00:00:53 ◼ ► Mine's covered in dust. Oh, yeah, right above the camera, on the top bezel, like the top-facing surface,
00:01:06 ◼ ► Well, you know, most of matter is empty space, so it's really a philosophical question.
00:01:33 ◼ ► I spent that afternoon and evening setting it up, which sounds like a whole lot of time.
00:01:44 ◼ ► It came with Mojave and I really want to put Catalina on it, but I have resisted the call so far.
00:02:04 ◼ ► But I've resisted so far. I will hopefully resist at least to the new year because apparently that's going to change something.
00:02:09 ◼ ► Hi, I'm Casey Liss. I finally have a working computer and the first thing I want to do on it is replace its pretty much fine, mature-ish OS
00:02:23 ◼ ► That's a question that people keep asking. I just saw it just before we came on the air.
00:02:27 ◼ ► People keep asking it and I haven't put it into the show formally, but every time we talk about Catalina it's worth mentioning again.
00:02:34 ◼ ► They ask, "Is it safe to update to Catalina?" Like the same thing that Casey's debating about this computer and he just happens to have a new one.
00:02:41 ◼ ► But anyway, it wants to update. The computer keeps prompting you and says, "Oh, there's an update available. Are you sure you want to update to it?"
00:02:47 ◼ ► And as Marco has said in past shows and as I've said in past shows, I don't think there's any super compelling reason to update unless you really want one of the new apps like the TV app or something.
00:02:59 ◼ ► Or you really like the music app instead of iTunes app. And I like to see the new features in the photos app, but it's scary and you have to decide whether those benefits are worth the apparently ongoing weirdness.
00:03:13 ◼ ► Whether it's Casey's weird cursor that could have been hardware, could have been software, we don't actually know. We don't want him to run that experiment.
00:03:19 ◼ ► But my personal answer is it's not a strong answer. Like is it safe to update to Catalina? Probably.
00:03:28 ◼ ► But you should be asking yourself is what am I going to get on the other side of it other than the comfort of knowing that I don't have a badge on my system preferences icon?
00:03:38 ◼ ► Like if there's some new feature that's in Catalina that you want, probably okay upgrading to it. But if you can't name a feature right now that you're dying to have in Catalina, don't. Don't upgrade.
00:03:50 ◼ ► Right, like upgrading is a risk. It brings on potential downsides. So there has to be some kind of upside to make that worth it. And for most people, that just isn't there.
00:04:00 ◼ ► Which is not to say that it's bad. Like if you're running it and it works fine for you. Like I'm running it on my MacBook Air and have zero problems with it. But I'm also running Mojave on my wife's iMac and I don't have problems with that either.
00:04:12 ◼ ► So both computers are fine. And I do want the new features in photos, but I'm also very scared of the upgrade process. I've heard lots of strange things about it. So I'm still waiting. Surprise.
00:04:28 ◼ ► The good news is that right now, if you're willing to classify the iMac Pro as, I know it's not the Mac Pro, but I would say it's a Mac Pro. And if you're willing to accept that classification.
00:04:52 ◼ ► Define the Mac Pro. I mean, this isn't that different from the 2013 trash can Mac Pro with a monitor glued to the front. Like, it's exactly as expandable.
00:05:17 ◼ ► I agree with you, Marco, but of course that's self serving. Now, I don't remember what you said your build of your iMac Pro was. I think it's almost identical. Is that correct? Do you have the 10 core or the 8 core?
00:05:33 ◼ ► I'm actually going to go through it again for a bit. I'm going to do later. We'll get to that later. But yeah, short version is 10 core, 4 terabyte, 64 base GPU.
00:05:42 ◼ ► Blast. For a fleeting moment, I thought maybe I would have a better computer than all of you losers. But no, Marco and I have the same computer.
00:05:53 ◼ ► It's an amazing computer. It's an amazing computer. But for a fleeting moment, before John spends $30,000 on his Mac Pro, we'll talk about it later, don't worry.
00:06:01 ◼ ► Before John spends 30 grand on his Mac Pro, I thought maybe, just maybe, I have the best computer of the three of us, which would be...
00:06:17 ◼ ► Uh huh. Sure. Anyway, so I got my iMac Pro. I really like it. It seems to be working really well. I really shouldn't do anything to it like Catalina, but the call is strong.
00:06:28 ◼ ► But I'm trying to be a mature adult because this is the first time in like a year that I feel like I actually have a computer that friggin' works, which is nice.
00:06:34 ◼ ► And I really enjoy that. And things are fast, but you know, you can't make Xcode losing code completion and syntax highlighting in Swift any faster. That still happens.
00:06:47 ◼ ► And you can't make storyboards load any faster, which is frustrating. I don't care if you don't like storyboards. Tell somebody else.
00:06:54 ◼ ► I just, I like storyboards. They work well for me, except it takes FOREVER to load them even on this iMac Pro, and that's very frustrating.
00:07:02 ◼ ► But the advantage now is that when Xcode has bugs and stuff like that, you can quit and relaunch it way faster. Much faster.
00:07:15 ◼ ► So anyways, so all kidding aside, I don't think there's really going to be any more of Casey's Computer Corner. I consider this a footnote.
00:07:22 ◼ ► Likely story. Yeah, we'll see. Hopefully this won't break anytime soon. I did get AppleCare this time, because why wouldn't I? But yeah, this computer's real nice, and I really like it, and I'm glad I bought it, even if my wallet isn't.
00:07:34 ◼ ► And again, John is going to know that pain, or maybe already knows that pain. We'll talk about that later.
00:07:39 ◼ ► Moving on, Jason Painter wanted to tell us that they bought an iMac two years ago with an extended keyboard, and it bent. And it was replaced under warranty.
00:07:49 ◼ ► One year after it was originally purchased. The new one hasn't bent, so based on this one piece of anecdotal data, maybe they solved it.
00:07:57 ◼ ► Yeah, I hope so, because I'm going to get one of these weird keyboards with my new computer, and I really don't want it to bend. So fingers crossed.
00:08:05 ◼ ► But I was heartened to hear that the one person who replied with an actual experience with the bent one was the replacement in bent, which is unlike, for example, butterfly keyboards, which people get replaced and then still have problems with.
00:08:18 ◼ ► Alright, moving on. Justin Winchester would like to talk about Destiny, but I don't care, so we'll move right along. The iPad remote control...
00:08:33 ◼ ► I was talking about playing Destiny on Stadia, and I was playing it in Chrome, the web browser on a Mac, and I was complaining about the lag.
00:08:42 ◼ ► And Justin says that if you play on a Chromecast, he says it was flawless. No noticeable input lag. He was super impressed.
00:08:50 ◼ ► Now, I don't have a Chromecast Ultra. I do have an older Chromecast, but I can't, as far as I'm aware, try Stadia with that setup, because I don't have the weird $130 controller thingy.
00:09:02 ◼ ► The only reason I could play at all is because I was doing it on my Mac in a browser, and I had my PlayStation controller paired to my Mac with Bluetooth, so I would like to try it on a Chromecast to see if the lag is better there.
00:09:14 ◼ ► I can't imagine it being flawless, and I can't imagine not noticing the lag, but I am willing to believe it would be better than running it through a web browser.
00:09:22 ◼ ► Alright, iPad remote control and classrooms. So we were talking about loading an iPad up and how you could troubleshoot things remotely, especially for people who maybe aren't as familiar with computers and stuff like that.
00:09:37 ◼ ► And Martin Feld wrote in, kind of on behalf of his wife, Natasha Candelas, and apparently she teaches in a class that uses Apple Classroom on iOS, and so speaking for Martin, or Martin speaking through me, if you will,
00:09:53 ◼ ► I asked my wife, Natasha Candelas, about Apple Classroom on iOS. She's a primary/elementary teacher, and she said that it enables you to control students' devices to an extent.
00:10:02 ◼ ► You can lock them out of the iPad to gain attention and make apps and documents open. Apparently the look on kids' faces when their device is free is priceless. Their heads snap up to face the front of the room, which is kind of cool for the use that it's actually designed for.
00:10:15 ◼ ► But we were wondering, you know, does Apple Classroom allow for any sort of remote control, and it doesn't seem like it has any sort of VNC-style remote control as we were hoping.
00:10:25 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite web host. Go to linode.com/ATP to learn more. If you need a virtual server in the cloud, you need Linode.
00:10:37 ◼ ► I've been with so many web hosts over my career, dedicated, VPS, whatever else. This is what used to be called VPS but is now like every web host now, and this is by far my favorite web host.
00:10:47 ◼ ► I've been with Linode for almost a decade now, I think eight or nine years, since long before they were a sponsor, and I actually sought them out as a sponsor. I wanted to tell you all how great they are.
00:10:55 ◼ ► Linode is an amazing web host for running whatever you need to run on dedicated servers. So applications, services, websites, certain tools like CI or CD-type environments.
00:11:06 ◼ ► Whatever you need to run on a dedicated server, let Linode be your host. They are an amazing value, they have amazing performance, they have amazing support, they have all sorts of plans to fit whatever your needs might be. So they have a basic 1 gig of RAM plan for just $5 a month.
00:11:20 ◼ ► You can't beat that. And then whatever your needs are above that, if you need multiple servers, if you need servers with more RAM or more disk space or specialty needs like dedicated CPUs or high RAM plans, they have it all.
00:11:32 ◼ ► I'm just so happy with them. They're just an amazing value, amazing support when I need it, and just really good performance in everything. Everything I need.
00:11:39 ◼ ► They have data centers all over the world, they just opened one up in Toronto, Canada, I believe they're opening one up in Mumbai, India shortly, and they have all sorts of other things.
00:11:47 ◼ ► Two factor authentication, they have a whole API so you can script things or automate things, you can deploy your apps super easily, you can pick your Linux distro, whatever you need from a web host, Linode probably has it.
00:11:57 ◼ ► I gotta say it's so nice being a Linode customer. I've never had major issues with them and I've been with them for so long, I've run so many servers there, I just keep doing it because it's just that good.
00:12:07 ◼ ► Check it out today at linode.com/atp and use promo code ATP2019 to get a $20 credit. That could be 4 months free on a $5 a month plan.
00:12:17 ◼ ► And they have a 7 day money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose. Check it out today. Linode.com/atp, promo code ATP2019 for a $20 credit.
00:12:25 ◼ ► Thank you so much to Linode for keeping all my servers running and for sponsoring our show.
00:12:29 ◼ ► Well, I'll just sit on back and I'll see you two later. So John, tell me what's going on.
00:12:41 ◼ ► You're gonna participate in this Casey, we need you for this journey we're about to go on. Are you ready everybody?
00:12:48 ◼ ► I appreciate it. Alright John, all kidding aside, I like to snark, but I am genuinely, genuinely, genuinely excited that the day has come and that you finally have information about your future computer unless you really ruin all of our hopes and dreams and say you're not gonna buy one.
00:13:06 ◼ ► So please John, tell me at the very least, are you going to buy a Mac Pro and then I don't know how you want to take it from here, perhaps we can walk through the configurator, but what are you gonna buy?
00:13:15 ◼ ► Well, I just, you know, settle in here. The holiday season, it's a time of giving, right? On ATP, that usually means that we're giving money to Apple, which is a form of giving, I suppose. Apple is composed of people.
00:13:34 ◼ ► So I think on this episode, on this night, join me won't you, as we take a tour of the Mac Pro configurator, which as we all know is the most powerful tool for giving money to Apple that has ever been presented to people like us.
00:13:50 ◼ ► So that's what I thought we would do. We're gonna go through the Mac Pro configurator, we're gonna look at the options and I'm gonna tell you my thoughts about those options.
00:14:00 ◼ ► It's not gonna take that long. Honestly, there's not that many options, so don't flip out.
00:14:05 ◼ ► Alright, I'm buckled in, I'm buckled in. So let me start, John, are you getting a rack mount or are you getting a tower?
00:14:10 ◼ ► Yeah, so the link will be in the show notes, but yeah, the first thing you have to do is choose your Mac Pro, which sounds ominous.
00:14:16 ◼ ► And this is the first time, as far as I'm aware, that Apple has released a photograph of the rack mount Mac Pro, other than maybe they showed it on a slide at WWDC when it was announced.
