ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► I don't really know if you need me for this one.

00:00:04 ◼   ► What are you talking about?

00:00:06 ◼   ► Because I really just want to go watch the Letterkenny special that came out yesterday that I haven't had time to watch yet.

00:00:13 ◼   ► So I don't even know why I'm here right now.

00:00:15 ◼   ► Are you in denial about the announcements or something?

00:00:19 ◼   ► We'll find out. So here's the thing.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Oh my God.

00:00:22 ◼   ► I'm going to do that thing where I'm not going to tell you whether or not I bought anything until later on in the episode.

00:00:28 ◼   ► the episodes. You have to listen. Although I will also say that my brand is very strong. My brand

00:00:33 ◼   ► is very strong because I got a lot of tweets with people saying with questionable amounts of

00:00:40 ◼   ► sarcasm like, "Oh gosh, are we going to have to listen to Casey plug membership 85 times this week?"

00:00:45 ◼   ► Uh, the answer is probably. And, uh, I'm, I'm a little concerned that this is my brand now. He's

00:00:51 ◼   ► just yelling for our own membership, but that's okay.

00:00:55 ◼   ► (electronic beeping)

00:00:57 ◼   ► So we have anything to talk about this week?

00:00:58 ◼   ► - No, no, there's--

00:01:00 ◼   ► - Nothing at all?

00:01:01 ◼   ► - Nothing really happened, did it?

00:01:02 ◼   ► - No, nothing at all.

00:01:03 ◼   ► This was a big week, my goodness.

00:01:05 ◼   ► - Oh, wow. (laughs)

00:01:06 ◼   ► - So we can start with standard ATP fair.

00:01:10 ◼   ► We should talk fashion.

00:01:14 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:01:16 ◼   ► - Have you bought any new watch brands

00:01:18 ◼   ► from the Spring Collection?

00:01:19 ◼   ► - Is there, actually, all kidding aside,

00:01:21 ◼   ► Is there a new spring collection?

00:01:21 ◼   ► 'Cause I missed it, if so.

00:01:22 ◼   ► Oh really, I honestly didn't realize.

00:01:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, this is one of those things,

00:01:24 ◼   ► like in recent years, like, not just recent years,

00:01:28 ◼   ► Apple has for a long time now debuted new

00:01:31 ◼   ► like Apple Watch bands and iPhone cases,

00:01:34 ◼   ► usually at least once or twice outside of the usual

00:01:39 ◼   ► fall events. - Yeah, yeah.

00:01:41 ◼   ► - And usually there's a spring collection,

00:01:42 ◼   ► and there is indeed a spring collection.

00:01:44 ◼   ► You gotta get a nice new yellow and a new orange

00:01:48 ◼   ► and I think a new green maybe?

00:01:50 ◼   ► But yeah, anyway, that's that's the spring collection.

00:01:52 ◼   ► Are you talking about the green phone though?

00:01:53 ◼   ► Is that what we're talking about?

00:01:54 ◼   ► - No, actually not even that.

00:01:56 ◼   ► - I wonder if the watch bands are gonna be like,

00:01:59 ◼   ► I was gonna say like beanie babies,

00:02:00 ◼   ► but like, because you know, they do that thing

00:02:03 ◼   ► where they introduce them, you know, and spring and fall.

00:02:05 ◼   ► But the other part of that is that they go away.

00:02:07 ◼   ► Like, so if there's one particular shade of like purple

00:02:10 ◼   ► that you really liked, but they only sold it like

00:02:12 ◼   ► three years ago in the fall, you may never see that again.

00:02:15 ◼   ► So I wonder if someone's just like collecting them all

00:02:17 ◼   ► and like at the end of this, we'll just have like

00:02:19 ◼   ► the ultimate collection of Apple watch bands.

00:02:21 ◼   ► I have all the colors.

00:02:22 ◼   ► It's impossible to get them.

00:02:24 ◼   ► So I know that this was a thing,

00:02:26 ◼   ► that the watch band collections was a thing,

00:02:28 ◼   ► but I had no idea that they actually really did do a new one.

00:02:30 ◼   ► - Wait, something's, okay.

00:02:32 ◼   ► I might freak out for a moment here.

00:02:35 ◼   ► The white sport band is gone.

00:02:39 ◼   ► - That's what I'm telling you, they go away.

00:02:40 ◼   ► - The white sport band though?

00:02:42 ◼   ► That's always the, that's my band.

00:02:45 ◼   ► What?

00:02:46 ◼   ► - Oh, the white band is your band?

00:02:48 ◼   ► Did it just happen to you, Marco?

00:02:50 ◼   ► - It was Johnny Ive's band too, right?

00:02:52 ◼   ► - I mean, I guess he's gone.

00:02:53 ◼   ► And honestly, he's looking at this event good for his...

00:02:56 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:02:58 ◼   ► - Oh my word.

00:02:59 ◼   ► - I guess we'll get to that.

00:03:00 ◼   ► Oh man, what am I gonna wear?

00:03:02 ◼   ► I guess I'll have to switch to like lemon zest or something.

00:03:05 ◼   ► - So you're gonna become like me,

00:03:06 ◼   ► you're gonna stock up on them like cheese graters,

00:03:07 ◼   ► you know, in the basement, just 50 white watch bands.

00:03:09 ◼   ► - Starlight just looks dirty.

00:03:11 ◼   ► - Mm-hmm.

00:03:12 ◼   ► Dish water, they call it.

00:03:13 ◼   ► - Yes, dish water white.

00:03:14 ◼   ► Which honestly, the white band does get dirty easily,

00:03:17 ◼   ► But I just, you know, I clean it. It's fine.

00:03:19 ◼   ► All right. So for the record listeners, before we started recording,

00:03:22 ◼   ► before we did anything, John's this was, you know,

00:03:27 ◼   ► as long as we don't get mired down in the early stuff, sidetracked,

00:03:31 ◼   ► whatever. As long as you don't get sidetracked.

00:03:34 ◼   ► Why would we get sidetracked?

00:03:35 ◼   ► I will take the blame for this one. We are on line one of the notes.

00:03:39 ◼   ► We haven't even gotten to line one. We've gotten to Apple event.

00:03:43 ◼   ► That is literally the only thing that we've gotten to.

00:03:45 ◼   ► - No, I mean like line one, yeah,

00:03:46 ◼   ► that's the heading though, the first body line.

00:03:48 ◼   ► All right, go ahead, Kasey.

00:03:49 ◼   ► - Okay, so the fashion I was trying to talk about

00:03:51 ◼   ► before we went down this rabbit hole

00:03:52 ◼   ► is astute individuals, of which I was not one of them,

00:03:56 ◼   ► noticed Tim's combination of shirt color and watch band.

00:04:00 ◼   ► And I'm going to choose to believe this was deliberate,

00:04:03 ◼   ► and I am here for it.

00:04:04 ◼   ► He had a very lovely blue shirt and a very yellow watch band.

00:04:08 ◼   ► What could that possibly indicate?

00:04:10 ◼   ► - He could just like lemon zest,

00:04:12 ◼   ► which is the color that he was wearing.

00:04:13 ◼   ► However, yeah, it's definitely a Ukraine thing.

00:04:15 ◼   ► absolutely although it is interesting that like

00:04:18 ◼   ► so he has this idea i should wear colors for solidarity with ukraine great right

00:04:22 ◼   ► so he goes to his wardrobe and he's like well i've got the yellow watch band

00:04:25 ◼   ► that's part of the new spring line i've got to get a blue shirt but i

00:04:28 ◼   ► guess his closet simply doesn't contain any shirts that are

00:04:32 ◼   ► close to the color blue on the flag of ukraine

00:04:36 ◼   ► he just has like a tasteful like tim cook kind of blue

00:04:40 ◼   ► and so that's what he wore like i don't like he couldn't bring himself to wear

00:04:43 ◼   ► like the actual colors because it would just not be appropriate for Tim Cook.

00:04:47 ◼   ► Well, I think there's a limit of how much excitement Tim Cook can display.

00:04:52 ◼   ► And I think the yellow wristband, that's his limit.

00:04:56 ◼   ► It's very exuberant.

00:04:57 ◼   ► Yes, that's as exuberant as he can be.

00:05:00 ◼   ► Indeed.

00:05:01 ◼   ► Alright, so in the attempt to move it right along, Apple starts announcing things.

00:05:06 ◼   ► They start with a recap of some of the things.

00:05:09 ◼   ► Not even a recap.

00:05:10 ◼   ► both a recap and a preview of some of their featured films,

00:05:13 ◼   ► some of, most of which actually I was not aware of.

00:05:16 ◼   ► There's apparently a new animated series,

00:05:18 ◼   ► or excuse me, not animated series, but animated film.

00:05:21 ◼   ► Lucky, I think is the name of it.

00:05:23 ◼   ► - I think it's called Buck, right?

00:05:24 ◼   ► - Oh, was it Luck? Okay.

00:05:25 ◼   ► - Maybe you're getting confused with the David Milch show

00:05:29 ◼   ► about horse racing, maybe?

00:05:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, let's go with that.

00:05:33 ◼   ► And so as per upgrade this week,

00:05:35 ◼   ► I believe that this is Tim, is it Tim Laster?

00:05:38 ◼   ► No, John Lasters.

00:05:39 ◼   ► John Lasseter's new place that's doing that.

00:05:43 ◼   ► There's a spy movie of some sort

00:05:46 ◼   ► with the dude from which are Henry Cavill.

00:05:49 ◼   ► There's all sorts of different stuff that's coming,

00:05:51 ◼   ► some of which looked really, really good.

00:05:52 ◼   ► And then they also announced, Apple announced,

00:05:55 ◼   ► that Friday Night Baseball is coming to Apple TV+

00:05:59 ◼   ► if baseball ever comes back.

00:06:01 ◼   ► So two episodes every Friday night.

00:06:03 ◼   ► It will be available on Apple TV+

00:06:05 ◼   ► and for a limited time without the need of a subscription.

00:06:08 ◼   ► And there's a post from friend of the show Jason Snell and also a huge baseball fan about

00:06:13 ◼   ► this which we will put in the show notes.

00:06:14 ◼   ► Wait, hold on.

00:06:15 ◼   ► Honest question.

00:06:16 ◼   ► Is baseball not back?

00:06:17 ◼   ► I have no idea.

00:06:18 ◼   ► No.

00:06:19 ◼   ► Really?

00:06:20 ◼   ► No.

00:06:21 ◼   ► So there's supposed to, well, I probably know the most of the three of us about this and

00:06:25 ◼   ► I know very, very, very little.

00:06:26 ◼   ► So take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt.

00:06:29 ◼   ► But my limited understanding is...

00:06:31 ◼   ► Welcome to the show.

00:06:32 ◼   ► You know as much about sports as we know about a lot of the stuff we talk about.

00:06:36 ◼   ► Right?

00:06:37 ◼   ► So it is supposed to have been back, but the owners and the players are bickering over

00:06:43 ◼   ► the owners not thinking they're rich enough and the players feeling like they deserve

00:06:47 ◼   ► a small cut of the ridiculous riches that the owners have.

00:06:52 ◼   ► And so Jason apparently is listening live and is correcting me already.

00:06:55 ◼   ► He said it's an owner lockout.

00:06:57 ◼   ► So the owners are refusing to, if I understand it right, let any of the games happen because

00:07:02 ◼   ► they're greedy jerks.

00:07:03 ◼   ► And so there's no baseball yet.

00:07:06 ◼   ► In fact, I believe breaking news just before we record it,

00:07:09 ◼   ► I believe they have announced another couple of weeks delay

00:07:12 ◼   ► in the season or something like that.

00:07:14 ◼   ► So yeah, it's kind of ugly and an interesting time

00:07:18 ◼   ► for Apple to announce that they're getting

00:07:19 ◼   ► Friday night baseball, assuming it ever comes back.

00:07:21 ◼   ► - You should read that post because even if you don't care

00:07:23 ◼   ► about baseball because it talks more about streaming

00:07:27 ◼   ► services and how that intersects with the way sports

00:07:30 ◼   ► has traditionally been funded and viewed by sports fans.

00:07:33 ◼   ► So even if you're not into sports,

00:07:35 ◼   ► you might be interested in that

00:07:36 ◼   ► because it's all of our future.

00:07:38 ◼   ► We're not gonna get into now

00:07:39 ◼   ► 'cause we're not getting sidetracked, right?

00:07:40 ◼   ► Casey, next item.

00:07:41 ◼   ► - That's right, that's right.

00:07:42 ◼   ► Moving right along.

00:07:42 ◼   ► - Speaking of disputes,

00:07:43 ◼   ► I have no ferry service right now because of a dispute.

00:07:46 ◼   ► - I know, we heard.

00:07:47 ◼   ► - Did we hear?

00:07:48 ◼   ► I didn't hear this.

00:07:49 ◼   ► - Well, a couple of shows back,

00:07:50 ◼   ► he said they're gonna stop ferry service.

00:07:51 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, and they did.

00:07:53 ◼   ► - No one thought they would actually do it.

00:07:54 ◼   ► They did it starting yesterday,

00:07:56 ◼   ► so we have no ferry service.

00:07:58 ◼   ► Yay.

00:07:58 ◼   ► - If only you had a vehicle you could drive on the sand

00:08:01 ◼   ► and go somewhere.

00:08:02 ◼   ► - We're just gonna make them buy a boat, stop.

00:08:04 ◼   ► Everyone's boats are still in the marshmallow wrap.

00:08:06 ◼   ► - You're getting one of those off-road vehicles

00:08:09 ◼   ► that turns into a boat, a duck boat or whatever.

00:08:11 ◼   ► - Oh, don't even tease.

00:08:12 ◼   ► Or like, what was it, a Gibbs Aquatica?

00:08:14 ◼   ► Oh, man.

00:08:15 ◼   ► - A duck boat would fit under your house.

00:08:16 ◼   ► Take a measurement.

00:08:17 ◼   ► - Would it?

00:08:18 ◼   ► They're pretty big.

00:08:19 ◼   ► - No, it would not.

00:08:20 ◼   ► They are massive.

00:08:20 ◼   ► Don't they have them in Boston?

00:08:21 ◼   ► They're frickin' huge.

00:08:22 ◼   ► - Their house is very high, though.

00:08:23 ◼   ► - The duck boats are significantly larger

00:08:25 ◼   ► than you think they are.

00:08:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, they are absolutely massive.

00:08:27 ◼   ► - They barely fit on the road.

00:08:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, I thought they had them tooling around Boston.

00:08:31 ◼   ► Am I making this up?

00:08:32 ◼   ► - They do, yeah.

00:08:33 ◼   ► Have you not seen them? They are massive.

00:08:35 ◼   ► I've written on them. I think I went on a duck tour.

00:08:37 ◼   ► What about one of those fan boats they use in Florida? Would that work here? Or is the bay too choppy?

00:08:40 ◼   ► No, that's not good for the winter.

00:08:42 ◼   ► Because the bay's really shallow, which makes it hard to drive a lot of boats on it.

00:08:45 ◼   ► But like, you know, you figure one of those fan boats are actually probably really nice for shallow.

00:08:49 ◼   ► What is that actually called? I'm drawing a blank. What's that actually called?

00:08:51 ◼   ► It's called a fan boat.

00:08:52 ◼   ► Is it really? No, I thought there was another one.

00:08:54 ◼   ► There's a hovercraft. That's a different thing.

00:08:55 ◼   ► No, no, no, no. I know exactly what you're thinking of. On the Everglades.

00:08:57 ◼   ► Yeah, in Florida.

00:08:59 ◼   ► But what was that show that was on the Everglades huh? You probably saw it on naked night. What the hell was that called?

00:09:03 ◼   ► Oh, I have no idea probably not Dexter Jason. Hey, you're talking to Jason Jason. What was the show where they're on the Everglades?

00:09:08 ◼   ► I have no idea. It doesn't really matter. Well, I guess fanboat is what we're gonna go with. You see we keep getting distracted.

00:09:16 ◼   ► Us?

00:09:18 ◼   ► Totally not my fault. Yeah, not at all. Definitely not at all.

00:09:21 ◼   ► All right moving along this these show notes are already a mess. We've got

00:09:27 ◼   ► Apple Watch bands, Beanie Babies,

00:09:29 ◼   ► Gibbs Aquatica, Duck Boats, Fan Boats.

00:09:32 ◼   ► Oh my gosh, it's an airboat.

