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ATP

681: The Price of Your Nightmares

 

00:00:00   All right, let me start by saying I'm a little congested, nasally, whatever. It's not because Marco screwed up the editor or anything like that. I'm just ever so slightly under the weather. It's fine. However, I will redeem myself by telling you to, and all of you who are listening, I have found the best website on the internet.

00:00:15   Oh, is this better than Million Dollar Homepage?

00:00:18   Yes, especially because I didn't earn a million dollars from it.

00:00:21   I think of all the various internet clever things, what an amazing winner that site was.

00:00:29   Oh, God, yes.

00:00:30   Because it's the kind of thing that it only works once.

00:00:32   Yep.

00:00:33   And even if it could work another time, it wouldn't be cool if somebody did it again. It only works once. It only works for the first person to try it. And what a fun, weird idea that was.

00:00:43   Yeah, so for those that aren't familiar, what this was, and jump in and interrupt me when you're ready, but it was like each pixel or something like that was a dollar, and there were a million pixels on the homepage.

00:00:53   So you could buy any number of pixels at a dollar apiece, and over the entire million pixels on the homepage, that's a million bucks. And it's still at milliondollarhomepage.com.

00:01:03   Incredibly good idea, and I'm really impressed by it.

00:01:07   But like you said...

00:01:08   It's so tiny on my big monitor now, my big modern monitor.

00:01:11   Oh, well, it's not that modern. We'll talk about that.

00:01:13   This glorious one-megapixel image.

00:01:15   Uh-huh. I found the best website on the internet. Before we started recording, I asked both the boys what model year their cars were. And I asked because I was looking at...

00:01:30   What is the URL? Autocatalogarchive.com. So if you look in the chat, and I'll put it in the show notes, there, John, is the official brochure for the 2014 Honda Accord.

00:01:41   And because it's my favorite of all of Marco's cars, the 2013, is that what we said? 2013 BMW M5. Unfortunately, the M5 catalog is the international one, whereas the Accord catalog, or brochure, if you will, is the American one.

00:01:57   All right. Well, the problem with this website, even though it is the best website on the internet, it is also the slowest website on the internet. Autocatalogarchive.com. It is incredible. And so you can look up all different, like, all the different marks. Is it Marquis? Marks? How do you pronounce it?

00:02:21   Okay. M-A-R-Q-U-E-S.

00:02:24   You could just say makes. In this country, we say make and model.

00:02:26   That's true. But anyways, very, very good stuff. It is impossibly slow and impossibly disorganized. And yet, this is my new favorite website on the internet. Incredibly good stuff.

00:02:40   All right. We have a lot to do. We are going to do the unthinkable that we do every time there's an Apple event and issue follow up. And we're going to jump straight into topics. John, how are we going to cover this? It's been a busy week.

00:02:51   I can't remember a time when we've had this many products released in this short a period of time. I know it wasn't just one event. It was three days worth of press releases, yada, yada. And I know, like, what they announced was now there's no new product category. They're not transitioning chip architectures. Like, significance-wise, it's not like it's the, you know, iPad or the Vision Pro or the Apple Watch or something.

00:03:10   But boy, is it a lot of products in a short period of time. And the only real, like, hitch to the schedules that the M5 Pro and Max laptops essentially got delayed until spring when they normally would have been back then. But still, even not even not accounting for those, this is a lot of products in a short period of time. So that's why even though this is not a quote unquote Apple event, even though there was an Apple experience, no follow up. And this is just a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff to cover, a lot of goodies all at one time.

00:03:36   Yep, very much so. So you have in here, John, iPad, A18 DNF.

00:03:42   Did not finish, yeah, of all the rumored items, because obviously I have, like, the bullet points for all these items and based on the rumors, that was the only one that didn't show up, which is also rare. Normally, like, there's rumors of, like, four or five things. But, like, we know that the top three are the ones that are definitely going to be there and then maybe a fourth or something. And usually the fourth doesn't show up. This time, they all showed up except for the new, presumably A18-powered plain old iPad. But that's a boring product anyway, so nobody cares.

00:04:06   All right. So the first real thing that we're going to talk about is the M4 iPad Air.

00:04:11   Yeah, it's just, you know, they stuck an M4 on the iPad Air. It's always interesting to see how they save money on these when they put them in a lesser product. So it's got an M4, but it's, you know, it's binned, as they say, in a particular way. So you can get it with an eight-core CPU, which is three P cores and five E cores. And yes, we're going to talk about those later.

00:04:31   But a full M4 is four P cores and six E cores. So it's down one P and it's down one E to save money. The GPU is missing a core. It's nine core instead of 10. And the RAM is 12 gigs, which is an increase over the iPad Air, which only had eight gigs. So that's nice.

00:04:47   You get the iPad Air M3.

00:04:50   Um, you get the N1 and the C1X, which is really nice. Apple's latest chips, you know, for Wi-Fi and stuff. So you get a Wi-Fi 7, you get Bluetooth 6. That's cool. Uh, same size as the iPad Air M3, but a little bit heavier. Uh, and storage is no change. You can go from 128 up to a terabyte. Same colors. Uh, environmental impact statements. I've been, I diffed them for this particular thing. Cause like they say the same stuff all the time, but I'm like, well, what, what new stuff are you doing in the environment? Or have there been any regressions?