00:14:28 ◼ ► But this is on the product page. They announced it, "Hey, we're gonna have a rack mount version of this," but it was never on the product page anywhere.
00:14:37 ◼ ► Yeah, there's also, I don't know if this was here before this was opened up, but on the design page, if you scroll down a while, it shows you that there along with the little side view, you can see the rail.
00:14:48 ◼ ► But anyway, that one is grayed out, which is the first sign that things are as they have ever been when it comes to this particular Mac Pro. They just can't get to the damn fireworks factory.
00:15:00 ◼ ► The whole Mac Pro Day thing is a thing, and by the way, Mac Pro Day came and went. It was the day they announced it on stage at WWDC.
00:15:07 ◼ ► But everyone keeps saying, "Oh, today is Mac Pro Day," which is a way of acknowledging that there's always one more thing with this computer.
00:15:13 ◼ ► Literally, in the Steve Jobs sense, it never fully arrives, and that continues to be true. Say you wanted a rack mount Mac Pro. Can you order one? No.
00:15:21 ◼ ► Can you see what the options are? How much it costs? No. Someday, that will also arrive, but it's frustrating.
00:15:28 ◼ ► But anyway, I wasn't gonna buy a rack mount one, so I don't care. So let's click on "Configure" for the Mac Pro. Tower from $5,999.00.
00:15:40 ◼ ► Right underneath that, by the way, they have a little blue text that says, "Get 6% daily cash back when you pay with your Apple Card until December 31st," which is a deal that many people have told me about and I'm glad exists.
00:15:55 ◼ ► Although there is a small asterisk on that, though. Apple typically doesn't charge your card until your machine ships, and so if you order it with a ship date that is after December 31st, which at this point is almost any configuration of it, it might be charged to your credit card after December 31st.
00:16:11 ◼ ► So according to one person who tweeted at me something they were told by their business rep, "You will not get the cash until they charge your card, but as long as you place the order before the end of the deadline, you will get the cash." So you could place the order now and get 6% cash back on January 30th or something. That is what one tweet from one person told me.
00:16:31 ◼ ► Business reps don't know crap a lot of the time. I honestly wouldn't assume that was true. It might be, but it doesn't have high credibility.
00:16:41 ◼ ► What I can say is if you have ordered a Mac Pro with your Apple Card and you've already done so or within the time window and you don't get 6% back because they charge your card next month, call and complain and try to get that 6%.
00:16:53 ◼ ► Because that is BS. I'm hoping that the business rep person was right. Anyway, let's configure. Customize your Mac Pro and at the top it lists all the specs. These are the default specs.
00:17:02 ◼ ► 3.5 GHz 8 core, 32 GB of RAM, Radeon 580X with 8 GB of DRAM, 256 GB SSD, which is way too small, Magic Mouse keyboard with numeric keypad. Those are the stock stuff. First choice you have is processor. Which processor is right for you?
00:17:20 ◼ ► Let me interrupt you really quickly. Are you going to be explaining what you plan to do during the tour or are we saving that for the end of the tour? Should we hold our questions for the end of the tour?
00:17:38 ◼ ► processor. You have a lot of choices. The default one is 8 core, 3.5 GHz Xeon tour boost up to 4. As sort of becomes apparent as you scroll through the configurator for this very expensive computer, there aren't a lot of upgrade options where you add 50 or 100 bucks and get something better.
00:18:02 ◼ ► They could almost be measured in MacBook Airs. How many MacBook Airs do you have to add to get the next processor?
00:18:09 ◼ ► Right. So 3.5 GHz 8 core. The very next option, the smallest step you can make from that is 3.3 GHz 12 core with a 4.4 turbo. So it's a lower base clock, higher turbo speed, more cores. That's at 1,000 bucks.
00:18:28 ◼ ► That's not that that processor costs $1,000. It's that processor costs $1,000 more than the 8 core.
00:18:35 ◼ ► If you want to make the next jump, which is from 12 to 16, again, the base clock drops to 3.2 and the turbo is still 4.4. That's at $2,000 over the 8 core.
00:18:45 ◼ ► If you want to go up one more, now you can do the silly ones. You want the 24 core, that's at $6,000 and you want the 28 core, that's at $7,000. So obviously, the 6 and 7, the 24 and 28 core ones are, you know, forget about that.
00:18:59 ◼ ► Although it is interesting that when Apple distributed Mac Pros to all the YouTubers and everything, they gave them 28 core models.
00:19:05 ◼ ► I mean, usually they make sure they're spec'd well, but like, I suppose it makes sense because they're all going to do the demos of like CPU bound things that aren't accelerated if they don't use like ProRes and the afterburner card or whatever.
00:19:17 ◼ ► And I think that's honestly what those very wealthy YouTubers are going to actually buy. But add $7,000 for your CPU option? Not great.
00:19:26 ◼ ► So when I'm looking at these options for me, who doesn't actually need this computer for anything important at all, nevertheless, I'm thinking that I don't want an 8 core because it's the one part of this computer that is the most difficult to upgrade.
00:19:44 ◼ ► I don't think it's impossible to upgrade. I'm sure people are going to hack this thing and put new CPUs in it when new CPUs come out and so on and so forth. But as far as I'm personally concerned, I'm never going to take that CPU out of there. I never took any CPUs out of my Mac Pros before and I'm probably not going to start now, especially since like our Macs will be out and I'll just want to kick this thing to the curb eventually anyway.
00:20:04 ◼ ► So I don't want the 8. But the only option open to my wallet is the next step up. So I think I'm going to choose the 12 core.
00:20:20 ◼ ► I would make probably the same decision because I currently have 10 in my Mac Pro and so I wouldn't want to go down to 8. I'm not going to take a step down. So if I was buying this, I'd go either 12 or 16. The 12 would be the most likely choice or 16 if I really wanted to have it be significantly better than my iMac Pro which we'll get to later.
00:20:40 ◼ ► And also some quick real time follow up. The configuration that YouTubers got, I know they have two GPUs. Do you know whether they have the two Vega 2s or two...
00:20:50 ◼ ► They have the big ones. Two Vega 2s. They have the most expensive GPU option. We'll get to that.
00:20:55 ◼ ► So if that's what they have, then the configuration sent to YouTubers is a $33,000 configuration.
00:21:10 ◼ ► And that's the thing, they were showing it's amazing performance in benchmarks and they weren't even using the Afterburner card in some cases because the thing they were doing wasn't accelerated.
00:21:22 ◼ ► Well, I think the reason... They had to give YouTubers something crazy like this because...
00:21:27 ◼ ► And I would imagine what they were seeing with render time differences, I would imagine a lot of that comes down to the GPUs.
00:21:33 ◼ ► Because even though a lot of it is core-based, we've had... The iMac Pro went up to what, 24 cores I think?
00:21:43 ◼ ► So to go from 18 to 28 at the top end, yeah, that's a lot, but that's not going to cut your render time by four times, right?
00:21:56 ◼ ► If you want that kind of result, you're going to have to also do something GPU intensive and just destroy those GPUs and put in like...
00:22:05 ◼ ► If they had configurations that had four high-end GPUs in them, because each of these cards has two GPUs on it, the Duo series of cards here.
00:22:17 ◼ ► So that's four GPUs with apps that run GPUs very heavily in parallel, like video stuff.
00:22:22 ◼ ► So they had to give them a configuration like this so that they could show massive improvements over the iMac Pro.
00:22:34 ◼ ► Yeah, although they did show some things like... Some people did 3D rendering of the CPU bounds.
00:22:39 ◼ ► You could see all 28 cores get pegged, and it did well in that, but obviously not four times faster.
00:22:47 ◼ ► There's a thing here that says that you need the 24 or 28 core if you use the 1.5 terabyte of RAM option.
00:23:14 ◼ ► But the reason there's such a big price hike between 16 and 24 is, in part, Intel's fault.
00:23:20 ◼ ► Yeah, and also not a concern for me because I'm definitely not going for the 1.5 terabyte of RAM option.
00:23:26 ◼ ► In the core things, though, I did want to spend money on this because it's basically...
00:23:38 ◼ ► I don't have much stuff that's multi-core, like every once in a while a handbrake rip or something from a Blu-ray.
00:24:20 ◼ ► This actually is the cheapest upgrade option, but the default is 32, which I think is a reasonable default, unlike the SSD, which we'll get to eventually.
00:24:46 ◼ ► So I could get 48 in Admort because, blessedly, like many Tower Macs before, it has lots of RAM slots.
00:24:52 ◼ ► But Macs that have lots of RAM slots tend to have interesting rules about where RAM should be installed for maximum performance.
00:25:01 ◼ ► Whether they have triple channel memory, or you have to put them in pairs, or they have to be matched in the two banks.
00:25:07 ◼ ► The best was the Mac Pro I had at work, which had triple channel memory, but I think it didn't let you install things in multiples of three.
00:25:19 ◼ ► 48 for an extra $300 seems like too little to me, but when it comes to RAM, is it really that big a deal?
00:25:43 ◼ ► They go bad. This Mac I have underneath my desk now, the 2008 Mac Pro, has cute little lights that go on that shows you exactly which DIMM is having problems.
00:26:02 ◼ ► I was like, I'm going to go with 48. I'm doing configs and checking prices or whatever.
00:26:24 ◼ ► Who knows what those might be for this machine and how cheap they might be or whatever.
00:27:24 ◼ ► And as lots of people tweeted out, if you go to Dell, you can configure a "tower computer" that's like $170,000.
00:27:46 ◼ ► But they do -- you can buy tower PCs that are even more obscene in terms of the costing capability.
00:28:17 ◼ ► But as an adult, I actually really appreciate high quality clothing and I would actually love high quality socks.
00:28:25 ◼ ► They're so good that you don't even realize how awesome socks can be until you've tried these.
00:28:50 ◼ ► So whether you're walking your dog or chilling at home or saving the world, whatever it is, you'll be comfortable in Bombas socks.
00:29:01 ◼ ► Each sock is built with a special arch support system that's not too tight, so it's more like a nice little hug for your foot.
00:29:06 ◼ ► And also, you ever notice that annoying seam right at the toe that most socks had, a little ridge on top?
00:29:13 ◼ ► They designed their socks not to have a seam there because they care about that kind of stuff and they know that's annoying.
00:29:24 ◼ ► They have dress socks for work, performance socks for working out, even limited edition holiday socks.
00:30:05 ◼ ► The default one is the Radeon Pro 580X with 8 gigs, which is a very pedestrian, previous generation, perfectly fine video card.
00:30:13 ◼ ► The very next option that is available to you, the next step up is $2,400 more if you want a Radeon Pro Vega II with 32 gigs of RAM.
00:30:28 ◼ ► And it just gets worse from there. You can get two of those for twice the price. Lucky you.
00:30:32 ◼ ► You can get a Duo for an extra $5,200, or you can get two of those for double that, an extra $10,000.
00:30:46 ◼ ► It's kind of one of the things that, if you remember, that turned me off to the trash can as a product for me personally was I don't want a bunch of workstation cards.
00:30:56 ◼ ► But it doesn't do anything for me, even on the coolness factor. None of this stuff is like, "I need it."
00:31:06 ◼ ► And the only cool thing that I do that I enjoy that has anything to do with GPUs is games.
00:31:11 ◼ ► And games do not benefit from the extra money that you spend on a workstation style card.
00:31:19 ◼ ► But you can get a "gaming card" that plays the game just as well for a fraction of the cost.
00:31:25 ◼ ► These are not gaming cards. These are cards for people who need them to render stuff in video or do workstation 3D graphics.
00:31:32 ◼ ► It's too rich for my blood. And so my only option, I feel like, is the base video card.
00:31:39 ◼ ► And here again, the factor that I've been talking about through all these things comes in, which is it's not set in stone.
00:31:52 ◼ ► If, assuming I don't get rid of this computer and switch to ARM in the next few years, I'm assuming I will upgrade this GPU because the GPU is upgradeable.
00:32:01 ◼ ► It's a miracle. Here's the only thing I have a trepidation about when it comes to these upgrade stuff.
00:32:07 ◼ ► RAM and storage or internal stuff like that, I feel like third parties are going to fill that.