00:09:33 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what I do.

00:09:34 ◼   ► - I put in a link to the Luck TV show,

00:09:36 ◼   ► don't forget to get that.

00:09:37 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, the Luck TV show.

00:09:39 ◼   ► Oh golly.

00:09:41 ◼   ► This is a mess, this is an absolute mess.

00:09:43 ◼   ► But this is what the people tune in for.

00:09:45 ◼   ► All right, so moving right along,

00:09:46 ◼   ► there's new colors, there's green and other green,

00:09:49 ◼   ► otherwise known as Alpine green.

00:09:51 ◼   ► - This is actually interesting,

00:09:52 ◼   ► because normally in the spring event,

00:09:55 ◼   ► For Apple to release a new color of the mainstream/value phone,

00:10:01 ◼   ► that's been fairly common in recent years.

00:10:04 ◼   ► But to release a new version of the pro phone is less common.

00:10:07 ◼   ► I believe-- when was the last time that happened?

00:10:10 ◼   ► I think they did a Project Red a while back.

00:10:13 ◼   ► But I don't remember the last time they did a new pro

00:10:15 ◼   ► color in the spring.

00:10:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I can't remember one off the top of my head either,

00:10:19 ◼   ► unless you count when they tried to release the white-- what

00:10:21 ◼   ► was it, iPhone 4-- for 18 months and never quite got around

00:10:24 ◼   ► Other than that I can't think of any. But yeah, so Alpine Green and Green, and they

00:10:30 ◼   ► look good at a glance. New iPhone SE 3 for $430 as introduced by Francesca Sweet using

00:10:37 ◼   ► A15. Apparently it is "incredibly popular with new iPhone users." They also made an

00:10:43 ◼   ► off-handed comment that they've added more new users to the iPhone 13 lineup than each

00:10:47 ◼   ► of the prior five launches. The iPhone SE 3 gets 5G. I believe, I might be wrong about

00:10:53 ◼   ► but I believe it does not get the millimeter wave wideband ultra wideband whatever it's called super fancy technology

00:11:00 ◼   ► But it's a lot of phone with touch ID

00:11:02 ◼   ► For 430 bucks which ain't bad. It's it's following the SE pattern of

00:11:07 ◼   ► It was it's been a couple years since the last SE and they gave it in the spring

00:11:12 ◼   ► What the flagship phones had in the fall guts wise with a couple, you know things cut here and there in an old case design

00:11:20 ◼   ► My question is, do you think this is the last

00:11:23 ◼   ► Touch ID phone finally that we will see?

00:11:25 ◼   ► - I hope so, but I mean, not that I'm against Touch ID,

00:11:29 ◼   ► but it's just weirder and weirder to see it.

00:11:31 ◼   ► It just looks like from a different era, you know?

00:11:33 ◼   ► - Well, on the other hand, though,

00:11:34 ◼   ► they leaned into that hard.

00:11:37 ◼   ► Like, when they were showing it,

00:11:38 ◼   ► they showed a huge shot of the bottom half

00:11:41 ◼   ► with the big Touch ID sensor.

00:11:43 ◼   ► They mentioned the Touch ID sensor.

00:11:44 ◼   ► They showed a screenshot of Touch ID working.

00:11:47 ◼   ► So I think clearly what they're going for here

00:11:48 ◼   ► is a lot of people still love Touch ID on their phones

00:11:52 ◼   ► and don't want to move from it.

00:11:54 ◼   ► And so they are keeping this around for a reason.

00:11:57 ◼   ► Part of it is budget and price and segmentation.

00:12:00 ◼   ► But I think part of it is just trying

00:12:02 ◼   ► to keep those people happy that insist on Touch ID still.

00:12:06 ◼   ► And that might be a while before it goes away.

00:12:09 ◼   ► So might this be the last one?

00:12:11 ◼   ► Or maybe it won't be.

00:12:12 ◼   ► Maybe they're going to keep this style around even longer

00:12:15 ◼   ► than we think just because those last texture ID holdouts

00:12:18 ◼   ► aren't really going anywhere.

00:12:20 ◼   ► - I keep hearing how expensive,

00:12:21 ◼   ► how surprisingly expensive,

00:12:23 ◼   ► relatively speaking obviously,

00:12:24 ◼   ► face ID is to deal with, I guess,

00:12:26 ◼   ► all the sensors or whatever,

00:12:27 ◼   ► and we still haven't really seen,

00:12:29 ◼   ► we saw a little bit of consolidation

00:12:30 ◼   ► with when they made the notch smaller or whatever,

00:12:32 ◼   ► but that may be the limiting factor.

00:12:35 ◼   ► Not that they, or maybe they would do something

00:12:37 ◼   ► like they did with the iPad Air,

00:12:38 ◼   ► which we're gonna get to in a second,

00:12:39 ◼   ► where it's like, well,

00:12:40 ◼   ► we're gonna give you the new design,

00:12:41 ◼   ► but no, you don't get face ID

00:12:42 ◼   ► because this is the budget price or whatever.

00:12:45 ◼   ► So, but you can't do that with a phone, right?

00:12:47 ◼   ► You can't, well, can you put Touch ID in the power button

00:12:51 ◼   ► on a phone-sized device?

00:12:52 ◼   ► Probably not, I don't know.

00:12:54 ◼   ► I had to do the measurements to figure it out,

00:12:56 ◼   ► but I feel like that's what's holding this thing here.

00:12:58 ◼   ► It's not so much that they love Touch ID,

00:12:59 ◼   ► it's that the replacement for it

00:13:01 ◼   ► would bump this price up too much right now.

00:13:03 ◼   ► At least that's my impression.

00:13:04 ◼   ► - Eh, it could be both, honestly.

00:13:05 ◼   ► But there are a lot of people who love it.

00:13:07 ◼   ► Like, if it was purely a value move,

00:13:10 ◼   ► I don't think they would have accentuated

00:13:12 ◼   ► as much as they did in the presentation.

00:13:14 ◼   ► I mean it's a differentiating factor.

00:13:15 ◼   ► It's like hey, if you like Touch ID, here's the one.

00:13:17 ◼   ► Like obviously you're gonna pitch it for

00:13:19 ◼   ► how it's different from the other phones.

00:13:20 ◼   ► But that could be just selling what you have

00:13:23 ◼   ► versus updating.

00:13:25 ◼   ► But anyway, to spoil it,

00:13:28 ◼   ► they did not update the super cheap iPad to have flat size.

00:13:30 ◼   ► But they did update the iPad Air, which was nice.

00:13:33 ◼   ► - We are sponsored this week by New Relic.

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00:15:04 ◼   ► (jazz music)

00:15:06 ◼   ► - New iPad Air, which is in many ways

00:15:09 ◼   ► not that different from the old,

00:15:11 ◼   ► but it does have an M1 in it, so that's exciting.

00:15:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, not an A15.

00:15:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, this is an interesting choice.

00:15:18 ◼   ► In the past, the iPads, the bigger iPads,

00:15:23 ◼   ► would have the X versions of the system on a chip.

00:15:27 ◼   ► And of course, that one Z one, that was weird.

00:15:29 ◼   ► But for the most part, it was like,

00:15:30 ◼   ► you'd have the X version that had like,

00:15:32 ◼   ► same base cores as the A whatever iPhone one of that number

00:15:35 ◼   ► but then more GPUs or maybe one more CPU core.

00:15:38 ◼   ► And so it's interesting in this case to not do that.

00:15:43 ◼   ► So to give it the M1, first of all,

00:15:45 ◼   ► that actually will hurt it single-threaded wise

00:15:48 ◼   ► or in certain tests 'cause the M1 is based on the A14 cores

00:15:52 ◼   ► which of course we'll get to more later.

00:15:54 ◼   ► So to launch a new M1 iPad today

00:15:59 ◼   ► I thought was a little bit surprising

00:16:01 ◼   ► but also giving it all that heft.

00:16:05 ◼   ► It's gonna have, I believe somebody confirmed

00:16:07 ◼   ► that it has eight gigs of RAM,

00:16:08 ◼   ► or at least it can have eight gigs of RAM, I don't know.

00:16:10 ◼   ► And all that massive CPU and GPU cores,

00:16:14 ◼   ► huge parallel performance on the M1.

00:16:17 ◼   ► To have that in the iPad Air and the iPad Pro

00:16:22 ◼   ► definitely leaves the gap as a weird question mark

00:16:26 ◼   ► of like, well, what does the Pro still offer above it?

00:16:29 ◼   ► And there are some things.

00:16:30 ◼   ► I made a quick list here.

00:16:32 ◼   ► The big thing for me is that the Pro has speakers

00:16:34 ◼   ► on both sides still, and none of the other iPads

00:16:36 ◼   ► do as far as I know.

00:16:38 ◼   ► So if you have it in landscape, you

00:16:39 ◼   ► have sound coming out of both sides, which is nice.

00:16:42 ◼   ► Pro also has Face ID, has 120 hertz, the big triple camera

00:16:46 ◼   ► system with the LiDAR, and the Pro's USB-C port

00:16:49 ◼   ► is a Thunderbolt port, whereas the new Air is still just USB-C.

00:16:54 ◼   ► And they said they made it a faster USB-C data rate,

00:16:57 ◼   ► but it's still not Thunderbolt.

00:16:58 ◼   ► - It's USB 3.1 Gen 2, which to figure out what that means,

00:17:02 ◼   ► you have to go look up in the weird chart

00:17:04 ◼   ► and realize that they renamed everything recently,

00:17:06 ◼   ► but yes, it's faster USB.

00:17:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, so it's interesting, but I feel like it's,

00:17:12 ◼   ► now that the Air has so much of what the Pro has,

00:17:17 ◼   ► it's pushing the Pro more and more into specialty markets,

00:17:21 ◼   ► which makes me think that maybe the Pro is,

00:17:24 ◼   ► I know that the Pro is kind of expected

00:17:26 ◼   ► to have an update later this year,

00:17:28 ◼   ► so maybe this will be,

00:17:30 ◼   ► maybe this will make more sense when that happens.

00:17:32 ◼   ► But it does seem like there's,

00:17:34 ◼   ► there's decreasingly a gap between those two

00:17:37 ◼   ► feature and spec-wise,

00:17:39 ◼   ► and yet there's still a pretty substantial price difference,

00:17:42 ◼   ► and it's still a different model line,

00:17:43 ◼   ► so I am kinda curious, like,

00:17:45 ◼   ► where they're gonna go with this.

00:17:48 ◼   ► - I mean, I think the, this past year,

00:17:50 ◼   ► where only the big iPad Pro had the good mini-LED screen,

00:17:54 ◼   ► right, that seems temporary to me,

00:17:56 ◼   ► and I would imagine that when the new iPads both have Mini LED and both have M2 or whatever,

00:18:03 ◼   ► this will make more sense.

00:18:04 ◼   ► It's just that the cadence of iPad is always weird and very often you get these strange

00:18:07 ◼   ► things.

00:18:08 ◼   ► I mean, even just like having the iPad Mini have a better CPU than the iPad Air for a

00:18:12 ◼   ► while, they're just all out of sync on the iPad line.

00:18:14 ◼   ► So I think we always have these periods where it looks a little bit weird.

00:18:16 ◼   ► But who cares?

00:18:17 ◼   ► This is a great product.

00:18:18 ◼   ► I'm always recommending the iPad Air to people because it's got the new design, new pencil,

00:18:23 ◼   ► but it doesn't have all the features that most people don't care about.

00:18:25 ◼   ► the very fancy screen, and even face ID.

00:18:28 ◼   ► - What's interesting too is if you actually,

00:18:30 ◼   ► I just, if you spec them up spec by spec,

00:18:32 ◼   ► which you have to like, you have to spec up the Air

00:18:34 ◼   ► to match the 256 gig configuration of the Pro

00:18:38 ◼   ► 'cause they don't have a matching base level,

00:18:40 ◼   ► but if you spec them up both to 256,

00:18:43 ◼   ► the Pro is only $150 more than the Air.

00:18:46 ◼   ► So it's actually a smaller difference

00:18:47 ◼   ► than I initially assumed.

00:18:49 ◼   ► So maybe, I mean, maybe the answer is that the Air is just,

00:18:53 ◼   ► you know, they're pushing the Air higher end.

00:18:55 ◼   ► because I feel like if you buy an iPad,

00:18:58 ◼   ► either you care about the cool features of it or you don't.

00:19:02 ◼   ► If you don't, you get the cheap one, period.

00:19:03 ◼   ► And that's what most people buy.

00:19:04 ◼   ► You get the base level iPad nothing,

00:19:07 ◼   ► and everyone buys that and they're mostly happy with it.

00:19:09 ◼   ► And if you want anything else besides that,

00:19:12 ◼   ► you're gonna be spending 900 bucks.

00:19:14 ◼   ► Like, whatever, however you spec it,

00:19:15 ◼   ► you're gonna be, no one's getting a $500 iPad anymore.

00:19:20 ◼   ► - I have no problems with the iPad Air.

00:19:22 ◼   ► I recorded an episode of Clockwise earlier today

00:19:24 ◼   ► where the thesis that was presented on Clockwise

00:19:28 ◼   ► was that it's kind of a weird in-between product

00:19:31 ◼   ► where it's not super duper duper cheap

00:19:33 ◼   ► like the regular iPad or the iPad mini,

00:19:35 ◼   ► and it's not the super baller pro.

00:19:39 ◼   ► So it's kind of this weird in the middle.

00:19:41 ◼   ► I don't necessarily begrudge that.

00:19:42 ◼   ► I think it's nice for Apple to have an offering

00:19:44 ◼   ► at basically any price point,

00:19:46 ◼   ► but it is a little bit, like you guys were saying,

00:19:48 ◼   ► it's a little bit of a weird in the middle area

00:19:50 ◼   ► where I'm not 100% sure who the right market is for it.

00:19:55 ◼   ► But it looks real nice and it's not extremely expensive.

00:19:58 ◼   ► And $600 to start is not terrible.

00:20:01 ◼   ► And I don't know, for me, I don't need,

00:20:03 ◼   ► in my experience anyway,

00:20:04 ◼   ► I don't need a whole ton of storage on an iPad.

00:20:06 ◼   ► Maybe I'm using my iPad wrong,

00:20:07 ◼   ► but you know, 600 bucks for 64 gigs, that ain't bad.

00:20:10 ◼   ► That ain't bad at all.

00:20:11 ◼   ► - I should take a moment also to reflect

00:20:13 ◼   ► on the ridiculousness of the air suffix on this product.

00:20:17 ◼   ► Like, what, we just ignore it now,

00:20:19 ◼   ► but like it does not, there's no analogy to the MacBook Air.

00:20:23 ◼   ► It is not any particularly airier than the iPad Pro.

00:20:28 ◼   ► It's just called this because that's what it was called

00:20:31 ◼   ► a long time ago when at one point

00:20:33 ◼   ► it was actually pretty thin,

00:20:34 ◼   ► but now it's just the same as the Pro.

00:20:36 ◼   ► I guess it does have more air in it.

00:20:38 ◼   ► I don't know, it doesn't make any sense.

00:20:39 ◼   ► - No, the Pro didn't wear

00:20:40 ◼   ► 'cause the speakers have a lot of air in them.

00:20:42 ◼   ► - But the Pro might be heavier.

00:20:45 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:20:46 ◼   ► I just wanna look it up.

00:20:47 ◼   ► One thing, Air in the Mac line,

00:20:50 ◼   ► when the MacBook Air first launched,

00:20:51 ◼   ► yeah, it was this thing that was premium

00:20:54 ◼   ► because it was so small and everything,

00:20:56 ◼   ► but that was very short-lived.

00:20:58 ◼   ► What the Air very quickly came to mean

00:21:00 ◼   ► was the one most people should buy

00:21:02 ◼   ► because it's pretty good and pretty small and light.

00:21:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, but that doesn't connect with Air,

00:21:06 ◼   ► and the thing is Air got undercut

00:21:07 ◼   ► by the skinny, plain old MacBook Adorable,

00:21:09 ◼   ► but then the Adorable died,

00:21:10 ◼   ► and the Air is like, now I am the skinniest.

00:21:12 ◼   ► - Right, well, 'cause the Adorable was never the cheap one.

00:21:15 ◼   ► Like, well, in certain ways. - Right, but it was

00:21:17 ◼   ► - The airiest.

