

00:29:53   and they were like, "Oh, it's completely silent."

00:29:56   I was like, "Well, I'll just wait to see."

00:29:58   You know, I'll wait and see how this shakes out

00:30:00   because lots of people have different ideas

00:30:02   of what is noisy, what is quiet, so on and so forth, right?

00:30:05   So here are some facts that we've gathered

00:30:08   from various people looking at these things

00:30:09   and taking measurements, right?

00:30:11   So from the Max Tech video,

00:30:13   which we'll link in the show notes,

00:30:15   it seems like the fans on the Max Studio,

00:30:17   and there's two of them if you look at Apple's intro video,

00:30:19   there's like two fans that pull air in from the bottom

00:30:22   and shove it out the back, right?

00:30:23   They idle around 1300 RPM.

00:30:27   And according to TG Pro,

00:30:28   an app that does like a fan measurement speed,

00:30:31   we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well,

00:30:33   according to the TG Pro app,

00:30:35   it lists the minimum fan RPM

00:30:37   on the Max Studio fans as 1100 RPM.

00:30:40   Now this is a third party application,

00:30:41   I don't know if it's actually true,

00:30:42   but the point is the minimum is 1100

00:30:44   and they're idling at 1300.

00:30:46   In the testing that Max Tech did,

00:30:48   under what they consider full load,

00:30:50   they tried to exercise the CPU and the GPU

00:30:52   as much as possible.

00:30:54   The SOC temperature maxes out around 60 degrees Celsius.

00:30:58   And I know we don't do Celsius around here,

00:30:59   but I can just tell you,

00:31:00   if you've ever done anything having to do with PC cooling,

00:31:02   60 degrees Celsius is not hot.

00:31:05   Like this is the maximum temperature

00:31:06   where they're trying to say,

00:31:07   can we put the CPU and the GPU maxed out,

00:31:10   all cores, everything at the same time,

00:31:12   and they got it to max at like 60 degrees.

00:31:15   That is extremely cool, okay?

00:31:17   And during that stress test of maxing everything out,

00:31:21   the fans stayed at 1300 RPM.

00:31:23   So these fans apparently never change RPM

00:31:28   and even under max load at 1300 RPM,

00:31:30   they can keep the thing at 60 degrees Celsius.

00:31:33   - And I'm sorry, for those of us who believe

00:31:35   in good temperature units, that's 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:31:38   - Honestly, I'm a Fahrenheit proponent,

00:31:41   but not with CPU temperatures.

00:31:43   'Cause it is not describing ambient air temperature.

00:31:44   And so the whole world describes CPU temps in Celsius,

00:31:48   and it is actually useful because 100 degrees Celsius

00:31:52   is roughly the limit of what you would ever want

00:31:54   a CPU to reach, and you should really keep it below that.

00:31:56   And so the scale actually makes sense a lot.

00:31:59   - I agree, I'm just trolling for the fun of it.

00:32:02   No, I completely agree with you.

00:32:03   - Yeah, and so if you're listening to this

00:32:05   near an Intel Mac, please go look at what your CPU

00:32:07   temperature is as you sit here idle listening to a podcast.

00:32:13   If you max an Intel Mac to use all the cores

00:32:17   and some kind of stress test,

00:32:19   it will not stay at 60 degrees Celsius.

00:32:21   Chances are very good, right?

00:32:22   - Well, what is your, as a lone Intel--

00:32:25   - Just have Dropbox running.

00:32:26   That's all you need to do.

00:32:28   - And or Slack.

00:32:29   What is your CPU running at right now, John?

00:32:31   Do you have--

00:32:32   - I have to launch TG Pro, and I will tell you,

00:32:34   oh, there's an update.

00:32:34   Well, I'm going to, I'm gonna click install update.

00:32:37   But while I click install update,

00:32:38   oh, I have to change to Celsius, I think,

00:32:40   'cause it might be in Fahrenheit.

00:32:43   where are the settings for TG Pro?

00:32:45   I'm gonna install and relaunch.

00:32:46   - So while you figure that out,

00:32:47   I would say that it seems, I mean,

00:32:50   I haven't been following the videos

00:32:51   and everything on this yet,

00:32:52   but I am certainly disappointed to hear

00:32:54   that there's audible fans, but we know what these,

00:32:57   'cause even not talking about the M1 Ultra version,

00:33:00   even just talking about the M1 Max version,

00:33:02   people say it has the same approximate fan noise

00:33:05   being noticeable, and I don't know anything

00:33:09   about the blowers they're using.

00:33:11   I mean, it's probably some kind of weird custom thing

00:33:12   that they made, but I would hope that they can

00:33:16   actually spin slower than 1100 or 1200 RPM.

00:33:19   And I would love to see that idle speed,

00:33:22   what does it sound like when it's like 800, 900 RPM?

00:33:25   Because it seems like if they're able to keep that CPU

00:33:29   at 60 Celsius, even under full load, at the same speed.

00:33:33   - At the same speed it idles at.

00:33:34   - Right, then that tells me that they could get away

00:33:38   with less cooling and therefore less noise

00:33:40   when it's not under full load.

00:33:41   And so meanwhile, I sit here next to my desktop laptop,

00:33:45   which by the way, quick aside,

00:33:47   I love the desktop laptop lifestyle so much.

00:33:50   So earlier today, earlier today,

00:33:52   we were about to do a FaceTime session

00:33:55   with our workout trainer.

00:33:57   The session was like a half hour away

00:34:00   and I had a software update ready to go

00:34:02   on the 14X that we would normally would use for that.

00:34:06   So I said, all right, fine, installed 12.3

00:34:09   or whatever it is, whatever we're on.

00:34:10   I know system updates on M1 Macs are not fast,

00:34:14   but surely a half hour will be enough time.

00:34:18   Little did I know, after you hit install,

00:34:20   well then it has to first prepare the update.

00:34:24   And that took like 15 of the minutes.

00:34:26   We now only have 15 minutes left,

00:34:28   and I'm like, okay, I'm not gonna reboot

00:34:30   to after doing this because I know as soon as I begin,

00:34:33   it's gonna take longer than 15 minutes

00:34:35   'cause M1 software updates are very, very slow.

00:34:38   Sure enough, it finishes the preparing stage,

00:34:41   and then it shows me the do you agree to these terms screen,

00:34:45   and I thought, aha, I just won't agree to the terms

00:34:47   until after the workout.

00:34:49   So I just hid the window.

00:34:52   Sure enough, a few seconds later, the computer reboots.

00:34:55   So by the way, you don't have to agree to the terms,

00:34:57   turns out, so we'll see what that means

00:35:00   if I get a knock on the door from Apple Legal in the morning

00:35:02   and then of course it blew way past the workout

00:35:05   doing its random, like I don't even know

00:35:07   what the progress bars are indicating,

00:35:08   like when it's actually in the rebooted environment

00:35:11   doing the software updates,

00:35:12   it went through like four different progress bars.

00:35:14   So it's displaying nothing,

00:35:17   it might as well just be a spinner at that point.

00:35:18   So it's not useful information.

00:35:20   Anyway, so it was just so slow

00:35:21   that I was at the last minute able to just

00:35:23   take my desktop laptop off of my desk,

00:35:26   unplug it, open it up, pop it open and use that.

00:35:29   It's so nice having this dual laptop lifestyle.

00:35:33   So this is one of the reasons why

00:35:36   I am not envious at all about everyone else's

00:35:39   Mac Studio results they're getting of,

00:35:41   wow, look at compile Xcode 20% faster.

00:35:43   I am so happy with my dual setup of dual laptops.

00:35:48   And by the way, my 16 inch that is my desktop laptop,

00:35:53   I have never heard the fan, not once.

00:35:55   It is a much smaller volume of inner dimensions in there

00:36:00   that it's keeping cool, it's much smaller fans.

00:36:03   It should theoretically be much louder

00:36:05   than the Mac studio reportedly is.

00:36:08   And yet, it is dead silent

00:36:10   with everything I've ever thrown at it.

00:36:12   I've never heard the fan.

00:36:13   - I have only heard my 14-inch a couple of times.

00:36:17   I think both of them were FFmpeg-related.

00:36:19   (laughing)

00:36:20   But it's only been like twice, and I've had this thing,

00:36:23   when did we get these, like November of last year

00:36:24   or something like that?

00:36:25   Whereas if I breathed wrong on my Intel MacBook Pro,

00:36:29   the fans would spin up.

00:36:30   No, I don't wanna continue to belabor this point

00:36:33   because I feel like you and I have been gushing

00:36:35   about the desktop laptop for a while now,

00:36:37   but it occurred to me as we were talking

00:36:41   that we were overjoyed this year

00:36:45   when what ended up happening was the 13 Pro regular size

00:36:50   didn't really have any compromises

00:36:54   from the 13 Pro max size, right?

00:36:57   Was it this year, last year, or both?

00:36:58   It was this year, I believe.

00:37:00   And we were overjoyed by that.

00:37:02   And that I think is a reasonable expectation,

00:37:05   that the two phones that are of roughly the same size,

00:37:10   and I know with that size class, everything matters more,

00:37:13   but two phones for roughly the same size

00:37:15   have roughly the same capabilities,

00:37:17   and that's really awesome.

00:37:18   Never in a million years did I think I could say that

00:37:21   about freaking computers.

00:37:23   (laughing)

00:37:25   The Ultra Accepted, it really is choose your own adventure,

00:37:28   choose your own case when it comes to M1s.

00:37:31   And I know that the you know, that's not entirely true because you can't get a max in certain places and so on

00:37:35   But but amongst the kinds of computers that I would look at buying I can get an m1 max

00:37:41   In a max studio or I can get it in my 14 inch MacBook Pro and they're the same like it never been a million years

00:37:48   Did I think I would be I would be able to choose what case I wanted but have

00:37:53   Effectively the exact same processor in any of them

00:37:56   I mean, I've been paying attention to computers since I was eight or something like that. So since like 1990 and

00:38:03   Never has this been even close to an option in my in my lifetime

00:38:07   It's just so amazing and so cool that we can have these really well unless you're John, Syracuse

00:38:13   Uh, these no compromise machines that that you can take anywhere. It's just phenomenal

00:38:18   Yeah

00:38:19   I mean even like you know the year that the year that I spent before the MacBook Pros

00:38:23   using the M1 MacBook Air as my main computer

00:38:26   for a lot of that time, and then using the M1 Mac Mini,

00:38:29   which is the same chip for the other half of it.

00:38:31   The M1 MacBook Air, that alone,

00:38:34   that could have been my main computer the entire time

00:38:36   if I would have gotten higher specs on it.

00:38:38   And it's just like, I couldn't believe that computer.

00:38:41   It was so incredibly good to have Apple's cheapest laptop

00:38:45   be the best computer I'd ever used,

00:38:50   and have no fan, didn't even have one,

00:38:53   have this amazing performance, incredible battery life,

00:38:57   it's super small and light, that's amazing.

00:39:00   We're in such a good time right now for these computers.

00:39:03   So let's get back to the MacStudio.

00:39:05   That's why it is kind of, I wonder,

00:39:07   this fan noise thing seems like a pretty big downside

00:39:10   to this and I have to wonder,

00:39:13   maybe this is adjustable in firmware.

00:39:15   Maybe they set the idle RPM speed a little too high

00:39:20   and maybe they can bring it down.

00:39:23   Like again, I don't know what,

00:39:25   maybe the blowers can't go that slowly,

00:39:26   but they probably can.

00:39:28   And I really hope that they consider that

00:39:30   because this, we know what these chips do.

00:39:34   We know from the laptops and from the Mac Mini,

00:39:37   there is no reason why a desktop with an M1 Max,

00:39:42   not the Ultra, we don't know about the Ultra yet.

00:39:44   - We do know about that, I'll get to that in a second.

00:39:46   - Okay, but there's no reason why the M1 Max

00:39:50   in a desktop enclosure should ever be audible,

00:39:53   no matter what it's doing.

00:39:54   Because on a laptop, it's barely audible,

00:39:58   even under the most ridiculous load.

00:40:00   And it's inaudible under almost any other load.

00:40:02   So we know that if a laptop can do that inaudibly,

00:40:05   so can a desktop with the exact same chip.

00:40:07   Now, so John, tell me about the Ultra.

00:40:09   - Yeah, so the question is, okay,

00:40:10   well you just told me all these things at idols at 1300,

00:40:13   And again, I think this is another first.

00:40:15   Can you think of a desktop computer

00:40:16   whose fan runs at the same speed

00:40:18   when it's under maximum load versus when it's idle?

00:40:21   Like, what is the point of a cooling system

00:40:22   if the fan is never going to change RPM?

00:40:24   Like, you know, you would think you would tune the thing

00:40:27   so like, yeah, when it gets hotter,

00:40:28   the fans spin faster, right?

00:40:29   But to literally be at 1300 RPM

00:40:31   under full CPU and GPU load running this weird benchmark

00:40:35   that's synthetically designed to do that,

00:40:37   it's like one of those benchmarks

00:40:38   that does stuff off screen

00:40:39   so you're not even delayed

00:40:40   by the refresh rate of the monitor, right?

00:40:43   That is weird.

00:40:44   So what is the Ultra like?

00:40:45   Because that was the Max.

00:40:46   The Ultra has no real difference in fan speed or temperatures than the Max.

00:40:52   So both the Ultra and the Max run around 1300 RPM when they're idle, stay at around 1300

00:40:58   RPM and around 60 degrees Celsius under full CPU and GPU load.

00:41:01   Now obviously the Ultra has a better cooling system.

00:41:03   It has big copper heat sinks that weighs twice as much.

00:41:06   It has extra heat pipes that the Max one doesn't have.

00:41:10   but it definitely seems like they tuned the cooling system

00:41:14   so that both of those things,

00:41:16   that the fans run at the same speed

00:41:17   and that the system on a chip stays at the same temperature.