00:05:17   So just like the iPad Air M3 is 30% recycled content, a hundred percent recycled aluminum in the enclosure and recycled cobalt in the battery. And the new thing that they've been touting for all their products, and you'll hear it for each one, uh, is manufactured with X percent renewable energy. And the iPad Air M4 is 40% renewable energy, which is nice, I guess. I mean, in the past they would say, we try to use renewable energy, but now they're putting a number on it. So it shows that they're tracking it. So good job, Apple keep, uh, ratcheting that stuff up. Um, and the pricing is unchanged.

00:05:46   And not particularly interesting. Comes in 11 and 13 inch cellular is 150 extra bucks. Pre-order March 4th, available March 12th. You know, like it's, it's a, not an exciting product, but as we always say, every time there's a speed bump, uh, speed bumps are not particularly exciting, but it's so much better than not having them. By all means, speed bump every product. If you don't have a big redesign, just put new stuff in it. And this is, this is, I think is an ideal speed bump.

00:06:09   The M number went up from three to four. It got the N1 and the C1X. So it's got the latest modem chip and the latest wifi chip, the latest wifi standard, the latest Bluetooth standard in Apple's lines, if not in the entire world, right? Thumbs up. Good speed bump.

00:06:23   Yeah. I think the, the iPad air, um, kind of like the, the like base M chip 14 inch MacBook pro, which I have, but it's one of those, it's one of those items that like, it's a, it's a mid range product that we, you know, we talk about maybe once a year when they update it.

00:06:43   And we never think about it again. We never talk about it again, but people out there buy it and it's fine. And it's not like, it isn't the most exciting model in any direction in particular. It's like right down the middle and it's fine. And a lot of people out there buy it and are happy with it. You know, just like me and my 14 inch MacBook pro. Like a lot of people are perfectly fine with this model. It doesn't have the best of everything. It doesn't have the worst or the best of anything. It doesn't have the worst of anything.

00:07:08   The only thing that, that I, I wish they would break down one barrier on the low end iPads. It's face ID. Like I recently, I, I got a recent iPad mini for some testing and it's touch ID of course, cause all iPad minis to date have been touch ID. Um, and it is so it's brutal. Like once you're used to face ID on the iPad pro and the iPad pro is so expensive and has been pushed so high up the line.

00:07:38   Face ID. I think should be table stakes for all iPhones and iPads. And it is for most of them except mid range and low end iPads now. And I think that's the one, the one thing that they push you to pro for that. I wish they wouldn't. Yeah. We have a way for the next redesign, right? Cause this is not really redesigned. This is just an internal bump, but, uh, yeah, but maybe like I, you know, we'll see, like there's rumors of, of the next iPad mini going a little bit higher end with OLED. You know, we'll see like maybe as

00:08:07   the OLED trickles down through the line, maybe they'll use an opportunity to do it.

00:08:11   And as they get the smaller face ID things, like it might take a while, I think, because there's rumors of smaller face ID stuff in the upcoming iPhones, but that smaller face ID stuff is probably going to be exclusive to the high end iPhones for a while.

00:08:21   So I think you might have to wait two generations. We'll see.

00:08:23   Maybe talk about being stingy about face ID. When are we getting a Mac with it? So get in line, I guess, iPad.

00:08:29   But at least like on, on the Mac and on the iPhone, I feel like, you know, on an iPhone, touch ID was not punitive because the way you hold the phone, your thumb is already there. And you were already using the home button on those models constantly. So your thumb is already there. On the Mac, the touch ID button is on the keyboard, right where your hands already are. It's really easy to go hit it all the time.

00:08:53   On the iPad, though, in my experience so far using this, this iPad mini, touch ID is a pain in the butt because you're never already on it. You always have to like reach around for it. And it is very disruptive to the experience and very, it feels very clunky and punitive because like when, when they went from home button iPads, well, again, your hand was already there all the time.

00:09:18   When they went from the home button iPad to touch ID iPads, it was not a step forward. It was, it was just like, we're going to take this thing that you need to do a lot and we're going to make it worse because on the high end model, we made it better with face ID. On these low end models, we don't want to do that. So I, I, I wish they would change that. That's the one thing about the, the non pro iPads that feels punitive. And I'm every time there's an update to the air or the mini or the base model, I hope for that. But so far they have to deliver that. We'll see.

00:09:48   Next up, we have the iPhone 17 E, the 17 E. And, uh, this definitely is fulfilling the promise of the 16 E, uh, which is that it would get updated every year, which is exciting. And they have fixed the one major complaint that most of us had from the 16 E, which is that it actually has MagSafe this year, which is very exciting.

00:10:08   That was the one big fumble in the 16 E. I couldn't believe they did it. They corrected it immediately. So I'm excited that the 17 E exists. Uh, and I'm excited that it has MagSafe because that really made it went from a product that I felt like I couldn't recommend people because I just felt like, like you're spending so much money for this phone. It's not that cheap. Get one with MagSafe.

00:10:26   It opens up this whole world of peripherals and sticking it to magnetic things on your dashboard and all sorts of other, you know, pops and magnetic pop sockets and, uh, holders for cards and all sorts of other great stuff. And it just seemed a shame they didn't have it and they fixed it. So good job, Apple.