00:21:18 ◼   ► - Right, but what I'm saying is when Apple says air,

00:21:20 ◼   ► they usually mean this is like the, it's small,

00:21:24 ◼   ► but it's also like the entry level one

00:21:26 ◼   ► and also the mainstream choice that you should probably buy.

00:21:29 ◼   ► So it's interesting that in the Mac,

00:21:31 ◼   ► it is the entry level one,

00:21:33 ◼   ► and it has been for a very long time.

00:21:35 ◼   ► So really I think the iPad Air

00:21:37 ◼   ► should be the lowest end iPad.

00:21:38 ◼   ► - Should be the lowest without the plain old iPad,

00:21:40 ◼   ► without a suffix, but it's not.

00:21:42 ◼   ► - But I guess it would be the question

00:21:44 ◼   ► of what you call this one,

00:21:45 ◼   ► because it's not the pro, I don't know what they would call,

00:21:50 ◼   ► oh, they would call the iPad Studio, of course.

00:21:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, actually that's a good point.

00:21:56 ◼   ► Spoiler alert.

00:21:57 ◼   ► No, I think the most reasonable thing,

00:21:58 ◼   ► if not going the studio route,

00:21:59 ◼   ► is the cheapo iPad becomes the iPad Air.

00:22:04 ◼   ► So the thing that is now iPad becomes iPad Air.

00:22:06 ◼   ► - After they updated, hopefully, to the flat sides.

00:22:09 ◼   ► - Okay, fair, and then the iPad Air becomes just plain iPad.

00:22:12 ◼   ► So iPad, no qualifier is the default.

00:22:15 ◼   ► iPad Air becomes the cheapo.

00:22:17 ◼   ► iPad Mini is obviously tiny.

00:22:19 ◼   ► iPad Pro is if you have too much money, et cetera.

00:22:22 ◼   ► - They're trying to rationalize their naming.

00:22:23 ◼   ► Like, 'cause we know how it got to this point historically,

00:22:26 ◼   ► but then on top of that, what we mentioned before,

00:22:28 ◼   ► that the iPad updates are always weirdly staggered.

00:22:30 ◼   ► So they're never like in lockstep with each other.

00:22:32 ◼   ► There's always leapfrogging each other in odd ways

00:22:34 ◼   ► and encroaching on each other's supposed market segments.

00:22:37 ◼   ► But we know the next update is coming to rationalize.

00:22:39 ◼   ► They never settle down to be like,

00:22:41 ◼   ► here's the iPad line and all the prices and form factors make sense, especially with the whole Tim

00:22:45 ◼   ► Cook practice of selling the old form for years and years and years. Instead of just saying flat

00:22:52 ◼   ► sides everywhere on all iPads, you won't see that other design. It's like, nope, you're gonna be

00:22:55 ◼   ► seeing that design for a long time. It's not gonna make sense. And the names aren't gonna make sense.

00:22:59 ◼   ► And the update cadence isn't gonna make sense. But for the most part, they're still good products.

00:23:02 ◼   ► And anyway, I think I would much rather have this get the M1 than a lesser chip and economies of

00:23:09 ◼   ► scale making a lot of those M1s.

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00:25:16 ◼   ► So then we get to the Mac, and this is where everything got really interesting to me. Let

00:25:22 ◼   ► me ask you, and Jon, I think you're the most likely to remember this, do you recall exactly

00:25:27 ◼   ► when this whole Jade, Jade 2C, Jade 4C discussion happened.

00:25:31 ◼   ► I believe it started with the German report.

00:25:33 ◼   ► - It was like last spring.

00:25:34 ◼   ► - Last, sometime last year.

00:25:36 ◼   ► - Okay, it was a long time ago.

00:25:38 ◼   ► - And do you have like a date on your diagram that,

00:25:41 ◼   ► yeah, I don't have the URL handy, but the one--

00:25:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, if you look at the URL to them,

00:25:45 ◼   ► I put the date, the date is actually in the URL,

00:25:47 ◼   ► and so you can see like how long it was.

00:25:49 ◼   ► I think my diagram was like May, maybe.

00:25:52 ◼   ► You can look it up, look up on my tweets in a second,

00:25:54 ◼   ► but I will start this section by saying

00:25:56 ◼   ► something that someone else noted, I forget who it was,

00:25:58 ◼   ► somebody on Twitter made a little montage video of,

00:26:02 ◼   ► oh no, it was Ben Thompson,

00:26:04 ◼   ► a little montage video of this presentation saying how,

00:26:07 ◼   ► in this presentation in particular,

00:26:09 ◼   ► and historically you'll recognize this pattern,

00:26:10 ◼   ► but in this presentation it was notable

00:26:12 ◼   ► because they did it almost every single time.

00:26:14 ◼   ► Before they would talk about a product,

00:26:16 ◼   ► before everything we just talked about,

00:26:18 ◼   ► before they talked about the iPhone,

00:26:19 ◼   ► the iPhone SE, the iPad Air,

00:26:22 ◼   ► they would start by talking about,

00:26:24 ◼   ► here's the Apple Silicon that lets us make this great thing.

00:26:27 ◼   ► Even though it's not new, you know,

00:26:28 ◼   ► the M1 we know about, the A15,

00:26:30 ◼   ► and it's not like they didn't have any Silicon announcements,

00:26:33 ◼   ► but they would, you know, add a Silicon section

00:26:36 ◼   ► to all those products just to emphasize,

00:26:37 ◼   ► like, you know why we're great?

00:26:39 ◼   ► We have great products, yeah,

00:26:40 ◼   ► but the reason we have great products

00:26:41 ◼   ► is because of great Silicon.

00:26:42 ◼   ► And for a while now with the Macs,

00:26:44 ◼   ► which obviously it makes sense

00:26:44 ◼   ► 'cause they're transitioning the Macs

00:26:45 ◼   ► to these new processors,

00:26:47 ◼   ► they would begin the Mac section

00:26:49 ◼   ► by talking about a processor.

00:26:50 ◼   ► Before they even announced any Macs,

00:26:51 ◼   ► they've done it in many press presentations

00:26:53 ◼   ► they did it again. So let's talk about the Mac. And what's the first thing they talk

00:26:57 ◼   ► about? Not a Mac. They're just going to talk about chips for a while. And then you're going

00:27:01 ◼   ► to see, you know, the Mac that that chip is in. I mean, I don't mind that. I think it's

00:27:06 ◼   ► a great way to start it. We get to see Johnny Cerucci in his little lab telling us very

00:27:11 ◼   ► emphatically about their awesome chips. And for the most part, they are awesome. Did you

00:27:16 ◼   ► find the date on the? No, I'm looking as we speak in the chat room. Let me down. I'm sorry.

00:27:22 ◼   ► May 21, May 21 of last year.

00:27:25 ◼   ► So the May 21, 2021.

00:27:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, so that was, to refresh everyone's memory,

00:27:31 ◼   ► it was the German rumor and he described a bunch of stuff.

00:27:33 ◼   ► And then I made this diagram saying, okay,

00:27:35 ◼   ► if we take what is described in this rumor

00:27:38 ◼   ► and make pictures of it, what does it look like?

00:27:39 ◼   ► And I mostly did it just to see how big would they be?

00:27:43 ◼   ► Like, you know, at that point we just had the M1

00:27:45 ◼   ► and I wanted to see basically the M1 is a square this big.

00:27:48 ◼   ► If we map out all these rumors, how big did the squares get?

00:27:52 ◼   ► and figuring out that they get monstrous.

00:27:54 ◼   ► And we've been talking about these things

00:27:56 ◼   ► for over a year now.

00:27:58 ◼   ► And Apple has been knocking them down.

00:28:00 ◼   ► First, they came out with like, I said,

00:28:03 ◼   ► the second row of the diagram showed

00:28:05 ◼   ► what would eventually become to be the M1 Pro and M1 Max.

00:28:10 ◼   ► And then in this presentation,

00:28:11 ◼   ► we did the third row of the diagram,

00:28:13 ◼   ► which ended up being called the M1 Ultra,

00:28:16 ◼   ► which is more than Max

00:28:17 ◼   ► because Ultra is obviously more than Max.

00:28:20 ◼   ► The theory I had earlier today was

00:28:23 ◼   ► that max does not stand for maximum,

00:28:24 ◼   ► but is short for max a million, so it makes perfect sense.

00:28:27 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:28:28 ◼   ► Good old M1 max, old maxi.

00:28:30 ◼   ► - Well, and I feel like the focus on the chips

00:28:35 ◼   ► as the primary introduction to the computers,

00:28:38 ◼   ► honestly, in this day and age,

00:28:39 ◼   ► especially in the context of a desktop,

00:28:41 ◼   ► but in this day and age, I think that matters more

00:28:44 ◼   ► because it helps dictate what these machines actually are.

00:28:49 ◼   ► Like it helps dictate what class of machine you can build,

00:28:52 ◼   ► how good of that version,

00:28:53 ◼   ► or how good a version of that can exist.

00:28:56 ◼   ► So by leading with the chip,

00:28:59 ◼   ► and then by eventually showing the enclosure,

00:29:01 ◼   ► which we'll get to, of like,

00:29:02 ◼   ► well, here's just like a box, basically.

00:29:04 ◼   ► It's a nice looking box.

00:29:05 ◼   ► It's a box with a lot of useful holes on it,

00:29:07 ◼   ► but still just basically a little box.

00:29:10 ◼   ► And because when you're using a desktop, it doesn't matter.

00:29:12 ◼   ► Like this I feel like is such a great breath of fresh air

00:29:15 ◼   ► compared to the unedited Johnny Ive,

00:29:18 ◼   ► worst days there where the form of the machine

00:29:22 ◼   ► was held as higher importance and a higher priority

00:29:26 ◼   ► in its design than the stuff that went inside of it.

00:29:29 ◼   ► And by having that as their priorities,

00:29:32 ◼   ► like look at this gorgeous object,

00:29:34 ◼   ► by the way it has some Z on it,

00:29:35 ◼   ► but look at this gorgeous object.

00:29:37 ◼   ► What you ended up with is gorgeous computers

00:29:40 ◼   ► that didn't serve their needs as well.

00:29:42 ◼   ► Whereas now, they start with what kind of amazing chip

00:29:46 ◼   ► can we make for market segment X,

00:29:49 ◼   ► pro desktops or small laptops or whatever.

00:29:52 ◼   ► And they make the chip and they design the computer

00:29:54 ◼   ► around it and in certain cases,

00:29:56 ◼   ► we're seeing this over the last couple years,

00:29:58 ◼   ► in certain cases, certain parts of the enclosure

00:30:00 ◼   ► have to get less beautiful or bigger or heavier.

00:30:04 ◼   ► But that then makes a better product.

00:30:06 ◼   ► And I feel like Apple of seven or eight years ago

00:30:10 ◼   ► wouldn't have done that.

00:30:11 ◼   ► And they didn't do that and it was to their expense

00:30:15 ◼   ► and to all of our expenses.

00:30:17 ◼   ► Whereas now, leading with the chip

00:30:19 ◼   ► and designing the computer around the technical needs

00:30:22 ◼   ► and the user's needs, like,

00:30:24 ◼   ► oh, I know we'll get to this,

00:30:25 ◼   ► but when I saw the holes in the front of the Mac Studio,

00:30:29 ◼   ► I almost cried, I was so happy.

00:30:31 ◼   ► 'Cause this is a company that is now valuing usefulness

00:30:36 ◼   ► and its customers' actual needs over visual purity

00:30:39 ◼   ► in so many ways, and this just makes me

00:30:41 ◼   ► so incredibly happy as a Mac user.

00:30:43 ◼   ► Yeah, the interesting thing about designing the chips and designing around them, getting

00:30:48 ◼   ► back to the diagram, is that what the rumor laid out over a year ago and what this diagram

00:30:53 ◼   ► shows is when Apple is making its own chips, you think, "Oh, now Apple can make whatever

00:30:59 ◼   ► it wants."

00:31:00 ◼   ► But Apple is still subject to economies of scale and all the other factors that make

00:31:06 ◼   ► it not possible for Apple to make a brand new custom-made chip for every single possible

00:31:12 ◼   ► application.

00:31:13 ◼   ► wisely, had a plan.

00:31:14 ◼   ► And the plan was, we're going to make building blocks,

00:31:17 ◼   ► and we're going to use those building blocks

00:31:18 ◼   ► to make a bunch of very similar chips

00:31:20 ◼   ► that we think we can assemble into final products,

00:31:24 ◼   ► final system-mounted chips that are appropriate

00:31:25 ◼   ► for the various products we have planned.

00:31:27 ◼   ► But they share a lot, and that's the point of that diagram.

00:31:29 ◼   ► The JDC die is the building block of the future

00:31:32 ◼   ► of high-performance ARM-based Macs,

00:31:36 ◼   ► and here's how you use that building block to build up.

00:31:39 ◼   ► We have the M1, but the M1 was not the building block.

00:31:41 ◼   ► It was JDC that was the building block,

00:31:43 ◼   ► We get the chopped version, which is the pro.

00:31:45 ◼   ► We get the unchopped version, which is the max.

00:31:47 ◼   ► And now we get the fused together,

00:31:50 ◼   ► unchopped versions, which is the ultra.

00:31:52 ◼   ► And the reason I bring this up now is because

00:31:54 ◼   ► at the start of this presentation, Blame Apple,

00:31:57 ◼   ► they did the sequencing.

00:31:59 ◼   ► They said, and I think this is a direct quote,

00:32:01 ◼   ► we're adding one last chip to the M1 family.

00:32:04 ◼   ► This is before they introduced the M1 Ultra, one last chip.

00:32:07 ◼   ► So the diagram has another row.

00:32:09 ◼   ► It has a fourth row because the first row is the M1

00:32:12 ◼   ► and then it shows the Max and the Pro,

00:32:13 ◼   ► and then it shows the Ultra,

00:32:14 ◼   ► and then it shows the, what, I don't know,

00:32:17 ◼   ► the Hyper, the Ultimate, the Super, the Epic.

00:32:20 ◼   ► - The Plaid.

00:32:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, we're not doing Plaid, the Ludicrous, whatever.

00:32:25 ◼   ► It shows, like basically, you know, like four Jade C dies.

00:32:29 ◼   ► What is it called, Jade 4C die or whatever?

00:32:31 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:32:32 ◼   ► - And when we talked about this in the past,

00:32:33 ◼   ► it was like, look, you can't economically make

00:32:36 ◼   ► a chip that big.

00:32:36 ◼   ► You can't even economically make a chip as big as the Ultra,

00:32:39 ◼   ► which is why they didn't, they did the thing

00:32:40 ◼   ► that we're gonna talk about in a second

00:32:42 ◼   ► where they sort of have them communicating to each other

00:32:44 ◼   ► over this very high speed bus with an interconnect

00:32:45 ◼   ► that we talked about in past shows, right?

00:32:48 ◼   ► But you can't have that.

00:32:49 ◼   ► But so what, if they hadn't said this line,

00:32:51 ◼   ► it would be like, okay, well, boy,

00:32:53 ◼   ► I can't wait to see what the one on the Mac Pro's gonna be.

00:32:56 ◼   ► Is it supposed to be four of these?

00:32:57 ◼   ► These rumors have been dead on every step of the way

00:32:59 ◼   ► over the course of a year.

00:33:00 ◼   ► These rumors have been, that rumor from a year ago,

00:33:03 ◼   ► it's turning out to be true.

00:33:04 ◼   ► Every time, we didn't know the names, but you look at them,

00:33:06 ◼   ► it's like, yep, same number of execution units.

00:33:07 ◼   ► It's made the same way.

00:33:08 ◼   ► everything is just coming up just the way we expected, right?

00:33:11 ◼   ► But when they said one last ship, it's like,

00:33:15 ◼   ► well, I guess maybe there's not gonna be a four-way thing.

00:33:19 ◼   ► So here's what I have to say about it.

00:33:21 ◼   ► So in episode 453, how long ago was that?

00:33:24 ◼   ► - It was 21st of October of last year.

00:33:27 ◼   ► - Yes, back in October,

00:33:28 ◼   ► I tried to give a warning to everybody

00:33:31 ◼   ► from something I've been thinking about

00:33:33 ◼   ► and mulling over for a while now

00:33:36 ◼   ► that that rumor is so old and that the Mac Pro

00:33:40 ◼   ► is going to be, in theory, so late,

00:33:42 ◼   ► like maybe the end of this year or whatever,

00:33:44 ◼   ► that a lot might have changed by the time

00:33:46 ◼   ► we get to making the Mac Pro.