00:41:20   Obviously the Ultra produces more heat,

00:41:22   but then the cooling system gets rid of more heat from it.

00:41:25   So it's scaled to be like that.

00:41:26   So I totally agree with Marco

00:41:28   that if these fans are capable of running slower,

00:41:32   you should be able to run them slower and be just fine

00:41:34   because obviously 1300 RPM is sufficient to keep.

00:41:37   And this is like, I mean, it's not an hour long test,

00:41:39   it's like a 10 minute test,

00:41:40   But even after 10 minutes at maximum load, if the fans are still at 1300 RPM, there's

00:41:45   so much headroom for you to deal with this.

00:41:47   And again, we'll put links to the MaxTech videos where they show these things.

00:41:49   Now, as I said before, noise, right?

00:41:53   Some people say it's noisy, some people say it's not.

00:41:55   These blower fans, there's, we'll get to this in a little bit too, but there's two of these

00:41:58   blower fans in the Max Studio too, and everyone pretty much agrees that the Max Studio you

00:42:02   can't hear the fans in.

00:42:03   You can feel the air coming out the top of your hand over it, but you just can't hear

00:42:06   it.

00:42:07   Wait, you're referring to the studio display?

00:42:08   Oh, sorry, yeah, the studio display.

00:42:09   I hate the fact that they both have studio in the name.

00:42:10   The studio display has two blower fans that look very similar to the blower.

00:42:14   They're not the same obviously, but the same style of fan, like where it, you know,

00:42:17   where it pushes air sideways from the direction of the rotation of the thing,

00:42:21   is in the studio display. And everything I've read has said you can't hear the

00:42:26   fans in the studio display unless you literally shove your ear on the top of

00:42:29   the display, but you can feel the air coming out, right? So there's agreement

00:42:33   about what constitutes silent when it comes to the display, but for the Mac

00:42:38   studio computer itself, Max Tech in their video describes it as "completely silent"

00:42:44   whereas many other people say "I hear the fan all the time" as Quinn Nelson says on

00:42:48   his channel, this is a tweet actually, "Don't mistake this to me in the Max Studio is loud,

00:42:52   it's not, but the M1 Ultra Max Studio is persistently audible at idle.

00:42:55   It's louder than any Mac I've ever owned in recent memory including Intel machines."

00:42:59   So lots of opinions vary on this.

00:43:02   How loud does it seem to you?

00:43:03   Maybe you're doing it in a loud room.

00:43:06   Based on the RPM, I feel like if all these machines are idling at 1300 RPM, these subjective

00:43:11   differences have to do with the people they're listening to and the rooms they're listening

00:43:15   in.

00:43:16   So here's this website, quietmac.netlify.app.

00:43:20   This is made for John Syracuse.

00:43:22   That purports to measure the noise levels of computers both at idle and when browsing

00:43:28   the web.

00:43:29   I will put a link in the show notes.

00:43:31   What this graph shows is that the Mac Studio at idle comes in at around 24 decibels and

00:43:42   the Mac Pro comes in at 27 decibels.

00:43:46   So what this is saying to me is at idle the Mac Studio is quieter than my Mac Pro.

00:43:51   I'm already sitting in a room with my Mac Pro.

00:43:53   I'm sitting like I can touch it with my hand.

00:43:55   It's not that far away.

00:43:57   So if I can live with that noise, I'm hoping that my wife will be able to live in May or

00:44:03   June or whatever the hell I get my computer with the noise of a Mac Studio which will

00:44:07   be shoved back on her desk behind a bunch of crap.

00:44:12   And even if it's running at 1300 RPM, the good news is that no matter what she does

00:44:16   to her computer, apparently it will always run at 1300 RPM and never get any louder and

00:44:20   it will be quieter than my Mac Pro.

00:44:22   And if you compare it and this thing to the Retina 5K iMac, that's 24 decibels.

00:44:26   So the difference between a 5k iMac, which is what she's got now, 23-24 decibels depending

00:44:31   on what year iMac and what processor it is, to 25, and I know decibels aren't a linear

00:44:35   scale, right, so 24 is not, you know, 25 is not 1/25th bigger than 24 or whatever, like

00:44:40   it's not a linear scale, but it's not a huge difference between the noise level of these

00:44:46   things.

00:44:47   And so I'm inclined to think that I'm going to be annoyed from a philosophical perspective

00:44:52   that why are you running the fans at 1300 RPM when clearly you can run them way slower

00:44:57   and be just fine when the machine is idling, but I do like the fact that it appears that

00:45:01   the cooling systems on both the Ultra and the Max are tuned such that even under artificial

00:45:07   benchmark kind of like loads that you'll never induce even when playing a game probably,

00:45:12   that they're not going to get much louder and that you're not going to get the hair

00:45:14   dryer effect and during all that time it's not like they're baking the innards of this

00:45:19   machine because everything is staying relatively cool.

00:45:21   - I still, it's still, to me, it seems like some kind of

00:45:25   either bug or mistake that, you know,

00:45:30   on this Quiet Mac site, that the desktop Apple just released

00:45:33   is the second loudest desktop they've released in years.

00:45:35   Second loudest computer they've released in years at idle.

00:45:38   - I mean, it makes sense in terms of

00:45:39   if you look at the top two,

00:45:40   it's their biggest honking desktop thing,

00:45:43   and their second biggest honking desktop thing, right?

00:45:47   I mean, like, you would hope,

00:45:48   like, the laptops aren't on there.

00:45:49   These are the separate desktop box type machine

00:45:53   that nobody really buys.

00:45:55   And so I don't think it's surprising that they're up there,

00:45:58   but it is surprising 'cause the Mac Studio

00:45:59   is kind of small and you're like,

00:46:00   "Oh, did they make it so small so it's so hot in there?

00:46:02   "They gotta run the fans really high all the time?"

00:46:04   They don't have to, they just do.

00:46:06   And by the way, if anyone has this,

00:46:07   I believe if you get like TG Pro,

00:46:09   you can put the fans on manual.

00:46:11   And I do wonder if you drag the little progress bar

00:46:13   down to 1100 RPM, like can you tell a difference

00:46:16   in the sound or can you go below, like to Marco's point,

00:46:19   maybe they go down to 800.

00:46:20   TG Pro doesn't seem to think they do,

00:46:22   but you can put the fans on manual control

00:46:24   and mess with stuff.

00:46:25   And I finally got the TG Pro update.

00:46:26   The iMac Pro right now is idling around

00:46:29   40 degrees Celsius on the CPUs.

00:46:32   And yeah, mid 30s, low 40s on pretty much everything

00:46:37   inside my computer as it sits here idle

00:46:39   while I record a podcast.

00:46:41   - That's still pretty good.

00:46:43   I mean, that's not bad at all.

00:46:44   - But I can make them go way up.

00:46:46   I just run Microsoft Flight Simulator

00:46:47   and all those fans will, the temperatures will go way,

00:46:50   way up and the fans will get much, much louder.

00:46:53   And it seems that on a Mac studio,

00:46:54   the fans will not get much, much louder

00:46:56   no matter what you do to the thing

00:46:57   because it just has cooling to spare.

00:47:00   - That is pretty incredible.

00:47:01   So I'm glad your heart is unbroken

00:47:02   and Tony Braxton is also glad.

00:47:04   So both of us are very excited.

00:47:06   - By the time I actually get mine,

00:47:07   maybe they'll change the fan firmware in a software update.

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00:49:07   show.

00:49:08   We got a lot of feedback and I don't know what the source of this feedback was and most

00:49:16   of it was not snarky at all but a lot of feedback about why 5k? Why do people care? Why is this

00:49:24   a thing? And I have an answer to this but Jon it sounds like you perhaps had something

00:49:31   you wanted to start with and since this seems to be the Jon episode so far if you would

00:49:35   like to kick us off and then I would like to add some things potentially at the end.

00:49:40   Yeah, I saw a lot of this in a lot of Apple Studio Display reviews as well, particularly

00:49:43   the reviews that were trying to say, you know, "Is this monitor a good deal?" Right? Because

00:49:48   it costs $1600, which to someone who doesn't routinely shop in the Apple world seems like

00:49:53   a lot for a monitor, you're like, "1600 for a monitor? I can get a good monitor for like

00:49:57   $500. What are you doing? What's different about this?" And those, I think those debates

00:50:02   or the reason this 5K thing kept coming up.

00:50:05   Even on Twitter, I was sort of like thrown

00:50:07   into a Twitter canoe, as they say,

00:50:08   with a bunch of people who are arguing

00:50:10   with each other about this.

00:50:11   And inevitably what it would say, it was like,

00:50:13   yeah, $1,600 a lot, but there's really only,

00:50:16   as Casey, you've pointed out on your website,

00:50:18   there's not a lot of competition for this.

00:50:21   The LG is like 1,300, and the LG has a lot of problems,

00:50:25   as detailed in the show, and the Apple One

00:50:28   is really well built and looks nice,

00:50:30   And so the couple hundred dollar difference is reasonable.

00:50:33   And if you don't like either one of those monitors,

00:50:35   what are your choices?

00:50:36   And everyone would say, "What are you talking about?

00:50:38   "That's not the only competition.

00:50:39   "Look at all these monitors."

00:50:40   And everyone would say, "Yeah, but that one isn't 5K."

00:50:43   And you'd come back to this question.

00:50:44   But why do you care about 5K?

00:50:46   So you're telling me the only monitor

00:50:49   that I can compare this Apple to

00:50:50   is the one other 5K monitor,

00:50:51   and every other monitor doesn't count

00:50:53   'cause you can't compare it?

00:50:54   Because the prices are not proportional.

00:50:57   Like if you go down to a 4K monitor,

00:50:58   You can get a really good 4K monitor for way, way less.

00:51:02   And not only that, you can get a 4K monitor

00:51:05   with mini LED, with HDR, with high refresh,

00:51:09   all of that for less than the 5K.

00:51:10   So every one of these conversations about value

00:51:12   inevitably saw people talking past each other

00:51:14   until they realized they didn't agree on the premise

00:51:16   that the only competition to a 5K monitor

00:51:18   is a 5K monitor.

00:51:19   And what I wanna say about it in the context of ADP

00:51:22   is the reason we, three individual people,

00:51:25   keep talking about a 5K monitor

00:51:27   is because it is a thing that hasn't existed.

00:51:30   The only one out there was the LG

00:51:31   and the one that you could build into the iMac.

00:51:33   And so we didn't spend a lot of time

00:51:35   talking about 4K monitors because there's tons of them.

00:51:37   There's plenty of competition.

00:51:38   You have many different choices.

00:51:39   There's lots of different models

00:51:40   with lots of different prices.

00:51:41   Like I have one attached to my PlayStation.

00:51:43   Casey's have them.

00:51:44   Like that wasn't a problem area

00:51:46   or a hole that needed to be filled, but there was no 5K.

00:51:50   And the reason, I'm speaking to myself,

00:51:52   the reason why I'm interested in 5K

00:51:53   is because we have a 5K iMac since 2015.

00:51:57   And as we said many times, once you get used to being able to see more stuff, to have more points of resolution, if not necessarily pixels,

00:52:05   it's hard to go back to a smaller monitor. It feels like a downgrade, because we are accustomed in general over the course of our computing lives,

00:52:13   to starting off, I start off with a 9-inch monochrome monitor, and progressively as computers have gotten better and better,

00:52:19   the screen that I look at every day has gotten bigger. Obviously this will stop at some point, it's not going to be 7000 inches eventually, right?

00:52:26   but it has gotten bigger over time.

00:52:28   So if you spent many, many years in front of a 5K monitor,

00:52:31   the idea of getting a brand new Mac

00:52:32   and having to go down to a 4K monitor

00:52:36   isn't particularly attractive.

00:52:38   It's not the end of the world.

00:52:39   What if you get two 4K monitors?

00:52:40   Isn't that better?

00:52:41   Maybe you don't like two monitors.

00:52:42   Maybe you don't have room for two monitors.

00:52:43   Maybe you're just a single monitor person like I am.

00:52:45   So once you get used to 5K, it's nice to have 5K.

00:52:49   And Apple made a Mac with a 5K monitor,

00:52:52   but they never made a standalone 5K monitor

00:52:53   and the LG was the only one.

00:52:55   So the reason why we keep talking about this is one,

00:52:57   it was a product that seemingly nobody made,

00:53:00   which was frustrating.

00:53:00   And two, for me personally, I've gotten used to 5K.

00:53:04   So it was frustrating that this is what I'm used to,

00:53:06   but my options are so narrow when I go to my next computer.

00:53:09   I mean, it's what drove me to buy this ridiculously priced

00:53:12   6K monitor because hey, it's even more than 5K.

00:53:14   I would have been happy with 5K,

00:53:16   but at the time, literally my only option was the LG

00:53:18   or this, and I wasn't gonna get that LG

00:53:20   'cause I'm not as brave as Casey.

00:53:21   So I got this stupid 6K, right?

00:53:23   But now they have a 5K, that's why people are talking about it.

00:53:26   And the people who are stuck on 5K, why do you care about 5K?

00:53:30   It's basically people who have gotten used to 5K,

00:53:32   probably by using a 5K iMac or maybe by using the 5K LG,

00:53:36   and going to anything smaller or going to 2K 4K displays.

00:53:39   Feels like to them either a downgrade or something

00:53:42   they don't want to do.

00:53:44   Yeah, it's tough because I think Mac users are

00:53:50   a little bit different and cut from a different cloth

00:53:54   than your average PC user, and that doesn't mean

00:53:56   we're more right or anything like that.

00:53:58   We're just a little different. - No, we are.

00:53:59   We are definitely more right.

00:54:01   - Fine, fine.

