ATP

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.

01:07:34 ◼   ► We are brought to you this week by JumpCloud. JumpCloud is launching a new IT community for IT

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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