00:33:48 ◼   ► Like maybe almost all that diagram is gonna come true.

00:33:52 ◼   ► At that point, the middle part hadn't even come true yet.

00:33:54 ◼   ► Maybe almost all the diagrams are gonna come true,

00:33:56 ◼   ► but the Mac Pro one is so far off in the distance

00:33:58 ◼   ► that if anything is gonna vary, it's going to be that.

00:34:01 ◼   ► Maybe they couldn't make that in time.

00:34:03 ◼   ► Maybe a different roadmap interrupts that.

00:34:05 ◼   ► Maybe they have something else planned for the Mac Pro or whatever.

00:34:07 ◼   ► And so when they said, you know, and that's what I said in that episode back in October,

00:34:11 ◼   ► like don't put all your, even though it looks like, oh, this it's coming true.

00:34:15 ◼   ► Just like the diagram shows that last step is going to be a doozy.

00:34:19 ◼   ► So they said one last chip.

00:34:20 ◼   ► So that makes it sound like there won't be any more chips in the quote M1 family.

00:34:26 ◼   ► Now what is the M1 family?

00:34:27 ◼   ► The M1 family is whatever Apple says it is, but we think of it as chips made with cores

00:34:32 ◼   ► based on the M1 because the M1 had the Ice Storm and Fire Storm cores. Those are the

00:34:35 ◼   ► things that make up Jade Sea Die and all that stuff. So lots of people saw that and said,

00:34:42 ◼   ► "Oh, the Mac Pro, it's going to have an M2-based system on its ship with 40 cores." And as

00:34:49 ◼   ► we've discussed in past shows, I will be extremely surprised if a 40-core M2-based ship ships

00:34:56 ◼   ► this year for the Mac Pro,

00:35:00 ◼   ► because that tends not to be how silicon is done.

00:35:03 ◼   ► You don't say we have a brand new chip

00:35:05 ◼   ► and the first one we're gonna make has 40 cores.

00:35:07 ◼   ► Like you usually start smaller and you build up.

00:35:10 ◼   ► You start with the small chip and you make it bigger,

00:35:12 ◼   ► slightly bigger, slightly bigger,

00:35:13 ◼   ► 'cause you get better at making the components of that chip.

00:35:15 ◼   ► Now, just because that's the way it's happened

00:35:17 ◼   ► in the past doesn't mean it's physically impossible

00:35:19 ◼   ► to do that.

00:35:20 ◼   ► It is plausible that it could, but I would be very surprised

00:35:23 ◼   ► and I think a lot of people would be very surprised

00:35:24 ◼   ► just because historically that's not how chip making

00:35:26 ◼   ► has gone. So before we, I know we're getting derailed into Mac Pro territory already, but

00:35:31 ◼   ► it's their fault for bringing this stuff up. So I just do want to talk about the possibilities

00:35:35 ◼   ► for the Mac Pro. This is the last chip in the M1 family. One possibility is the Mac

00:35:39 ◼   ► Pro just has an M1 Ultra. That's crappy because the M1 Ultra does not have enough GPU cores

00:35:45 ◼   ► to be remotely competitive with the current Mac Pro, right? So I hope that's not the case,

00:35:51 ◼   ► but hey, that could be a thing, who knows? And by the way, the reason we're talking about

00:35:54 ◼   ► Mac Pro, as Apple later confirms at the very end of the presentation, that the Mac Pro

00:35:58 ◼   ► is absolutely coming.

00:35:59 ◼   ► So this is not speculation.

00:36:01 ◼   ► Second possibility, put two M1 Ultras in there.

00:36:03 ◼   ► Oh, we didn't make another chip.

00:36:05 ◼   ► It's just two M1 Ultras, and they're connected by a different interconnect between the two

00:36:09 ◼   ► M1 Ultras.

00:36:11 ◼   ► Or it's two M1 Ultras back to back and stuck together and we don't call it a new chip,

00:36:15 ◼   ► it's just M1 Ultra, L1 Ultra X2.

00:36:18 ◼   ► That would have 40 cores, it would be plausible, it would be fine.

00:36:22 ◼   ► And then the final possibility is the Mac Pro is not going to have an M1-based chip

00:36:26 ◼   ► in it at all.

00:36:27 ◼   ► It's going to have an M2-based thing with 40 core.

00:36:31 ◼   ► And it's going to come out in 2023?

00:36:32 ◼   ► I don't even know.

00:36:34 ◼   ► So Apple continues to be extremely frustrating when it comes to the Mac Pro by like, if they

00:36:41 ◼   ► hadn't said this, we would all just be blissfully unaware and be like, "Here we go, on our way

00:36:44 ◼   ► to 40 core.

00:36:45 ◼   ► It's going to be great."

00:36:46 ◼   ► But then they just have to throw this in there and say, "You thought you knew what the Mac

00:36:49 ◼   ► Pro was going to be, but you actually don't."

00:36:50 ◼   ► Or maybe you do, but we're just screwing with you.

00:36:52 ◼   ► Haha, one last chip in the M1 family.

00:36:54 ◼   ► So that was frustrating/intriguing.

00:36:57 ◼   ► On the subject of having an actual, like, 4 J4C die, like the possibility of that, Hector

00:37:04 ◼   ► Martin, who's been porting Linux to the M whatever chips, was looking at the M1 Macs

00:37:09 ◼   ► and had this to say in a tweet.

00:37:11 ◼   ► The IRQ controller registers on the M1 Macs go die 0, die 1, and then other stuff.

00:37:16 ◼   ► There is literally no space for dies beyond those two to exist in there.

00:37:20 ◼   ► If they somehow glued four chips together, one pair wouldn't be able to send interrupts

00:37:23 ◼   ► to the other.

00:37:24 ◼   ► That doesn't make any sense.

00:37:25 ◼   ► And conversely, the IRQ controller claims the theoretical design max is 8 dies, so it's

00:37:29 ◼   ► not like they were stuck with two.

00:37:30 ◼   ► They could have instantiated with room for more dies, but they didn't.

00:37:33 ◼   ► So the implication seems to be, both physically speaking and looking at the innards of the

00:37:37 ◼   ► chip, that the M1 max at the very least, which is what he was looking at at the time because

00:37:41 ◼   ► he hadn't seen the M1 Ultra then, was not designed to have more than two.

00:37:45 ◼   ► And lo and behold, the M1 Ultra is two M1 Maxes

00:37:48 ◼   ► stuck together with this cool internet connect thing, right?

00:37:52 ◼   ► So can there physically be four M1 Maxes stuck together?

00:37:56 ◼   ► Is M1 Ultra really just two M1 Maxes stuck together?

00:37:59 ◼   ► It sure looks like it.

00:38:01 ◼   ► So that's another nail in the,

00:38:03 ◼   ► like there's not going to be four, you know,

00:38:06 ◼   ► Jade 4C die in the way that you think,

00:38:08 ◼   ► just because it seems like the M1 Max wasn't made to do that

00:38:11 ◼   ► and the M1 Ultra does not do that.

00:38:13 ◼   ► And it doesn't seem like there's a way to make that work.

00:38:15 ◼   ► Maybe they can be back to back,

00:38:17 ◼   ► but it just doesn't seem like that's in the cards

00:38:19 ◼   ► from what we know now.

00:38:20 ◼   ► It's hard to know because we don't know what, you know,

00:38:22 ◼   ► they're doing for the Mac Pro.

00:38:24 ◼   ► The second thing is, if it's two M1 Ultras,

00:38:26 ◼   ► it's like, oh, we didn't make a new chip,

00:38:27 ◼   ► it's just two M1 Ultras,

00:38:28 ◼   ► how do the two M1 Ultras talk to each other?

00:38:31 ◼   ► You would think that's not a big problem.

00:38:32 ◼   ► That's been multi-processor Macs for a long time.

00:38:34 ◼   ► That used to be the way they made high-performance Macs.

00:38:36 ◼   ► You get multiple processors, right?

00:38:38 ◼   ► But those Macs did not have the RAM stuck, you know,

00:38:41 ◼   ► wedged, welded to the CPU.

00:38:45 ◼   ► And so what you'd end up with is a good old NUMA.

00:38:48 ◼   ► NUMA?

00:38:48 ◼   ► NUMA, NUMA?

00:38:49 ◼   ► There was another meme about that somewhere.

00:38:50 ◼   ► Yodel-a-hee.

00:38:52 ◼   ► Sorry, go ahead.

00:38:53 ◼   ► P-E-C.

00:38:54 ◼   ► NUMA stands for N-U-M-A. It's Non-Uniform Memory Access.

00:38:57 ◼   ► What it basically means is that if you had two M1 ultras

00:38:59 ◼   ► in there, they would each come with their own complement of RAM

00:39:02 ◼   ► that is sort of unchangeable and connected to the CPU.

00:39:05 ◼   ► It's the Unified Memory Architecture, right?

00:39:07 ◼   ► But they would each have their own pool of it.

00:39:09 ◼   ► And so if you wanted to have a Mac Pro with 256 gigabytes

00:39:12 ◼   ► of RAM, you'd have one M1 Ultra with 128.

00:39:15 ◼   ► Another M1 Ultra with 128, but each one of those M1 Ultras

00:39:19 ◼   ► would be really close to its own 128,

00:39:21 ◼   ► but theoretically, not physically speaking,

00:39:25 ◼   ► but like latency-wise, farther from the other 128, right?

00:39:30 ◼   ► And that's what non-uniform memory access means.

00:39:32 ◼   ► It means that you have some pool of memory

00:39:33 ◼   ► that's quote unquote close to you that you can get at fast,

00:39:36 ◼   ► and there's some other pool of memory that's far away.

00:39:38 ◼   ► When you had traditional multiprocessor chips,

00:39:40 ◼   ► instead you'd have two CPUs,

00:39:42 ◼   ► so that you'd have one pool of memory

00:39:43 ◼   ► that they both access that they were essentially both

00:39:46 ◼   ► uniformly far from, right?

00:39:48 ◼   ► That the unified memory architecture,

00:39:49 ◼   ► having the RAM really close to the system on a chip

00:39:51 ◼   ► is great and gives incredible memory bandwidth.

00:39:53 ◼   ► But if you put two M1 Ultras in there,

00:39:56 ◼   ► now half your RAM is really fast

00:39:57 ◼   ► and half your RAM is less fast.

00:39:59 ◼   ► Now maybe they have a cool new interconnect

00:40:00 ◼   ► that is different than the one that we're gonna talk about

00:40:03 ◼   ► in a second for the M1 Ultra,

00:40:05 ◼   ► that it connects the two M1 Ultras so it's not that bad

00:40:08 ◼   ► and the distant RAM is not that bad

00:40:10 ◼   ► and it just looks like one pool of memory,

00:40:12 ◼   ► you know, just like the M1 Ultra does.

00:40:13 ◼   ► We don't know.

00:40:14 ◼   ► We still have to wait for that Mac Pro,

00:40:15 ◼   ► but it is mysterious and intriguing

00:40:17 ◼   ► and slightly concerning to me.

00:40:20 ◼   ► We'll get to that maybe at the end

00:40:21 ◼   ► when I talk about the possibilities for Mac Pro stuff.

00:40:23 ◼   ► But in the meantime, let's look at the M1 Ultra

00:40:26 ◼   ► and what they actually did do by,

00:40:29 ◼   ► I keep trying so hard for this whole section

00:40:31 ◼   ► not to say they took two M1 Maxes

00:40:33 ◼   ► and put them butt to butt

00:40:33 ◼   ► because it's a movie reference

00:40:35 ◼   ► and I don't want to do it and it's unseemly,

00:40:38 ◼   ► but they really did.

00:40:39 ◼   ► So Casey, please save me.

00:40:40 ◼   ► - It's okay, butts are funny.

00:40:42 ◼   ► So I remember, and I will be the first to tell you,

00:40:45 ◼   ► I have the world's worst memory,

00:40:46 ◼   ► but I swear that when you were working

00:40:48 ◼   ► on your chip diagrams that eventually made it onto shirts,

00:40:51 ◼   ► and now we don't know what we're gonna do about shirts yet,

00:40:53 ◼   ► but--

00:40:54 ◼   ► - Should we just make pants?

00:40:56 ◼   ► - Somebody suggested a onesie.

00:40:58 ◼   ► - One C, raincoats, yeah, there's all sorts of ideas.

00:41:00 ◼   ► - No, 'cause each leg is an M1 max, and--

00:41:04 ◼   ► - They're not that long.

00:41:05 ◼   ► - They just join in the middle, shorts,

00:41:06 ◼   ► then we should make shorts.

00:41:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, that might work.

00:41:09 ◼   ► - That's definitely it.

00:41:10 ◼   ► What do you call it when you have the tails on your coat?

00:41:13 ◼   ► Isn't there a name for that other than tail?

00:41:14 ◼   ► - I think it's called coat tails.

00:41:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, fan boats and coat tails.

00:41:17 ◼   ► - There you go, title.

00:41:19 ◼   ► So I remember, I swear to you,

00:41:22 ◼   ► I remember that you were working on these diagrams

00:41:24 ◼   ► and you were looking closely at the diagrams

00:41:26 ◼   ► that Apple had showed and like the scans that they had showed

00:41:31 ◼   ► and you had said to us, I could swear that it was John

00:41:34 ◼   ► that had said to us, there's this section off at the bottom

00:41:38 ◼   ► or left or right or wherever it was

00:41:39 ◼   ► that they never really explained what is this about?

00:41:42 ◼   ► And I swear we talked about this at some point on some show.

00:41:46 ◼   ► - We did, but it wasn't like I discovered it.

00:41:48 ◼   ► Everyone was talking about it.

00:41:49 ◼   ► In fact, on the very last episode,

00:41:51 ◼   ► I just mentioned casually offhand,

00:41:52 ◼   ► and of course there's the chip-to-chip interconnect.

00:41:54 ◼   ► So it becomes so accepted as like, you know,

00:41:56 ◼   ► accepted wisdom based on the shots

00:41:58 ◼   ► that there was some kind of interchip interconnect.

00:42:01 ◼   ► That was sort of an open secret, you know.

00:42:04 ◼   ► But yeah, we did talk about that

00:42:06 ◼   ► back when the original diagrams came out,

00:42:07 ◼   ► that we still don't have the mystery solved

00:42:09 ◼   ► of why the execution units were repeated

00:42:10 ◼   ► and whether they were trying to hide the internet

00:42:12 ◼   ► or whether they just have redundant stuff.

00:42:14 ◼   ► We don't know all the answers, but anyway,

00:42:15 ◼   ► this is not a shock.

00:42:16 ◼   ► What they actually did was not a shock.

00:42:17 ◼   ► They have two M1 maxes and what do they call the thing?

00:42:19 ◼   ► Ultra fusion.

00:42:21 ◼   ► - And it's a die to die interconnect.

00:42:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, I feel like they've used the word fusion

00:42:25 ◼   ► like one too many times.

00:42:27 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, worse have stopped having all meaning

00:42:29 ◼   ► when the max is not the biggest chip.

00:42:31 ◼   ► - It's Maximilian, it's just his name.

00:42:34 ◼   ► - All right, so Sroushi says,

00:42:35 ◼   ► "The ultra fusion architecture uses a silicon interposer

00:42:38 ◼   ► that has twice the connection density of any technology available. It connects over 10,000

00:42:43 ◼   ► signals and provides an enormous 2.5 terabytes per second of low latency interprocessor bandwidth

00:42:50 ◼   ► between the two dies using very little power. That's more than four times the bandwidth of

00:42:54 ◼   ► the leading multi-chip connector technology. The result is an SoC with blazing performance due to

00:42:59 ◼   ► low latency, massive bandwidth, and incredible power efficiency. And thanks to the magic of

00:43:03 ◼   ► of the UltraFusion architecture, it behaves like a single chip to software and preserves

00:43:09 ◼   ► the benefits of unified memory.

00:43:11 ◼   ► This is cool stuff.

00:43:12 ◼   ► It really, really is.

00:43:13 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the big advantage, in particular for the GPU stuff, because typically like

00:43:17 ◼   ► dual GPU things, like the games would have to be aware of it or whatever.

00:43:20 ◼   ► So even though this is, it's two M1 Maxes shoved together, they're shoved together and

00:43:26 ◼   ► sort of connected in such a way that you can just think of it as one giant chip.