00:54:02   And so I think another way of looking at this is that,

00:54:07   you know, especially,

00:54:08   when did the Retina MacBook Pros come out?

00:54:11   - 2012. - 2012.

00:54:12   God, was it that long ago?

00:54:13   10 years ago. - It sure was.

00:54:15   - Holy smokes.

00:54:17   So when these Retina MacBook Pros came out in 2012,

00:54:20   we got these incredibly, incredibly crisp displays,

00:54:24   just phenomenally crisp.

00:54:25   And the same thing happened with the phones

00:54:27   and the iPads and so on and so forth.

00:54:28   But it was the first time that I saw

00:54:31   any sort of computer monitor that was that crisp,

00:54:33   that was what people sometimes call high DPI.

00:54:36   And when you have all of that data

00:54:41   to make things so clear,

00:54:43   but you put it in a relatively small package,

00:54:46   So what was the original sales pitch of retina?

00:54:48   You get four pixels where you would previously

00:54:50   have only had one, if I remember correctly.

00:54:52   Do I have that right?

00:54:53   - I mean, that is what happened.

00:54:54   I don't know if that was the sales pitch.

00:54:55   - The sales pitch is you can't see the pixels anymore.

00:54:58   They're so small that your eye can't resolve them.

00:54:59   That's what makes it a retina display.

00:55:01   - Exactly.

00:55:02   And so this was true on the iPhone, it was true on the iPad,

00:55:04   then it was true on Macs.

00:55:06   And so from 2012, Mac OS,

00:55:10   or it might've even still been OS X at that point,

00:55:12   had phenomenal high DPI support

00:55:14   because they were making computers

00:55:16   that had these ridiculously high DPI displays.

00:55:19   And as of years ago now,

00:55:22   and I haven't personally tried this recently,

00:55:24   although I have friends that still run Windows,

00:55:26   and they say it's not great.

00:55:28   As of, actually, John,

00:55:29   you might even have opinions about this,

00:55:30   but as of years ago now,

00:55:32   Windows high DPI support was rather trash.

00:55:35   Like, it would work in some places,

00:55:37   it wouldn't work in others,

00:55:38   and it was kinda messy.

00:55:40   - Well, I can tell you my experience with it,

00:55:41   'cause I always say I'm running Windows

00:55:43   on a high DPI screen here.

00:55:44   Windows itself does pretty okay.

00:55:46   It has adjustable resolution

00:55:48   and you can basically make it look,

00:55:50   even more flexible than Apple,

00:55:52   it's probably the same flexibility.

00:55:53   It's more straightforward than Apple

00:55:54   because I hate those stupid little thing

00:55:56   where you have five different choices

00:55:57   and it's like, default, scaled.

00:55:59   And it's like, just tell me what the ratio is.

00:56:02   Anyway, Windows is straightforward with that.

00:56:03   But here's the problem with you

00:56:04   using Windows on a high DPI monitor.

00:56:06   Just because Windows, the OS,

00:56:08   has reasonable scaling and handles it well,

00:56:10   and I'm running Windows 10

00:56:11   and I send Windows 11 is even better,

00:56:13   Because Windows backwards compatibility is like their religion, tons of stuff that you

00:56:18   run on Windows has no idea that it's running on a high DPI monitor and just plain shows

00:56:24   itself at 1x and everything is microscopic.

00:56:26   I was playing like Valorant or something, like a fairly modern game and like the Riot

00:56:33   game launcher thing shows itself at 1x with retina pixels.

00:56:37   It was so small, like my nose was practically touching the screen, I couldn't see anything.

00:56:41   They just don't expect to run, especially gaming things.

00:56:44   You don't game on a retina monitor.

00:56:46   That's why most gaming monitors on PCs,

00:56:48   they have these resolutions.

00:56:49   When you look at them, you're like,

00:56:50   "Oh, it's an awesome monitor."

00:56:50   You're like, "No, that's not points, that's pixels."

00:56:52   You're like, "Oh, well."

00:56:54   For a Mac user, that's not how we wanna do things,

00:56:56   but for a PC gamer, retina is not something

00:56:59   that you crave, really.

00:57:01   And so games never expect to run at high DPI,

00:57:03   and sometimes they just don't care,

00:57:05   and they just show themselves microscopic.

00:57:06   And you wouldn't think that's a big deal,

00:57:08   but if you're old and don't have great vision,

00:57:10   Being able to use the tiny Windows controls on a 1x window being displayed on a 2x retina

00:57:18   display is actually really difficult, and I can tell you, very frustrating.

00:57:21   It's literally like you're reading an eye chart.

00:57:23   So yeah, the overall experience is something to be desired, but it's mostly not the fault

00:57:28   of Microsoft because they get it right in the OS.

00:57:31   So if you start from the premise that you want something that's high DPI, that changes

00:57:38   your requirements quite dramatically. So when I was going on a search for a retina monitor,

00:57:44   when I was still at my jobby job, we landed on a bunch of different options and that was

00:57:50   covered in a post of mine from 2017. And at the time there was a 24 inch 4k monitor and

00:57:58   that's actually the one I'm looking at right this very moment. And it was about $300 then

00:58:02   it's about $300 now. And that worked, that worked out just fine. It's not a fantastic

00:58:06   monitor, but it's fine. And it's cheap. I mean, $300 is a lot of money, but given everything

00:58:11   else we're talking about right now, it's pretty cheap. There was at the time a Dell 24" 4K

00:58:16   that was a little more expensive and a little bit better, like a little bit better color

00:58:19   reproduction and so on and so forth. That has been discontinued to the best of my knowledge.

00:58:23   And there was a 27" Dell 5K monitor, which has also been discontinued. So we have the

00:58:30   LG 24-inch 4k. There's also the LG Ultrafine 4k, which at the time in 2017 was like 700 bucks.

00:58:38   I don't know if that is the case anymore or not. And then you had the LG Ultrafine 5k, and that was, you know,

00:58:43   like 1300 bucks. I think it was like 15 or 16 when it was brand new and then they dropped the price

00:58:46   shortly thereafter. And that was it. That's all you could do because, in my personal opinion, if you cross above about

00:58:54   24 inches with 4k resolution, you start to get out of retina because you can start to see the pixels. And yes,

00:59:00   This is the first worldiest of first world problems

00:59:02   But that's the whole point is that you want to have a setup where you can't see the pixels where it really does look

00:59:08   You know pixel doubled and everything is retina

00:59:10   And so my rule of thumb that works for me and a lot of people like to argue with me about this

00:59:15   Maybe you feel differently but for me anything over 24 inches you really need 5k

00:59:19   Well, all of these monitors that people love to cite as being way more expensive

00:59:24   Excuse me way less expensive and way more inches and so on and so forth

00:59:27   I don't want that more inches is bad in this context

00:59:31   Like that is the opposite of what I want

00:59:33   There are cases where I do want that that is the opposite of what I want in this context

00:59:37   And so so people will say well why not have this 39 inch curved monstrosity?

00:59:42   That's you know, ridiculously large and looks stupid in my opinion. Well aside from the fact that it's aesthetically not great

00:59:48   I don't want that much space unless I have you know, like an 8k resolution monitor, which would be unaffordable

00:59:54   What you want is more in Apple parlance. You want more points. You don't want more inches. You want more points.

00:59:59   And when we say points, it's the abstract unit that Apple uses to measure things on screen.

01:00:03   They try to display everything at a fixed size in points. The number of pixels may vary.

01:00:08   In an Apple simple case, if you have a retina monitor, you know, two pixels of length is equal to one point in length, right?

01:00:14   And if you have a non-retina amount, one pixel is one point, right? But in that monstrosity, it's 32 inches.

01:00:20   The point resolution of that in retina parlance is you take the pixels you divide by two and that's how many points wide it is

01:00:27   And then that's how you would see that the width of that giant

01:00:30   Really wide monitor and points is less than the width of the 5k in points not in inches

01:00:36   But in points because that's how everything is measured and when we say we want retina

01:00:40   We don't want a monitor or one pickle pixel equals one point

01:00:43   We want a monitor or as Casey said in 2d parlance

01:00:46   Four pixels equals one point a little square one two three four and a little square that is one point because that allows

01:00:52   The edges of things to be drawn using pixels which are half their quarter of the size of a point again

01:00:58   I'm keep switching from 1d to 2d depending on how you're measuring it

01:01:01   And so that's what Mac users are looking for because all of Apple's Macs with built-in displays are within that range

01:01:07   They have a DPI range that puts them in that sort of retina ish range and the point size of things

01:01:12   You know the number we shop for them based on how many points because how many points is how much stuff you can see on

01:01:18   Screen now you can do non-native scaling modes and get essentially more points of resolution with the same pixels

01:01:22   But just starting from the native res of saying at native res in retina mode

01:01:27   Here's how many points wide it is and you can go up or down a little bit in either direction by scaling

01:01:31   But that's the native res when when people who?

01:01:35   Don't care about retina, but there's a lot of those people including among Mac users

01:01:40   but when people who don't care about retina enter this discussion, you keep telling them

01:01:45   over and over again, "What I want as a retina carer is this DPI range in this size range."

01:01:53   And every single time they're like, "Well, what about this?"

01:01:57   And it's not that.

01:01:58   And it drives you mad because you're like, "Okay, I literally want this very specific

01:02:03   set of conditions.

01:02:05   This small number of monitors satisfies these conditions, and literally everything else

01:02:10   you've ever told me about does not.

01:02:13   And I don't understand, it's not like these specs are hard to find, it's not like these

01:02:18   are somehow unreasonable things to want in a monitor.

01:02:22   What could be more natural to the specs of a monitor than its physical size and the number

01:02:27   of pixels it has?

01:02:29   Those are pretty basic specs.

01:02:31   And yet it seems like the world keeps showering us with options that we should like that are

01:02:37   totally outside of the specs that we want.

01:02:39   It's like, no, you don't, did I not speak it correctly?

01:02:43   Did I not communicate?

01:02:44   Are we having a communication issue?

01:02:46   Why would you think if I say I want this, why would you think I would want that?

01:02:50   Like, it's crazy.

01:02:52   It's maddening.

01:02:53   - Yeah, I imagine you've written two different posts across four years about this very issue

01:02:57   and how many suggestions you've gotten.

01:02:58   You know Marco, I know you're interested in a four-door electric car, but have you heard

01:03:04   about two-door V8 Mustangs?

01:03:06   I think you would really like them.

01:03:07   How about this motorcycle?

01:03:08   I'm like, "No, that's not even close!"

01:03:11   And by the way, the reason why we want this, like, "Well, but why do you want that thing?

01:03:14   It's dumb to like that thing.

01:03:15   I haven't ever had it and I think it's fine.

01:03:17   I like my monitor better.

01:03:18   Why don't you, why do you want that thing?"

01:03:20   Basically, we've been trained by Apple to want it, because Apple has shipped monitors

01:03:23   with most of its computers for a long time and you get accustomed to looking at things

01:03:28   like that.

01:03:29   And it's the same thing with the size thing in terms of like I had a monitor that had

01:03:32   this many points on it and going to one with fewer at native res feels like a downgrade

01:03:36   because either I have to scale and things are more blurry or I just don't get to see

01:03:40   as much and that feels like a downgrade.

01:03:41   In the same way, if you're accustomed to Apple computers since 2012 coming to you with retina

01:03:48   DPI monitors with a given number of points, going back to non-retina from that doesn't

01:03:55   feel, it doesn't even feel like a lateral move, it feels like a downgrade because you're

01:03:59   used to years and years of not being able to see the pixels and suddenly you can see

01:04:02   them again and it feels kind of like, you know, going back to your Palm PDA after using

01:04:06   an iPhone.

01:04:07   It doesn't feel like, it feels worse, it doesn't feel like an advancement.

01:04:12   If you never got used to retina and have only used non-retina max, maybe you don't even

01:04:16   care when you see your first retina Mac because at this point we're all old and we wouldn't

01:04:19   but like we're used to retina we're used to 5k resolution from having 5k iMacs from having

01:04:25   laptops that have retina screens in them for all these years and although it may not be

01:04:29   what you're shopping for it's what we're shopping for and it's such a tiny market getting back

01:04:33   to the studio display it's why the studio display looks so much more reasonable because

01:04:37   it has so little competition and this competition is so bad that in the abstract it may still

01:04:43   seem outrageous, but practically speaking, if you go out there looking for something

01:04:47   with these specs, there are so few choices, and the Apple Studio display looks like, according

01:04:54   to our taste and many other people's tastes, actually the best choice.

01:04:58   Does it mean it's super awesome and a great value?

01:05:00   No, but if your choices are that limited and you really want these things, it's slim pickings

01:05:04   and this is the best one.

01:05:05   Yeah, and another great example is, you know, I've gotten used to having the blackest blacks

01:05:10   on my OLED displays, on my OLED TV, on my OLED iPhone.

01:05:14   And I do prefer to have that kind of super deep black

01:05:19   in the same way that you guys have it in your,

01:05:22   what is the technology in the XDR that does this,

01:05:25   the backlight technology?

01:05:26   - It's just mini LED, it's the same thing.

01:05:27   - Okay, so in your mini LED displays,

01:05:30   like the, I almost said cinema display,

01:05:33   the studio display does not have particularly black blacks.

01:05:37   And that is annoying but for me for me that is like a tertiary or what is a quaternary?