00:10:40   Yeah. The 17 E is, is one of these models that like we are talking about it now. We will probably never talk about it again, but it serves an important role in the lineup. And they have done seemingly by all accounts, a pretty good job this time. You know, the 16 E seemed pretty good for what it was, but we all said, except MagSafe. Yeah. Now they've fixed that. This seems like, you know, a nice model that those of us like who tend to buy the higher end phones, we'll see it in the store.

00:11:08   We'll pick it up and be like, Ooh, this is really small and light and simple. This is kind of fun. No camera bump kind of. Right. Yeah. Sort of. Yeah. Like we won't be the ones buying it, but a lot of people will. That being said, if you are in this budget category, if you can go $200 more to go from the 17 E to the base model 17, you do get a lot of upgrades for that. So it is kind of worth considering, especially in the area of the screen. Um, you get, you get promotion, you get always on, which like that, that does dramatically change how people use a phone.

00:11:38   So if the screen is important to you, that might be worth it. But otherwise, if you just want the absolute cheapest iPhone of like a new generation, this is a really solid option. And I do like that. They're updating it every year. Seemingly now, um, that's going to be really nice for them. And for people who buy these phones.

00:11:55   Yeah. And we would be talking about it. It's like, and we won't talk about it again. You know why we would talk about it again? If they didn't update it for like three years, because they'd be like, when are they ever going to update the, like, remember the SE would just sit there forever. And we would talk about it because you say, what the hell? Like, are you, are you making this phone or you're not? And you know, this, I feel like putting the number in it and they fulfilled the promise so far of like, we will update this phone. We will put better stuff in it. We will correct our mistakes quickly instead of like, Oh, we made an SE, but the feature set isn't quite right. I'll see you in three years when we try to fix it. Um, so that's great. Uh, it does have an A19 in it with no cores disabled.

00:12:25   Which is cool. Um, the GPU is four core instead of six, which would be full. So they're, they're saving a lot on the GPUs there. It gets the C1X modem, but it does not get the N1, which is interesting. Uh, it just has wifi six, not even six E and it has Bluetooth 5.3. Um, they do mention stuff about in their comparison list of features like next generation portness portraits with focus and depth control. I think that's just a software change because it's as compared to the 16E, which said portrait mode with depth control, but this says next generation

00:12:55   portraits, which I think it's a software thing, but I'm not entirely sure. It might be a 19 powered with like the image processor. Um, speaking of screens, this does have the ceramic shield to front, uh, durability thing, which does, I think make a difference in scratching. So it's good that it gets that even if the screen itself is not much better. Um, it charges faster than the 16E. They say 50% in around 30 minutes. Um, there's no more 128 gig option. It starts at 256. So thank goodness for that. Uh, it's about the same. It is exactly the same size.

00:13:25   16E and weighs two grams more, uh, comes in black and white and a new color, soft pink, which, you know, black and white are boring, but straight up the middle. It's nice that it comes in one color that is not black and white. I hope they rotate that color. Cause the pink looks fine. It looks good, but maybe you do a blue next year or a red or a green. That's again, with the, with the lowest end, you know, bargain basement phone, you're not going to get that many options, but it's good to see one more, um, environmental stuff, 30% recycled content, 85% recycled aluminum, 100% recycled cobalt in the battery.

00:13:55   A new thing for this year, 55% renewable energy, um, manufactured with 55% renewable electricity on it, not renewable energy. That's across their whole supply chain. So they say, uh, price is 599 for 256, which was the same price as the 16E 128.

00:14:09   So they got rid of the 128, but actually are selling the 256, the same price. They sold the 128, which is nice. Cause sometimes they get rid of the low end config, but they just sell the higher end config at the higher price. Uh, and then the 512 gig is a hundred dollars less than the 512 gig 16E was.

00:14:25   Again, pre-order March 4th available, available March 11th. Uh, pretty good update to the e-phone.

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00:16:28   this is the point in this is the point in which I, as the kids say, crash out a little bit. New displays. And actually, I think all three of us will be crashing out for different reasons, come to think of it. But Apple has released two new displays. They have the studio display, which is basically the same as the one that I'm looking at right now. It has a better center stage camera, quote, now with improved image quality and support for desk view. Cool.

00:16:54   Also, apparently better audio, particularly 30% deeper bass. It is moved up to Thunderbolt 5. So that can be up to 120 gigabits per second, including one upstream Thunderbolt 5 port for the host with 96 watt charging for that host.

00:17:09   And then one downstream Thunderbolt 5 port for connecting high speed accessories or, fascinatingly, daisy chaining additional displays. Very cool stuff. Then there's also two USB-C ports. And we'll be talking more about the distinction between USB-C and Thunderbolt ports later.

00:17:25   The SoC in this is the A19, which is different than the A13. And we'll be talking about the A19 later. It is still $1,600 with standard glass. It's $2,000 when you get the height adjustable stand or $1,900 with nanotexture, which that's a $300 Delta, and thus $2,300 with a height adjustable stand and nanotexture.