00:32:21 ◼ ► Apple has sold graphics cards. In fact, I believe the graphics card that's in my 2008 Mac Pro right now is a first-party Apple-upgraded graphic card.
00:32:32 ◼ ► But Apple used to sell, "Hey, we'll send you a box with an Apple little stamp on it that it's a graphics card upgrade for your Mac Pro, and we will sell it to you separately."
00:32:42 ◼ ► Right now, of course, like so many things about this computer, there's no word on that, and there's no sort of, "You can't buy them now."
00:32:56 ◼ ► Will Apple ever offer video cards that you can buy separately to stick into the Mac Pro?
00:33:03 ◼ ► Even though this is an incredibly expandable computer and you have lots of options, as far as I can tell, Apple considers that a thing that you choose at the time you build your machines, not a thing that you change into a machine that you already bought.
00:33:16 ◼ ► And like I was saying, historically, you've been able to buy "PC graphics cards" with a similar enough architecture and maybe some tweaking to the firmware or whatever, and just shove them into a Mac, and they work.
00:33:29 ◼ ► I have had video cards like that in my Mac Pro that were not Apple-specific cards at all, but happened to work with some tweaking in an Apple computer because it's the same GPU family, and as far as the operating system is concerned, it's the same drivers.
00:33:44 ◼ ► Is that still the case? Will there still be third-party cards that can run on this thing?
00:33:49 ◼ ► NVIDIA continues to be on the outs, and it seems like, I think we talked about it a few shows back, it may be possible that NVIDIA will continue to be sort of locked out of the driver space for kernel drivers.
00:34:01 ◼ ► Will you be able to buy an NVIDIA card and then download from NVIDIA website a driver that goes into the thing? I don't know.
00:34:09 ◼ ► I shouldn't buy this thing 100%, I'm 100% sure I'll be able to upgrade and the next time a new GPU comes about, we'll be able to buy a new one.
00:34:21 ◼ ► Real-time follow-up from the chatroom, apparently you can buy RAM? What else can you buy?
00:34:27 ◼ ► They're actually selling the GPUs, I mean, not technically, it's currently unavailable, but they're listed on their site as separately purchasable items that will presumably become available soon.
00:34:37 ◼ ► So you can buy the Radeon Pro Vega II MPX module, $2800, it's what you'd expect, I don't see the low-end one yet, but it's what you'd expect, basically.
00:34:48 ◼ ► They're at least selling the ones that they're offering. Now, we don't know what they're going to offer in the future, and also it's worth clarifying, there is one option, it's similar to the 8TB SSD option,
00:34:57 ◼ ► they've announced that soon there will be a Radeon Pro W5700X option offered, and by the specs it appears to be kind of between the base GPU and the Pro Vega II,
00:35:10 ◼ ► so it seems like there will probably be an option that is less than a $2400 upgrade, but still an upgrade that sits between these two.
00:35:18 ◼ ► It just isn't quite ready yet, so that's worth noting. And I would also say, on the expandability front, Apple intends for this to be what pros want now and going forward.
00:35:32 ◼ ► They intend to have this actual platform, where they will continue to update things, to put out new MPX modules with GPUs as time goes on.
00:35:42 ◼ ► We just don't know if that's going to happen. Their history so far, with recent Pro stuff, as they've gotten back on track, they've been really good with updating GPUs for the MacBook Pros, for the iMac,
00:35:56 ◼ ► the iMac Pro they did a GPU update, although they haven't updated anything else for the iMac Pro yet, so I'm getting a little bit nervous.
00:36:02 ◼ ► So this could be great. It could be that in 6 to 12 months they release a couple of new MPX modules with new generation GPUs on them.
00:36:20 ◼ ► And we don't like to believe that Apple is a company run by spreadsheets, but it kind of is in a lot of ways.
00:36:33 ◼ ► This could just be, "Oh, this is the only one they ever made, and it didn't work out, not enough people bought it because it's really expensive, not enough people bought it, and I guess nobody wants it.
00:36:41 ◼ ► I guess we can exit this business." That could totally happen. And only time will tell whether that's really what's going to happen or not.
00:36:48 ◼ ► Yeah, so basically the difference between being at the whim of Apple deciding what GPUs they want to put out in their cool black heatsinks and hardware and everything, which to be clear is what I would want.
00:37:00 ◼ ► I'm not trying to come up with some giant RGB festooned weird PC-looking thing, but having the option to install third-party cards is good.
00:37:12 ◼ ► You can be assured that if you buy a third-party equivalent GPU, they have a good relationship with AMD, and I'm sure Radeon will continue to work on this thing, but NVIDIA is the question because you need more and more permission from Apple these days to get a kernel driver loaded.
00:37:27 ◼ ► So I suppose you could turn off system integrity protection or whatever and just get your NVIDIA "web drivers," assuming NVIDIA keeps trying to make those.
00:37:36 ◼ ► But that's questionable. NVIDIA and Apple have been fighting for years, and that doesn't seem to be changing.
00:37:44 ◼ ► So all that is to say, yeah, the option that I expected to pick is the option that says "coming soon," which is why on the day this thing launched, I asked on Twitter, "Does anybody have any idea what 'coming soon' means?"
00:37:57 ◼ ► And I asked that question in the context of the 6% cashback thing that we were just discussing, because it's like, look, if you really aren't going to get your 6% back if your thing doesn't ship before the end of the year,
00:38:12 ◼ ► well, then if you're waiting around for the "coming soon" Radeon Pro, W5700X, whatever, you may be missing out on a 6% back, and that's a lot of money as we rack up the price on this thing.
00:38:28 ◼ ► So I think, and to be clear, no one has told me anything, so I have no idea what "coming soon" means, but it's a pretty safe bet to guess that "coming soon" does not mean within an hour.
00:38:39 ◼ ► Considering how long everything has taken on this computer, it could mean before the end of the year. I don't know what "coming soon" means, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it means spring.
00:38:50 ◼ ► But because the GPU is upgradeable, and I'm very excited to see this page here, by the way, it's on Apple's website, I'll put the link in the show notes, the title of the page, it says "Mac accessories" on top, that's the section it's in, I think that's why I was not finding this, because I don't consider these accessories.
00:39:05 ◼ ► Anyway, the big text, the H1 on the page, "Mac components". Hey! It's been years since that has been a category of things that you can buy for yourself.
00:39:15 ◼ ► Now some of them are things like the Silly Stand and the VESA mount, and they've always had stuff like that, like VESA mounts through your iMac or whatever, and there's some Logitech and Belk and stuff thrown in there too, but these actual parts, right from the little option picker, Radeon Pro Vega II MPX module, $2800, you could buy this, the Pegasus thing that lets you put regular drives in,
00:39:34 ◼ ► inside the case, $400 for a thing with no drives in it, okay. I mean, everything is expensive and black on this page, but at least it exists.
00:39:45 ◼ ► By the way, it has one drive in it. Does it? Yeah, it comes with a single 8 terabyte drive and you can put your own in the second bay. Oh! Presumably you can also take out that one.
00:39:54 ◼ ► It's a spinning disk. For $400. Yeah, well. The funny thing is, 8 terabyte SSDs are almost that cheap now. Yeah, I know. Well, this is a special enterprise one, I'm sure. I bet it's not.
00:40:08 ◼ ► This also has, I think, the first time I've seen the Logitech camera, the magnetic camera that sticks on top of the monitor, that is $200.
00:40:16 ◼ ► Yeah, that was a cool surprise. I don't think we heard about that before the configurator and everything came up. No, we did. They told us about it at the launch, but they said,
00:40:24 ◼ ► "The Logitech's going to have a magnetic camera that attaches." And we said, "Great, can we see it?" And there was no way to be found. I don't know, I haven't been keeping up with it, but you couldn't see it on launch day, I think, but here it is.
00:40:33 ◼ ► It doesn't look that bad. I already have an external Logitech camera, so I'm not sure I'm going to spend $200 on a new one, but having a camera on the top of your thing is nice. It would have been nice if they could have spared a little bit of budget in their $6,000 monitor to, say, put a camera and a microphone in it, but I understand money's tight when you're selling a monitor for $6,000. You can't have everything.
00:40:57 ◼ ► Did you happen to see the Belkin AUX Power Cable Kit? I did. I did see that. Did you happen to look at the images that are on that product page? Specifically the last one? I didn't click through to it. What are we seeing here?
00:41:09 ◼ ► So the Belkin AUX Power Cable Kit is a set of cables for $70 that runs from a special power header on the Mac Pro motherboard and provides those kind of AUX power cables that modern gaming GPUs typically use. The final image on this, on Apple's site, shows the Mac Pro with a third-party AMD Radeon something card in its kind of secondary slot there, powered by these cables.
00:41:33 ◼ ► So it's actually showing you on Apple's website an official marketing image of you using a non-Apple GPU as a secondary GPU in this machine, presumably for, I don't know, gaming maybe? I don't know. Not Nvidia, that's for sure.
00:41:45 ◼ ► Yeah, no, definitely not. Yeah, all the Radeon stuff is sure to work because they're basically the same cards. Yeah. But it's cool to see that, to see them showing this on the site.
00:41:53 ◼ ► I mean, they do the same thing with the eGPUs, the Blackmagic stuff, and Pegasus, their favorite storage vendor. For years they'd show whatever the fancy Mac is with some Pegasus RAID array or the eGPU stuff.
00:42:05 ◼ ► I think before the advent of Thunderbolt, when people were speculating about what they do, it's like, "Oh, and Apple will have these sleek external GPU boxes." And it's like, "No, they're just letting third parties do all of that."
00:42:15 ◼ ► Which is kind of a shame because some of them don't match as nicely, but it's nice in that they actually are allowing companies other than Apple to extend their computer.
00:42:25 ◼ ► I love that if you just go to the Mac accessories page, you click on the header up top, you just go to the front page of Mac accessories, it's showing the Pro Display XDR there, but it's showing it without the stand because the stand doesn't come with it.
00:42:36 ◼ ► And it looks so ridiculous, just this rectangle floating in space. It just highlights how audacious it is to be selling this incredibly expensive monitor without a stand and then to have the stand be $1,000. It's amazing.
00:42:52 ◼ ► I've been watching the YouTubers play with their Mac Pros, and initially, seeing all the people who got the Mac Pros, it's like, "Well, this totally makes sense. These people actually legitimately 'need' these computers in that it will save them."
00:43:09 ◼ ► They have the thing they do routinely at work that takes a really long time where they are waiting on the computer. And by buying this horrendously expensive computer, they can wait half as long, a quarter as long.
00:43:18 ◼ ► That's what you pay money for. That's the kind of gains you want. So it makes sense that these people have them. But sometimes, the YouTubers aren't going to be doing that much with this computer, and they're just...
00:43:29 ◼ ► You can tell that they're in some ways not particularly the market for it because the thing about the monitor attaching to the stand, that makes perfect sense in the context of someone who works, say, in the film industry who has to lug this stuff from set to set and set up the monitor for the director to look at shots right after they've been done.
00:43:54 ◼ ► I don't know that, obviously, I'm not in this industry either, but I understand the concept of you've got to pack up all your junk and move it to someplace else and then unpack it and set it back up.
00:44:02 ◼ ► And you're like, "Is this really a problem? Is the stand attached to the computer? Why is it magnets? Why does it need to come off? Why is it a separate thing?"
00:44:09 ◼ ► If you've ever tried to deal with a large monitor in any form, especially if it's expensive and fragile, the stand is a pain. It really limits how you can pack that thing and how bulky the packaging has to be.
00:44:22 ◼ ► The ability for the panel to come off the stand lets you pack it into a way smaller, very completely flat, like it's perfectly flat, rectangular, no weird curve.
00:44:31 ◼ ► You can put that in a nice padded pelican, whatever case, and then the stand can be totally separate. The stand is still kind of ungainly, but the stand is not as fragile as a giant piece of glass.
00:44:40 ◼ ► So it makes perfect sense for these things to separate from each other, and it shows they've actually been talking to people and saying, "It would be really useful to us if you didn't sell us this $6,000 thing with a weird, ungainly, heavy stand that sort of clanks at the end of it.