01:05:45   Priority for me. My number one priority is a monitor that works

01:05:49   My second priority is one that's about 27 inches and that's 5k and like anything else is

01:05:56   Subsequent to that like I in my personal list good speakers are above black blacks. I'm not saying you have to agree

01:06:03   That's just the way I look at it. And so it's like you said John

01:06:07   I mean you there really aren't many options and if you look at the post I wrote at the very very end of last year

01:06:12   You know your options were the 24 inch 4k

01:06:15   Which I've got right here the ultrafine 4k the ultrafine 5k and the Pro Display XDR

01:06:19   Literally that was it and now you've got one more slotted in there

01:06:23   which is the studio display, which is a touch more expensive than the ultrafine 5k and

01:06:28   by any reasonable measure is

01:06:32   Way way way nicer because I can tell you even though I am an LG 5k apologist even after my crummy experience with it

01:06:38   the speakers on this are

01:06:41   Hilariously bad the stand makes the speakers look like they're high fidelity

01:06:45   Like there's so much around the panel itself. That is so bad

01:06:50   Like the webcam is fine, which is apparently better than this studio display at least as exists right now

01:06:57   But but like the speakers suck the stand sucks the service sucks

01:07:02   Everything about the 5k other than the panel sucks and so for $300 hell yes

01:07:09   I'm gonna go for the Apple version hell

01:07:12   Yes, I am because that's gonna be so much nicer and you know what if it breaks

01:07:15   You know what? I do instead of shipping it to friggin city of industry

01:07:19   You know where I ship it in my car to the Apple Store. That's like 10 minutes away. Don't be creepy

01:07:24   So it's so much better in every measurable way for the things that I prioritize.

01:07:31   But you may feel differently and that's quite alright.

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01:08:32   [Music]

01:08:33   >> All right, so some details on this monitor that have come out in the weeks since we last

01:08:39   recorded.

01:08:40   So the first is this is just a tip from a friend that I don't know if this is just a

01:08:42   one-off thing, but at least watching for it, when he hooked it up to his Mac, it defaulted

01:08:45   to 1920 by 1080.

01:08:46   He was like, "Why does this look all fuzzy?"

01:08:49   And I have not heard of this happening to anyone else, so maybe this is just a one-off

01:08:53   fluke, but if you get up an Apple Studio display and you hook it up to your Mac and it looks

01:08:56   a little weird, just hop over to the display preference brain and make sure it's set to

01:08:59   2560x1440, which is the native retina res, because it might not be.

01:09:06   Another one of the weird foibles of this monitor is that it apparently comes with a very short

01:09:11   Thunderbolt cable, the thing that you use to connect the monitor to your computer, the

01:09:14   only thing that connects the monitor to your monitor to the computer.

01:09:18   It looks like it's about 3 feet or maybe 1 meter for metric folks or whatever, which

01:09:23   is not particularly long.

01:09:24   It's perfectly fine if you're connecting it to a laptop that's sitting next to it, but

01:09:28   if for example you had a Mac Pro and it was sitting on the floor, that probably wouldn't

01:09:33   reach.

01:09:34   And if you look at Apple's prices for their braided Thunderbolt cables, they're outrageous.

01:09:38   So if you want to get something cheaper, maybe look at an old WBC or something, you can find

01:09:43   more reasonably priced Thunderbolt cables.

01:09:46   You can even use a DisplayPort cable if you can get that cheaper as well, but of course

01:09:49   it depends on what you're connecting it to.

01:09:52   And also all the accessory stuff won't work like the camera and USB port, so maybe you

01:09:55   don't do that.

01:09:56   Just get a Thunderbolt, like a 2-meter Thunderbolt cable is probably going to be like 50 bucks.

01:10:00   I know, but it still just seems very expensive, right?

01:10:02   Okay, so speaking of cables, the power cable.

01:10:06   I was actually looking at this last week before we recorded, I kept trying to find photos

01:10:09   of like the back of the Apple Studio display and the only one I found was really small

01:10:14   and blurry.

01:10:15   What I wanted to see was, is the cable

01:10:17   permanently attached or not?

01:10:18   And I found a photo of the back of it without the cable.

01:10:21   So I'm like, well it must be unattachable.

01:10:22   And I saw like three little dots inside it.

01:10:24   I'm like, that must be the plug, the little,

01:10:26   what is it called Marco, N-E-M, whatever.

01:10:29   What is the one?

01:10:30   - Oh yeah, like the C13 or whatever it is.

01:10:32   - Yeah, the little triangle E3 hole.

01:10:34   Anyway, that's what I thought it was,

01:10:36   but it was a really small picture.

01:10:37   So now we know what the deal is.

01:10:39   The cord is quote unquote non-removable,

01:10:43   but you can remove it.

01:10:44   And so we have a picture from Apple's repair manual

01:10:47   for the tool they apparently give

01:10:49   to like the Apple stores or whatever

01:10:51   on how to remove this.

01:10:51   And it's basically like a giant barrel

01:10:54   with a handle for leverage

01:10:56   and you wrap the cord around the barrel

01:10:58   and then you push down on the stick

01:11:00   that's coming out of the barrel

01:11:01   and it sort of presses against the back of the stand.

01:11:04   What it's doing is basically pull exactly straight

01:11:07   out of the monitor really hard and it will come out.

01:11:11   We'll have a video to Matt Panzorino of TechCrunch

01:11:15   doing that to presumably his Mac Studio display.

01:11:19   It's a pretty violent process, right?

01:11:21   (laughing)

01:11:22   It does come out.

01:11:23   It is not like a normal plug connector.

01:11:25   It's more like, I mean, you can do this in your home pod too.

01:11:28   Like lots of things you can pull the cord out of.

01:11:31   Like it's not attached by tiny little wires.

01:11:33   There is an actually connector.

01:11:35   So the thing you pull out has three holes in it

01:11:37   and it is connected to a thing with three metal pins.

01:11:40   So it's not like you're breaking it to pull it out,

01:11:42   but boy, it's almost like you're breaking it.

01:11:44   - You probably wouldn't want to do it unnecessarily.

01:11:47   - Yeah, and the reason this comes up is

01:11:48   no one wants a permanently attached cord

01:11:50   'cause why do you have this expensive monitor?

01:11:51   What if your cat chews through the cord?

01:11:52   Do you have to get the whole monitor replaced?

01:11:54   The answer is no, you won't have to get

01:11:55   the whole monitor replaced,

01:11:56   but you probably will have to bring it to an Apple store

01:11:58   'cause it's not like you can go buy this cord.

01:12:00   Like this is a part, it is not a,

01:12:02   oh, I'll just go to the store and buy a power cable.

01:12:05   That won't work, whatever this thing is.

01:12:07   It might not even be proprietary, but whatever it is,

01:12:08   not the type of thing you're going to find at a store that you can just buy and plug

01:12:12   in there. So imagine, Jon, just hypothetically, if you had a desk that had your computer and

01:12:19   a couple of displays on it and maybe one or two other things that might need power, and

01:12:23   then you had off to the corner of the room, and it's not a very big room, but in the corner

01:12:28   of the room, you had a Synology and a Mac Mini and a Switch and an Eero and things of

01:12:33   that nature and you wanted all of those things to be on the same uninterruptible power supply,

01:12:39   then what you might end up doing is realizing that most of the equipment that needs to be

01:12:43   in the UPS is off in the corner of the room, and you would need just a couple of longer

01:12:49   cables to reach to the desk.

01:12:52   Imagine if you had, I don't know, a need for maybe a six-foot power cable instead of a

01:12:58   three-foot power cable.

01:13:00   And on the LG Ultrafine, this is all just hypothetical, John.

01:13:03   On the LG Ultrafine, you can just swap out

01:13:05   whatever that plug, Marco always knows,

01:13:07   I never remember it, whatever that plug type is

01:13:09   for like a six or 10 foot version of it, easy peasy.

01:13:12   - I don't think this is, I'm not sure the power cord

01:13:14   is three feet, the Thunderbolt cord is three feet.

01:13:16   - No, I understand, I understand,

01:13:17   but whatever the length of the power cable is.

01:13:19   - I think this cord is six feet, or two meters,

01:13:20   or whatever. - Well, six feet

01:13:22   is potentially too short, hypothetically,

01:13:23   hypothetically, hypothetically.

01:13:24   - You can always buy another UPS, it's okay.

01:13:26   I gave her permission.

01:13:28   - But I actually don't even have a plug

01:13:30   that Glagsight dev will not tell me.

01:13:31   - Hey, don't talk to me about lack of plugs.

01:13:33   - Actually, that's true.

01:13:34   I take it all back.

01:13:35   I take it all back.

01:13:35   Sorry, Dan.

01:13:36   - My dining room has literally one plug.

01:13:38   Not one plug with two places to plug in, one plug.

01:13:42   (laughing)

01:13:44   And it is not an inconvenient place.

01:13:47   - If we don't have a better post show,

01:13:48   remind me about a adventure I went on recently.

01:13:51   But anyways, I have the UPS in the corner

01:13:56   and I need easily six feet, maybe closer to 10

01:13:59   to get to the back of the monitor

01:14:01   between the length of the wall

01:14:03   and then going up the back of the desk.

01:14:06   And so I'm gonna have to get like a stupid extension cord

01:14:08   just from the monitor.

01:14:09   - You can buy, the other end of the cord is just,

01:14:12   you know, a regular, in the US, just a regular US plug.

01:14:14   So it's okay to buy a sufficiently heavy duty

01:14:17   extension cord, it will be fine.

01:14:19   It's a lot easier than extending the Thunderbolt cable,

01:14:21   let me tell you, and it'll cost you a lot less money

01:14:23   and you can buy it in a hardware store.

01:14:24   - Yep, all true statements.

01:14:26   - So more details on the studio display,

01:14:27   this time from Jason Snell, talking about the mounts,

01:14:31   as we said last week, you can't,

01:14:33   you have to pick them out when you buy it

01:14:34   and they're not interchangeable,

01:14:35   but Jason says just like in the past,

01:14:37   while Apple says that the display's mounts

01:14:39   are not user serviceable, it's my understanding

01:14:41   that if you take a studio display

01:14:42   to an authorized Apple dealer and pay a fee,

01:14:44   they should be able to swap on a different mounting element.

01:14:47   And of course, the way they'll probably swap that

01:14:48   is they'll replace the entire back of your display

01:14:50   at a cost that you probably will not wanna pay.

01:14:52   But technically it is possible,

01:14:54   just like with the iMacs, I believe, in the past.

01:14:56   So if you make the wrong choice and decide you want to go with the Visa mount and you

01:15:01   bought the one with the stand or something, it is possible, but again, probably not for

01:15:05   a price that you want to pay, but how desperate are you going to be?

01:15:09   And then Jason also posted a screenshot once the studio display embargo went up that is

01:15:14   showing a little dialog box that says, "Your display was restarted because of a problem."

01:15:19   So that is a thing that might happen.

01:15:22   Do you think, like, you know, getting into that angle of it, where they have this, basically

01:15:26   this entire iOS stack running on the monitor, and it can have its own software updates on

01:15:32   the monitor, it can reboot itself, it can crash, all the stuff with the camera that

01:15:37   I'm sure we're gonna get to in a second, like, do you think this was over-engineered, in

01:15:43   the sense that, do you think they should have gone with all of this iOS-based processing

01:15:48   and complexity in the monitor?

01:15:50   Because the XDR does not do this, and frankly I'm really kind of happy about that.

01:15:56   Like I'm very happy that when I plug in my monitor, it's just a monitor.

01:16:01   And there's a relatively small amount of things that can go wrong with that, and it

01:16:06   always kind of just wakes right up.

01:16:09   It never, my monitor does not display its own ellipsis icon or animation when it's

01:16:15   itself booting up.

01:16:16   Like I kind of like things to be simple like that, if they can reasonably be.

01:16:23   Do you think it was a mistake to design this with such complexity?

01:16:28   Well so let me go through some of the details of the complexity you're talking about so

01:16:31   we can sort of put some parameters on that and say what actually is inside there and

01:16:35   how bad is it.

01:16:36   And Martin posted on Twitter a picture of extracted from the studio display firmware

01:16:43   showing like an icon on the screen with an exclamation point and the URL it says support.apple.com/display/restore

01:16:50   for a restore percent.

01:16:51   I mean this is not a thing that happened to him but like for you know if your monitor

01:16:54   to your point Marco if your monitor something goes wrong with all this crap they put in

01:16:57   there might I have to go restore my monitor by going to your URL that's the thing you

01:17:01   can do.

01:17:02   So the story underlying this is that people discovered pretty quickly that Apple Studio

01:17:06   to Spray runs its quote-unquote "firmware" is version 15.4 with the exact same build

01:17:14   number as iOS 15.4, which is very suspicious, making people think that it is just plain

01:17:20   running iOS.

01:17:21   The operating system it runs, according to Guy Rambo, reports itself as just "Darwin

01:17:26   OS", which is not much of anything.

01:17:28   But if the build number is the same as iOS and the regular version is the same as iOS,

01:17:32   it's probably running iOS.

01:17:36   And in terms of the complexity you were describing, many people who, if they got like I guess

01:17:40   the early batch of manufactured ones or whatever, when they got it out of the box, they were

01:17:43   prompted on their Mac for a "display firmware update" because not all of them came with

01:17:49   the version that like the reviewers got, like the latest latest version, whatever it is,

01:17:53   build 19e241, some of them came with an earlier version.

01:17:57   And the update for the display, it looks like an iOS update, it's 632.4 megabytes.

01:18:05   for the firmware, for your quote unquote firmware

01:18:09   for this, but people don't remember

01:18:10   when the iPhone first came out,

01:18:12   it was also described as having firmware.

01:18:14   And when they would update the operating system

01:18:16   on the iPhone, it was a firmware update.

01:18:18   Eventually they figured out,

01:18:19   okay, we're not gonna call it firmware,

01:18:20   we're gonna call it iPhone OS and eventually iOS

01:18:23   and so on and so forth.

01:18:24   And so the people who dug into this figured out,

01:18:28   well, what's in there?

01:18:29   Well, we already knew there was an A13 in there.

01:18:32   Mentioned last time like the A13 is better

01:18:33   than what's in the Apple TV.