00:17:49   $400 for that height adjustable stand is really hurting. Yeah, this is, uh, we had a good throwback, uh, snarky, uh, toot from Jack Wellborn that used our, uh, uh, uh, bluish new banner on an angle. It used to actually be the logo for the show. It was the fav icon for ATP.fm website at a long time.

00:18:05   Early on in the, in ATP, we all attended a WWDC where they updated the Mac Pro with a Mac Pro that they said was new, but it wasn't really new. They, I forget what they did to it. I didn't even think it was a speed bump.

00:18:16   They just, like, they, like, raised the minimum spec, like, like, to a higher tier.

00:18:20   Yeah, like, they got rid of the low-end model.

00:18:22   I think, like, because Intel got rid of the processor.

00:18:24   Yeah, here's a new Mac Pro. Like, that's not a new Mac Pro. Well, this, uh, the snark is less, uh, I think, less powerful now that we know that it comes with the A19, because it's not literally the same.

00:18:35   They actually changed the hardware. They didn't change it a lot, but they did change the hardware.

00:18:40   They didn't change the screen part of the hardware, and when you're talking about displays, the screen part of the hardware is a really important part.

00:18:47   Now, I'm not complaining, like, by all means, update the Thunderbolt 5, put an AA19 in it for whatever that does, right? That's good.

00:18:54   Daisy chaining is a cool feature, but the bottom line is this is, like, exactly the same specs as the old studio display, which I believe was from 2022.

00:19:02   It's an old display. It's 600 nits. It's 60 hertz. It's exactly the same resolution. It's exactly the same size.

00:19:09   It is exactly the same price, which is insane, because the price did not make any sense.

00:19:14   That's what we've been harping on for the past, you know, several years.

00:19:16   Like, here are the specs. It's a nice display.

00:19:19   But $1,600 without a high-adjustable stand and $400 to add the high-adjustable stand?

00:19:24   Those numbers do not make sense for these specs, and they didn't change the screen specs, the thing you look at with your eyeball, so it's an extremely frustrating product.

00:19:33   Now, I think they should still make this product, and I'm sad that the price hasn't changed, and good luck for them selling it in an increasingly competitive market,

00:19:41   where there are many, many options with similar or better specs for way less money, even if they come in cases that don't quite look as nice.

00:19:48   But this product, like, if they had changed the price, I would have been fine with this.

00:19:52   But keeping the price the same is just like a finger in the eye.

00:19:56   I don't know what the right disrespectful expression is, but it is disrespectful.

00:20:01   And I just, like, they did update the internals.

00:20:04   It has an A19S Thunderbolt 5, but, like, not changing the screen is just very upsetting to me.

00:20:09   So this, you know, I continue to not be enthusiastic about the base model studio display.

00:20:15   I wonder, like, who is this product for, besides Casey?

00:20:19   Oh, hold on a second.

00:20:21   Like, who, because it seems like if you want a nice monitor that is not the best monitor you can get,

00:20:27   there are so many better options that, like, in the world of PC monitors now.

00:20:32   I mean, I guess we still often have, like, you know, lack of integration with Apple's features.

00:20:37   And their cases aren't as nice or whatever.

00:20:39   Yeah, but...

00:20:40   But it's like, but here's, but the price, I just feel like you can't keep the same price without changing the screen part of the monitor.

00:20:45   It's just, it's, it's insulting.

00:20:47   You can if you're Apple.

00:20:48   Yeah, but we'll see.

00:20:49   We'll see how they sell.

00:20:50   Like, that's their, I feel like they very often travel with their displays in a Mac Pro-like trajectory where they make bad product decisions and say,

00:20:56   well, see, look, no one's buying it.

00:20:57   It's like, well, what are you doing?

00:20:59   Like, you're not, like, it's not like, as we'll see in a second, it's not like there aren't ways to continue charging ridiculous margins on monitors.

00:21:06   You just kind of make a really fancy, really nice one.

00:21:08   And then, you know, you get your margins.

00:21:10   But, like, trying to be like, like, as someone pointed out, I forgot who it was.

00:21:14   I'm sorry.

00:21:14   But, like, someone was saying, it's just such a shame that Apple does not make any basic monitors.

00:21:18   As we'll see when we discuss later products, Apple is getting better at making just the basic version of a lot of its products.

00:21:25   But monitors, it's like, no, there's no such thing as a basic monitor from Apple.

00:21:28   You have to buy it from a third party.

00:21:30   And that's terrible.

00:21:30   Like, there should, yes, by all means, make these fancy monitors, right?

00:21:33   But there should be, you know, Studio Display Neo.

00:21:37   You know what I mean?

00:21:38   Like, there should be a basic monitor for people who just wanted a monitor.

00:21:41   Why won't you sell it to them, Apple?

00:21:42   Yes, the margins will be a little bit lower.

00:21:44   But, like, anyway, this thing, this thing is a dud.

00:21:47   The first minor update to the Retina iMac was the late 2015 model.

00:21:54   About 10 years ago, that panel in the late 2015 27-inch Retina iMac was a 27-inch, 5K, P3, wide color, 500-knit panel, 10 and a half years ago.

00:22:12   Now, John, remind me, what are the specs on this?

00:22:14   Was it 600 nits?

00:22:15   600 nits, yeah.