00:44:55 ◼ ► It makes our life miserable. Can you do something better?" And of course, Apple is like, "What about a cool magnetic connector?" and blah, blah, blah. So that's what they did.
00:45:02 ◼ ► But if you're just going to have it on your desk, it doesn't make sense. And that is entirely separate from the idea of, "Okay, but does it come with the stand or not?" So we're setting that aside.
00:45:11 ◼ ► I'm surprised that more people aren't as excited about the idea of Apple talking to the pro customers and listening and giving a feature that clearly comes from not just speculatively thinking, "It would be cool if the stand came off," but this is an actual use case.
00:45:28 ◼ ► But every decent monitor has a push-button release to pop the stand off. I had that on my Dells like 10 years ago.
00:45:39 ◼ ► As I'm saying, Apple's monitors didn't because they were like, "Well, we can make it cooler."
00:45:46 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm setting aside the price. But the idea that it attaches, and of course when Apple does do the attaching thing, yeah, you could do it with a simple release mechanism or something, but magnets are cooler. That's the Apple way to do it.
00:45:57 ◼ ► And it's more proprietary and they can sell you more weird-ass adapters. And that's why the VISA adapter is like that and whole nine yards.
00:46:04 ◼ ► So it's definitely an Apple way to do it. But for years, Apple hasn't had monitors that adjusted in height, which is, again, not a groundbreaking concept. Every monitor does that, right?
00:46:15 ◼ ► In fact, Apple's first LCD external monitor, which none of you remember and was horrendously ugly, was in fact height adjustable, the telescoping thing on it.
00:46:23 ◼ ► Have you ever seen that one? It's ugly. Don't look it up. But yeah, they lost that technology. They found it again with the cool iMac with the metal arm.
00:46:31 ◼ ► Anyway, I'm glad height adjustment is back. And I'm kind of glad the detachable stand is back because it's cool, even though it makes no difference in my life.
00:46:40 ◼ ► All right, so we concluded the base graphics card. Before we move on to storage, I wanted to call attention to, I think it was Baron von Klack in the chat, sent a KBase link for "Install and replace parts in your Mac Pro 2019."
00:46:52 ◼ ► Learn about the many different parts you can replace and upgrade in your Mac Pro. Memory, PCIe cards, Apple I/O card, power supply, SSD, and wheels.
00:47:00 ◼ ► You will find links in the show notes to some YouTube videos that Apple put up showing how to do that.
00:47:08 ◼ ► So Apple is totally on. They've got the KBase articles, they've got videos they made to show you how to, I think they just have ones for GPU and RAM upgrading. And of course they have the cool. Anyway, check out the videos. We will put them in the show notes that Apple is clearly pitching this as an upgradeable machine.
00:47:23 ◼ ► So I know this isn't quite what they've ever done before, but it's so damn close and it sounds so much cooler. Why didn't they call this the 2020 Mac Pro?
00:47:42 ◼ ► Yeah, and the 2013 Mac Pro was the same thing. I know zero people who got it in 2013. Even if you order it on day one, it came in February 2014. And this is almost that bad.
00:47:52 ◼ ► Right now, if you order it now, it delivers December 3rd to January 7th. So almost no one is actually getting these in 2019. Why didn't they just call it 2020? It would sound cooler, indicate a clean break from all this teen garbage.
00:48:05 ◼ ► And also, it's going to sound older than it is in the future. You think the 2013 Mac Pro, that's super old, but it's actually really 2014 basically, right?
00:48:19 ◼ ► I'm just saying. I take your point, but at this point, 94 years later, it's not that big a difference.
00:48:25 ◼ ► Yeah, anyway, it's a small thing, but I think they should have called it the 2020 Mac Pro.
00:48:29 ◼ ► I'd mostly agree. All right, storage, including how much storage is right for you, Jon?
00:48:34 ◼ ► Actually, before we go to storage, on the GPU thing, I just want to be clear that I'm selecting the base GPU in protest.
00:48:45 ◼ ► It doesn't actually make a difference. Literally nothing I'm going to do with it is going to require more GPU.
00:48:53 ◼ ► But it is kind of a waste of money. If the other option was there, I would pick it because it's not going to be a great resale value for a Radeon Pro 580X.
00:49:02 ◼ ► And so even if the new GPU option comes out in January, like, "Oh, now I can upgrade and swap it in," I'm not going to, because it would be just expensive and a waste of the money and I'd have to resell the old one or whatever.
00:49:12 ◼ ► So it's, like I said before, the thing is never completely done and available for you. It's always a work in progress.
00:49:21 ◼ ► Even though the reason I was into this GPU is because I think they discussed it, like when they were discussing the GPU options.
00:49:26 ◼ ► I was like, "Well, I'm not interested in these super high-end workstation ones, so forget about those.
00:49:31 ◼ ► And of course I'm not going to take the base one, and there's that sweet spot in the middle and it's just not even available to me unless I want to keep waiting."
00:49:38 ◼ ► I will defend this base GPU. First of all, I would probably get it because I don't touch my GPU really.
00:49:45 ◼ ► And this is, it seems, I don't know too much about it, but it seems like this is fairly similar to the base model GPU in the iMac Pro, which admittedly is two years old.
00:49:53 ◼ ► But, like, this seems like, okay, it seems pretty good. But also it's the only one offered currently that only takes up one slot instead of two.
00:50:03 ◼ ► And so if you had a need to populate all the other PCI Express slots with other stuff, you actually would want this, because then this would leave you one extra slot than any other configuration would.
00:50:13 ◼ ► Yeah, no, it's not bad. And the fact that it's not a quote-unquote "MPX module," like, it's great because it doesn't take up more slots.
00:50:23 ◼ ► Right, it's not the double-wide thing or whatever. But the double-wide things look cool.
00:50:28 ◼ ► I mean, honestly, like, my use case is "computer that is cool." Right? So these are actual relevant criteria for my use case, because I literally, like, there is no game I'm going to be using that's going to need a bigger GPU.
00:50:40 ◼ ► There's no video that I'm rendering. There's none of that. It's all just about the cool factor. So base GPU.
00:50:45 ◼ ► All right, storage. 256, default, and it's ridiculous. I don't understand that default. They did so well with the defaults elsewhere. Default 32 gig. The default video card is fine.
00:50:57 ◼ ► The default CPU is fine. For people who don't want CPUs, it's still 8 core. It's not like they offered a quad-core one.
00:51:03 ◼ ► But 256, it's not like the SSDs in this are fantastically better than the ones in the iMac. They're basically probably about the same. I don't know. I haven't seen benchmarks for it yet.
00:51:13 ◼ ► But, like, I don't think there's any reason to have 56. You go up to 1 terabyte, it's an extra $400, which is the typical ridiculous markup. Extra 800 for 2 terabyte. Extra 1400 for 4 terabyte, which is better than what Marco paid, but it still ain't great.
00:51:28 ◼ ► 8 terabyte, coming soon, which, granted, wasn't, I don't think, was it even mentioned as an option at W3C? I forget.
00:51:35 ◼ ► No, they announced this with the release of the 16-inch MacBook Pro at the briefing. They said, by the way, because the 16-inch can go up to 8 terabytes, and they said, we're also adding this as an option to the Mac Pro. They didn't say when.
00:51:47 ◼ ► Yeah, they're adding it, and you would think, oh, adding it as an option would mean I'll be able to click it on the options page when you put that up, but no, that's not the case.
00:51:53 ◼ ► Not that I'm, I wasn't in the market for 8 terabytes, that's just too rich for my blood.
00:51:57 ◼ ► Which leaves you in the curious state of currently you can get a 16-inch MacBook Pro with more SSD space than you can the Mac Pro.
00:52:03 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, obviously you could shove way more stuff inside that case and get all the storage you want out of it, but it's, I mean, I suppose if you're doing video and you really wanted that 8 terabyte, you can't order.
00:52:13 ◼ ► You just have to wait for coming soon. All these YouTubers who got these things with 8 terabytes, or do they have 8 terabytes, I forget, but anyway, I'm assuming what they're going to buy, they want the 8 terabyte, because they all talk about they have all this storage, and it's great to have all this internal storage and so on and so forth, even though they have all their external SANs and all that other stuff.
00:52:30 ◼ ► They seem like they wanted to buy the 8 terabyte, but it's not an option. I don't want to buy the 8 terabyte. My current iMac, my wife's iMac has 1 terabyte, and I outgrew that, so now I have my photos on an external drive.
00:52:44 ◼ ► And so I have 1 terabyte external, 1 terabyte internal, and I'm pressing up against the limits of that, kind of, so 2 terabytes does not give me much breathing room, so it's got to be 4. It's a lot of money.
00:53:01 ◼ ► Even though you can upgrade the internal storage, I don't know if you're going to be able to or going to want to rip out those little pair of SSD thingies and put in another different pair of them. Anyway, that would be a waste of the internal storage.
00:53:24 ◼ ► No, I'm telling you, when I bought my iMac Pro, I took the 4 terabyte option, and it was so embarrassingly expensive, I didn't even want to tell anybody I got it, because it cost a ridiculous amount of money back then. It's way cheaper now.
00:53:36 ◼ ► And I do not regret it for a second. Even though at the time I was really angsty about it, I was like, "I really hope this isn't a mistake," but it wasn't. I love having 4 terabytes. I'm currently using about 3.2 terabytes of that 4, so I'm using it.
00:53:51 ◼ ► And it's so nice to have it all in the built-in internal drive on this computer. Now, granted, on the Mac Pro, you can add stuff a lot more easily.
00:53:58 ◼ ► So if you were trying to configure this a little bit more on a super tight budget, well, first of all, you shouldn't be buying this computer. But if for some reason you're in that state, then sure, do after the fact third party expansion through drive bay cards or whatever else, or PCI express SSDs directly.
00:54:19 ◼ ► So I was pointing out in the chat room, back to the GPUs briefly, that if you look at the price of the base one, it has no price in their configurators. And then the next one down is the Pro Vega 2. It's $2,400 more.
00:54:33 ◼ ► If you buy that, what I assume is the same Radeon Pro Vega 2 module separately, it's $2,800. So that prices the 580X at $400, basically. So that's the money that you're burning if you really wanted some other GPU and you buy it later.
00:54:51 ◼ ► How much money are you wasting with that 580X? In Apple dollars, it's $400. How much did we sell it for? Maybe $200 or whatever. All right. Apple Afterburner. Now, this is nice. This is all the other things like how much storage is right for you, what graphics card is right for you.
00:55:09 ◼ ► Afterburner, it says, do I need an Apple Afterburner card? It should really just say, if you don't know what this card is, you probably don't need it. Maybe that's not true. Maybe you don't know what it is because it's just a brand name. But this is actually the biggest surprise of the configurator for me.
00:55:22 ◼ ► I knew nothing about field programmable gate arrays, FPGA. That does not roll off the tongue. I knew nothing about them other than that they existed and what they did, but I'd never been in the market to buy one because why would I, what would I do with it?
00:55:40 ◼ ► It's field programmable. It's a bunch of logic games that you can tell, quote unquote, in the field how to configure themselves. So when you get a silicon chip, normally, like it's sort of burned into the factory. Here's a bunch of little transistors that are arranged in a particular way and the performer certain function. And that's it. It's like a fixed function.
00:55:58 ◼ ► They use lithography to put it on a little chip and that's what you get. Field programmable gate array lets you change the arrangement of those gates to sort of, it's like programmable hardware sort of. Right?
00:56:10 ◼ ► So you can do lots of interesting things with it, but as you can imagine, it's much more expensive than the equivalent functionality if you just got it burned into a chip that did one thing. But it's reconfigurable. So that's what's cool about it.
00:56:20 ◼ ► And I didn't know what the pricing of this stuff would be like, but it was so strange and foreign. Some people had told us that these things cost a lot of money in the markets, but they exist. I expected it to be very, very expensive. Turns out not so much.
00:56:33 ◼ ► And especially compared to the GPUs, it's $2,000. No afterburner is free and if you want it, the only choice is you get an Apple afterburner card, it's $2,000. I suspect the reason it's so much cheaper than GPUs is if you were to put the GPUs down and take their chips and look at exactly how much square footage or square inches of silicon surface area there is in these giant GPU options, it's probably vastly larger than the afterburner card.