01:18:34   so the thing could like doubles in Apple TV,

01:18:36   but oh, but it doesn't have everything in there.

01:18:37   It doesn't have like wifi and Bluetooth or whatever.

01:18:40   But we do know that it has the A13.

01:18:42   And of course we could have surmised that the A13 is useless

01:18:45   without some kind of storage, flash storage,

01:18:47   'cause what would the A13 do?

01:18:49   How does it boot?

01:18:50   It has to have storage somewhere.

01:18:52   How much storage does it have?

01:18:54   64 gigabytes, 64 gigabytes.

01:18:57   So this has a better system on a chip than the Apple TV.

01:19:01   And it has as much storage as the big expensive Apple TV.

01:19:04   64 gigs.

01:19:05   And how much of that 64 gigs is taken with stuff?

01:19:10   Not a lot.

01:19:10   People like looked at the file system output

01:19:12   and it's like taking,

01:19:13   this is just the operating system on there.

01:19:15   It's taking like, I don't know,

01:19:16   two gigs of that 64 gigs or whatever.

01:19:18   As Gruber said, effectively there's a base model

01:19:21   ninth generation iPad in there.

01:19:23   An A13 with 64 gigs of storage.

01:19:27   Just sitting inside your monitor.

01:19:29   Now, as Joe Pansuo pointed out,

01:19:32   My 11-year-old, this is Joe talking,

01:19:34   my 11-year-old Thunderbolt display

01:19:36   also has firmware updates.

01:19:37   It also definitely crashes.

01:19:39   Still a great external monitor.

01:19:40   So he put a screenshot of a Thunderbolt display,

01:19:44   firmware update, I have one of these monitors,

01:19:45   I used it for years, it's non-retina, but it's 27 inch.

01:19:48   Was it 5K, I forget.

01:19:50   Maybe. - The Thunderbolt display, no.

01:19:51   It was not retina. - No, 24 inch.

01:19:53   - No, no, no, it was 27 inch, but it was non-retina.

01:19:57   - Yeah, okay, that's right.

01:19:58   It's 5K size in points, like,

01:20:01   It's the same point resolution as a 5K monitor,

01:20:03   but it was non-red.

01:20:04   But anyway, it has firmware updates and it can also crash.

01:20:08   And he put a screenshot of the firmware update.

01:20:10   It is 923 kilobytes.

01:20:12   (laughing)

01:20:14   So 632 megabytes versus 923 kilobytes.

01:20:18   - It's probably running like an iPod CPU in there.

01:20:21   - Yeah, so this is the thing that people don't think about

01:20:24   because it's the magic of language.

01:20:26   When we say firmware,

01:20:27   oh, I had a firmware update for my what's a hoosy thingy.

01:20:30   oh, there's just some kind of firmware that it runs.

01:20:32   We don't like to think of that as like,

01:20:34   oh, this thing is a general purpose computer

01:20:37   with an operating system.

01:20:38   But of course they are.

01:20:39   In the same way we don't like to think

01:20:40   about tiny ARM processors on our flash memory chips

01:20:43   in our Mac Studio and other tiny ARM processors

01:20:45   inside the M1 that are doing other little jobs,

01:20:49   anything that seems like it's got computer-y type chips

01:20:52   in it and does a thing probably has some kind of software

01:20:56   and operating system that makes it work.

01:20:59   And so our stupid XDRs, right?

01:21:03   Inside them is not just a display panel.

01:21:06   There's also a bunch of circuit boards

01:21:07   that run essentially the USB hub

01:21:10   and the display controllers and a bunch of other stuff.

01:21:12   So inside there are various little chips,

01:21:15   little Turing complete machines that run software.

01:21:19   And we don't think of it as like a full fledged computer,

01:21:24   but it's performing the same function.

01:21:27   If you make custom chips that run, quote unquote,

01:21:30   "custom firmware" to do the minimum functionality required

01:21:33   to do your thing, that certainly costs less money.

01:21:36   I'm not gonna say it takes less power

01:21:39   'cause that's not necessarily true,

01:21:40   and we'll get to that in a second.

01:21:42   The updates are smaller because the software

01:21:46   that needs to run is probably very minimal,

01:21:48   but it is a lot more work to make

01:21:50   because you have to make it do exactly the thing

01:21:52   that you want it to do.

01:21:53   and you usually have to build it up from if not nothing,

01:21:57   from some sort of foundational pieces

01:22:01   that exist in the industry

01:22:02   or are part of some chipset or whatever.

01:22:04   The obvious reason that Apple put an A13

01:22:07   in a 64 gig thing in here is because

01:22:09   Apple knows how to make those, can manufacture them,

01:22:13   they're a well-known thing,

01:22:14   it's already got an operating system that runs on them,

01:22:17   and that operating system is thoroughly debugged,

01:22:19   well tested, does everything they need it to do,

01:22:22   which we'll get to in a second when we talk about the camera,

01:22:24   center stage, running the sneakers, spatial audio,

01:22:28   they already have an operating system that does that

01:22:31   and they already have hardware

01:22:31   that runs that operating system.

01:22:33   Why did they choose the A13,

01:22:34   not the A12 or something down or whatever?

01:22:36   Maybe they don't make those smaller chips anymore.

01:22:39   Maybe they needed the A13

01:22:40   to be able to do all the things they did,

01:22:42   but it is a known quantity

01:22:43   that already does everything they did.

01:22:45   In some ways, it would be stupid for them

01:22:47   not to put an A13 in there.

01:22:48   And yet, as a customer,

01:22:50   When you get a 600 megabyte update from your monitor,

01:22:53   like what is going on here?

01:22:55   And it also seems like it's a waste

01:22:57   that they're doing it.

01:22:58   Now, having had several peripherals over the years

01:23:01   for Macs and other things that have had hardware

01:23:04   and firmware that has been buggy,

01:23:06   I am mostly comforted, not by the 600 megabyte outbite,

01:23:09   but by the fact that the stuff that is running

01:23:12   inside this monitor is not weird one-off stuff

01:23:15   that may be awesome or may suck.

01:23:18   it is iOS running on hardware that iOS has run on.

01:23:21   So I have some confidence that A, it will work and be reliable,

01:23:24   and B, that if it doesn't work, it will get its bugs fixed

01:23:29   because it's presumably part of the iOS update cycle now.

01:23:35   Especially with the same build number.

01:23:36   It's not like they build a custom version of the OS

01:23:38   dress for the monitor.

01:23:39   I think every time iOS gets updated,

01:23:41   it will include updates that help this monitor,

01:23:43   because this is really like a little iPad running in there

01:23:47   that's running a display that doesn't take touch and it runs the camera and it runs the speakers and it does whatever else it

01:23:52   needs to do and it runs the thing where it talks to the Mac and

01:23:54   Although that seems ridiculous and wasteful and expensive. It's already a pretty expensive monitor that a thirteen probably cost Apple 30 bucks

01:24:01   Whatever for the whole thing

01:24:03   And it's super low power because the a thirteen is built on a fairly modern process and it was built to be inside a phone

01:24:09   So it's not like they're putting a you know a giant hot CPU in there

01:24:13   that's a waste of energy and is, you know,

01:24:15   causing the thing to burn up

01:24:16   and the fans are silent and everything.

01:24:17   So I have mostly made my peace with this,

01:24:20   but boy is it weird.

01:24:21   And you know, as many people, I was pointing out,

01:24:23   oh, this could be a standalone Apple TV.

01:24:25   At this point, it could also be a standalone Mac.

01:24:28   'Cause I found this actually,

01:24:30   that A13 is faster than, yeah,

01:24:33   it is faster than the 27 inch Retina iMac, right?

01:24:37   - Wow. - From 2020.

01:24:39   So if you have an Intel iMac from 2020

01:24:41   with a Core i7, the A13 that's in your monitor

01:24:46   is faster than that in single-core performance.

01:24:48   (laughing)

01:24:48   - That is utterly bananas.

01:24:49   - So you could just make that monitor a complete Mac.

01:24:52   Now, again, I haven't seen the teardowns yet,

01:24:54   but I'm pretty sure there's no WiFi chip,

01:24:55   there's no Bluetooth chip or whatever,

01:24:57   but there is USB input/output, there is storage,

01:25:00   there is a camera, there is speakers.

01:25:03   It's a little bit absurd, but in the grand scheme of things,

01:25:07   I endorse the decision to do this

01:25:09   if it means that we get on that iOS update train

01:25:13   and that this monitor has more of a chance

01:25:16   of being reliable over a long term.

01:25:18   Because as pointed out by Joe who wrote in,

01:25:20   the Thunderbolt display from 11 years ago,

01:25:23   it also had a little mini OS and firmware, and it could crash.

01:25:27   And that got abandoned way sooner than iOS will.

01:25:31   It's wild.

01:25:32   And I think we have a little bit more we need to go through.

01:25:36   But I do want to answer the question,

01:25:37   is this too complicated?

01:25:38   But before we get there, Mark Christian writes,

01:25:41   "I set up my new studio display today

01:25:43   "and noticed that it caused an ethernet device

01:25:44   "to show up under system information,

01:25:46   "which is odd since the display

01:25:48   "doesn't actually have an ethernet port on it."

01:25:51   I would assume, and I think Mark himself had guessed later,

01:25:56   that this is about sending firmware updates

01:25:59   back and forth to the monitor,

01:26:00   but do we have any idea what this is about?

01:26:02   - Yeah, I mean, obviously,

01:26:03   that's another thing people are asking.

01:26:04   Why does the Mac do the firmware updates for the monitor?

01:26:07   The monitor is a full-fledged computer, it could do it itself, but like, the monitor

01:26:10   doesn't have, it isn't actually, like, it doesn't, you can't just boot it by itself.

01:26:15   It does boot when you turn it on, as Margot alluded to earlier, when you turn on the monitor

01:26:18   it boots iOS essentially, but it doesn't show an Apple logo when it's booting like your

01:26:23   iPad or your iPhone would, because that would be confusing because the Mac also shows an

01:26:27   Apple instead it just shows a three dots thing.

01:26:30   But yeah, there is, because the Mac runs the firmware updates for the monitor, it has to

01:26:33   have some way to send the firmware to the A13 and its 64 gigs of storage inside the

01:26:38   monitor.

01:26:39   And so what it appears to do if you look at it is it's basically a USB ethernet adapter

01:26:44   inside there and so it presents it an ethernet type interface using its existing USB hub

01:26:48   thing and that seems to be the way the Mac and the thing communicate with each other.

01:26:52   You know, I feel like again this is an advantage of having a full-fledged iOS thing running

01:26:58   in there.

01:26:59   I think we've touched on this in past episodes, the, what was it?

01:27:02   the lightning to HDMI adapter or something like that.

01:27:06   It was like an adapter, you'd plug it into your iPhone

01:27:08   and you'd be able to output to a TV through HDMI.

01:27:11   That had a full operating system that would boot,

01:27:14   like it was a faceless plastic dongle,

01:27:16   but you'd plug it in and it would boot an operating system

01:27:19   as quick as it could, start it up and do an H.264 encoder

01:27:22   or whatever.

01:27:24   If we never told anyone that, they would just think

01:27:26   this is an adapter and it either works or it doesn't.

01:27:28   But it turns out the things that we ask the adapter to do

01:27:31   are often complicated enough that you need a real Turing complete machine in there that

01:27:34   runs software and it turns out Apple has a bunch of those and they have an operating

01:27:39   system that runs on them and it's all well tested and they probably already have software

01:27:43   to do this stuff and so you know we need some hardware and we need to have an H.264 encoder

01:27:48   and we need an operating system that can run it and we need software that knows how to

01:27:51   do that.

01:27:52   It's like they've got that.

01:27:53   So they just take a shrunken version of it and shove it in a dongle.

01:27:56   So the fact that it is inside a monitor is probably less ridiculous than it is in a dongle

01:27:59   And by the way, don't cut open your lightning connectors,

01:28:01   because there's little chips in there too.

01:28:04   - It looks like I'm looking at this panic teardown

01:28:07   of the lightning digital AV adapter.

01:28:10   It also had two gigs of RAM, apparently.

01:28:12   I had forgotten about that.

01:28:13   - I guess we haven't talked about how much RAM

01:28:16   is on the A13, but I think the teardowns will show us.

01:28:20   - Yeah, and that brings us to our next section

01:28:23   of the notes, which is, as we previously mentioned,

01:28:25   it has 64 gigs of onboard storage, which is,

01:28:29   I know we talked about this a moment ago,

01:28:30   but golly, that is just bananas.

01:28:32   - Yeah, and why 64 instead of 32 or 16?

01:28:34   Probably just because they're used to manufacturing

01:28:37   A13s with 64 gigs of flash, maybe it was economical,

01:28:40   who knows, maybe it's there for extra storage for games.

01:28:42   Again, we'll debate it just like the Apple TV.

01:28:45   What is it there for?

01:28:46   For caching, I don't know.

01:28:48   So you can do snapshots of the last 18 versions

01:28:50   of the operating system that have been put onto it?

01:28:52   - Yeah, it's literally just like,

01:28:53   here's what they had the most of and the parts been.

01:28:55   - Yeah, I was gonna say, I think this was just about

01:28:57   making it easy to make many, many, many of these same chip.

01:29:01   And presumably, I don't know anything about scaling

01:29:04   at this level, but presumably by just making a gazillion

01:29:07   of the exact same thing, it's actually cheaper

01:29:10   than making like an A13 with two gigs of RAM

01:29:13   or whatever they would need alternatively.

01:29:14   - Well, they wouldn't want it to not be able

01:29:16   to update its software 'cause there wasn't

01:29:18   much of a free space.

01:29:19   - Right, exactly.

01:29:20   Yeah, and apparently according to MacRumors,

01:29:22   only two gigs of the 64 gigs is being used,

01:29:25   as of right now.