00:22:16   Is that the only significant difference?

00:22:18   I would guess so.

00:22:19   Maybe the viewing angle is a little better.

00:22:20   Maybe the image retention isn't quite, but it's ridiculous.

00:22:23   So, yeah, it just tells you, like, this is not cutting-edge technology going into this panel.

00:22:28   Oh, and this monitor has a faster CPU than that iMac.

00:22:30   Fair.

00:22:33   But, like, okay, at this incredibly premium price point, what you are getting is a very, very, very similar panel and monitor and general image quality and specs to the 10 and a half year old iMac panel.

00:22:51   I think it's a little weird to not be pushing this a little further or at least to not be lowering the price.

00:22:58   Yeah.

00:22:59   I mean, I don't argue.

00:23:00   Yeah.

00:23:00   Like, if they had made this the basic panel and lowered it to $9.99 or something like that, we'd all been singing its praises.

00:23:06   Like, finally, if you just want a basic monitor, you have a Mac laptop, you want to get an Apple monitor to match it, you don't care about fancy specs, this is the one for you.

00:23:14   But they did not change the price.

00:23:15   Apple does not sell any basic monitors.

00:23:17   Yeah, I mean, I'm in support of them revving it.

00:23:21   I think, generally speaking, I'm not actually that disappointed with this when you ignore the price tag.

00:23:27   But I concur with both of you, particularly, John, that once you look at the price tag, it's like, come on.

00:23:33   Really?

00:23:33   Really?

00:23:34   You can't lower it any.

00:23:35   And the nanotexture is still hundreds of dollars.

00:23:38   The tilt adjustable or height adjustable stand, rather, is hundreds of dollars.

00:23:42   Like, really?

00:23:43   But if you're Apple, you can do it.

00:23:45   Yep.

00:23:46   But then, it's okay, because you two have a positively ancient monitor sitting in front of you, and there's a new version, and it's better than ever-ish.

00:23:57   There's not a new version.

00:23:58   That's the thing.

00:24:00   Like, so, our monitors, the Pro Display XDRs, have been killed.

00:24:06   They're discontinued.

00:24:07   They are gone.

00:24:08   Apple has released a new monitor that is an expensive desktop monitor with XDR in the name,

00:24:14   but it is not a replacement for the Pro Display XDR, because the Pro Display XDR is a 6K 30-inch, 32-inch monitor.

00:24:23   32-inch.

00:24:23   Yeah.

00:24:23   They did not release a 6K 32-inch monitor today.

00:24:27   They killed their 6K 32-inch monitor and replaced it with a better 27-inch 5K monitor.

00:24:35   Oh, what were the resolution and screen size of that 10-and-a-half-year-old iMac?

00:24:40   Oh, that's right, 27-inch 5K.

00:24:42   It's kind of, it's weird, because now that there's so many more third-party 6K monitors, like, Apple was kind of first to the party with, like, a big fancy 6K monitor, and eventually third parties started releasing them, too.

00:24:52   And Apple's like, you know what?

00:24:53   Never mind, 5K 27-inch.

00:24:55   It's very sad, like, you know, Apple has gone in and out of making very large monitors over their history, and they've always been really good.

00:25:03   And, like, when there's a span where Apple's not making the biggest monitor size, everyone's kind of like, oh, I guess I'll get the third-party one.

00:25:10   But, oh, man.

00:25:12   What they did release with this, you know, XDR 27-inch looks pretty good for a 27-inch monitor.

00:25:20   But once you are accustomed to a certain lifestyle, it's really hard to go back.

00:25:28   Yeah, it is hard to go back real estate-wise.

00:25:30   It's like, that's the whole thing with monitor sizes, like, in general, the trend across the entire industry, including Apple's product lines, to be honest, has mostly been upward.

00:25:38   Like, Apple did make the 30-inch non-retina cinema display, and then there was a while in the wilderness where they didn't make anything that big again, but then eventually they came back with a 32.

00:25:46   So maybe we're going through that cycle.

00:25:48   Let me find the language.

00:25:49   I think, what did they say?

00:25:50   Like, I think they said something to the effect of the studio display XDR replaces the pro display XDR.

00:25:58   So it's not like, oh, we're just surmising this because they stopped selling the pro display XDR, which they have.

00:26:02   They stopped selling it.

00:26:03   But they literally said the studio display XDR replaces the pro display XDR.

00:26:07   So if you read that, you're like, oh, well, that's a clear signal that they're not going to come out with the rumored pro display XDR successor.

00:26:14   Right.

00:26:15   I would mostly agree that that is, like, if I had to put money on something, that's what I would put it on.

00:26:19   But if Apple was going to come out with a pro display XDR successor in a year or a WWC in the summer, they would say the exact same damn thing.

00:26:29   They would say the studio display XDR replaces the pro, because it does.

00:26:32   It does replace it.

00:26:32   They stopped selling the pro display XDR.

00:26:34   They started selling studio display.

00:26:35   It replaces it.

00:26:36   And then, you know, WWC comes along.

00:26:38   They're like, oh, pro display XDR, too.

00:26:40   You know, that did replace it.

00:26:42   But now here's this.

00:26:43   They're never going to say, like, oh, don't save your money because we might introduce a new bigger one.