00:57:02 ◼ ► Even though the FPGAs are bulkier for the functionality they provide, it seems like this one is not monstrous and performs, they're using it to perform a few specific functions, which is able to do very, very quickly. But it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
00:57:20 ◼ ► So it's too bad I have absolutely no use for this card and does not contribute to the coolness factor in any way because I have no idea what I would do with it. So no afterburner card for me.
00:57:29 ◼ ► Well and the great thing is because it's a regular slot filled iMac pro, you can always add it later. If Apple adds some ability to this via a software update down the road that you would actually benefit from, you can then at that time buy an afterburner card and stick it in.
00:57:47 ◼ ► That's the magic of the pro, like all their other computers, you have to make so many decisions up front that you can never upgrade. And so you have to often overbuy or underbuy for budget reasons or for not foreseeing future needs and then your needs change in the future and all of a sudden you have to get a whole new computer just because you didn't have enough disk space or RAM or something like that and you can't upgrade it.
00:58:10 ◼ ► That's why this is so great because if you make the wrong choice on most of these things, you can change it later.
00:58:17 ◼ ► I thought of a use for the afterburner card. I was thinking of at what point, aside from the rare times when I'm doing like Blu-ray encoding or whatever, when I see my computer or rather my wife's computer suffering.
00:58:32 ◼ ► I hear the fans go up a little bit because I don't have an iMac pro. What is it usually when that happens? I bet both of you know.
00:58:47 ◼ ► No, it's not her, it's me. I'm using the computer and I hear the fans go up and I'm like, "What the hell is going on?"
00:58:54 ◼ ► It's always like a browser tab. It's always something, some browser window open. You know when that happens? The tab you haven't looked at in a while, it's like a link you followed from Twitter and it's some article and you started reading it and you're like, "I'll get back to that later," and you went off to do something else and then you're doing something else and all of a sudden you hear the fans go up and you're like, "I'm not even, my hands aren't even touching the keyboard or the mouse. Nothing is going on. Why are the fans spinning up?"
00:59:15 ◼ ► And what is it always? Some stupid, extremely inefficient JavaScript and/or Bitcoin miner in some ad festoon crappy website that you would never visit normally but that you got linked to from Twitter has gone off the rails and one Chrome tab is taking 200% CPU or something.
00:59:33 ◼ ► That's always what it is. So the Asperger card should be used for JavaScript acceleration. So this is Bitcoin miners can go really fast and not have your fans spin up.
00:59:49 ◼ ► This was a tense moment in the configurator because some options are like coming soon and not available. When I first went through this configurator, there was no option for wheels. There was no wheels. There was no feet. There was no casters. I was searching the page for any of those words. It just wasn't on the page.
01:00:04 ◼ ► Due to the magic of CDNs and slow rollout of content, anyone who puts anything up in the app store is familiar with this thing. It's just you need to wait a little bit. I jumped the gun a little bit. So yeah, feet or wheels are an option.
01:00:17 ◼ ► Do I need wheels for my Mac Pro? That's a good question, Apple's website. Do I need wheels?
01:00:23 ◼ ► Way back when we did the W2C show, I remember talking about this and saying I was afraid that my beautiful, very expensive Mac would be vulnerable under my desk to people slamming chairs into it or vacuum cleaners or dogs running into it or all sorts of terrible things could happen to it.
01:00:42 ◼ ► So maybe if I had it on wheels, I could roll it out of the way or roll to safety, R2D2 style to avoid the slings and arrows of life on the floor.
01:00:52 ◼ ► But as of a couple of shows ago when I was talking about preparing the way and I got the new side table and everything and I was thinking about putting the Mac Pro on the little side table, if it's going to be on the side table, there's no way in hell I want wheels on it because now it would be high up on a surface on a slick, hard surface with wheels.
01:01:07 ◼ ► That is not a good situation to be in. So I think not because they're $400, bargain price of $100 per wheel, but mostly because my current plan is to try putting it on the little side table thing, no wheels because I don't feel secure with it up off the ground with wheels.
01:01:28 ◼ ► I think I would probably get the wheels if I was getting it because I don't have any notion of putting it up. I would definitely have it on the floor.
01:01:37 ◼ ► And if it's going to be on the floor, I want wheels not only because just in case it helps move it around. It's giant and heavy. That would actually be nice.
01:01:53 ◼ ► Pulling it along the sidewalk with a string like it's your red rider wagon that you're dragging behind you.
01:01:59 ◼ ► Exactly. But also, first of all, I'd be afraid of those feet scratching up my floor. If it gets nudged slightly, wherever it was sitting on my floor would probably scratch it up.
01:02:13 ◼ ► I don't know. I hope so. I would appreciate the extra inch of ground clearance that would give it because that would make it easier to clean under.
01:02:26 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. I assume there's rubber under there just because if anyone's familiar with the Apple-style monitors with a sort of L-shaped tongue of aluminum bending underneath them, the iMacs are like that. Their displays have been like that for ages.
01:02:38 ◼ ► I'm sitting in front of one of the earlier models that have very thick tongue on it. And they all look like it's just a bent piece of aluminum.
01:02:43 ◼ ► But if you pick those up and look on the bottom, there is actually rubber underneath that big aluminum thing to keep it grippy, to keep it from scraping every desk, so on and so forth.
01:02:54 ◼ ► So kvnava9 in the chatroom said, "What if they offer giant wheels like they do for bikes meant for riding on the beach?"
01:03:03 ◼ ► Oh my god. I would buy that in a second. It would make it so much easier. That I would actually bring it to the beach. I would pull it with its power cable or whatever down the half-mile sidewalk from the ferry to the half-mile sand-covered sidewalk.
01:03:21 ◼ ► The other factor with these is that I think I had been thinking anyway, I had been assuming that you get wheels as an option and you either buy it with wheels or buy it with feet. But the way it would work is the feet would get unscrewed at the factory and they would stick in wheels or vice versa.
01:03:39 ◼ ► The metal tube that runs from top to bottom in this case is apparently all one piece and there's no connecting or disconnecting.
01:03:46 ◼ ► So if you get wheels, you've got wheels. And if you get feet, you've got feet. And you cannot take one, as far as I know, that has feet and switch it to wheels or vice versa.
01:03:54 ◼ ► I think you can, but I think Apple's telling you that you have to have an authorized service provider do it. It's a little vague on that point. I think you can do it later, but you're not supposed to.
01:04:06 ◼ ► I don't know. They don't appear to be selling the wheels directly. I'm guessing it's just because they don't want you to install them yourself.
01:04:12 ◼ ► So in that same KBase article, "Install and replace parts in your Mac Pro," it does mention wheels. And it says you can configure your Mac Pro with wheels to make it easier to transport.
01:04:20 ◼ ► If you already have your Mac Pro and want to add wheels, to Marco's point, contact Apple or an Apple authorized service provider.
01:04:27 ◼ ► We need to fix it to tear this thing down. Because obviously you can just replace the entire internal skeletal case and then you get one with the wheels.
01:04:34 ◼ ► Here's what the options say. They say, "Stainless steel frame with feet and stainless steel frame with wheels." They phrase it as part of the frame itself.
01:04:43 ◼ ► Whether it actually can be disconnected, we need iFixit to open this thing up and see if they can get the feet or the wheels off or if it's just one big piece.
01:04:50 ◼ ► So yeah, feet, which is nice because it saves $400, but I do think the wheels look super cool.
01:04:57 ◼ ► So what if I get it, try to put it on that little side table and it's too wobbly or it doesn't fit in my office or it looks weird or I don't like the sound or whatever.
01:05:05 ◼ ► Then it's going to go back on the floor and then it's going to be on the floor with no wheels. But I'll feel better about saving $200.
01:05:16 ◼ ► What about which input device is right for you, Apple? What happened to that phrasing? I thought we were friends.
01:05:21 ◼ ► I'm not going to use any of these input peripherals. I really just like trackpads. I don't like Apple's mouse even though it is a fine mouse.
01:05:29 ◼ ► It's just not the style of mouse that I like, so I'm going to stick with the default, which is Magic Mouse 2.
01:05:34 ◼ ► I'm loving the Apple peripheral lifestyle. I have both, the trackpad on the left, mouse on the right.
01:05:39 ◼ ► I will say though, I saw these peripherals in the demo rooms because they have a different color scheme.
01:05:44 ◼ ► Instead of just being all space gray like the iMac Pro, they have black tops and then silver aluminum bottoms.
01:05:51 ◼ ► It's a very high contrast look. I actually don't think they look very good. I thought they looked kind of weird in person.
01:06:10 ◼ ► I don't recall if I did. I might have one of those keyboards upstairs somewhere. That's the problem.
01:06:15 ◼ ► I've got too much stuff and I'm too old and I forget things. Someone listening right now is like, "Yes, you have it. I gave it to you. How can you not remember?"
01:06:22 ◼ ► I bought underscores and then I now have a set of my own that's brand new that I've not touched.
01:06:29 ◼ ► Well, that's not entirely true. I bought underscores that included both the mouse and the trackpad.
01:06:33 ◼ ► The iMac Pro that I bought, I only got the default option which was the mouse because it was cheapest and I knew I wasn't going to use it.
01:06:40 ◼ ► I'm pretty sure I have a brand new unopened version of my current keyboard, the old Apple extended with the white keys like the pre-Magic key switches or whatever.
01:06:54 ◼ ► With keyboard, you have no options here. Magic keyboard with numeric keypad is your only option. You can change the language but that's about it.
01:07:04 ◼ ► Pre-installed software. I was trying to upsell you on the software. You want Final Cut, you can get it. You want Logic, you can get it. I'm skipping all of that.
01:07:10 ◼ ► What's in the box? A big giant Mac Pro. A really cool power cord. They're into the braided stuff now.
01:07:17 ◼ ► So it's a braided power cord. I think the USB-C to lightning cable is also braided. The mouse and the keyboard.
01:07:24 ◼ ► Are you ready to continue? See, that was it. We've sailed through these options on the Mac Pro. What my screen says right now is $9,399.
01:07:33 ◼ ► Real time follow up from somebody inside your house. I am being told that you bought Jason Snell's old iMac Pro peripherals.
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01:09:54 ◼ ► You click continue and the next page it goes at the top it has a banner that says Mac Pro with an add to bag button.
01:10:02 ◼ ► Now granted we didn't click add to bag which is Apple's insistence on calling your thing a bag and not a cart.
01:10:09 ◼ ► Which honestly what kind of bag could fit something this big? I suppose it might not fit in a cart either.
01:10:14 ◼ ► It's like a drum depot like sleds. Anyway it hasn't yet been added to my bag. It's just sitting up there you can add to bag.
01:10:21 ◼ ► But before we get there it says expand your Mac Pro workstation and it has the disembodied floating monitor that Margaret was talking about before.
01:10:27 ◼ ► Expand your Mac Pro workstation. Pro display XDR. Your choices are no thanks which is free.
01:10:33 ◼ ► Nice of Apple to give you no thanks without charging you. Standard glass which is $5,000 and nano texture glass which is $6,000.
01:10:42 ◼ ► We have one small item on the nano texture glass. Apple has a support article. This might have been up for a while but it was going around recently.
01:10:54 ◼ ► Use only the dry polishing cloth that comes with your display to wipe dust or smudges off the screen.
01:10:59 ◼ ► Don't add water or use liquids to clean the nano texture glass. Never use any other cloth to clean the nano texture glass.
01:11:07 ◼ ► If you lose the included polishing cloth you can contact Apple to order a replacement polishing cloth.
01:11:17 ◼ ► Literally the only thing you can touch this screen with is Apple's own cloth and if you lose that one or it gets gross you have to buy another one.
01:11:29 ◼ ► Having seen both the standard glass and nano texture glass in person at WWDC I have always been on the side of the standard glass when it comes to this monitor.
01:12:05 ◼ ► How are you going to get this thing clean by just taking a dry thing and rubbing it on it?
01:12:11 ◼ ► And the thing is for a lot of the videos I saw people who had the earlier review units of these things.
01:12:21 ◼ ► Are you in an environment like in these big production houses where you're going to be doing real work with real people there?