01:29:26   - Oh yeah, did I have a thing in here?

01:29:28   Like someone saw, so what is this thing running

01:29:31   all the time, what processors?

01:29:33   - It's in the show notes under Gee Rambo

01:29:36   and it says here's what the studio display OS runs

01:29:39   most of the time.

01:29:39   Interesting processes include Tcon Control D,

01:29:43   which possibly drives the panel itself,

01:29:44   CoreSpeechD_Darwin for Hey Dingus,

01:29:48   and Apple Darwin Camera D for the camera system.

01:29:51   - Yeah, so that's how, you know,

01:29:52   how would you make the monitor run?

01:29:54   We might have to make a few new demons,

01:29:55   or maybe some of these already exist in iOS

01:29:57   'cause it's not like we know the names

01:29:58   of the various processes that are in iOS

01:29:59   'cause it's not like we're running PS on our phones

01:30:01   and iPads all the time.

01:30:02   But that's what it's doing all the time.

01:30:05   And it's probably not breaking a sweat,

01:30:07   but hopefully, well, in the next second,

01:30:09   maybe we'll make it break more of a sweat

01:30:11   because the one Apple product scandal,

01:30:15   Brew-ha-ha, that is usually,

01:30:16   we hadn't had one in a while,

01:30:17   but now we've got one again,

01:30:18   so it feels like things are back to normal,

01:30:20   is that most of the reviews of this display said,

01:30:24   "Oh my goodness, the camera is terrible."

01:30:27   So you can see lots of people posting pictures of it.

01:30:29   Joanna Stern, The Wall Street Journal,

01:30:30   had a good video review,

01:30:31   and you can look at the different webcams

01:30:33   of comparing this to other webcams

01:30:36   that are built into other monitors

01:30:37   to the ones that are built into the MacBooks.

01:30:39   The Verge has a big article on it,

01:30:42   and Apple basically sent the same statement

01:30:45   to all these that said,

01:30:46   I don't think I have a direct quote from here,

01:30:48   but like, "We've found situations

01:30:49   "where the camera's not working as we expect.

01:30:51   "We'll be sending a software update."

01:30:53   But the point is that all the reviews came out

01:30:54   before the software update.

01:30:55   It's still not out as we're recording this, right?

01:30:57   It's not the update that we just described.

01:30:58   That's just an update to bring older manufactured monitors

01:31:01   up to the new one, but everyone who did a review

01:31:02   had the latest and greatest quote unquote firmware.

01:31:06   And what they're complaining about

01:31:07   is that it doesn't look as good,

01:31:09   doesn't even look as good as Apple's other hardware

01:31:11   with an identical camera.

01:31:12   I'm pretty sure this is the same camera

01:31:14   that's used as a front-facing camera

01:31:15   in one of Apple's iPads.

01:31:17   And so you can do a direct hardware to hardware comparison.

01:31:20   Here's the iPad with ostensibly the exact same camera hardware,

01:31:24   and I'll look at myself in that camera,

01:31:26   and I'll look at myself in Studio Display,

01:31:28   and everyone was saying that they thought they looked worse,

01:31:30   that it was sort of washed out and over noise reduced,

01:31:33   low contrast.

01:31:34   Sometimes people described it as grainy.

01:31:36   I have to admit, after looking at lots of these things,

01:31:38   sometimes I found it hard to tell

01:31:40   which image they were trying to tell me was the bad one,

01:31:44   because they look different from each other,

01:31:45   but neither one of them was clearly worse to me

01:31:48   than the others.

01:31:48   And Jason Snell said when he tested it in his environment,

01:31:52   lighting condition and everything,

01:31:53   that it didn't seem terrible to him

01:31:54   except for in one application that was not doing,

01:31:56   that was like clearly doing something different

01:31:58   than the others.

01:31:59   I think the bottom line with this is for $1,600,

01:32:04   we kind of expect there to be a better hardware camera

01:32:09   in there setting aside the software issues.

01:32:11   It seems like a cheap move to put a very inexpensive camera

01:32:17   'cause remember it's not like this is the same camera

01:32:20   that's like on an iPhone,

01:32:21   it is the front facing camera on an iPad.

01:32:24   iPads already have often lesser cameras than iPhones

01:32:28   and almost always the front facing one

01:32:30   is lesser than the back facing one, right?

01:32:32   For $1,600 I feel like it should at least have

01:32:35   the back camera of a recent iPhone and it doesn't.

01:32:40   And then beyond the hardware,

01:32:42   okay then you have to do all sorts of processing.

01:32:43   Like their decision to use a super wide angle camera,

01:32:46   which is what they did for center stage.

01:32:47   It's like a very wide angle, fisheye type camera.

01:32:50   And the way center stage works is not by moving the camera,

01:32:52   it just crops a different portion

01:32:53   of a very big fisheye camera

01:32:55   and then unworps it and everything, right?

01:32:57   The decision to do that further reduces the resolution

01:33:00   because you're only ever seeing a crop.

01:33:02   And if you saw the whole resolution,

01:33:03   you'd look all weird and fisheye and everything.

01:33:04   So you don't want that.

01:33:05   And so it's really hampering the hardware.

01:33:09   They didn't put great hardware in there to begin with.

01:33:11   It's not terrible, but it's not great.

01:33:12   And then they're making it be even worse

01:33:15   because it's a fisheye type thing.

01:33:16   and it's using center stage.

01:33:18   And so, what that comes up with is a camera experience

01:33:22   that is less than people expected.

01:33:23   People's Mac, they're saying my MacBook Pro

01:33:25   that I just got, which has a camera that fits

01:33:27   within a little tiny skinny lid,

01:33:28   it looks better than this.

01:33:30   The $400 iPhone SE front facing camera,

01:33:32   it looks better than this.

01:33:33   The iPad that ostensibly has the same hardware,

01:33:35   it looks better than this.

01:33:37   And Apple says, oh, there's some kind of software problem

01:33:39   'cause there is a ton of software processing going on.

01:33:41   And by the way, all that software processing is happening

01:33:43   in the monitor on the A13.

01:33:45   your Mac is not doing that.

01:33:47   So this is a way to get center stage,

01:33:49   even if you have an Intel Mac or whatever connected to this,

01:33:52   because all that happening is happening in iOS

01:33:56   running on the A13 inside the monitor.

01:34:00   And that's why you need a monitor update

01:34:01   and not a Mac OS update to solve this problem,

01:34:04   because whatever the problem is

01:34:05   with aggressive noise reduction

01:34:07   or bad lighting compensation

01:34:08   or whatever the heck is wrong with it,

01:34:10   that has to happen inside the monitor

01:34:12   and it'll be another 600 meg update.

01:34:14   So it's disappointing, but I have to say,

01:34:18   I mean, I'm on a 2015 iMac

01:34:20   with this built-in front-facing camera.

01:34:22   That one's not great either.

01:34:23   If this is an upgrade for that, I'll take it, right?

01:34:27   I think it should be better, but the other thing is

01:34:31   I have a fairly expensive 4K Logitech camera

01:34:34   on top of my XDR.

01:34:36   I don't think that camera looks very good either.

01:34:38   I mean, I just don't have good lighting in this room.

01:34:39   Most people don't. - Really?

01:34:40   - Like, it's not, I mean, it looks okay, it's 4K,

01:34:43   But like, you know, you only look,

01:34:47   I don't have a ring light,

01:34:48   I don't have multi-source lighting,

01:34:49   I just, it's not good lighting for video.

01:34:51   So I spent all this time on Zoom calls

01:34:53   and I see myself, I'm like,

01:34:54   this is not flattering lighting conditions,

01:34:56   I'm not in a studio.

01:34:58   It is only, and that's part of the reason

01:34:59   why Apple does all this processing,

01:35:01   'cause they're trying to make people

01:35:03   in their normal houses, which are not, you know,

01:35:05   television studios, trying to make them,

01:35:08   trying to make it look okay,

01:35:09   trying to be able to be able to see their faces

01:35:11   so they're not completely hidden in shadows,

01:35:13   so they don't look terrible, and that's a hard job,

01:35:15   and it seems like they're not doing it very well

01:35:18   with the studio display, but if they put a 4K camera

01:35:22   like this Logitech one in there,

01:35:23   I don't know how much it would change my experience

01:35:25   of Zoom calls, because my main barrier

01:35:27   to looking good on Zoom calls, aside from my actual looks,

01:35:29   is the lighting conditions that I'm in.

01:35:34   I don't have good lighting here.

01:35:35   Anyway, I'm not excusing it, I'm just saying,

01:35:37   for me personally, this is not a big deal.

01:35:38   I'd much rather have a Kreddy built-in camera

01:35:40   that's slightly better than the 5K iMacs

01:35:42   than no camera at all, but people are absolutely right

01:35:44   to say there's no reason that on $1600,

01:35:47   A, we shouldn't have better hardware,

01:35:48   and B, even if we don't have better hardware,

01:35:51   it should at least look as good as the same hardware

01:35:52   in other Apple devices.

01:35:54   - Yeah, but I think the current explanation of like,

01:35:58   okay, something is wrong in software,

01:35:59   so they will issue an update,

01:36:02   I think that is very plausible.

01:36:05   When you look at the same comparisons,

01:36:09   that seems very plausible,

01:36:11   But I think also, as you mentioned earlier,

01:36:13   I think the choice to do center stage on this

01:36:17   was itself a bad move.

01:36:20   Because again, the way that works is it has

01:36:23   the super wide camera and it crops in.

01:36:25   Now, that works okay on an iPad, I'm sure.

01:36:29   Although, you know, reviewers have often said,

01:36:31   like, yeah, the way it kind of like has to like

01:36:33   drift around and follow you doesn't always work very well.

01:36:35   So that's a problem for sure.

01:36:37   But when you think about on a display,

01:36:39   like on a 27 inch display on your desk,

01:36:42   the distance the camera is from your face

01:36:45   is probably significantly further

01:36:47   than if you were using an iPad with FaceTime

01:36:49   like on a table or something, or in your hands.

01:36:52   It's a much longer distance to go,

01:36:55   usually the way most people set up displays in desks,

01:36:57   to go from the top of the monitor to their head

01:37:00   compared to an iPad in their hands.

01:37:02   You figure the amount of cropping it would have to do

01:37:05   on that same sensor is probably more.

01:37:09   And so most of the quality problems of this camera

01:37:13   are not going to be solvable in software.

01:37:15   What I suspect is that it's just cropping more

01:37:17   and therefore you have way less sensor area to work with.

01:37:22   So it's gonna be way noisier

01:37:25   and it's gonna have to over process in software

01:37:27   which is what we're seeing.

01:37:28   That like the images people are posting,

01:37:31   the sample images and everything, what they're posting,

01:37:33   it's exactly what you'd expect from something

01:37:34   that is just working with very little resolution

01:37:38   and a very bad signal to noise ratio,

01:37:40   and it's having to really, you know,

01:37:42   de-noise like crazy, blur things,

01:37:45   you know, really you get that smeary,

01:37:47   you know, watercolor kind of effect.

01:37:48   That's the effect of just over-processing

01:37:51   because the signal is just too bad physically.

01:37:53   Like you can't, you're not getting enough light,

01:37:55   you're not getting enough pixels,

01:37:56   that's what you end up with.

01:37:58   And I think this is where like the part spinning aspect

01:38:01   and the, or you know, the part reuse aspect,

01:38:04   and also just the marketing consistency I think here,

01:38:07   where I think they really wanted to put center stage

01:38:10   in this and they wanted so badly to say that look,

01:38:13   we now have center stage on the Mac

01:38:14   and here's how great it is.

01:38:16   I think they wanted to do that so badly

01:38:18   that they didn't think to consider, well, wait a minute,

01:38:20   is this even, first of all, is center stage necessary

01:38:23   on any stationary desktop computer?

01:38:26   And then second of all, is the physical difference

01:38:29   of where the camera is compared to an iPad,

01:38:32   is that even gonna work in that context?

01:38:35   And of course, and you can say like,

01:38:36   why don't they put a bigger camera, a bigger sensor?

01:38:39   I understand why they didn't.

01:38:40   It's clear when you look at the form factor of this monitor,

01:38:45   they probably can't fit much in that bezel

01:38:48   without making the bezel bigger,

01:38:49   and that looks ugly and people would say it looks old.

01:38:52   So it makes sense why they have

01:38:54   a little skinny camera in there.

01:38:55   And certainly my XDR with Logitech magnetic camera

01:38:59   on top of it, which frankly, John, you're nuts,

01:39:02   it looks awesome.

01:39:03   Like the Logitech camera-- - That's what I'm saying.

01:39:05   it's not the camera that's bad,

01:39:06   it's the lighting conditions that dominate.

01:39:08   It doesn't matter how good a camera you have,

01:39:10   it's not like a full frame sensor behind there.

01:39:12   So if I'm in a dim room constantly in shadow,

01:39:15   it's not gonna be able to rescue that.

01:39:16   Especially since it doesn't have, as far as I'm aware,

01:39:18   any kind of processing to try to help.

01:39:20   So what I'm seeing out of the camera

01:39:21   is more or less what the sensor is seeing, you know?

01:39:24   - Yeah, that's fair, but like,

01:39:27   I used to open a photo booth to show mine.

01:39:29   This thing looks incredible.

01:39:30   It's just, this is the best webcam

01:39:33   I've ever seen anywhere ever.

01:39:34   But it's also huge.

01:39:36   And something, that size lens and presumably

01:39:39   whatever sensors behind it, that would never fit

01:39:42   in the bezel of the studio display, not even close.

01:39:44   And so I understand why they wanted

01:39:47   to put something small in there.

01:39:48   And so putting an iPad camera in there makes some sense,

01:39:52   but using the ultra wide angle iPad cameras

01:39:55   that are made for center stage,

01:39:57   that I think was the wrong move.