00:26:47   So my fingers are still crossed, you know, keep hope alive, yada, yada.

00:26:51   There were rumors of a pro display XDR successor.

00:26:53   This one is not called pro display XDR.

00:26:56   It's called studio display XDR.

00:26:57   So the name is still available.

00:26:59   But right now, this replaces it.

00:27:01   Maybe you can find used ones cheap or increasingly cheap.

00:27:05   But, like, as we'll get to in a second with the specs on this, the pro display XDR is starting to become the, like, oh, I don't care about image quality.

00:27:12   I just want a lot of pixels, you know, because as the as the image quality improves across the entire industry, the pro display XDR specs look less impressive.

00:27:21   But the number of pixels you get stays just as impressive because there's a lot of them and the screen is big.

00:27:26   So I'm glad I've still got my monitor.

00:27:27   I hope it never breaks.

00:27:28   I would not want to replace it with one of these, despite the fact that it has better picture quality in a lot of ways.

00:27:34   Righto.

00:27:35   So the studio display XDR, as you guys said, 5K, 27 inch, same resolution.

00:27:42   There is a mini LED for the backlight with 2,304 dimming zones.

00:27:46   John, do you happen to remember if that's more or less or otherwise?

00:27:49   Pro display XDR has 576 or something.

00:27:52   2,300 dimming zones is pretty good.

00:27:55   It's not the best in the world, but it's pretty, pretty good.

00:27:58   It's also more dense because it's a significantly smaller monitor.

00:28:01   Yes, exactly.

00:28:01   Right.

00:28:02   So much sadness for Marco.

00:28:03   There is up to 1,000 nits brightness in SDR and 2,000 nits peak brightness in HDR.

00:28:08   Those are big numbers, by the way, because, first of all, Nolan,

00:28:11   you do not want to, well, maybe Marco does, but most people don't want to blind themselves,

00:28:14   would want to put it at 1,000 nits SDR.

00:28:16   That means like your window, white windows would be 1,000 nits.

00:28:19   That's, unless it's a really sunny room, that's very bright.

00:28:22   And 2,000 nits peak is higher than the XDR because the XDR was a 1,600 nits peak.

00:28:27   So, good specs.

00:28:28   And most importantly, I would argue, is that this is Apple's first entry, as far as I'm

00:28:34   aware, is a 120-hertz external display.

00:28:37   There have been 120-hertz internal displays.

00:28:39   This is the first time we've seen it on the outside.

00:28:41   And we've been theorizing that this was coming.

00:28:43   We had heard some rumors that maybe 90 hertz would be the peak.

00:28:46   But no, apparently, 120-hertz refresh rate and adaptive sync, which allows it to vary the

00:28:52   refresh rate between 47-hertz and all the way up to, of course, 120-hertz.

00:28:56   That's great.

00:28:56   This is what piqued my interest.

00:29:00   This is what's making me wonder, should I buy one of these?

00:29:02   Because even though I don't need 120-hertz, I certainly don't need mini-LED.

00:29:05   I don't need all that brightness.

00:29:06   But I kind of want it.

00:29:09   Yeah, this is a better monitor than the studio display, as the name would imply.

00:29:14   It is a better monitor specs-wise than the protospax XDR.

00:29:18   It's just not as big.

00:29:19   If I had never tasted the forbidden fruit of 6K, I would be tempted by this monitor.

00:29:25   Unfortunately, I have, and so I'm not.

00:29:27   Yeah, so that's the thing, right?

00:29:29   But the color reproduction, it has Adobe RGB color gamut support in addition to P3 wide

00:29:34   color, and both of them are available from the same default preset.

00:29:38   But that's nice.

00:29:38   So you don't have to, like, switch modes.

00:29:40   I mean, I guess that's just standard, but they called it out specifically.

00:29:43   So I'm assuming that's a default mode, and you get Adobe RGB and P3.

00:29:47   If you look at the little triangles on the color area, they're not quite the same, but they're

00:29:51   similar.

00:29:52   Additionally, it has 80% of the REC 2020 coverage, and they also leaned into,

00:29:58   whatever, I don't remember where I read this, but they leaned into somewhere that it has

00:30:03   DICOM medical imaging presets and the medical imaging calibrator to enable the use in diagnostic

00:30:09   radiology.

00:30:10   That's D-I-C-O-M.

00:30:11   The medical imaging calibrator on macOS is pending FDA clearance, but is expected to be

00:30:16   available soon in the U.S.

00:30:18   So that's something that's different, and I don't recall having ever seen before an Apple

00:30:22   documentation.

00:30:22   Yeah.

00:30:23   I mean, it's a high-end monitor.

00:30:24   It has good color support.

00:30:25   It is well calibrated, and they're just trying to get a certification that allows it to be

00:30:28   used in this particular way, because who else is going to buy this monitor at the prices

00:30:32   that we're about to see?

00:30:34   A 12-megapixel center stage camera with desk view, which your Pro Display XDR does not

00:30:39   have, a six-speaker system with force-canceling woofers, and wow, I don't think I realized that.

00:30:43   Force-canceling woofers?

00:30:44   That's pretty cool.

00:30:44   That's not new.

00:30:45   That's the old Studio Display has that as well.