01:12:29 ◼ ► Are you going to defy the wisdom of the 75 degree angle wizards telling you that Apple's website is it clearly says you cannot use any other cloth.
01:12:56 ◼ ► I mean, again, I'm not ordering one of these, but like if, like I've been telling myself all this whole time, like if I got this, I would get nano texture.
01:13:03 ◼ ► But now I'm not so sure because like, yeah, you know, I've been living with the glossy iMac for the last five years or whatever.
01:13:10 ◼ ► You know, it's, there's occasionally been an annoying reflection on it, but it's not the common case.
01:13:14 ◼ ► And like, yeah, if it's going to have like this finicky side effect of I'd be afraid of anything ever getting on it and afraid of anybody ever touching it.
01:13:21 ◼ ► And like, you know, like what if someone, you know, who's like, you know, cleaning my house wipes off the monitor like with the wrong cloth?
01:13:28 ◼ ► Like what's, oh my God, like it's like I don't want to have to worry about that for the lifetime of this product.
01:13:42 ◼ ► You're looking at it and seeing these tiny specks and you're like, what do I do about those?
01:13:48 ◼ ► You'd be there, you'd be like, you know, rubbing away that thing like 500 strokes in each direction on time and every time you collect a fisherman's friend.
01:14:01 ◼ ► They're like, wow, I was going to get that nano-textured glass, but now that I think about it, there's no way.
01:14:04 ◼ ► Anyway, so I've just gone through this configuration process of this computer that, you know, configured the quote unquote the way I want it with all the compromises.
01:14:13 ◼ ► And conveniently at the top of the page it says add to bag but does not show me the price.
01:14:32 ◼ ► $5,000 option for a display that can lay flat on my desk, I guess, or be supported by a small child as is suggested at WWDC?
01:14:58 ◼ ► Honestly, this thing just sort of leaning slightly back on your desk with whatever supporting it completely hidden by the monitor would be less offensive to me than attaching this to a third-party stand.
01:15:12 ◼ ► Again, my stupid use case is focused heavily on aesthetics, which makes no sense to anybody, but let me be me.
01:15:22 ◼ ► Part of the reason I want a first-party monitor is because it matches the computer and looks cool on the front and the back.
01:15:48 ◼ ► Everything about this is ridiculous. You don't need any of it, but you want it, and it makes you happy. You've been waiting a freaking decade. You just get the thing you want, which is the standard glass and the ProStand.
01:15:58 ◼ ► So here's the thing. We discussed this at length, mostly not restated because nothing has really changed.
01:16:04 ◼ ► Part of what I was, you know, fraught and upset about at the announcement, excited by the new Mac Pro, but also had some trepidation, was all about the monitor.
01:16:15 ◼ ► Because, yes, the computer is horrendously expensive, and, yes, I just configured it up to like $9,500.
01:16:21 ◼ ► But, you know, it's not unreasonable. Like, a lot of people are sending us the audio clips of old episodes where it's like, "I'm not going to spend $15,000 on a computer."
01:16:32 ◼ ► The computer, as configured by me here, you know, not particularly frugally, but whatever, it's under 10 grand for the computer.
01:16:42 ◼ ► And then you just buy a monitor. How much can a monitor cost? This monitor screws everything up in terms of, like, I do want a bigger monitor.
01:16:49 ◼ ► And I do appreciate that this one is a cool big monitor, but it's not. Even in my use case of "I want a cool thing," it is not worth $5,000 to me.
01:16:59 ◼ ► Like, it doesn't do anything. If it was just a 5K iMac screen, I'd be happy. If it was a 6K iMac screen, like everything the same as the iMac, but bigger and more pixels, that's the monitor I would buy.
01:17:10 ◼ ► And that would be 2 grand, and I would be like, "Fine." This thing, like, it is wasted on me. Totally and utterly wasted.
01:17:17 ◼ ► I'm sure it's going to look cool. It will look better than my television set or whatever, but, like, it is the most frustrating part of the solar experience.
01:17:24 ◼ ► We talked about it at length. Apple should do something better. Instead, they went super high-end, which I can't blame them for, because the whole point of this product is to plant a flag at the very, very, very high end.
01:17:32 ◼ ► So, good job, Apple. You've done that. But for me, personally, it's very disappointing that they did this.
01:17:58 ◼ ► That's the only option that makes sense. Like, everything else sucks. Like, if the point of this is to have the Halo computer that you've waited so long for and that you really want and that you've worked and earned your hard-earned money to buy, that is the option to pick.
01:18:14 ◼ ► Like, I know it's ridiculous. Again, this whole thing is ridiculous. But that's, like, you want an Apple monitor for your brand-new, top-of-the-line Apple computer, dammit.
01:18:29 ◼ ► And I find it especially ridiculous that they've told us on a number of occasions that developers are their biggest pro-market segment.
01:18:38 ◼ ► And I can't think of any developers, except John Syracuse, who are going to buy this monitor.
01:18:49 ◼ ► What developers need is what John said. A lot of space, but still otherwise consumer-grade.
01:18:56 ◼ ► We don't need the crazy XDR stuff with the fans, which I want to ask you about. The fans and the huge thousand nits of brightness. We don't need that.
01:19:06 ◼ ► And the iMac 5K screen and the iMac Pro screen is really good for photos that has full P3 color gamut. It's not a garbage monitor. It's really good for things well beyond development.
01:19:17 ◼ ► Yeah, they've been selling, as far as I know, they've been selling the same panel in iMacs since the second version of the Retina iMac, which I think was 2015, when they added P3.
01:19:27 ◼ ► I'm pretty sure it's been the same panel since 2015. It's fantastic. Just put this panel as an external monitor, and yeah, you could charge 1500, 2000, that'd be fine.
01:19:39 ◼ ► It doesn't even need to be bigger. If it can be bigger, if you can give us 6K, that's even better. But we don't even need that. We just want this monitor that you've been shipping in iMacs for four years as a standalone monitor to buy that you can plug into any other computer.
01:20:01 ◼ ► It sort of exists, Asterik, but it's in this terrible plastic enclosure with bad backlight bleeding all around it.
01:20:08 ◼ ► Yeah, so for as weird as I am with the "oh, it's got to match the computer and the aesthetics and the cool factor" and stuff like that, I'm not that far outside of the mainstream of the tech enthusiasts.
01:20:22 ◼ ► Because people in general like cool computers. That's what makes them tech enthusiasts.
01:20:30 ◼ ► In the same way that people who are into cars like fast cars that they're never going to own just because they're cool. Most people sensibly are not doing the stupid thing that I'm doing and buying this very expensive computer.
01:20:40 ◼ ► But they appreciate Apple's case wrapped around an LG LCD. They understand it like it's literally the same panel in both of these things.
01:20:50 ◼ ► But most, I think even plain old developers are willing to spend one or two hundred bucks more to get a cool Apple case because it matches their computer and it looks cool. There is a threshold of looks coolness and in general Apple customers are willing to pay a little bit more for something that looks cool.
01:21:04 ◼ ► So the LG one is unsatisfying even within the realm of practical people with actual needs. They want more screen space, they can see more code, they don't really care about color gamma.
01:21:15 ◼ ► But they do do photos in their computer too so if they're going to have a big desktop it's nice to have something with a P3 display so great get that LG panel.
01:21:21 ◼ ► Can you put it in a case that at least passes my threshold of acceptability and it feels like the LG one is both flaky and not particularly expensive feeling but still actually kind of expensive as Casey pointed out in the past few shows.
01:21:36 ◼ ► I'd rather be really upset for a little while about how much money I spent on the right product than buy the wrong product and be kind of upset about it forever.
01:21:46 ◼ ► And then the Pro stand, I mean we've gone over this before, it's very silly. I hope it's a good stand.
01:21:55 ◼ ► It seems the magnet thing is cool, the interlocking mechanism is cool, hopefully it won't get loose over time. I have some faith because Apple is usually good at these kind of mechanical things like witness the iMac arm which did get loose over time but held up surprisingly well in very hostile environments with children yanking on the thing.
01:22:32 ◼ ► At the bottom I have a new subtotal that says $15,397.00 and there's an add to bag button. I'm going to click that.
01:22:44 ◼ ► Yeah, so at the top now it says review bag, $15,000.00 with accessories but there are more options. AppleCare+ for Mac, $300.00 perhaps the cheapest thing you can buy for this thing. Cheaper than wheels.
01:22:57 ◼ ► Cheaper than the monitor stand. Cheaper than any of the GPU options. Cheaper than any of the CPU upgrades.
01:23:06 ◼ ► AppleCare. I think in the relative cost of this thing, I tend to buy AppleCare for my computers.
01:23:15 ◼ ► I bought it for the Mac Pro that's sitting below me. I bought it for all the portable things that I knew my kids were going to be using because that just makes sense.
01:23:22 ◼ ► I think I bought it for my iOS iMac. I tend to buy AppleCare. Am I coming out ahead? Probably not. It just makes me sleep better at night so I'm clicking on add to bag for AppleCare.
01:23:32 ◼ ► Which is weird because it doesn't go off to a different screen. It says underneath item added to bag but the add to bag button remains there and active. Bad UI Apple.
01:23:41 ◼ ► Next option. AppleCare+ for Apple Display. Because unlike, I think unlike in the past, I recall in the past buying AppleCare that covered the display if you bought it as a system.
01:23:51 ◼ ► Yeah, if you bought like a Mac Pro old cheese grater or a Power Mac G5 with an Apple Display that's not a purchase, there is a unified AppleCare that covered both of them.
01:24:01 ◼ ► Yeah, that does not exist in this case for the Pro Display XDR. Not only that but the Pro Display XDR AppleCare which lasts the same amount of time as the Mac AppleCare costs $200 more. It is $500 for the AppleCare for the display.
01:24:14 ◼ ► I was thinking like this is, I would imagine if you think about from Apple's perspective of like, you know, if you're like an insurance actuary and you're trying to figure out what's this actually going to cost them over time. The parts that can go wrong in a Mac Pro are, first of all, it's unlikely that anything inside of a modern Mac Pro is ever really going to die within three years because it has very few moving parts except fans and they're cheap.
01:24:36 ◼ ► And otherwise, if one of the solid state components dies which is very unlikely in the first three years, then fine, you know, you can replace just that part.
01:24:44 ◼ ► Whereas what can go wrong on a 6K display? Dead pixels or image retention and those kind of problems, you have to replace that entire panel.
01:24:56 ◼ ► And I'm guessing it's probably not possible. I'm guessing you have to replace the entire thing and so you figure like if something goes wrong, that's a lot of pixels that could die and there's pretty much no servicing it.
01:25:11 ◼ ► Like you have to replace the entire super expensive component or entire thing. Whereas again with the Mac Pro, you can replace like just the bad RAM stick or whatever and you're fine.
01:25:21 ◼ ► So I'm guessing it's actually, they're probably figuring it's actually more expensive for them to provide extra warranty coverage on that display.
01:25:29 ◼ ► Which by the way, is probably a good indicator that you should probably get this application for it.
01:25:36 ◼ ► You don't say Marco, interesting opinion coming from you. Yeah, no, I agree. And also the other thing I would add is it's much more prone to accidental damage.
01:25:44 ◼ ► It's a huge fragile thing that comes off the stand and is meant to be carried around if you're in that type of environment, like from station to station, like it's breakable.
01:25:54 ◼ ► Yeah, here's the thing that's killer about all this, like AppleCare, I'm going to buy this, I'm going to have peace of mind.
01:26:00 ◼ ► If you're in sort of the geological time set that I deal with my products in, it's always shocking to look at this and say, three years? You're barely getting started in three years.
01:26:11 ◼ ► These all run out in three years, so if you buy AppleCare for your very expensive display and then four years later you ding it with your elbow, you're like, well good thing I had AppleCare.
01:26:20 ◼ ► What do you mean good thing you got AppleCare? AppleCare is gone. I know you can do the thing where you keep paying monthly and we talked about that on past shows, but in general, like thinking that you're going to get AppleCare and you never have to worry about anything is not true if you keep your computer as long as I do.
01:26:33 ◼ ► All that said, I live in deadly fear of breaking this way too expensive monitor that I don't need, so I'm clicking add to bag. AppleCare Plus for Apple Display.