01:39:58   And I don't think any software update's

01:40:00   gonna make that really good.

01:40:02   - Well, so that's something I didn't see

01:40:03   in a lot of the reports.

01:40:04   of people are saying, I mean Gruber even said like, "Oh here I'm using the iPad

01:40:06   with sensibly the same camera and it's in the same lighting conditions, in the

01:40:09   same room, at the same time, here's the iPad and here's the studio display." But one

01:40:13   thing he didn't mention is, "Are these two things the same distance from me?" Which

01:40:17   gets to your point. Was he holding the iPad closer just because it's natural to

01:40:19   hold the iPad closer? Like was he holding the iPad between, like in front of him in

01:40:23   his hands, but well in front of where the studio display is, you know what I mean? Or

01:40:27   did he push the iPad back to be in the same plane as a studio display to try to

01:40:31   to get an apples to apples comparison.

01:40:33   I'm not sure about that.

01:40:34   - I can't even reach the top of my monitor

01:40:36   from where I'm sitting.

01:40:37   Like if I don't lean forward,

01:40:38   if I'm just sitting straight up,

01:40:39   I cannot reach the webcam.

01:40:41   - Well, you're very small and it's a big monitor.

01:40:43   (laughing)

01:40:45   So the next thing about center stage though,

01:40:47   I think the use of center,

01:40:49   like the use of center stage for a desktop Mac,

01:40:53   a lot of people were saying exactly what you said.

01:40:54   It's like, well, aren't you sitting right in front of a thing?

01:40:56   Why do you need center stage to track people's faces around

01:40:59   or whatever?

01:40:59   I think the use of center stage is aspirational

01:41:02   and forward-looking for,

01:41:03   because I think in many real scenarios,

01:41:07   when you're using the camera on a desktop display,

01:41:10   sometimes you have more than one person

01:41:12   sitting in front of it.

01:41:13   There's probably one desk chair

01:41:15   in front of your desktop computer,

01:41:16   but when other people come in to say hi to the relatives,

01:41:19   or you just wanna sit and have a call,

01:41:20   or you're on Zoom meetings with multiple people,

01:41:22   parent-teacher conferences during COVID times,

01:41:25   very often my wife and I have both been sitting

01:41:27   in front of her iMac on Zoom calls, right?

01:41:30   And it's sometimes difficult to get us both

01:41:32   into the frame and everything.

01:41:34   And so that's where center stage can help.

01:41:36   And the second thing is,

01:41:37   if you're not within the range

01:41:39   of the non center stage camera,

01:41:41   it actually is fairly difficult,

01:41:43   especially with Apple stupid stands,

01:41:45   to reposition the camera that is built

01:41:47   into your giant desktop display to point at a person,

01:41:49   oh, here's somebody just came.

01:41:51   Oh, I can't see them.

01:41:52   They have to crouch down 'cause it's not like

01:41:54   you can just grab the neck of your iMac G4

01:41:56   or grab the monitor and just point it towards them.

01:41:59   Apple's monitors do not move that way on their stands.

01:42:01   They are not fully articulated.

01:42:03   And so it actually is kind of tricky to do that.

01:42:05   So it would be great if we had good cameras

01:42:09   with high enough resolution to be able to tolerate that crop

01:42:12   because I think center stage is the right choice

01:42:14   for a big desktop display,

01:42:16   but with a camera with low resolution,

01:42:19   whether you have to crop in even more on it,

01:42:21   and it's not even a good camera,

01:42:23   that is maybe not the best choice.

01:42:25   Now, as I saw some people post with all these Apple blowups

01:42:29   about whatever the scandal of the day,

01:42:31   about some hardware flaw or whatever is,

01:42:32   or some product flaw, eventually someone comes in

01:42:35   and is just sick of seeing it all, and they're like,

01:42:38   today I'm learning that people care

01:42:39   what they look like on their webcam.

01:42:42   Basically saying, who cares what you look like?

01:42:44   Can they see your face?

01:42:45   Can they see who you are?

01:42:46   Can they see your expression?

01:42:47   It's not a beauty contest or whatever,

01:42:50   but that, obviously, if you're listening to a tech podcast,

01:42:53   you probably care about the progress of technology.

01:42:56   The progress of technology is cameras and sensors

01:42:58   and stuff should get better over time.

01:43:00   And to Marco's part spin comment,

01:43:03   Apple has a part spin filled

01:43:04   with much better cameras than this.

01:43:06   And yes, some of them are a little bit bigger

01:43:07   and maybe they wouldn't have fit into the thing.

01:43:10   I do not, repeat Apple, don't listen to this,

01:43:12   close your ears, Apple,

01:43:14   I do not want them to put a notch on the next version of this

01:43:17   so they can fit a bigger camera sensor.

01:43:19   If Apple, you would like to reach into your part spin

01:43:21   and use like the back camera from the iPhone 13

01:43:24   or two of the back cameras from the iPhone 13

01:43:26   on the next version of this, make a camera bump.

01:43:29   A vertical camera bump.

01:43:30   I give you permission because it'll be smaller

01:43:32   than this Logitech thing that's on top

01:43:33   of my display right now.

01:43:35   Do not, I repeat, do not put a notch on this monitor.

01:43:40   You'll never hear the end of it, at least for me.

01:43:42   But it is possible to, you know,

01:43:44   not make the bezels bigger on it,

01:43:46   but just have a bump for the camera or whatever.

01:43:48   And eventually technology will catch up

01:43:49   to be able to fit a much better quality camera with center stage in the top of their monitors

01:43:54   ten years from now.

01:43:55   I'm hoping, or maybe twenty knowing Apple, I'm hoping this problem will be solved.

01:43:59   But for now, they give you a not so great camera on your $1600 monitor.

01:44:03   The good thing is, if you hate that camera and never want to use it, you can buy this

01:44:07   Logitech 4K camera for a great expense and plug it into your Mac, because it's a Mac,

01:44:11   not an iPad, and you can replace the front facing camera with one of your choosing.

01:44:15   It also comes with the microphones, although most people didn't comment about that, they

01:44:18   that the tri-microphone system on these displays is actually pretty good.

01:44:21   So maybe you would just use camera from Logitech and the microphone from the monitor or from

01:44:25   your AirPods.

01:44:26   Again, these are all great things you can do through the magic of having a Mac and not

01:44:29   an iPad.

01:44:30   Sorry iPad people.

01:44:31   All right, I'm getting sleepy, so let's speed run through the latest Mac Pro rumors.

01:44:38   I figure if I set an alarm for, set a timer for like an hour and a half, then you should

01:44:42   be done at that point.

01:44:43   Is that fair?

01:44:44   Yeah, you can make it less than that, I think.

01:44:47   Okay, go ahead, the clock is ticking.

01:44:49   - Last week I talked about my pessimistic,

01:44:51   like nightmare scenario for the Mac Pro.

01:44:54   Like, oh, all these things they said,

01:44:56   they can make a machine that's like this,

01:44:57   and that machine is dumb and doesn't make any sense,

01:44:59   and I really hope they don't do that, right?

01:45:01   And I described a bunch of different rumors

01:45:02   from different videos saying,

01:45:04   oh, they could take two M1 ultras

01:45:05   and stack them on top of each other,

01:45:06   but then there was this rumor tweet about them

01:45:08   that being alongside, and it didn't make any sense,

01:45:10   and we didn't, you know, whatever.

01:45:12   Things change fast in the Mac Pro rumor world,

01:45:13   so this week I just wanted to touch on

01:45:15   what the new optimistic rumor for the Mac Pro,

01:45:20   the previous, this is again from Max Tech,

01:45:22   the previous Max Tech video was like,

01:45:23   they're gonna take two M1 Ultras

01:45:25   and put them on top of each other.

01:45:26   Like, nope, nevermind, that's not gonna happen,

01:45:28   I misread the patent.

01:45:29   Here's the new rumor.

01:45:30   And this new, I'm saying it here, it's optimistic.

01:45:33   So a lot of this stuff is gonna sound fantastical,

01:45:36   it's gonna sound like things that I've said

01:45:37   that I would really like but seem unlikely,

01:45:38   but take it or leave it, here it is,

01:45:40   we'll put links in the show notes to the video,

01:45:42   you can take a look at it.

01:45:43   And the rumor is, don't worry, it's an M2, not an M1.

01:45:47   Yes, the M2 will be ready.

01:45:49   And there's gonna be four M2 max size types of things.

01:45:52   And they're gonna be next to each other.

01:45:53   And they're gonna be connected with that daisy interconnect

01:45:55   so that they're all connected with each other.

01:45:57   And how can they all be connected?

01:45:58   I thought there was only connections on one edge.

01:46:00   Ah, that's the M1 you're thinking of.

01:46:02   This is the M2.

01:46:03   Yes, I said the M2.

01:46:04   And there's four of them.

01:46:05   And they can be connected together.

01:46:06   And they have RAM all around them.

01:46:08   How are they gonna deal with the RAM situation?

01:46:10   There's not gonna be enough room

01:46:11   for 1.5 terabytes of RAM.

01:46:13   The rumor there is, oh, there'll be a huge amount of RAM

01:46:15   shoved around these things.

01:46:16   In fact, there might even be HBM3,

01:46:18   which would cost $24,000 for a terabyte of it, maybe not.

01:46:21   But either way, there'll be a bunch of really fast RAM,

01:46:24   even if it's just LPDDR5,

01:46:26   but also there's an external RAM controller

01:46:28   so you can have RAM in slots.

01:46:29   And that RAM in slots will be slower and more distant,

01:46:32   but it'll act as a kind of a RAM hierarchy.

01:46:34   128, 256 gigs of really, really fast RAM

01:46:37   next to these four M2 max things

01:46:39   that are all tied together,

01:46:40   and then an even bigger pool of like a terabyte of RAM

01:46:42   in DIMS that is slower, probably even slower

01:46:45   than it is in the current Mac Pro Xeon,

01:46:47   but it will be there.

01:46:48   How are they gonna deal with GPUs?

01:46:50   The rumor here is, oh, there's actually a GP,

01:46:53   what looks like might be a standalone GPU from Apple,

01:46:56   code named Lifuco, and the code name for the M1 chip

01:46:59   was apparently Tonga, and Lifuco is a smaller island

01:47:02   in the kingdom of Tonga, and the idea is like,

01:47:05   oh, it's a bunch of GPU cores,

01:47:07   but it doesn't live inside the M1,

01:47:08   that's outside it, as in an Apple branded separate GPU.

01:47:12   So the Mac Pro would have four M2 Maxes,

01:47:15   a bunch of RAM around it, maybe some external RAM,

01:47:18   slots that can take GPUs and those GPUs

01:47:21   to add onto the massive amount of GPUs

01:47:22   that are in the system on chips.

01:47:23   Those GPUs would be Apple GPUs made from Apple GPU cores

01:47:28   that would go in slots to augment the GPUs

01:47:30   that are already built into the thing.

01:47:32   That is the optimistic Mac Pro rumor,

01:47:34   which is like, just take everything

01:47:36   that has ever been mentioned that sounds cool

01:47:38   and say yeah they're gonna do all of that.

01:47:40   Oh and by the way it'll come out in September or something.

01:47:43   So-- - Yeah, I don't think--

01:47:45   - That's a lot of stuff.

01:47:47   - It'd be nice but that seems optimistic.

01:47:50   - It has the benefit of saying that

01:47:53   the timeline doesn't make sense

01:47:55   but the technology makes sense

01:47:56   because we can't figure out

01:47:57   how they're gonna put four M1 based chips in there.

01:47:59   Apple said it's done with the M1 based things.

01:48:01   The M2 we know is coming.

01:48:03   If you take four M2 maxes

01:48:05   And they are able to connect in a four by four grid

01:48:08   with these new daisy connectors and everything,

01:48:10   like the rumors say.

01:48:11   And you could have an external pool of RAM,

01:48:12   and Apple could make its own external GPU.

01:48:14   These are all plausible things.

01:48:16   The only thing that doesn't make any sense is the timeline.

01:48:18   But hey, those are the two rumors.

01:48:19   You heard the pessimistic one last week,

01:48:21   you heard the optimistic one this week.

01:48:23   Now we just gotta watch the calendar and see what we get.

01:48:26   - That's it?

01:48:28   - That's it.

01:48:29   - Three and a half minutes, Jon, I'm impressed.

01:48:31   You made it.

01:48:32   - Yeah, talk fast.

01:48:33   - That's the secret.

01:48:34   Thanks to our sponsors this week, Collide, JumpCloud, and Quesada by Lutron.

01:48:40   And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join at atp.fm/join.

01:48:43   We will talk to you next week.

01:48:46   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental, oh it

01:48:57   was accidental.

01:48:58   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:49:04   'Cause it was accidental, it was accidental

01:49:09   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:49:14   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:49:19   Follow them @CASEYLISS

01:49:24   So that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:49:28   Auntie Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C

01:49:33   USA, Syracuse

01:49:36   It's accidental

01:49:39   They didn't mean to

01:49:41   Accidental

01:49:44   ♪ Tech podcast so long ♪

01:49:47   - I spent today kind of cleaning up,

01:49:51   I had finally shipped the next version of Overcast

01:49:55   to the App Store, it's being released on Friday,

01:49:57   so finally shipped it, and so I've been cleaning up,

01:50:00   like just catching up on paperwork, email,

01:50:04   and my digital cleanup things,

01:50:06   cleaning all the files off my desktop

01:50:07   and archiving all the old ATP episodes that I had

01:50:10   still sitting on my desktop instead of

01:50:12   in the archive drive where they belong.

01:50:13   So going through all this stuff,

01:50:14   and I decided I'm finally going to set up Synology backup,

01:50:18   and I'm not gonna do it in any kind of weird,

01:50:20   complicated, convoluted way where I can use Backblaze.