00:30:47   Does it?

00:30:47   Yeah, the only difference in the speaker setups is 30% deeper bass.

00:30:51   Okay, fair enough.

00:30:52   And so that's the same as the new non-XDR Studio Display.

00:30:57   Now, I'm not snarking.

00:30:58   Your display is only the display, right?

00:31:00   No speakers, or does it have speakers?

00:31:01   No speakers.

00:31:02   Okay.

00:31:02   The same, or similar story, if not the same story, oh no, similar story with the two

00:31:07   Thunderbolt 5 ports up to 120 gigs per second, gigabits per second.

00:31:12   One is for the host, which allows up to 140-watt charging up from 96 on the non-XDR version.

00:31:20   And then, again, the other one is for downstream with additional daisy-chaining possible.

00:31:25   They distinguish the ports by putting like a dot, like a little bullet, next to the one

00:31:29   that is the charging port, essentially, and the other one is the daisy-chained, like the

00:31:33   upstream port has a dot on it.

00:31:35   So, I mean, there's four ports in the back, so two have lightning bolts, or thunderbolts,

00:31:42   or whatever.

00:31:42   The two with little lightning bolt symbols are the thunderbolt ports.

00:31:45   The one that has a lightning bolt and also a dot, that is the charging upstream one, and

00:31:51   the other one is the daisy-chaining one.

00:31:53   All right.

00:31:54   And then this, of course, also has the A19 Pro, as per Mac Rumors.

00:31:58   Also, there's a day one software update, which is kind of funny.

00:32:00   Yeah, and by the way, they differentiated that as well, because remember, the other one has

00:32:04   an A19, this one has an A19 Pro.

00:32:06   I'm not entirely sure why it needs the A19 Pro, maybe to handle the dynamic backlighting

00:32:11   stuff, because it's the same number of pixels, same, you know, everything, but maybe it's

00:32:14   controlling the backlight displays, but that is a difference.

00:32:18   And then there was a big question from me about, what is the story with regard to Mac support?

00:32:24   Because they had said, oh, it's a Thunderbolt 5 port.

00:32:27   So, I think we had talked about, at some point in the past, well, is there enough bandwidth

00:32:31   in any flavor of Thunderbolt to do 120 hertz at 5K?

00:32:36   And I honestly don't remember what we concluded.

00:32:39   I think we thought that there was, but only just...

00:32:42   There is, especially with display stream compression.

00:32:44   But there are, like, as you're about to read, the compatibility specs for this are not entirely

00:32:49   based on hardware features.

00:32:50   Right.

00:32:51   So, I had read, I was nervous at first, because I'm kind of lusting after this thing.

00:32:55   I was nervous that my lowly M3 Macs wouldn't be supported, because it's only Thunderbolt 4,

00:33:00   not Thunderbolt 5.

00:33:01   And I had assumed, initially, that, oh, you're going to need Thunderbolt 5 to support 120 hertz.

00:33:05   As it turns out, that's incorrect.

00:33:06   There is some information about what Macs are supported.

00:33:10   Studio Display XDR is compatible with the following Mac models with Apple Silicon, sorry, John,

00:33:15   and macOS Tahoe 26.3.1 or later.

00:33:19   Sorry, anyone who doesn't want to update to Tahoe, this monitor requires Tahoe, presumably

00:33:23   because of display drivers that are only part of Tahoe.

00:33:25   But that's a software choice by Apple, and only supporting Apple Silicon is probably hardware

00:33:31   based, because I imagine the Intel ones might not be able to handle the adaptive sync stuff

00:33:35   or whatever, or they just didn't write drivers for it.

00:33:36   But anyway, these are not ridiculous requirements.

00:33:39   The OS one is a little bit ridiculous.

00:33:40   Like, you need the latest, latest, latest operating system to use a monitor, really?

00:33:43   That's kind of silly, but it's the truth.

00:33:45   And Apple Silicon, like, whatever, like, that's most Macs anyway, so.

00:33:49   It's fine.

00:33:49   So, basically, it's MacBook Pros with asterisks 2020 or later, MacBook Airs 2023, or I'm sorry,

00:33:57   2020 or later in some cases.

00:33:59   The Mac Studio, Mac Mini, Mac Pro 2023, and later, see ya, John, or the 24-inch iMac.

00:34:06   Then, what's interesting is, they say, they note that, well, let me just read it.

00:34:10   Mac models with M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, M2, and M3 support the Studio Display XDR at up to 60 Hz.

00:34:17   All other Studio Display XDR features are supported.

00:34:21   So, that implies that to get 120 Hz, you need an M2 Pro, Max, or Ultra.

00:34:26   You need an M3 Pro, Max, or Ultra.

00:34:28   Woo-hoo!

00:34:28   M4 Pro or Max, M5 Plain, M5 Pro or M5 Max.

00:34:32   Yeah, it's confusing, but, like, do read the things, because you don't want to spend the money with this monitor and only be able to drive it at 60 Hz.

00:34:38   Like, if you have, like, an M1 Ultra and you're, like, this really fancy computer that you bought, you know, a Mac Studio M1 Ultra ages ago, you're like, I'm going to get this fancy new monitor, and I'm going to get 120 Hz.