00:43:30 ◼   ► There's no way that you could economically make a jade 4c die and apparently making a jade 2c die is also not particularly economical

00:43:36 ◼   ► So they made them separate and they just take the good ones and they stick them together

00:43:39 ◼   ► With this interconnecting technology and I believe we had someone write in

00:43:42 ◼   ► With I think was the first time you know

00:43:44 ◼   ► Whatever is six months eight months ago the first time I saw the word silicon interposer

00:43:48 ◼   ► And here it is coming back up again

00:43:50 ◼   ► Because we were discussing like how you could when we talk about city of chips how you can connect all this stuff together

00:43:55 ◼   ► together. If you have them as separate dies, how do you get them into one package so that

00:44:00 ◼   ► they talk to each other in a high-efficiency way? This kind of technology was one of the

00:44:04 ◼   ► options, so lo and behold, here it is. This is things that people don't need to know about,

00:44:09 ◼   ► but it just goes to show that Apple is not immune from the economics of making silicon

00:44:12 ◼   ► chips. They have just found very clever ways to maximize performance while not breaking

00:44:18 ◼   ► the bank.

00:44:19 ◼   ► Yep. So the M1 Ultra can have up to 128 gigs of unified memory, a 20 core CPU with 16 high

00:44:27 ◼   ► performance and 4 high efficiency cores, a 64 core GPU, a 32 core neural engine, 800

00:44:36 ◼   ► gigs a second of memory bandwidth, which according to Apple is 10 times the latest PC desktop

00:44:40 ◼   ► chip. This thing sounds like it is going to scream. And as the owner of a mid-range M1

00:44:47 ◼   ► I can tell you I don't exactly long for power today. I cannot fathom what this is gonna be like

00:44:53 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a j2c die here. It is all the specs are the same

00:44:57 ◼   ► We'll get to the more interesting parts of the again the economics of this product

00:45:01 ◼   ► But if you get one where all the parts work you get 2x the parts you're getting one max

00:45:07 ◼   ► and and the GPUs more or less scale linearly like you would expect and the multi core scares scales according to your workloads and

00:45:15 ◼   ► You know we're continuing along on track despite the fact that Apple essentially totally derailed the train at the start of this by saying this

00:45:21 ◼   ► Is the last m1 chip and we don't know what that means?

00:45:23 ◼   ► Indeed so then we had a testimonial which normally I wouldn't call out

00:45:28 ◼   ► But I did enjoy that it was all women during that testimonial and this was this was recorded released

00:45:33 ◼   ► I should say on International Women's Day, so that's pretty cool, and then speaking of women we had a friend of other shows

00:45:43 ◼   ► - Well, hold on.

00:45:44 ◼   ► Colleen was the product manager at the Mac studio.

00:45:46 ◼   ► She's a friend of ours.

00:45:48 ◼   ► That's it.

00:45:48 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:45:49 ◼   ► I'll declare that right now.

00:45:50 ◼   ► Never met her, never talked to her.

00:45:51 ◼   ► She's a friend of ours.

00:45:52 ◼   ► - You know, if only there was an episode

00:45:53 ◼   ► where we discussed who is and is not a friend,

00:45:56 ◼   ► but I guess she is a friend of ours,

00:45:58 ◼   ► whether or not we are a friend of hers,

00:45:59 ◼   ► or maybe, do I get that backwards?

00:46:00 ◼   ► You know what I'm saying.

00:46:01 ◼   ► One way or the other.

00:46:02 ◼   ► It's a single--

00:46:03 ◼   ► - Is this like a mob thing?

00:46:04 ◼   ► Like what?

00:46:05 ◼   ► - It's a linked list.

00:46:06 ◼   ► - It's a linked list.

00:46:07 ◼   ► - Single linked list, not a double linked list.

00:46:08 ◼   ► - Not a double linked list.

00:46:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway, moving on.

00:46:12 ◼   ► So Colleen Novielli introduces the Max Studio.

00:46:14 ◼   ► There were some rumblings in the days leading up

00:46:16 ◼   ► to the event that Studio was going to play a role in this

00:46:20 ◼   ► and there was going to be a product or products announced.

00:46:23 ◼   ► Honestly, I don't even care about the Max Studio.

00:46:24 ◼   ► Can we talk about the next thing they talked about?

00:46:25 ◼   ► - Wait, we'll get there, we'll get there.

00:46:27 ◼   ► - I'm kidding, kidding.

00:46:28 ◼   ► - Let me start on the Max Studio.

00:46:29 ◼   ► First off, I want to say that it's a shame

00:46:31 ◼   ► that we once again just missed the last minute rumors.

00:46:33 ◼   ► But I mean, it's hard to pick the right day

00:46:35 ◼   ► for the new podcast.

00:46:36 ◼   ► I think we still have the right one

00:46:37 ◼   ► 'cause we tend to go after events.

00:46:38 ◼   ► But it seems like whenever there's gonna be an event,

00:46:41 ◼   ► we record an episode,

00:46:42 ◼   ► and then the late-breaking rumors come out,

00:46:44 ◼   ► and all the late-breaking rumors are like,

00:46:45 ◼   ► "Studio, studio, studio!"

00:46:46 ◼   ► So if you listen to the last episode,

00:46:50 ◼   ► you'd be like, "Wow, these guys got things totally wrong."

00:46:51 ◼   ► But the thing is, by the time the event came,

00:46:54 ◼   ► if you had read the rumors, a lot of the stuff leaked out.

00:46:57 ◼   ► And obviously, we've been talking about this for over a year.

00:46:59 ◼   ► Like the rumor, I think it was also from Germin,

00:47:01 ◼   ► the quote-unquote half-size Mac Pro.

00:47:03 ◼   ► And then eventually, in the week leading up to it,

00:47:05 ◼   ► we got the tall Mac Mini.

00:47:07 ◼   ► They're gonna do a tall Mac Mini,

00:47:08 ◼   ► is the tall Mac Mini the same thing

00:47:10 ◼   ► as the half-size Mac Pro?

00:47:12 ◼   ► All sorts of late-breaking stuff.

00:47:14 ◼   ► All extremely accurate, and before we start talking

00:47:18 ◼   ► about the reality of this machine,

00:47:19 ◼   ► I just wanna say that I think a tall Mac Mini

00:47:23 ◼   ► is not attractive.

00:47:25 ◼   ► - No, it is not. - I'm sorry.

00:47:26 ◼   ► I'm sorry, Mac Studio.

00:47:28 ◼   ► - It is not. - I agree.

00:47:30 ◼   ► When they were doing that video

00:47:31 ◼   ► where they were showing it in everyone's workspaces

00:47:33 ◼   ► right after the introduction of it,

00:47:35 ◼   ► I think it kind of looks bad sitting under a monitor

00:47:38 ◼   ► on your desk. - It's not great.

00:47:40 ◼   ► It's not great.

00:47:41 ◼   ► - And I am so happy that this computer is what it is

00:47:44 ◼   ► in so many other ways, but I do agree it is not attractive.

00:47:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, and again, I'm not slamming it.

00:47:51 ◼   ► I'm saying this is not a beauty contest.

00:47:52 ◼   ► Like Marco was saying, I don't actually care

00:47:55 ◼   ► that you've made the most beautiful object.

00:47:56 ◼   ► I care what's inside.

00:47:57 ◼   ► It's what's inside that counts

00:47:59 ◼   ► and also the ports to get to it.

00:48:01 ◼   ► Both of those things, just like people.

00:48:03 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:48:05 ◼   ► All right, Marlon will appreciate that one, okay.

00:48:08 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:48:11 ◼   ► But I really do think that this,

00:48:14 ◼   ► that there is certain something missing

00:48:17 ◼   ► from the design of this product.

00:48:18 ◼   ► Now part of it, granted, part of it is because

00:48:20 ◼   ► the Mac Mini has been a product for so long

00:48:22 ◼   ► and we've become so accustomed to it,

00:48:23 ◼   ► but to that I will say the Mac Mini has gone through

00:48:26 ◼   ► many iterations of its rounded rectangle extrusion form

00:48:29 ◼   ► and almost all the iterations have looked

00:48:31 ◼   ► progressively nicer.

00:48:33 ◼   ► And maybe it's because they've gotten lower and wider,

00:48:35 ◼   ► like the sports car thing, you make a car lower and wider,

00:48:37 ◼   ► people find it more attractive, right?

00:48:39 ◼   ► So the Mac Mini has gotten lower and wider,

00:48:41 ◼   ► and I think it's looked cooler.

00:48:42 ◼   ► And this reversed that trend,

00:48:43 ◼   ► by taking it lower and wider and saying,

00:48:44 ◼   ► "Now you are a top hat!"

00:48:46 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:48:48 ◼   ► It's just like, there's no,

00:48:50 ◼   ► and I know they pointed out like,

00:48:52 ◼   ► that it's made of one thing of aluminum,

00:48:53 ◼   ► I'm sure it's gonna be solid as a bank vault,

00:48:55 ◼   ► I'm sure it's going to fulfill its function well,

00:48:57 ◼   ► like I'm not saying this is a bad computer design.

00:49:00 ◼   ► And I'm not just saying that my Mac Pro is prettier,

00:49:03 ◼   ► although it absolutely is,

00:49:05 ◼   ► for a bazillion times the price and half the speed.

00:49:06 ◼   ► But anyway.

00:49:07 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:49:08 ◼   ► - Don't forget the power consumption.

00:49:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:49:11 ◼   ► This is not a particularly attractive computer

00:49:13 ◼   ► and I kind of wish that they had made it a little bit nice.

00:49:18 ◼   ► That's it, I don't wanna slam it too much.

00:49:20 ◼   ► It's just my personal opinion.

00:49:22 ◼   ► I think it gets the job done.

00:49:23 ◼   ► And the thing is, it is small, it is not big,

00:49:24 ◼   ► it's not gonna dominate your desk.

00:49:26 ◼   ► So I think it's fine.

00:49:27 ◼   ► - No, I completely agree with you.

00:49:28 ◼   ► and I feel like part of the problem I have with it

00:49:31 ◼   ► is the front of it has so much just dead space on it.

00:49:34 ◼   ► As tacky as I would normally find this to be,

00:49:37 ◼   ► I almost wonder if, what do you call,

00:49:39 ◼   ► is it embossed that's on the bottom of these laptops,

00:49:41 ◼   ► the new laptops where--

00:49:42 ◼   ► - No, no, no, no.

00:49:43 ◼   ► - No, just put like studio on the front of there, embossed.

00:49:46 ◼   ► Oh, come on, at least it would break up all that dead space.

00:49:49 ◼   ► - How about RGB lighting?

00:49:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, right, that makes everything better, so I hear.

00:49:52 ◼   ► - How about a series of really complicated holes

00:49:55 ◼   ► that people can't figure out how to make?

00:49:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, all the tryptophobia people really messes them up.

00:50:00 ◼   ► - Right, right, right.

00:50:00 ◼   ► - Everything's growing on you.

00:50:01 ◼   ► - I gotta say, when we started this episode

00:50:04 ◼   ► almost an hour ago, I did not expect

00:50:06 ◼   ► that by the midway point, maybe,

00:50:09 ◼   ► we would be wearing top hats and have coat tails

00:50:12 ◼   ► and be getting on airboats.

00:50:13 ◼   ► Like, this is a journey that I was not prepared for.

00:50:15 ◼   ► - The Mac studio has a five head.

00:50:18 ◼   ► - What? - A what?

00:50:19 ◼   ► - A five head, wasn't that a Seinfeld episode?

00:50:21 ◼   ► - Oh, I don't think so.

00:50:22 ◼   ► - It's like a forehead, but taller, it's a five head.

00:50:24 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:50:25 ◼   ► - This sounds like something that would be edited out,

00:50:27 ◼   ► like the cutting room floor of the Seinfeld writers room.

00:50:30 ◼   ► - I'm not making this up, five head is a thing.

00:50:32 ◼   ► - All right, well moving on, moving on, moving on.

00:50:34 ◼   ► So this is the Mac Studio.

00:50:37 ◼   ► I gotta say, I did not buy one of these,

00:50:39 ◼   ► and if this had come out before the 14-inch MacBook Pro,

00:50:44 ◼   ► which by the way, still freaking love,

00:50:48 ◼   ► I would have been really tempted by this,

00:50:50 ◼   ► even despite the relatively hefty price tag,

00:50:52 ◼   ► which we'll get to.

00:50:53 ◼   ► But I'm living a pretty good life right now and I don't want to mess with my system.

00:50:57 ◼   ► And honestly, I don't long for power right now. Remind me of this in like a year when they come

00:51:02 ◼   ► out with an M2 and I must have it. But sitting here now, I really don't long for power. And as

00:51:07 ◼   ► much as I am so genuinely excited about this machine in so many ways, they did exactly what

00:51:14 ◼   ► I/we want. And this is what you were saying earlier, Marco. They didn't do what they wanted,

00:51:19 ◼   ► largely, they did what I want and what you want and what we want and that is so exciting.

00:51:25 ◼   ► And this is the same thing we saw with the laptops. They were giving us our ports back.

00:51:29 ◼   ► They're giving us things that help us do our jobs. Imagine this, a bicycle for the mind that helps

00:51:34 ◼   ► you actually do your friggin job. Like how exciting is this? We're back and better than ever, baby.

00:51:40 ◼   ► So I did not buy one of these. Marco, how many have you bought?

00:51:44 ◼   ► Just last week, I said I have been very happy

00:51:48 ◼   ► with my desktop laptop and separate laptop situation.

00:51:51 ◼   ► Although I have to format and pave the laptop laptop

00:51:55 ◼   ► because I got some weird stuff going on.

00:51:57 ◼   ► Like it doesn't get, I don't know, sidetrack.

00:52:00 ◼   ► It's like I have to reboot it for FaceTime calls

00:52:03 ◼   ► to come in on it.

00:52:04 ◼   ► - Oh cool. - Like it doesn't get alerted.

00:52:06 ◼   ► It's as if it's in Do Not Disturb but it isn't.

00:52:08 ◼   ► Anyway, I don't know what that's about.

00:52:10 ◼   ► So I got a format and reinstall.

00:52:12 ◼   ► There's a couple other weird things

00:52:13 ◼   ► about that installation, but I don't know how it happened.

00:52:15 ◼   ► It was clean.

00:52:16 ◼   ► Anyway, so, but I was just saying last week

00:52:19 ◼   ► how my desktop laptop, I was super happy with this setup.

00:52:24 ◼   ► I too have chosen not to buy the Mac Studio right now.

00:52:27 ◼   ► (gasps)

00:52:29 ◼   ► - I'm stunned.

00:52:30 ◼   ► - Well, because here's, you know, in a world,

00:52:33 ◼   ► in a world where the laptops were

00:52:37 ◼   ► what they were a few years ago.

00:52:38 ◼   ► Hot, compromised, loud, you know,

00:52:42 ◼   ► Desktops could outperform them pretty well

00:52:44 ◼   ► for the kind of tasks I was doing.

00:52:47 ◼   ► The laptops of a few years ago sucked.

00:52:49 ◼   ► The laptops now don't, they're really great.

00:52:53 ◼   ► And what you were just saying a few minutes ago,

00:52:54 ◼   ► how you're not really hurting for performance,

00:52:56 ◼   ► most of the time I'm not either.

00:52:58 ◼   ► And in most of the ways that I would be hurting

00:53:00 ◼   ► for performance, I'm not even sure how much more

00:53:04 ◼   ► of the same CPU cores would help at this point,

00:53:06 ◼   ► because I'm usually not waiting on all my cores

00:53:09 ◼   ► to do something anymore.

00:53:10 ◼   ► Like the M1 Max is awesome.

00:53:13 ◼   ► Like I really am not hurting for performance

00:53:16 ◼   ► most of the time.

00:53:17 ◼   ► And again, and I think if I were to buy

00:53:19 ◼   ► like the M1 Ultra Max Studio,

00:53:22 ◼   ► I think it would drop my build times by maybe 30% at most.

00:53:27 ◼   ► But they're already so short that I'm not sure

00:53:29 ◼   ► if that's worth the downside of not having it

00:53:32 ◼   ► be a laptop anymore.