01:26:44 ◼ ► They're offering me a Thunderbolt 3 cable, which is USB-C on both ends and is white. Get that crap out of here. I only use black cables to connect to my computer.
01:26:55 ◼ ► Are you getting the Logitech webcam thing, because otherwise you won't be able to do like video calls on your computer.
01:27:00 ◼ ► I told you I already have a Logitech camera sitting on my desk right now, because my monitor also doesn't have a camera in it. It's so old. Everything old is new again.
01:27:13 ◼ ► I skipped over the original iSight because I don't know why I didn't get it then. There was no use for it and it was expensive and got really hot and it was weird.
01:27:21 ◼ ► So I didn't get the original iSight and then I got a monitor with no camera in it and then I just kept using that computer for a decade.
01:27:30 ◼ ► There are other options. You can buy a bunch of dongles. Luckily I have a bunch of dongles already.
01:27:35 ◼ ► Actually my own dongles. I work gave me some dongles for my dongle book at work, but I bought some of my own peripherals when there was this big sale at one point.
01:27:54 ◼ ► I'm all good on the iCloud and the Apple Music. The auxiliary power thing for $70. No thanks.
01:28:01 ◼ ► No, I think that's it. So I think I clicked on everything. Let's review bag and see what we've got.
01:28:33 ◼ ► Here's the thing about the prices. Normally if you've gone through the configurator to figure out which MacBook do you want or whatever when I was doing my MacBook Air,
01:28:41 ◼ ► you can tell when you screwed up because you're like, "Oh, the price is double what it should be."
01:28:45 ◼ ► You just look at the number and you know you've accidentally put the quantity to or something in your editor.
01:28:49 ◼ ► But with this computer, looking at the number does not tell you at a glance whether you accidentally added two monitors or two computers or anything
01:29:00 ◼ ► The estimated tax in my particular zip code is $858.34 and yours apparently is a couple hundred dollars more than that.
01:29:12 ◼ ► The tax on your... or I guess I should say in this context, the tax on y'all's computers is basically a MacBook Air.
01:30:09 ◼ ► you could receive the Mac Pro on December 30 and not receive the display until two weeks later on January 15.
01:30:26 ◼ ► It takes me so long to like, you've already heard about the repairing the way. That continues.
01:30:33 ◼ ► I'm fine with taking this slow and having the changeover be slow and careful and methodical.
01:30:38 ◼ ► I mean, I'm not John Roderick level who's had a new computer in a box in his house for a year,
01:30:55 ◼ ► Anyway, let's talk about these numbers here because it's ridiculous. I don't need this computer.
01:31:07 ◼ ► Luckily, there are many avenues available to not just fancy podcast hosts but everybody,
01:31:18 ◼ ► One of them is, in theory, you could find a state that doesn't have sales tax, like neighboring state of New Hampshire,
01:31:34 ◼ ► Yeah. Someone sent a list of the Apple stores that are going to have the Mac Pro in them for you to look at.
01:31:52 ◼ ► But anyway, if you can find a state without sales tax, you can save some money by going to drive over there and buy it in that location.
01:32:08 ◼ ► where people who work for Apple can offer to, as the name says, their friends and family a fairly substantial discount on hardware.
01:32:15 ◼ ► In general, and in my experience, the discount -- I think it might be like a flat percent, but occasionally the discount varies.
01:32:23 ◼ ► You can get less money off of the cheaper products and maybe more off the ones that have higher margins.
01:32:31 ◼ ► A lot of employers -- you may or may not know this, but one of the advantages of working for a big corporation in a jobby job
01:32:37 ◼ ► is they often have a program through which employees can buy discounted hardware from Apple, believe it or not.
01:32:43 ◼ ► 6% cash back. If you happen to have an Apple card or perhaps two Apple cards, a husband and wife, one could buy the monitor and one could buy the computer,
01:32:52 ◼ ► and you can both get 6% back. All this is to say, I'm not going to pay a lot for this muffler and I'm not going to pay 17 grand for this system.
01:33:00 ◼ ► By the way, no one knows this. If you're in the state of New York and you're going to use your computer primarily for software development or website development,
01:33:14 ◼ ► There you go. And finally, business reps. Depending on how you can ingratiate yourself/pretend you are a real business,
01:33:22 ◼ ► with the business reps at your local Apple store, they can often give discounts as well.
01:33:26 ◼ ► So if you combine all these together, kind of like when people buy new cars, since this is new car pricing here,
01:33:32 ◼ ► you don't want to pay the Windows sticker price. And right now with the 6% thing, it's bad in that there's a time limit,
01:33:48 ◼ ► But you're always going to get 3% back, right? So I plan to leverage everything at my disposal to try to save money on this stupid computer.
01:33:59 ◼ ► It's okay. You've been waiting a long time. You've been not buying a lot of computers. It's okay.
01:34:10 ◼ ► Well, I mean, I don't feel bad about buying this stupid computer. I'm excited about buying this stupid computer.
01:34:15 ◼ ► I feel bad about that much money leaving. So how much money is it and how much of a discount?
01:34:19 ◼ ► But all that is to say is that this is over my limit. That if I actually had to pay $17, I would not buy this computer in this configuration.
01:34:25 ◼ ► But I'm not going to pay $17. Yeah, you would. You would just grumble a little bit longer about it. Agreed.
01:34:31 ◼ ► I don't know. I'm glad I don't have to determine that. I feel like it's like $1,000 per week of grumbling.
01:34:39 ◼ ► I mean, if you just combine this together, like the sales tax that I'm saving, the 6% cash back, and a friends and family discount,
01:34:50 ◼ ► Right. So like they say in the ads, the more you spend, the more you save. Like percentages seem like nothing until the numbers get this big,
01:35:02 ◼ ► So there we go. We did it. Season of giving. Give all that you can. Give until it hurts to one of the world's richest corporations for a computer you don't need.
01:35:15 ◼ ► So here it was earlier tonight. I priced my iMac Pro, my brand new iMac Pro, as though I was just a rando off the street.
01:35:25 ◼ ► And before tax, if I computed this correctly, it was $7,200, and I almost fell off my chair thinking about spending that much money on a computer.
01:35:34 ◼ ► You are talking about a computer, pre-discounts and anything else, that is literally $10,000 more than that.
01:35:43 ◼ ► So it's interesting that you mentioned that. I actually prepared a little bit to, I hope this is a good time as any.
01:35:49 ◼ ► So, you know, I was looking at this as well for myself, thinking, do I need a Mac Pro? Should I get a Mac Pro?
01:35:54 ◼ ► Because I would probably like one. In some ways it would actually be worse than my current setup, like for my own practical needs.
01:36:00 ◼ ► But like it's hell. It's a hell of a computer. So I looked and I configured a Mac Pro that's almost identical to what John just did,
01:36:07 ◼ ► using almost exactly the same reasons. The only difference is where I added the wheels and the trackpad and the mouse.
01:36:21 ◼ ► Only difference from what you just said, Casey, was I had the mouse and trackpad, so that came to $7,517, which is almost exactly $10,000 less.
01:36:29 ◼ ► The iMac Pro that I have, compared to this Mac Pro setup, you know, the Mac Pro would be maybe like a third better in a lot of ways.
01:36:39 ◼ ► Like, I'd have the screen that was about a third bigger. I would have about a third faster CPU performance maybe.
01:36:46 ◼ ► You know, like about a third more RAM. You know, stuff like that. It would be like about a third to 50% better.
01:36:58 ◼ ► Or at least similar, yeah. So like, you know, in most ways it's like, you know, a quarter to 50% better than what I have now.
01:37:18 ◼ ► Because what I have now is already close enough to that in every way that I care about.
01:37:22 ◼ ► Like, who this computer is for, really, is it's for people who the other computers in the lineup can't be specced in the ways that they need for a really good reason.
01:37:48 ◼ ► If you need six GPUs, or four GPUs, like, if you need that, you can't do that with anything else.
01:37:56 ◼ ► If you need, like, 12 internal drives in these weird Promise arrays, like, yeah, again, you can do that.
01:38:02 ◼ ► If you need PCI Express slots, without using some weird buggy enclosure with limited bandwidth, like, through a Thunderbolt cable or whatever, like,
01:38:08 ◼ ► if you need a bunch of PCI Express slots for the kind of work you do, this is the computer for you.
01:38:12 ◼ ► Right? So like, there are a whole bunch of edge cases where this is the computer for you.
01:38:15 ◼ ► And I think that's really what it's for, is like, if what you want to do can't be done with the other models in the lineup, this is for you.
01:38:24 ◼ ► None of those apply to me. The iMac Pro is an amazing computer for everything I do. I don't need more than that.
01:38:31 ◼ ► So I thought, for the same price as this Mac Pro setup, I could buy this iMac Pro, and what else?
01:38:40 ◼ ► Now, I did the math. So, for the same cost as the Mac Pro setup, I could buy the iMac Pro, that's, you know, two-thirds as good,
01:38:50 ◼ ► a 16-inch MacBook Pro of my preferred configuration, the 2079 configuration, my iPhone 11 Pro 256 with the Apple leather case,
01:39:00 ◼ ► an iPad Pro 11-inch 256 cellular with the keyboard folio and the pencil, an Apple Watch Series 5 stainless steel,
01:39:08 ◼ ► AirPods Pro, I'm figuring, I'm re-caring my whole setup here. I could also buy the Peak Design Everyday Backpack to hold all this stuff.
01:39:15 ◼ ► I could buy my Herman Miller Embody chair, a standing desk from IKEA, I'm re-caring my whole desk here,
01:39:22 ◼ ► the Microsoft Sculptor ergonomic keyboard for business, my current favorite headphones if I only had to pick one pair,
01:39:27 ◼ ► the Dan Clark Audio EON 2 closed-back headphones, which are $900, and you know what? You could be a podcaster too.
01:39:34 ◼ ► The Rode Ai1 USB microphone interface, the Shure SM57 microphone, and a good cup of coffee for $4 or less.
01:39:40 ◼ ► That is the total amount. So you could have my entire setup with all this Apple stuff, you could have the iMac Pro,
01:39:48 ◼ ► the MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, Backpack, desk, chair, everything.
01:39:53 ◼ ► You could have all of that for the same price. Now, suppose you don't need that. I have a couple other options for you.
01:39:59 ◼ ► You could also get this iMac Pro, three of my MacBook Pros, seven HomePods, an AeroPress, to make some good coffee of course,
01:40:11 ◼ ► and a month of Disney Plus. Now, suppose you don't want that option. I also have a more luxurious higher-end option.
01:40:31 ◼ ► I'm worried about the macadamia nuts spoiling. I don't think I can eat 81 pounds before they go over.
01:40:44 ◼ ► You could get the iMac Pro, a Nintendo Switch with Mario Kart and Stardew Valley, a Domino's medium pizza with pineapple and pepperoni,
01:40:59 ◼ ► Oh, it's not getting any better. You don't have any money left over for something good to add to this bundle?
01:41:10 ◼ ► Or, again, you can get the 81 pounds of macadamia nuts and the Rolex and the MacBook Pro.
01:41:18 ◼ ► The traditional hypothetical scenario in the context of very expensive Apple computers is the one that really makes us all depressed because we can't tell the future,
01:41:27 ◼ ► which is, if instead of buying "insert expensive Apple computer here," you had taken that money and put it into Apple stock,
01:41:35 ◼ ► you would now be a millionaire. It's like, "Oh, well, that's fine. If you did it in the '80s, fine."
01:41:40 ◼ ► But there are really terrible ones where it's like, instead of buying a Power Mac G5, if you put that money into Apple stock, you'd have like 500 grand now.
01:41:47 ◼ ► I'm making no predictions about the future price of Apple stock, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but those always depress me.
01:41:53 ◼ ► In the "true spirit" of the season, like, buying things is, like, in general, like, the fad now, the same meme or whatever that all the youngsters know about it,
01:42:04 ◼ ► buy experiences, not things, right? But if you buy neither, that can be even better. That's what the investing advice is like.
01:42:11 ◼ ► Instead of buying the thing that you wanted that was fancy, if you put that money into an investment that you magically knew would be amazing,
01:42:19 ◼ ► which is the ridiculous part of the scenario, but basically, like, don't spend it. Save it. Put it into 401(k).