01:50:24   I'm just gonna pay for B2 storage per gig.

01:50:27   - Oh.

01:50:28   - Well, because I saw that what I actually need

01:50:32   and want to back up on it--

01:50:33   - Do you mean B2 or Synology's things?

01:50:35   Because B2 is Backblaze's thing.

01:50:37   - Yes, but I mean rather than using Backblaze's

01:50:39   regular backup client where it's unlimited, you know?

01:50:41   - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:50:42   - So you're gonna do what I do,

01:50:44   which is I pay for B2 storage

01:50:45   and my Synology backs up to it.

01:50:47   - Yeah, because what I actually need from B2

01:50:50   is gonna end up being something like 40 bucks a month.

01:50:52   It's like eight terabytes roughly,

01:50:54   which is about 40 bucks a month.

01:50:56   And you know what, I'll just pay that.

01:50:58   I'd rather pay that than have to deal with something

01:51:00   that is much more complicated than that.

01:51:03   And I've been doing those complicated solutions

01:51:05   for years now and I'm done with them.

01:51:07   I do not wanna do them anymore.

01:51:09   So I'm just gonna pay the 40 bucks a month

01:51:11   or whatever it ends up being,

01:51:12   to back up my massive Synology collection to B2.

01:51:15   - And the reason I mention Synology is I think,

01:51:17   don't they have like C2 or something that's there?

01:51:19   So you should compare prices,

01:51:20   'cause both of them are just as straightforward.

01:51:21   You just, you pay per byte that you store

01:51:24   and just compare the rates.

01:51:26   I think Synology might have its own thing.

01:51:28   - Maybe, and there's other things,

01:51:29   there's like Glacier and stuff, and I don't like Glacier.

01:51:32   I've used it before.

01:51:33   I really don't like it.

01:51:34   - Wait, so tell me why not.

01:51:35   I'm not arguing, but tell me why not.

01:51:37   - 'Cause the restore times are ridiculous,

01:51:39   And the way Glacier used to be implemented terrifies me,

01:51:42   so I don't like to think about it.

01:51:43   - So I also, because I keep bouncing

01:51:46   between these two locations,

01:51:48   I was looking into options for

01:51:50   synchronizing the two synologies,

01:51:53   the really ancient one in location one,

01:51:55   and the tiny little new one in location two.

01:51:58   And so I think, I set up the app on the Synology

01:52:03   is called Cloud Sync.

01:52:06   and that is backing it up to B2, but that says that it

01:52:10   offers a two-way sync option.

01:52:12   So could I set up Cloud Sync on both of them

01:52:15   and have them synchronized that way and back up

01:52:18   at the same time?

01:52:18   So I have my two synologies syncing one of their volumes

01:52:23   bidirectionally to each other, but they're

01:52:25   sitting next to each other connected

01:52:26   to the same ethernet switch.

01:52:27   Now, that probably means this would also

01:52:28   work over the internet, because it's probably just TCP/IP,

01:52:31   and assuming I set up all the networking, that would work.

01:52:35   But the problem is, the problem with all Synology things

01:52:37   that Kasey can relate to,

01:52:39   I don't remember what the name of the app is

01:52:40   that I used to show syncing,

01:52:42   'cause they're all called some variation

01:52:44   on sync cloud drive.

01:52:46   - Well, and Synology drive does this.

01:52:49   But I looked into setting that up

01:52:51   and it was so much more complicated

01:52:53   and I couldn't get it to--

01:52:54   - I can tell you the sync thing that I'm using,

01:52:57   every time I make a modification

01:52:59   to the drive that I know is syncing,

01:53:01   I get an email that says,

01:53:03   "Oh, Synology, or a notification on this,

01:53:05   "and I'll do this."

01:53:05   Synology drive sync had a problem,

01:53:07   'cause it doesn't like it

01:53:08   when you change files out from under.

01:53:10   It's like, "What kind of syncing system is this?"

01:53:11   I'm like, "I know, the file was probably partial

01:53:14   "when you went to sync it,

01:53:15   "or it got yanked out from under you

01:53:17   "while you were in the middle of syncing,

01:53:18   "but don't tell me that, just deal with it and resync."

01:53:20   And it does, it eventually gets the disks to be right,

01:53:23   but it gets upset every time it happens.

01:53:25   And again, I wish I could tell you

01:53:26   which feature of the umpteen features in Synology

01:53:29   that does this that I'm using,

01:53:30   but I set it up in 2013 and I don't remember.

01:53:33   - Yeah, 'cause I mean, for whatever it's worth also,

01:53:36   I would almost never be changing the contents of it

01:53:40   from a different location.

01:53:42   The other location would most likely be read-only.

01:53:46   - Yeah, so the problem, as much as I love Synology,

01:53:50   and I love my devices,

01:53:52   I have a small collection of them at this point,

01:53:55   but as much as I love the Synology--

01:53:56   - Everyone mail Casey your old Synologies as well.

01:53:58   - Oh, that's not a joke, I am in.

01:54:00   your old 5Ks and all your own Synologies, mail them to Casey. Bring them in, bring

01:54:03   them on baby. Synology's Achilles heel is that they are the worst at naming

01:54:11   things and they love, they love to regurgitate old names as new things and

01:54:18   just have like, Synology Drive has meant 15 different things across five

01:54:24   different years, like it's preposterous. To more directly answer your question, so

01:54:29   So I know that there are ways to have basically live syncing

01:54:34   between Synologies.

01:54:35   That is not what I am doing.

01:54:37   And it sounds like Jon would be a better tutor for you

01:54:39   if that's what you're looking to do.

01:54:40   And I think it is.

01:54:41   - If I could remember what the hell app was.

01:54:42   - If you can remember what the hell it is.

01:54:44   For what I'm doing is I'm just making a cold storage backup

01:54:48   from one Synology to the other.

01:54:50   And that's using hyper backup on both devices.

01:54:53   There's a hyper backup server and a hyper backup client.

01:54:57   But on the server side, which is the cold storage side,

01:55:02   it is not easy to get at the files.

01:55:05   They're not just sitting on the file system

01:55:07   like what I think you would prefer.

01:55:09   So my solution is not helpful for you.

01:55:11   And to go back a half step on a quick tangent,

01:55:14   there is Synology C2, and it is $60 a year for one terabyte.

01:55:19   How big is your backup set, did you say, two terabytes?

01:55:21   - About eight.

01:55:22   - Eight terabytes, okay, so yeah,

01:55:23   you're screwed just like me.

01:55:24   - Yeah, I forgot.

01:55:25   That's fifty five dollars a month or five hundred and fifty dollars a year for me sitting at about 12 terabytes right now

01:55:33   It's eight hundred dollars a year, which is a lot of money like for that money

01:55:38   I would just buy another Synology send it to you into this duplication

01:55:43   You know what? I mean? Like it's just not it's not worth it to me. What's also by the way?

01:55:47   What's also really nice about using b2 is that?

01:55:52   I can use, on the desktop, I have the wonderful app

01:55:56   Transmit by Panic.

01:55:58   That has B2 as one of its storage engines.

01:56:00   And when you just back up to B2 with the Cloud Sync thing,

01:56:04   it's not doing anything strange with the file structure

01:56:06   or anything like that.

01:56:07   You can just go and open up the bucket and browse the files.

01:56:09   They're right there.

01:56:10   And so anywhere I am, if I happen to be away from home

01:56:13   and not able to reach my Synology,

01:56:15   and I need a file off of it, I can just open up Transmit

01:56:18   and log into my B2 bucket,

01:56:20   and the files are just sitting there.

01:56:21   So that's really nice, and anything that's super complicated

01:56:25   or managed in a higher level way

01:56:27   might not necessarily do that.

01:56:29   Like when Arc does stuff, for instance,

01:56:30   the wonderful backup app Arc for Mac,

01:56:32   Arc has its own whole file structure,

01:56:34   and it's kind of an opaque structure

01:56:37   if you're just trying to use something like Transmit,

01:56:39   like you'll never find what you need.

01:56:41   Whereas this, the files are just sitting there in folders.

01:56:44   - While we've been talking here,

01:56:45   I've been going through the Synology UI

01:56:46   trying to find the place where I sync

01:56:48   my two Synologies to each other.

01:56:49   I did find the B2 one that's in Cloud Sync.

01:56:52   It's not in Storage Manager,

01:56:54   it's not in Control Panel that I can find.

01:56:55   I'm still looking for it.

01:56:57   Maybe it's in File Station?

01:56:58   Let's see.

01:56:59   - No, it wouldn't be in File Station.

01:57:01   Do you have Hyper Backup installed?

01:57:02   That would be, I would guess that's where it would be,

01:57:05   but that might be exclusively Synology to Synology backup,

01:57:08   so I'm not sure.

01:57:10   But anyway, so I'm looking at B2 for 12 terabytes,

01:57:13   which again is roughly my backup size,

01:57:15   and no downloaded data for month to month,

01:57:18   which is probably what it would be.

01:57:19   It's $720 a year, which is a lot of money.

01:57:22   I mean, that's 60 bucks a month.

01:57:24   I mean, after a couple of years,

01:57:26   I might as well just have a different Synology.

01:57:29   - This is one of those things where like,

01:57:29   I'm just gonna throw money at it

01:57:30   because I don't want to actually deal with

01:57:33   like multiple complex convoluted options anymore.

01:57:37   'Cause again, like that's what I've been doing.

01:57:38   I had my crazy iSCSI setup.

01:57:41   Like I just, and then there's things

01:57:43   that you can try to like hack the Synology to run,

01:57:46   you know, the backblaze client.

01:57:47   It's like, I don't wanna do any of that.

01:57:49   I don't want to deal with any of that.

01:57:50   I don't want to maintain it.

01:57:51   I don't want to deal with it when it breaks.

01:57:52   I just want this to work.

01:57:54   And I think the B2 option is going to do that for me.

01:57:57   And for 40 bucks a month for eight terabytes, fine.

01:57:59   Just fine, I'll do it.

01:58:01   - I found it backwards.

01:58:02   I have a new idea.

01:58:03   I'm like, I should just look for one of those emails

01:58:05   that I described with the sync and the email says,

01:58:07   shared folder sync has failed.

01:58:09   Please check the DSM log, blah, blah, blah.

01:58:11   I have a million of those messages.

01:58:12   So it's shared folder sync.

01:58:13   So I'm on the, I'm hot on the trail here.

01:58:15   Where is the shared folder stuff hiding in the UI?

01:58:17   You should know this.

01:58:18   - Shared folder control panel?

01:58:20   - There is a control panel.

01:58:21   - There you go, control panel, file sharing, shared folder.

01:58:26   And then there is...

01:58:30   - There is a high availability package for Synology

01:58:33   that you might end up using if you wanted to do

01:58:36   like a primary secondary style setup, Marco,

01:58:41   would if you wanted to make like the one on the mainland,

01:58:46   your secondary and the one near you,

01:58:48   your primary or something along those lines.

01:58:50   I know there's ways to do this.

01:58:52   The problem is, again, as much as I love Synology,

01:58:55   they change the mechanisms for doing this

01:58:58   and the apps you use on the Synology for doing this

01:59:00   as often as you change computers.

01:59:02   And so it's impossible to keep up with

01:59:04   what is the current best advice for these sorts of things.

01:59:09   But honest to goodness,

01:59:11   as much as I'm slamming Linus Tech Tips,

01:59:14   the video they did on this,

01:59:15   which I don't think is exactly what you want,

01:59:18   but it's worth, you know, it's like a quick,

01:59:19   it's a relatively quick video.

01:59:22   You really should dig that up

01:59:24   and see if they answer your question,

01:59:25   'cause I think that might help.

01:59:27   - Yeah, I probably should.

01:59:29   - Oh no, I mean, the easiest answer, absolutely,

01:59:31   without a shadow of a doubt, is just put it all on B2,

01:59:33   but that's solving backup,

01:59:36   but that's not solving local availability.

01:59:38   If you don't care about local availability, then yes,

01:59:40   that's the easiest answer by far, just do that.

01:59:44   The problem is I don't even,

01:59:45   I think, what is it, Cloud Sync to put it in V2?

01:59:47   I don't even know where you put it, how you get it there.

01:59:49   - Yeah, Cloud Sync.

01:59:50   - This is why I keep making backups of my Synology config

01:59:53   is I don't know any of this stuff.

01:59:54   I know it's called shared folder sync.

01:59:56   I'm in the shared folder control panel.

01:59:57   I can't find anything that has to do with sync.

01:59:58   If I ever had to set this up again,

02:00:00   God, it would take me so long to,

02:00:01   I would suggest that hyper backup

02:00:03   definitely seems like a better solution

02:00:05   to what you're doing, especially since I can't find

02:00:07   where I configured share folder sync.

02:00:08   But I know it's happening 'cause I get the emails

02:00:10   when it complains whenever something changes.

02:00:12   And I know it's working 'cause it does eventually sync them

02:00:15   because then I would look at the two different synologies

02:00:16   and I'd say, "Yep, they have the same contents

02:00:18   in that shared," quote unquote, "shared folder,"

02:00:20   which is really the top level and entire volume.

02:00:23   - So on Hyper Backup, when I choose,

02:00:26   or when I go to make a new backup destination,

02:00:28   I get Rsync, I've got Web Dev, OpenStack Swift,

02:00:32   whatever that is, and then Cloud Service,

02:00:34   Dropbox, High Drive, Azure S3, Hubic,

02:00:38   High Cloud S3, Rackspace, JD Cloud, and Google Drive.

02:00:42   I do not see B2 here, but I know there is a way

02:00:45   to get on to B2.

02:00:46   They may have their own package for all I know,

02:00:48   I'm not even sure.

02:00:49   But there's gotta be a way to do it, I'm almost sure of it.

02:00:52   (beeping)