00:53:33 ◼   ► And because the MacBook Pro seems to suffer

00:53:37 ◼   ► from almost none of the shortcomings

00:53:40 ◼   ► that laptops used to suffer from,

00:53:41 ◼   ► like I would actually be losing functionality

00:53:44 ◼   ► by going to a desktop right now

00:53:46 ◼   ► because I do still go back and forth

00:53:48 ◼   ► between a couple of places on a regular basis.

00:53:50 ◼   ► I do still very occasionally travel,

00:53:53 ◼   ► although I haven't been in an airplane

00:53:54 ◼   ► in a couple of years.

00:53:55 ◼   ► But it is really nice to be able to just take my laptop,

00:54:00 ◼   ► my desktop laptop with me and to have all my files

00:54:04 ◼   ► as a desktop when I do travel.

00:54:06 ◼   ► But then, you know, but to not be constantly unplugging it

00:54:09 ◼   ► and plugging it as my only portable thing.

00:54:11 ◼   ► Anyway, so I really do love the desktop laptop lifestyle.

00:54:16 ◼   ► And the other factor that will play into this

00:54:19 ◼   ► significantly in the latter part of the show

00:54:22 ◼   ► is that I already have the XDR.

00:54:24 ◼   ► I kind of already made this ridiculous setup,

00:54:28 ◼   ► and I love it.

00:54:29 ◼   ► And anything I would change about it

00:54:31 ◼   ► with what's available right now,

00:54:33 ◼   ► I think would make it worse in some way that I care about.

00:54:37 ◼   ► without making it better enough

00:54:39 ◼   ► to make the change worthwhile.

00:54:41 ◼   ► Now that being said, if I was still on an Intel Mac

00:54:45 ◼   ► and I was looking to get a new desktop setup,

00:54:48 ◼   ► maybe I'd make a different decision.

00:54:50 ◼   ► - Just hypothetically.

00:54:51 ◼   ► - Right.

00:54:53 ◼   ► Suppose I had bought a very, very large--

00:54:56 ◼   ► - Very, very expensive. - Very large, very expensive,

00:54:59 ◼   ► costs more than my first car, Mac Pro.

00:55:03 ◼   ► - Just hypothetically.

00:55:05 ◼   ► - Just hypothetically.

00:55:06 ◼   ► this would be a really compelling option.

00:55:09 ◼   ► Especially if I wasn't really using

00:55:13 ◼   ► what makes the Mac Pro currently differentiated,

00:55:16 ◼   ► like card slots.

00:55:19 ◼   ► I think this would be very compelling.

00:55:22 ◼   ► But right now my personal needs

00:55:24 ◼   ► don't really have a role for this.

00:55:26 ◼   ► But that being said, I am so happy this exists.

00:55:30 ◼   ► - Yup. - And because,

00:55:31 ◼   ► I've seen a number of reactions to this.

00:55:34 ◼   ► kind of themes to the reactions.

00:55:37 ◼   ► Some of the themes immediately,

00:55:39 ◼   ► about half the people who I saw react

00:55:42 ◼   ► to the price of the Max Studio,

00:55:43 ◼   ► we'll talk about the monitor later,

00:55:44 ◼   ► but the price of the Max Studio,

00:55:46 ◼   ► about half the people were like, yeah, that's about right.

00:55:49 ◼   ► And the other half were like, oh my God,

00:55:52 ◼   ► $4,000 for the big one, and then,

00:55:56 ◼   ► and you know, people even freaking out

00:55:57 ◼   ► about $2,000 for the base model,

00:55:59 ◼   ► and it's like, you know, we've been waiting

00:56:02 ◼   ► for a reasonably priced pro level performance

00:56:06 ◼   ► Mac desktop for a long time.

00:56:08 ◼   ► The last time a reasonably priced pro level

00:56:12 ◼   ► performance Mac desktop existed was, I believe,

00:56:16 ◼   ► the 2006 Mac Pro where there was a configuration

00:56:21 ◼   ► you could get for like 1800 or $2000.

00:56:24 ◼   ► And that was more than a decade ago.

00:56:27 ◼   ► And so to have this come out and be that level

00:56:31 ◼   ► performance, the base model I'm talking about first, that level of performance with just

00:56:35 ◼   ► the M1 Macs in a very port-covered, well-cooled desktop for $2,000 in today's dollars, that's

00:56:45 ◼   ► pretty good. Now I understand that PC hardware is cheaper. Yeah, you get what you pay for

00:56:51 ◼   ► right now. PC hardware right now sucks, and Mac hardware right now is really good. So,

00:56:57 ◼   ► You know, good for you on your PC.

00:56:59 ◼   ► By the way, I own PCs.

00:57:00 ◼   ► Actually, I just bought, I had to replace Adam's desktop,

00:57:03 ◼   ► or Adam's gaming laptop.

00:57:04 ◼   ► It's really having problems now.

00:57:06 ◼   ► And I'm pretty sure blue screening

00:57:08 ◼   ► when I plug in an HDMI cable

00:57:09 ◼   ► is probably not a software problem.

00:57:12 ◼   ► But anyway, so that's sort of the day.

00:57:14 ◼   ► But so I say this as a PC owner.

00:57:16 ◼   ► We now own four PCs.

00:57:19 ◼   ► - Oh my gosh.

00:57:20 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:57:21 ◼   ► - And as a multi Mac owner, obviously over time,

00:57:25 ◼   ► PC hardware, you're getting what you pay for

00:57:28 ◼   ► with a lot of that stuff or less.

00:57:30 ◼   ► And this hardware, just the base model alone here,

00:57:35 ◼   ► the base model of $2,000 for an M1 Max,

00:57:38 ◼   ► 32 gigs of RAM, 512 gig SSD, that's an awesome machine

00:57:43 ◼   ► for what is a very reasonable price for what it is.

00:57:47 ◼   ► And if you are balking at that wanting like,

00:57:51 ◼   ► I want the XMac, an expendable tower

00:57:53 ◼   ► made of component parts,

00:57:54 ◼   ► Look, that doesn't exist, and this shows you

00:57:56 ◼   ► that will never exist, but the role that we all

00:57:59 ◼   ► always wanted the XMac to fill, to Apple was mid-priced,

00:58:04 ◼   ► but to many of us was high-priced.

00:58:07 ◼   ► I didn't have a Mac Pro until 2008,

00:58:08 ◼   ► 'cause in 2006, I couldn't afford one yet.

00:58:11 ◼   ► It was $2,000.

00:58:13 ◼   ► I couldn't afford $2,000 in 2006.

00:58:15 ◼   ► And I was so upset in 2008 when it came out,

00:58:18 ◼   ► when the next one came out and it was like 2,800

00:58:21 ◼   ► for the configuration that was reasonable.

00:58:22 ◼   ► But now it's 12 years later, 14, whatever it is,

00:58:27 ◼   ► I can't do math, 14 years later,

00:58:29 ◼   ► to be $2,000 for what this base model offers,

00:58:33 ◼   ► and then to have some headroom on that,

00:58:36 ◼   ► that if you want or need more than that,

00:58:39 ◼   ► you can spec it up.

00:58:41 ◼   ► Four grand for the highest CPU,

00:58:45 ◼   ► or almost highest CPU, I guess there's the extra GPU model

00:58:48 ◼   ► for an extra thousand bucks, whatever,

00:58:49 ◼   ► but most people don't need that.

00:58:51 ◼   ► Four grand for the highest CPU option basically.

00:58:55 ◼   ► 64 gigs RAM, one terabyte SSD, that's really good.

00:59:00 ◼   ► If I look back at how I've configured like my iMacs

00:59:04 ◼   ► over the years, where you know,

00:59:06 ◼   ► back when I was using those as my desktops,

00:59:08 ◼   ► configuring an iMac really high to this level

00:59:11 ◼   ► of performance or to these capacities

00:59:14 ◼   ► is usually more than this.

00:59:16 ◼   ► And yes, this doesn't have a screen,

00:59:18 ◼   ► we'll get to that in a few minutes.

00:59:20 ◼   ► But even when you factor in the price

00:59:22 ◼   ► of the future discussed screen,

00:59:24 ◼   ► this is actually pretty much in line

00:59:27 ◼   ► with where things have been for quite some time

00:59:30 ◼   ► once you consider what you're actually getting.

00:59:32 ◼   ► Again, compare spec for spec and consider inflation.

00:59:36 ◼   ► I think these are very, very well positioned.

00:59:41 ◼   ► I think what you're getting for the price is very good

00:59:44 ◼   ► and it is right in line with what we would expect

00:59:48 ◼   ► Apple to charge for such a thing without being super

00:59:53 ◼   ► outrageous on that scale. So I thumbs up for me. I'm not buying

00:59:57 ◼   ► one yet. But thumbs up for me regardless.

00:59:59 ◼   ► You know, I have a I have a couple of points here. First of

01:00:01 ◼   ► all, I would like to publicly acknowledge your restraints

01:00:04 ◼   ► because this is a multi day only been a couple of days for Marco

01:00:10 ◼   ► that's I mean, Marco is usually measured in minutes, not days.

01:00:13 ◼   ► I mean, this is this thing where he has kind of like a delay

01:00:16 ◼   ► period where he thinks about it and tries not to give in but we'll see how long it lasts.

01:00:19 ◼   ► When Kramer walks in, I'm out. You know, it's like, exactly.

01:00:23 ◼   ► Well, and the other thing, the other thing I wanted to point out is I, you've changed,

01:00:27 ◼   ► you've introduced a little bit of new thought technology for me. So, um, I, one of the things

01:00:32 ◼   ► that the Mac studio and the, and I'm jumping ahead ever so slightly the apparent death of the 27 inch

01:00:39 ◼   ► iMac is that it leaves a hole in the lineup. And I think that hole is there, but it's not quite as

01:00:45 ◼   ► big or wide, if you will, as I thought it was because I'm thinking back to my Mac Pro,

01:00:50 ◼   ► which I loved so much. I really did. But I believe, and this was somewhat my own choice

01:00:54 ◼   ► because of the spec I bought. But I think I paid like seventy five hundred dollars for

01:00:58 ◼   ► that thing or something like that. Whatever the number was, it was ridiculous. And for

01:01:03 ◼   ► the Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra and the I don't know, this thing I'm excited to talk

01:01:09 ◼   ► about in a minute, the studio display, you know, you're looking at what? A little less

01:01:14 ◼   ► than $6,000. I mean, I'm not trying to say the $6,000 isn't a crap ton of money.

01:01:18 ◼   ► It absolutely is a crap ton of money, but this is not an unprecedented price point

01:01:25 ◼   ► for the performance that you're getting. And I think you're right, Marco. I didn't

01:01:28 ◼   ► really think of it that way, but this is, this is, you know, the, the computing, the

01:01:32 ◼   ► compute component of an iMac Pro in spirit, if you look at it in the right

01:01:37 ◼   ► light. Yeah, and, and, yeah, I mean, you know, look back, you know, the iMac Pros that

01:01:41 ◼   ► I've bought over the years, usually they cost so much

01:01:43 ◼   ► I wouldn't even want to discuss it in public.

01:01:46 ◼   ► I've usually, well over $5,000 in almost every case.

01:01:51 ◼   ► I think my most expensive might have been like 6,800

01:01:54 ◼   ► or something when I got the four terabyte SSD

01:01:56 ◼   ► back when that was fairly new.

01:01:58 ◼   ► That's what, you get a lot for that.

01:01:59 ◼   ► But going back to this, again we'll talk about the display.

01:02:03 ◼   ► The display being, in my opinion, only,

01:02:06 ◼   ► and we'll get to that too, $1,700 or whatever,

01:02:09 ◼   ► 1600, 700, whatever it is.

01:02:10 ◼   ► You know, the price of the M1 Max, not the super big CPU,

01:02:16 ◼   ► so base model Max Studio plus Max Studio Display,

01:02:20 ◼   ► you're looking at like $3,700.

01:02:22 ◼   ► That's actually really not bad when you look at the price

01:02:27 ◼   ► of what a 27-inch iMac spec to this level actually cost.

01:02:31 ◼   ► - Well, and the iMac Pro started at five grand, didn't it?

01:02:34 ◼   ► Or am I making that up? - Yep.

01:02:36 ◼   ► - But it came in space gray, I mean, let's be fair.

01:02:37 ◼   ► - Well, that is actually a genuine point.

01:02:39 ◼   ► - That makes it tremendously faster.

01:02:41 ◼   ► - Well, it makes it better looking.

01:02:42 ◼   ► - Should have had racing stripes

01:02:43 ◼   ► or maybe a little fan on the back.

01:02:45 ◼   ► - All right, easy big fella, easy.

01:02:46 ◼   ► - You two have made a mockery of my show notes here.

01:02:48 ◼   ► Let me try to get this back on track.

01:02:50 ◼   ► - Sorry, dad.

01:02:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, I was gonna say in the pre-flight,

01:02:53 ◼   ► I meant to say, but I totally forgot in the pre-flight

01:02:55 ◼   ► that we should talk about what we did and didn't buy

01:02:57 ◼   ► and say that to the end, but you two didn't do that,

01:02:58 ◼   ► but I'm going to do that.

01:02:59 ◼   ► So you'll have to wait till the end

01:03:00 ◼   ► to hear what's going on over here in terms of purchases.

01:03:04 ◼   ► So one tidbit about the Mac Studio,

01:03:07 ◼   ► If you get it with the M1 Ultra, it's two pounds heavier

01:03:10 ◼   ► because they use a copper heat sink instead of aluminum.

01:03:12 ◼   ► I like the fact that the Verge article,

01:03:13 ◼   ► they got a quote from Apple about this,

01:03:16 ◼   ► giving the explanation.

01:03:17 ◼   ► That's Apple's explanation, by the way,

01:03:19 ◼   ► that it has a copper heat sink.

01:03:20 ◼   ► - That's fantastic.

01:03:21 ◼   ► I was wondering, if they just gave you half of a heat sink,

01:03:24 ◼   ► you got the left half?

01:03:26 ◼   ► - Right.

01:03:27 ◼   ► Remember, well, yeah.

01:03:29 ◼   ► We'll see when they crack these things open,

01:03:32 ◼   ► but whoever authored the Verge article,

01:03:35 ◼   ► they did the work, they did the due diligence.

01:03:36 ◼   ► They got the quote from Apple that said it's because of a larger copper heat sink, whatever.

01:03:42 ◼   ► And then they said, "At room temperature," this is the Verge article, "At room temperature,

01:03:46 ◼   ► copper is 8.96 grams per cubic centimeter, whereas aluminum is 2.70 grams.

01:03:49 ◼   ► That means that the design of the heat sink is exactly the same.

01:03:51 ◼   ► The copper version would be over three times heavier than the aluminum one."

01:03:55 ◼   ► Yay!

01:03:56 ◼   ► Yay, physics and chemistry.

01:03:57 ◼   ► You make mine with the tungsten heat sink.

01:03:59 ◼   ► I want to see how that feels.

01:04:01 ◼   ► So that's cool.

01:04:02 ◼   ► Just to get to what this machine actually has on it, it's got on the back of it so much,

01:04:06 ◼   ► just so many ports, just the best, all the ports.

01:04:09 ◼   ► I'm so happy.

01:04:10 ◼   ► And they're going from left to right and panning across them and, sorry not panning, sorry,

01:04:13 ◼   ► sorry Todd, when they were doing a tracking shot going across the ports in the back.

01:04:19 ◼   ► It's got four Thunderbolt ports, right?

01:04:21 ◼   ► Wait, what's the difference?

01:04:22 ◼   ► Is panning like your feet are still but the camera moves, whereas tracking your feet move?

01:04:26 ◼   ► Panning is you have the camera on a tripod and you twist it on the tripod.

01:04:29 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:30 ◼   ► is you have the camera on a set of wheels and you move it in parallel with the, you

01:04:34 ◼   ► know. It's like moving versus strafing in a first-person shooter? Yeah, looking, looking,

01:04:38 ◼   ► looking versus strafing. Yeah, yeah. Moving forward and back, that's dollying, right?

01:04:42 ◼   ► And then tracking. I don't have the diagram in front of me, Casey, don't quiz me. I know,

01:04:45 ◼   ► I'm looking for it, I'm looking for it. Here it is, here it is. Alright, we'll put in the

01:04:47 ◼   ► show notes. I'm so sorry, Todd, I apologize on behalf of all of us. We are, we are all,

01:04:51 ◼   ► we are a mess. Send the joke one that has the, the, what is that, the director's version,

01:04:56 ◼   ► and other directors are the--

01:04:59 ◼   ► - Camera movement guide versus client camera movement guide.