01:42:24 ◼ ► Put it in government bonds. Put it in something like that. Don't buy the thing. Save that money to help you have experiences later,
01:42:30 ◼ ► like the experience of being able to afford healthcare for yourself when you're old, so on and so forth.
01:42:35 ◼ ► So this is not, uh, I was going to say, we are professionals. Do not, please, listeners, do not buy the Mac Pro. It's a stupid thing to do.
01:42:44 ◼ ► I will inevitably regret it when the ARM Macs come out that are so much faster than this thing.
01:42:49 ◼ ► And so there's a very short time window before both of you once again be able to make fun of me about how your phones are faster than my computer.
01:42:56 ◼ ► And by the way, I'm pretty sure the iPhone 11 Pro still beats the Mac Pro that I'd expect in single-core performance.
01:43:05 ◼ ► Obviously, that's not why you're buying a 12-core computer and a multi-core crushes it and in GPUs it crushes so on and so forth.
01:43:11 ◼ ► But the single-core performance of these computers is not good. Not good at all. Like, and the more cores you get, the worse it gets.
01:43:17 ◼ ► If you'll permit me a small journey, one of my favorite things to do when I'm really and truly bored is to look at, like, random YouTube videos about cars or motorcycles or what have you.
01:43:28 ◼ ► Now, I know almost nothing about motorcycles, but one of my favorite styles or flavors of motorcycle video is people who drive, or ride, I guess, a Suzuki Hayabusa, which is the, like, to the best of my understanding, the most crotch-rockety of all crotch rockets.
01:43:44 ◼ ► These typically get, or I guess often get turbocharged, and you'll see videos of these things doing, like, 200, 250 miles an hour on public roads, which is just terrifying and dangerous and terrible.
01:43:54 ◼ ► But I bring all this up to say the Hayabusa is, by some arguments, especially for people like me who are ignorant about motorcycles, the crème de la crème of motorcycles until you go into, like, the Ducati world, right?
01:44:16 ◼ ► But that thing is a monkey's paw. I mean, those things are going to kill you faster than cigarettes. Like, forget it. If you gave that to somebody, that was a plot point on a recent television show that I don't want to spoil, but, like, giving them to someone is basically like giving them a dead fish wrapped in newspaper.
01:44:37 ◼ ► But my point is just that even with the $395 destination charge, this is less than the MSRP of John's future computer.
01:44:48 ◼ ► Yeah. And speaking of the display stuff, one other item that Apple put up, I think, for the first time, their compatibility list for the Pro Display XDR.
01:45:20 ◼ ► And any Mac model with Thunderbolt 3 ports paired with a Blackmagic eGPU or a Blackmagic eGPU Pro.
01:45:29 ◼ ► There is one Mac notably absent from this list of computers that can drive the Pro Display XDR.
01:46:00 ◼ ► I have no problem believing that you're going to stick to your decision for at least some time not to buy a Mac Pro.
01:46:09 ◼ ► But I have a feeling that your determination will waver not because of the computer but because of the screen.
01:46:25 ◼ ► So when the moment arrives that you somehow convince yourself that there's some scenario in which you can get that display onto your desk.
01:46:32 ◼ ► Which obviously isn't now because you can't hook it up to your computer and it wouldn't fit in there physically anyway.
01:46:38 ◼ ► Somehow, some way, if you get into the headspace where you're going to do everything on a 16-inch MacBook Pro again or something.
01:46:43 ◼ ► Or who knows. If something's going to happen, you're going to hook it up to a Mac Mini once it can drive it. I don't know.
01:46:54 ◼ ► But if you can get some scenario where you can get that screen, I think it will lure you.
01:46:58 ◼ ► Because it is a really nice screen. And that is the thing that you look at all day long.
01:47:10 ◼ ► Right now, I've spent the whole last episode and many episodes before this talking about how much I love my iMac Pro.
01:47:26 ◼ ► It could be Intel's fault, but it's getting near the time when it probably isn't Intel's fault anymore.
01:47:37 ◼ ► And they might not update the iMac Pro anymore. This might be the only one they ever make.
01:47:42 ◼ ► And if that's the case, then in a few more years when this thing is getting pretty outdated and I want to upgrade,
01:47:53 ◼ ► Or whatever the consumer iMacs are at that point, but I'd probably want the Mac Pro out of those choices.
01:48:05 ◼ ► because as we just illustrated with the value arguments, if you wanted to know why should the iMac Pro still exist,
01:48:16 ◼ ► But if the iMac Pro doesn't still exist, then I would kind of be pushed up market for my needs.
01:48:23 ◼ ► Honestly, I hope that doesn't happen. I really hope they keep doing the iMac Pro as well whenever there's new chips for it.
01:48:30 ◼ ► And I think there still aren't, but I think there's about to be. So I hope that happens.
01:48:34 ◼ ► The other thing that can change my mind about this is if the monitor situation changes.
01:48:39 ◼ ► If they do actually end up shipping a good Apple 5K reasonably priced monitor that isn't super XDR everything,
01:48:46 ◼ ► or heck, a 6K that isn't super XDR everything, which I don't think they're going to do.
01:48:50 ◼ ► But if they do that, then that changes things. Because, yeah, my iMac Pro configuration,
01:49:00 ◼ ► And so to spend like $9,000 for a Mac Pro that is the kind of configuration I would want isn't that much more.
01:49:17 ◼ ► The display is what really kills it. When you look at like, this computer is so overpriced, a lot of that's the display.
01:49:23 ◼ ► And if they offered more good first-party display options, that would change the Mac Pro narrative a lot.
01:49:32 ◼ ► That would make it way more accessible. It would still be a very high-end, very expensive computer,
01:49:40 ◼ ► But it would make it a lot more justifiable to people like software developers who don't need that super XDR,
01:49:47 ◼ ► you know, color and brightness and everything, who just need a big monitor and a really fast computer.
01:49:51 ◼ ► Like that's what we need, right? So if either of those things change, if the iMac Pro goes away,
01:49:57 ◼ ► or if the monitor offerings come down market, then I would really strongly consider a Mac Pro for my future needs.
01:50:05 ◼ ► But if neither of those things happen, I think I'm going to stick with the iMac Pro for the foreseeable future.
01:50:11 ◼ ► It's really good for me. I love this computer. I'm not even dying for a new one. My current one is totally fine.
01:50:17 ◼ ► I'm almost two years into it. It's great. If my computer died today and I had to buy a new one,
01:50:23 ◼ ► which I wouldn't, it's under AppleCare, but if somehow I had to buy a new computer today,
01:50:28 ◼ ► I would probably still choose the iMac Pro for my needs, because it really does solve them very well.
01:50:43 ◼ ► Thanks for sponsoring this week, Eero, Linode, and Bombas, and we will see you next week.
01:51:03 ◼ ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.
01:51:51 ◼ ► I think for the after show, for our loyal listeners who know that the show continues after the song,
01:51:59 ◼ ► even though the song says now the show is over, they're still here, they know it's not over, they kept listening to the podcast.
01:52:04 ◼ ► Those people out there, which I assume is all of them, but we all know it's not, we all know somebody stopped this,
01:52:42 ◼ ► I hope so very much, since your birthday falls on a Tuesday, how amazing would it be if one or even better,
01:53:03 ◼ ► Not because I'm dying to get it, but just because I'm on vacation for the holidays, right?
01:53:07 ◼ ► So that's the perfect time for me to have time to set it up in my monk-like way, taking forever to do everything.
01:53:18 ◼ ► I don't know. I still don't have all of the sort of furnishing arrangements sorted out.
01:53:31 ◼ ► I have a microphone that I'm talking into right now that's connected through a cable to my Mac,
01:53:36 ◼ ► but my new Mac A won't be in that same place, and B won't have ports in the same place,
01:53:51 ◼ ► It's just sitting here unplugged next to my old UPS that is actually running the computer that I'm talking to now.
01:54:00 ◼ ► Although what I really want is that it arrives on a day when it's not snowing or raining.
01:54:25 ◼ ► The only thing that was making me wait for speculative things about the video cards and other things like that,
01:54:45 ◼ ► And there are things, and so I had to make compromises, and I was rushed by the 6% thing.
01:55:04 ◼ ► Like, I keep saying, like, almost nobody needs this computer, but there's always that little asterisk, except John Siracusa.
01:55:20 ◼ ► And this is, the main reason I said this is to be like, while we're recording, I see email arriving in another window of people saying,
01:55:27 ◼ ► Rest assured, you know, all the discounts I listed, I, you know, I did my best with the discounts.
01:55:41 ◼ ► Even though we don't have 8K cameras with which to shoot videos that are going to be shown on someone's phone,
01:55:46 ◼ ► we still can talk about products in an intelligent manner and entertain people while we do it.
01:55:54 ◼ ► What you need this Mac Pro for, really, is to have like three Chrome windows open at once.
01:56:16 ◼ ► It's funny, as soon as the configurator was available, the very first thing I did, before I even spoke to you about it,
01:56:23 ◼ ► I sent a text to your wife saying, "Hey, my thoughts and prayers during this difficult time,"
01:56:32 ◼ ► It is kind of funny, though. There's that, "What do you get? The person who has everything," right?
01:56:36 ◼ ► It's like, "Oh, it's so hard to shop for some people in your life," and so often those people are like your spouse.
01:56:41 ◼ ► What the heck does anybody get you for Christmas or your birthday this year when you've just ordered this thing for yourself?
01:56:51 ◼ ► I just ordered an item that is related to this. There's lots of preparing-the-way stuff, but unfortunately it's not good for gifts,
01:56:57 ◼ ► because I'm like, "Well, I can't wait for Christmas to that. I need it now." You know what I ordered?
01:57:04 ◼ ► I've needed a smaller level forever. Every time I use my stupid big level, I'm like, "This level is way too big."
01:57:12 ◼ ► It's too big for this purpose, but I'll just get by. When I'm leveling my refrigerator, it's like this level is so big it sticks off the end of the refrigerator.
01:57:23 ◼ ► Finally, after 10 years of needing a smaller level, what finally pushed me over the line?
01:57:34 ◼ ► I mean, I can try to eyeball it, but I want it to be perfectly level, and my big level is literally too big to fit in there.
01:57:43 ◼ ► That's an example of me thwarting someone who could have gotten a good, thoughtful Christmas gift.
01:57:52 ◼ ► I would say, "But I can't wait for Christmas for it, because what if the computer comes to you for Christmas?"
01:58:01 ◼ ► That's the type of purchases I'm making. I don't even want to go back through my Amazon history of all this garbage I'm buying to try to sort this stuff out.
01:58:11 ◼ ► Anyway, I don't need any gifts for Christmas. If it was up to me, no one would get me any gifts for Christmas. Some people don't like that.
01:58:18 ◼ ► So I have to cooperate with their desire to give me gifts, but I sure don't make it easy.
01:58:27 ◼ ► I would love to someday reach a point where we get gifts for the kids and the adults don't, but I don't think the family would tolerate that.
01:58:36 ◼ ► But the kids thing is difficult too, because I'm a big proponent of the kid age cutoff, but it's really difficult to suggest that policy.
01:58:47 ◼ ► Because what you're basically saying is, "I don't want to get your kids' gifts things anymore."
01:58:51 ◼ ► Sometimes it's one of those things where you look across the room, across the family table, and you see everyone else, and you can see in their eyes that they don't want to buy gifts for the kids after they're X age, and you just all say it at the same time.
01:59:02 ◼ ► It's like, "Oh, thank God, because there's so many kids, and there's just too many of them. There's too many gifts. What do your kids want? What do your kids want?"
01:59:09 ◼ ► And it's just like, "Enough!" After whatever, 16, 18, 13, whatever age we all collectively decide, we don't all get each other's kids' gifts after this age.
01:59:22 ◼ ► So I'm a fan of that. Many people are not a fan of that policy. And if they're not, you just have to deal with it, because what are you going to do?
01:59:32 ◼ ► Well, I will suggest, I think the best gift that your family could possibly get you is to never mention how much money you've just spent on this computer again.
01:59:48 ◼ ► I'm going to bring it up. Are you kidding? That's going to... I mean, it'll be on my tombstone probably.