01:05:02 ◼   ► - There you go, client.

01:05:03 ◼   ► That wasn't director,

01:05:03 ◼   ► 'cause that would be the directors, no, these things,

01:05:05 ◼   ► but clients don't.

01:05:05 ◼   ► Anyway. - We're not getting sidetracked.

01:05:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, 10 gig ethernet,

01:05:08 ◼   ► that shows that it's a pro computer,

01:05:10 ◼   ► 'cause Apple's pro computers have 10 gig ethernet.

01:05:13 ◼   ► To USB-A, yay!

01:05:15 ◼   ► I know people, who cares?

01:05:16 ◼   ► It's USB-A or whatever,

01:05:17 ◼   ► but that shows that they could have left those out.

01:05:19 ◼   ► It's weird, they're not super pro.

01:05:21 ◼   ► Johnny Ive would have left them out,

01:05:23 ◼   ► but you've got room on the back of the computer.

01:05:24 ◼   ► USB-A doesn't take that much bandwidth.

01:05:26 ◼   ► You got these monster chips in there,

01:05:28 ◼   ► just put some USB-A ports and you know what?

01:05:30 ◼   ► It's got them, love it.

01:05:31 ◼   ► Two of them, not just one.

01:05:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, we still use them.

01:05:34 ◼   ► Every desktop that's out there,

01:05:37 ◼   ► you probably have at least one thing

01:05:38 ◼   ► you're gonna plug into USB-A.

01:05:39 ◼   ► For me, I plugged my keyboard dongle into that.

01:05:41 ◼   ► Everyone has stuff like that.

01:05:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, and again, you've got room on the back,

01:05:45 ◼   ► it's not a big computer, it's not huge,

01:05:47 ◼   ► it's mini-ish, but you got it there, so put it in.

01:05:50 ◼   ► It's got HDMI for the same reason.

01:05:52 ◼   ► Who wants HDMI?

01:05:53 ◼   ► Is it never gonna have a fancy monitor?

01:05:54 ◼   ► No, maybe you have an HDMI monitor, it's fine.

01:05:56 ◼   ► Put the port there.

01:05:57 ◼   ► - Or what if you wanna run it headless for some reason

01:05:59 ◼   ► and you need one of those silly little dongles

01:06:01 ◼   ► like I have on my Mac Mini.

01:06:02 ◼   ► - The pro audio jack for high impedance headphones, right?

01:06:07 ◼   ► 'Cause make the good version of everything.

01:06:09 ◼   ► And then it's got ports on the front,

01:06:11 ◼   ► which no Mac Mini has ever had before

01:06:12 ◼   ► because apparently people didn't sit

01:06:15 ◼   ► in front of their Mac Minis.

01:06:16 ◼   ► Let's not start this again.

01:06:18 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:06:19 ◼   ► It says ports in the front.

01:06:21 ◼   ► It's got two USB-C, but if you get the Ultra,

01:06:24 ◼   ► those front ports become Thunderbolt 4

01:06:25 ◼   ► because there's just so many fricking Thunderbolt

01:06:28 ◼   ► controllers inside the system on chips.

01:06:31 ◼   ► The front ones can be Thunderbolt as well.

01:06:33 ◼   ► So that's six Thunderbolt four ports on the Ultra, I guess.

01:06:36 ◼   ► That's what you get when you throw two Maxes in there,

01:06:39 ◼   ► I guess.

01:06:40 ◼   ► And then SD card.

01:06:41 ◼   ► The only real disappointment in terms of the slots

01:06:43 ◼   ► is the SD card, I think, is still not one of the faster

01:06:46 ◼   ► SD card standard things.

01:06:48 ◼   ► Again, it's an obvious update,

01:06:49 ◼   ► just like we talked about in the MacBook Pros.

01:06:51 ◼   ► Maybe on a $4,000 computer, put in a better card reader,

01:06:54 ◼   ► but you know, whatever, you can always attach one to it,

01:06:56 ◼   ► attach one to one of the USB-8 ports maybe,

01:06:58 ◼   ► if it's fast enough.

01:06:59 ◼   ► But yeah, that's all great,

01:07:02 ◼   ► and they brag about what you can connect it to.

01:07:04 ◼   ► You can connect four Pro Display XDRs to it, plus a 4K TV.

01:07:08 ◼   ► It's kind of interesting that you can't connect

01:07:09 ◼   ► six Pro Display XDRs,

01:07:11 ◼   ► 'cause it's got six Thunderbolt 4 ports,

01:07:13 ◼   ► but I guess they run out of bandwidth eventually,

01:07:14 ◼   ► but no one's gonna have that set up,

01:07:16 ◼   ► 'cause it's ridiculous.

01:07:17 ◼   ► - Well, and also, they did mention,

01:07:19 ◼   ► you breezed by it a second ago,

01:07:20 ◼   ► that the front ports are not Thunderbolt.

01:07:24 ◼   ► They're only USB, only USB 3 if you have the M1 Max

01:07:28 ◼   ► instead of the M1 Ultra, because I guess you need

01:07:30 ◼   ► the additional Thunderbolt controllers on the M1 Ultra

01:07:32 ◼   ► to make them Thunderbolt.

01:07:33 ◼   ► So maybe they're just like, you know, not worth, you know,

01:07:36 ◼   ► I wonder if maybe the M1 Ultra versions

01:07:40 ◼   ► do actually support six displays,

01:07:42 ◼   ► and they just didn't wanna say that to avoid confusion?

01:07:45 ◼   ► I don't know, maybe not.

01:07:45 ◼   ► - It'd be weird having monitors connected

01:07:47 ◼   ► to the front of your computer, though.

01:07:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, that would be weird.

01:07:50 ◼   ► I mean, you just rotate it sideways

01:07:51 ◼   ► then everything's coming out of the side.

01:07:52 ◼   ► It's very symmetrical.

01:07:53 ◼   ► And so they did a bunch of bragging about performance.

01:07:56 ◼   ► I mean, the M1 Max is the M1 Max,

01:07:58 ◼   ► like it is what it is.

01:07:59 ◼   ► We already, they didn't say it was clocked higher

01:08:02 ◼   ► than it was in the MacBook Pro,

01:08:03 ◼   ► but conceivably it could be.

01:08:04 ◼   ► And you know, so this is a smallish computer,

01:08:07 ◼   ► but it is a five-headed and it is taller than Mac Mini.

01:08:10 ◼   ► I think a single M1 Max in there, even overclocked,

01:08:15 ◼   ► there's gonna be cooling despair.

01:08:16 ◼   ► Like they emphasize how quiet it is and so on and so forth,

01:08:19 ◼   ► but just remember an M1 Max fits in a laptop.

01:08:22 ◼   ► And now it's in a case that's not only bigger

01:08:24 ◼   ► than a laptop, but it's way bigger than a laptop.

01:08:27 ◼   ► There's so much room in there for the fans

01:08:29 ◼   ► and the blowers and the heat sinks.

01:08:30 ◼   ► I think if you get an M1 Max version of a Max Studio,

01:08:33 ◼   ► it will essentially be silent.

01:08:34 ◼   ► Like I don't see why it wouldn't be

01:08:36 ◼   ► because it is just over provisioned for cooling.

01:08:38 ◼   ► 'Cause it's gotta have in that same size,

01:08:40 ◼   ► in that same size case,

01:08:41 ◼   ► they have to be able to cool twice as much CPU heat

01:08:45 ◼   ► or system on a chip heat because the ultra is 2X that.

01:08:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, I would even say like the Ultra,

01:08:51 ◼   ► with its better heat sink,

01:08:53 ◼   ► might even be quieter under moderate loads.

01:08:56 ◼   ► Obviously, the Ultra will be able to go higher

01:08:58 ◼   ► and generate more heat,

01:09:00 ◼   ► so that the ceiling of how loud the Ultra can get

01:09:02 ◼   ► is probably higher than the ceiling of the Max,

01:09:04 ◼   ► but it might even be quieter.

01:09:06 ◼   ► I mean, but I just, I loved when they briefly showed

01:09:09 ◼   ► like the cutaway diagram of this case,

01:09:12 ◼   ► and they were showing the big blower fans,

01:09:14 ◼   ► and you could see like about half of the height of the case

01:09:18 ◼   ► is just those big fans. - Yep, more than half.

01:09:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's a huge proportion of the height

01:09:22 ◼   ► is just cooling, that's amazing.

01:09:24 ◼   ► - They do not wanna be painted into a thermal corner

01:09:27 ◼   ► ever, ever, ever again. (laughs)

01:09:29 ◼   ► - Speaking of thermal corners, though,

01:09:30 ◼   ► I feel like this case design, it's a little bit odd

01:09:33 ◼   ► in terms of, a lot of people are comparing it like,

01:09:36 ◼   ► oh, it's like the G4 Cube, oh no,

01:09:37 ◼   ► actually it's like the trash can,

01:09:39 ◼   ► but both of those two computers had a more straightforward

01:09:43 ◼   ► and sensible cooling strategy,

01:09:44 ◼   ► which was cold air in the bottom, hot air out the top.

01:09:48 ◼   ► This one does not do that.

01:09:49 ◼   ► There are no holes in the top of this computer.

01:09:50 ◼   ► It's like a Mac Mini up top there, right?

01:09:52 ◼   ► It's a single piece of aluminum, right?

01:09:53 ◼   ► So this does cool air from the bottom,

01:09:55 ◼   ► hot air out the back, which is not bad.

01:09:57 ◼   ► - I mean, at least you can't put a piece of paper on top

01:09:59 ◼   ► to make it shut down.

01:10:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, it's fine.

01:10:02 ◼   ► Like, I'm sure it's fine.

01:10:02 ◼   ► I'm not saying this is bad cooling,

01:10:03 ◼   ► but like part of the trashcan design,

01:10:06 ◼   ► it was just like totally embraced the idea.

01:10:07 ◼   ► Hot air rises, cool air comes in the bottom of this thing

01:10:09 ◼   ► and it vents out.

01:10:10 ◼   ► That's why it looks like a trashcan, right?

01:10:12 ◼   ► And so it was, and the Cube embraced it in a different way

01:10:16 ◼   ► by not having any fans using convection,

01:10:18 ◼   ► which maybe wasn't the best idea,

01:10:19 ◼   ► but still, it made sense.

01:10:21 ◼   ► And this one makes, like, the weird fan designs

01:10:24 ◼   ► that are in there are because they do want to do

01:10:26 ◼   ► sort of the right angle thing, you know, cool,

01:10:29 ◼   ► and they could have done what the Mac Pro does.

01:10:30 ◼   ► Cool air in the front, hot air out the back,

01:10:32 ◼   ► also very common, used in server racks all the time.

01:10:34 ◼   ► You get the hot aisle and the cool aisle,

01:10:36 ◼   ► just like the Mac DLT, right?

01:10:38 ◼   ► But they didn't do that either.

01:10:39 ◼   ► So it's cool. - Well done.

01:10:41 ◼   ► It's cool. I love the mech DLT. I know it's lots of styrofoam. It was a very wasteful product. I really liked it when I was a kid.

01:10:46 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:10:48 ◼   ► Cool air in the bottom, hot air out the back, and that seems like it's kind of to serve...

01:10:53 ◼   ► Well, it's practicality because then you can put things on top of this, although don't put any chocolate on top. I think it might melt.

01:10:59 ◼   ► You know, just harder to block the vents because the back's gonna have the cable so you can't push anything up against it.

01:11:06 ◼   ► You can't really block the bottom unless it's on a shag carpet or something.

01:11:08 ◼   ► But if they had done cool air in the front hot air out the back

01:11:11 ◼   ► It could have been more efficient cooling if they had done cool air in the bottom hot air up top

01:11:15 ◼   ► It would be more efficient in cooling

01:11:17 ◼   ► But the for whatever reason this is what they went with and again if it was aesthetically beautiful to my eyes

01:11:21 ◼   ► I'd be more willing to forgive it

01:11:22 ◼   ► But now I think it's homely and also it has a slightly awkward cooling thing that you know

01:11:26 ◼   ► It's probably not probably I can make difference again, especially with just an M1 max in there

01:11:29 ◼   ► It's gonna be so silent and to Marcos point if you provision it for it with twice the cooling for the M1 ultra

01:11:34 ◼   ► But then you don't stress the ultra that might even be quieter

01:11:37 ◼   ► So I don't I don't fear that these are going to be noisy machines

01:11:40 ◼   ► But it is interesting to note what they've done and also the stylistic choice to make very very tiny holes

01:11:45 ◼   ► Right it's kind of going is the opposite of the Mac Pro is a huge giant 3d holes

01:11:50 ◼   ► It's very very tiny holes lots and lots of it

01:11:52 ◼   ► They think it's like 2,000 of them or something which is interesting

01:11:55 ◼   ► But I you know cat hair dander dust like the smaller the holes the more it could potentially clog so

01:12:02 ◼   ► Fingers crossed that this cooling setup,

01:12:04 ◼   ► this slightly unorthodox cooling setup

01:12:07 ◼   ► doesn't cause any problems.

01:12:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, I was actually a little bit concerned

01:12:10 ◼   ► that because the intake is right up against

01:12:13 ◼   ► the desk surface and it has all these little tiny holes,

01:12:15 ◼   ► I do think dust down there is gonna be

01:12:17 ◼   ► a little bit of a thing,

01:12:19 ◼   ► but probably not enough to matter.

01:12:20 ◼   ► - Don't put it on a carpet, please.

01:12:21 ◼   ► - Well, yeah, obviously, or a cat.

01:12:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, and then they did the M1 Ultra benchmarks,

01:12:26 ◼   ► and of course, in the M1 Ultra benchmarks in the GPU,

01:12:29 ◼   ► it scales essentially linearly

01:12:30 ◼   ► because it's an embarrassingly parallel problem.

01:12:32 ◼   ► So you just take M1 max numbers and you multiply them by two

01:12:35 ◼   ► and that is real, that's not like a fake thing.

01:12:37 ◼   ► And CPUs, it'll scale with your load.

01:12:39 ◼   ► You've got twice as many of each kind of core.

01:12:41 ◼   ► And if you have a workload

01:12:43 ◼   ► that can actually parallelize across them,

01:12:45 ◼   ► it will take advantage of them.

01:12:45 ◼   ► If you don't, it absolutely will not.

01:12:47 ◼   ► So be aware of what your workloads are

01:12:50 ◼   ► and whether you can actually take advantage

01:12:51 ◼   ► of that number of cores.

01:12:53 ◼   ► And of course, because they've got the two of them there,

01:12:55 ◼   ► the bandwidth doubles as like what,

01:12:58 ◼   ► 800 gigs a second or something.

01:13:00 ◼   ► on the M1 Ultra instead of 400 on the Max

01:13:02 ◼   ► because it's two of them, hey, makes sense.

01:13:04 ◼   ► They brag about their 8K ProRes

01:13:06 ◼   ► because they have dedicated hardware

01:13:08 ◼   ► for ProRes video on the M1 Max

01:13:11 ◼   ► and now they've got twice as much.

01:13:12 ◼   ► So this thing can do 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video,

01:13:17 ◼   ► which no other machine can do.

01:13:18 ◼   ► That's, you know, but what the M,

01:13:20 ◼   ► we talked about this with the MacBook Pros,

01:13:21 ◼   ► like that Apple designs its chips to do the jobs

01:13:23 ◼   ► that it thinks people wanna do with its computers,

01:13:25 ◼   ► which unfortunately for some of us is not play games

01:13:28 ◼   ► or many of the other applications

01:13:30 ◼   ► we might wanna use GPU for,

01:13:32 ◼   ► but for Apple's customers, it's doing video work,

01:13:34 ◼   ► it's doing machine learning with a neural engine

01:13:36 ◼   ► and all that stuff, and that's where these things excel,

01:13:38 ◼   ► and the M1 Ultra is 2x that.

01:13:40 ◼   ► In some respects, it's like boring to talk about

01:13:43 ◼   ► because what's new?

01:13:45 ◼   ► You just double the thing that we already knew about,

01:13:48 ◼   ► but if you can use double the thing we already knew about,

01:13:50 ◼   ► this is like having two computers in one.

01:13:52 ◼   ► You can get your job done twice as fast

01:13:54 ◼   ► because now you've got 2x as much stuff, that's great.

01:13:57 ◼   ► Marco touched on this before,

01:13:59 ◼   ► but let's just put a pin in this.

01:14:01 ◼   ► The X-Mac angle, what the heck is the X-Mac?

01:14:03 ◼   ► Way back in the day, back in 2005-ish, I wrote an article.

01:14:06 ◼   ► And when I wrote this article in 2005 at Ars Technica,

01:14:08 ◼   ► it was already an old thing.

01:14:09 ◼   ► So the X-Mac, as far as I was able to determine in 2005,

01:14:13 ◼   ► and I'm certainly not gonna do any better today,

01:14:15 ◼   ► was a term that we came up with, and I say we

01:14:18 ◼   ► because I was there too, in the Ars Technica forums,

01:14:21 ◼   ► they used to have like web forums on their website,

01:14:23 ◼   ► I think they still do, in the Mac section.

01:14:26 ◼   ► And we would just argue with each other

01:14:27 ◼   ► about Mac stuff and yell at PC people and stuff.

01:14:30 ◼   ► And we talk about the idea of an XMac.

01:14:33 ◼   ► For this article, I tried to find out

01:14:35 ◼   ► where this term came from.

01:14:36 ◼   ► I found the oldest post in the forum that referenced XMac,

01:14:38 ◼   ► but it was already using the term

01:14:40 ◼   ► like we all knew what it was.

01:14:41 ◼   ► So it didn't help, but I think I am as well positioned

01:14:45 ◼   ► as anybody on the entire planet to tell you

01:14:48 ◼   ► what the definition of XMac is at this point,

01:14:50 ◼   ► because we're all old and none of us really remember

01:14:53 ◼   ► and I couldn't figure out back then.

01:14:54 ◼   ► And by the way, no one corrected me and gave feedback

01:14:56 ◼   ► and said, "Oh, I know where it came from.

01:14:57 ◼   ► none of us remember it's lost to the mist of time or as they would say in the Lord of

01:15:01 ◼   ► the Rings movie only I believe none now live who remember it.

01:15:07 ◼   ► The X Mac is a Mac that people who hang out at Ars Technica would like to buy because

01:15:13 ◼   ► it lets them configure and upgrade the parts that they care about right and it's you know

01:15:18 ◼   ► so it's like it's not a Mac Pro because that would let everyone do that but you know who

01:15:22 ◼   ► has Mac Pro money right.

01:15:24 ◼   ► It's not a Mac Pro, but it's also not something that's completely un-upgradable or a consumer

01:15:30 ◼   ► thing or whatever.

01:15:31 ◼   ► It's something in the middle.

01:15:32 ◼   ► And what do people back then care about?

01:15:33 ◼   ► I want to get a Mac where I can change the RAM, upgrade the storage, maybe even change

01:15:41 ◼   ► the CPU, and Apple would say, "We've got one of those.

01:15:44 ◼   ► Look, here it is.

01:15:45 ◼   ► It's a Power Mac.

01:15:46 ◼   ► It's a Mac Pro."

01:15:47 ◼   ► It's whatever we have.

01:15:48 ◼   ► It's like, "No, but I don't want to pay a bazillion dollars, and I don't need it to

01:15:50 ◼   ► be gigantic.

01:15:51 ◼   ► I just want a desktop Mac, no screen built in,

01:15:54 ◼   ► and I want to be able to do those things with it.

01:15:55 ◼   ► Like just basically a tech enthusiast's computer, right?

01:16:00 ◼   ► Not a professional giant workstation thing,

01:16:02 ◼   ► not an iMac where everything's all built in,

01:16:04 ◼   ► not an Xserve and a server rack, just make me an XMac.

01:16:07 ◼   ► That's what the XMac was, that's what everybody wanted.

01:16:10 ◼   ► It was a product like that.

01:16:11 ◼   ► When the Mac Mini came out, there was much debate.

01:16:13 ◼   ► Is the Mac Mini the XMac?

01:16:16 ◼   ► And based on that definition I gave you,

01:16:17 ◼   ► I think you can say that not really.

01:16:19 ◼   ► Like it was a Mac without a screen that was lower priced

01:16:23 ◼   ► and you could upgrade back in the day,

01:16:25 ◼   ► the RAM on it and the storage, but that's about it.

01:16:29 ◼   ► There was no GPU to speak of at all,

01:16:31 ◼   ► especially back in the early days of the Mac mini

01:16:32 ◼   ► with the Intel integrated graphics and crap like that.

01:16:35 ◼   ► You couldn't add a better GPU before the days of eGPU.

01:16:38 ◼   ► And it was just a little bit too small, right?

01:16:42 ◼   ► It was like, oh, it's not really the X Max,

01:16:44 ◼   ► but it's better than nothing.

01:16:45 ◼   ► And it certainly is inexpensive.

01:16:46 ◼   ► The first one was like 500 bucks or something.

01:16:47 ◼   ► Those days are long gone, right?

01:16:49 ◼   ► So, the need for the XMac was still there.

01:16:54 ◼   ► Is the Mac Studio the XMac?

01:16:56 ◼   ► Well, here's the funny thing.

01:16:58 ◼   ► If you have this thing like the XMac that has been circulating in a community for 10-15

01:17:03 ◼   ► years as an object of obsession, Apple never seems to make the computer that me, the weird

01:17:08 ◼   ► tech nerd, wants.

01:17:09 ◼   ► They just won't make a product for me.

01:17:11 ◼   ► And you'd say, "I know I'm not a big market, but tech nerds want what they want."

01:17:15 ◼   ► They were just so excited for Apple to make that.

01:17:17 ◼   ► If you have that in your mind for so long, eventually the world moves on.

01:17:21 ◼   ► This is getting to what Mark was saying before.

01:17:24 ◼   ► At this point, it's not that Apple is never going to make this for us or they keep cruelly

01:17:30 ◼   ► keeping it from us.

01:17:31 ◼   ► At this point, the fact that we can't have upgradable RAM, for example, in any of the

01:17:37 ◼   ► Macs that we're talking about, the ARM backs, we get huge benefit for that.

01:17:45 ◼   ► not doing it just to be mean. Not being able to upgrade the RAM is bad. That's the con.

01:17:50 ◼   ► On the pro side, the memory is really really fast and makes everything faster. Huge memory bandwidth,

01:17:57 ◼   ► low memory latency, it makes the computers better. It's lower power in the laptops. It is less

01:18:04 ◼   ► configurable, it is less flexible. We'll talk more about that when we talk about configuring

01:18:07 ◼   ► the Mac Studio. It has cons but it also has pros. What about the GPU? Oh certainly in this Mac

01:18:14 ◼   ► studio sized box they could probably fit a half size GPU in there or have an upgradeable card.

01:18:18 ◼   ► No, the GPU is integrated into the system on a chip. Well that's terrible integrated graphics

01:18:23 ◼   ► suck right? I want an XMac I want to be able to buy an Nvidia GPU and stick it in there.

01:18:26 ◼   ► I'm not saying the world has totally moved on from that but in many ways Apple you know didn't

01:18:32 ◼   ► give that to us. Con you can't change your GPU upgrade your GPU. Pro the GPUs are really fast and

01:18:40 ◼   ► low power, amazing performance without huge amounts of fan noise, and that doesn't just

01:18:45 ◼   ► benefit laptops because it lets you put tons and tons of cores into small desktops like

01:18:50 ◼   ► this without having them sound like hair dryers.

01:18:54 ◼   ► It may be that the time of the XMac is moving, you know, we've moved past the time of the

01:18:58 ◼   ► XMac, that it should no longer be an object of desire as I've defined it because the ability

01:19:04 ◼   ► to upgrade your CPU, GPU, storage, and stuff like that, you're basically describing a tower

01:19:09 ◼   ► computer and Apple makes one of those and yes it's a hoejillion dollars right

01:19:12 ◼   ► and for back to the whole thing of like but that's what Apple makes like Apple

01:19:15 ◼   ► is never going to make you a cheap PC right there was a window of time where

01:19:21 ◼   ► Apple could have made a small computer with one PCI slot or one AGP slot or one

01:19:25 ◼   ► whatever slot with a video card and a CPU yeah there was a time when Apple

01:19:31 ◼   ► could have made that computer it would have had upgradeable storage it would

01:19:33 ◼   ► have upgradeable RAM or could even have upgradeable CPU and you could put it the

01:19:37 ◼   ► GPU that you wanted into it and it would be half the size of a Mac Pro and it

01:19:41 ◼   ► would have cost less than a Mac Pro but I feel like the window is rapidly

01:19:44 ◼   ► closing on that machine even making sense for Apple because the way Apple is

01:19:48 ◼   ► building Macs precludes a lot of the things that we said we wanted to be able

01:19:52 ◼   ► to upgrade and it gets rid of them not punitively it gets rid of them in

01:19:57 ◼   ► exchange for benefits that even tech nerds will appreciate. Marco is

01:20:01 ◼   ► appreciating the fact that his computer is fast and silent it's not just silent

01:20:05 ◼   ► but dog slow, right?

01:20:07 ◼   ► It's silent and also very fast.

01:20:09 ◼   ► It's faster than his old noisier computer.

01:20:11 ◼   ► No, he can't upgrade these things in it.

01:20:13 ◼   ► He can't do technology things or whatever,

01:20:14 ◼   ► but I think the window is rapidly closing on the X Mac.

01:20:17 ◼   ► I'm not gonna have a funeral for the X Mac.

01:20:19 ◼   ► Like in theory, Apple could have still made one,

01:20:21 ◼   ► but I feel like the way Apple has decided

01:20:24 ◼   ► to build future Macs really closes the door on the X Mac.

01:20:29 ◼   ► And I'm not really sad to see it go.

01:20:33 ◼   ► Again, caveats, we'll get to the configuration part

01:20:35 ◼   ► of it because I think the benefits we're getting from it are worth it and like

01:20:38 ◼   ► you don't want to get stuck in the idea of like well you know if a car doesn't

01:20:41 ◼   ► have a carburetor it's not a real car like you have to embrace the march of

01:20:44 ◼   ► technology and the march of technology is that the advantages offered by a

01:20:49 ◼   ► system on a chip are so huge for almost everything that anybody does with a Mac

01:20:54 ◼   ► computer that there's no reason to hold on to the past you didn't say a computer

01:20:58 ◼   ► has to have a separate CPU a separate Northbridge and a Southbridge and

01:21:03 ◼   ► and separate PCI slots and Thunderbolt controllers and like that was the way we used to build

01:21:08 ◼   ► computers but things get consolidated and I think the way Macs are built now and the

01:21:12 ◼   ► way modern PCs are built is better than the old ways in enough ways for it to be worthwhile

01:21:18 ◼   ► at least for me.

01:21:19 ◼   ► So is the Mac Studio an XMac?

01:21:21 ◼   ► No it is not.

01:21:24 ◼   ► But I think it's the way things are going and I think it is better for most people who

01:21:30 ◼   ► want an X Mac it is mostly better but now now we have to start talking about

01:21:35 ◼   ► the bad news and start talking about pricing. Honestly I don't think it's that

01:21:39 ◼   ► bad. Well let me so you you went through the pricing before and how it seems

01:21:44 ◼   ► reasonable right but Apple has is really embracing its role as the Porsche of

01:21:51 ◼   ► because the base models are all pretty reasonable right but when you start

01:21:57 ◼   ► doing options and we moan about this all the time but it's really hammering it home with

01:22:01 ◼   ► the Mac Studio, especially as it relates to the 27-inch iMac, which we'll talk more about

01:22:06 ◼   ► in a bit.

01:22:07 ◼   ► The options really, really do hurt on this thing.

01:22:10 ◼   ► So let's look at the CPU options.

01:22:12 ◼   ► The base one is 24-core, so you get an M1 Mac with a bunch of stuff broken in it.

01:22:17 ◼   ► What's the M1 Pro?

01:22:19 ◼   ► The Pro, I think it's the same...

01:22:22 ◼   ► 16.

01:22:23 ◼   ► Is it the same CPU cores?

01:22:25 ◼   ► or is it you actually lose that as well?

01:22:28 ◼   ► - I can't keep it straight.

01:22:28 ◼   ► - We can't keep it, there's too many numbers

01:22:30 ◼   ► because they list like the neural engine cores

01:22:31 ◼   ► and like you'd have to look, it's just always 16 per, right?

01:22:34 ◼   ► So 16, anyway.

01:22:35 ◼   ► The base one is 10 core CPU, 24 core GPU.

01:22:39 ◼   ► So stuff is broken in the GPU,

01:22:41 ◼   ► but I think that's all the CPU core is working.

01:22:42 ◼   ► - Yes. - Right?

01:22:43 ◼   ► Eight and two, yeah.

01:22:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's always the same CPU cores,

01:22:46 ◼   ► but the GPU cores are variable.

01:22:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, and so if you want to bump that up

01:22:52 ◼   ► to an M1 max with nothing broken in it,

01:22:54 ◼   ► you know, 10 core CPU, 32 core GPU is 200 bucks.

01:22:56 ◼   ► You're like, all right, that's not bad or whatever.

01:22:58 ◼   ► You wanna go to the Ultra, it's plus 1400 bucks.

01:23:00 ◼   ► Now you're granted, you're getting two of them, right?

01:23:02 ◼   ► So it makes some sense, right?

01:23:04 ◼   ► But still that one really hurts, right?

01:23:06 ◼   ► Because we know, like we talked about,

01:23:08 ◼   ► like the system on a chip, they're expensive,

01:23:11 ◼   ► but they're not 1400, you know, $1400 each.

01:23:14 ◼   ► They're just not, like they don't cost Apple $800

01:23:17 ◼   ► to build either, they absolutely don't, right?

01:23:18 ◼   ► It's just, that's a lot of money.

01:23:21 ◼   ► And then, and that's the one, just to be fair,

01:23:23 ◼   ► there is gonna be additional cost

01:23:27 ◼   ► in all the other stuff around it.

01:23:28 ◼   ► You know, you have all the different other parts

01:23:30 ◼   ► that are required to have two dies.

01:23:33 ◼   ► You have the interconnect, you have to have two dies

01:23:36 ◼   ► that both have the interconnect part

01:23:38 ◼   ► of their silicon working.

01:23:40 ◼   ► You know, there is a lot of other stuff

01:23:43 ◼   ► that makes it, you know, probably not $1400 expensive.

01:23:48 ◼   ► - I think it's big margins, isn't it?

01:23:49 ◼   ► - Maybe 50%, you know, but at this point,

01:23:52 ◼   ► I think that's, given what it is and how specialized it is,

01:23:55 ◼   ► I think that's fair.

01:23:57 ◼   ► - And that's the one with the 48-core GPUs.

01:23:58 ◼   ► I saw you got a bunch of GPU cores broken.

01:24:00 ◼   ► And then when you upgrade to the one without the GPU cores,

01:24:03 ◼   ► this really hurts.

01:24:04 ◼   ► An extra thousand to go from 48 to 64 GPU cores,

01:24:07 ◼   ► that's just really gouging the people

01:24:08 ◼   ► who want the best of the best, right?

01:24:09 ◼   ► Because that's the same shit,

01:24:11 ◼   ► but now all the parts work. - Yeah, that's fair.

01:24:12 ◼   ► - Extra thousands, so that hurt.

01:24:14 ◼   ► But whatever, that's the top end.

01:24:15 ◼   ► All right, RAM.

01:24:16 ◼   ► This is where, this is one of the big cons

01:24:18 ◼   ► of the system on a chip thing.

01:24:19 ◼   ► You get massive, super fast RAM

01:24:22 ◼   ► that share between CPU and GPU,

01:24:23 ◼   ► which again has pros and cons.

01:24:25 ◼   ► Con, you don't get your separate pools,

01:24:26 ◼   ► you have to have less of it.

01:24:27 ◼   ► Pro, it's way faster for the CPU and GPU to interact

01:24:30 ◼   ► or operate, which is important

01:24:31 ◼   ► for a lot of Apple's applications, right?

01:24:33 ◼   ► But the other bad thing about this is that,

01:24:35 ◼   ► obviously the RAM is unchangeable,

01:24:37 ◼   ► it's also tied to your CPU choice.

01:24:40 ◼   ► So you can't get a MacStudio with the cheap CPU and max RAM.

01:24:44 ◼   ► You just can't, because the base is 32.

01:24:47 ◼   ► If you wanna go to 64, it's plus 400 bucks,