00:34:47   You're not.

00:34:47   Right.

00:34:49   It's a bummer, but that is what it is.

00:34:51   Yeah, so, with the environment, 100% recycled aluminum, standard glass display contains 80% recycled glass, 100% fiber-based box has been extensively redesigned for collapsibility, allowing it to be broken down into smaller pieces that will fit in most household recycling bins.

00:35:05   That's the YouTube video I want to see.

00:35:07   I want to see someone getting the box in.

00:35:08   Like, because what does that mean?

00:35:09   Like, do you, like, not have to use a box cutter to break it up?

00:35:11   Does it, like, come apart with Velcro?

00:35:13   Some YouTuber, please make this video.

00:35:15   I want to see this box.

00:35:15   Quinn, get on it.

00:35:17   All right.

00:35:18   So, you can pre-order them today as we record.

00:35:20   They're available March 11.

00:35:22   We said the Pro Display XDR is not for sale.

00:35:24   John, these are going to be incredibly affordable, right?

00:35:27   I mean, so, here's the thing.

00:35:29   The pricing, it replaces the Pro Display XDR, and thank God it doesn't cost what the Pro Display XDR did, but it costs a lot.

00:35:36   So, but, I think, all right, so, here's the price.

00:35:38   $3,300 with the standard glass, $3,600 with nanotexture.

00:35:43   That's it.

00:35:45   You get the adjustable stand as a no-cost option.

00:35:48   Can you imagine that on a $3,000 monitor that it might come with a stand?

00:35:51   Amazing.

00:35:52   It's unthinkable.

00:35:53   It's a miracle.

00:35:53   How generous of them.

00:35:55   However, I am very, very crabby about this.

00:35:59   If you decide to opt for the Visa mount, which is what I would do because I have, you know, my own stands, you save nothing.

00:36:06   Good day, sir.

00:36:07   It's like when you get, like, an automatic or a stick shift, and they're both no-cost options.

00:36:11   It's like, well, they can't possibly cost the same amount.

00:36:13   Nope.

00:36:13   But that's, yes, if you can get a stand or you can get no stand, and there is no savings for that.

00:36:18   I'm so mad.

00:36:19   Yeah.

00:36:20   And so, here's the thing with this price.

00:36:21   First of all, I think it is somewhat unconscionable to have this price and not have, like, an iPhone quality, like, good back camera as the camera.

00:36:29   Because, as far as I can tell, it has the same camera as the studio display, which, granted, is supposedly improved, but it's still 12 megapixel, whatever.

00:36:36   But, like, a $3,000 monitor, I believe there should be room in the margins to put in, like, a good camera from an iPhone, not a really gruddy one.

00:36:46   But, whatever, maybe it's hard to get those wide-angle ones.

00:36:48   Like, they're really into center stage because they're not going to have a little motor moving the camera, so they want a wide-angle one.

00:36:52   Like, I don't know what the issues involved are, but it just seems like a little bit of a shame that the camera isn't significantly better.

00:36:58   I mean, hey, this has got the A19 Pro instead of the A19.

00:37:00   Why couldn't they bump the camera as well?

00:37:02   And the price, although it is somewhat offensive, this is the best big monitor you can buy from Apple, and it is a very good big monitor by the standards of the entire industry.

00:37:14   It's not price competitive.

00:37:15   You can get other monitors with the similar specs for less money, but it's not as if there are other monitors out there that are a million times better than this.

00:37:23   Like, the specs of this, 1,000-nits sustain, 2,000-nits peak, 2,000-nits dimming zones.

00:37:28   Really good calibration, nice case.

00:37:31   There's not a lot of monitors out there that are actually better than this monitor.

00:37:35   There are only ones that are about the same for less money, and we call that a win.

00:37:39   In the world of Apple monitors, we call that a win because you're paying the premium, but you're getting a premium monitor that looks really good and has modern specs.

00:37:47   Modern-ish specs.

00:37:48   Like, again, 120 hertz, there are ones with higher rates than that, but this is not a gaming monitor.

00:37:52   Like, over 120 hertz is kind of wasted on you scrolling your windows for most of the times.

00:37:57   You're not playing a video game where you want 144 or whatever, or like, you know, 340 or whatever.

00:38:03   So, like, for its purposes, as a color-accurate, high-quality, well-made, Mac-native monitor, the features of this are good, and I give a thumbs up.

00:38:14   The price is not so good, but what do you expect?

00:38:16   It's the highest of the high-end, and I say again, it is still less egregious than the XDR was.

00:38:21   And certainly less egregious than the XDR was two days ago, when it was still for sale with the same specs from, like, six years ago.

00:38:28   So, the XDR needed to be discontinued, like, to be clear.

00:38:31   Like, it needed to either be price-reduced, which is not a thing that Apple's super into, or discontinued.

00:38:35   And so, it was discontinued.

00:38:36   I don't hold a grudge on that.

00:38:37   I do continue to hope that someday Apple will release.

00:38:40   Like, bring it back at the same price, like, a higher-end monitor that is essentially like this, but XDR-sized, and just do it at XDR price.

00:38:47   Like, look at the price.

00:38:48   This is $3,600, $5,000, $6,000 for an XDR with these specs?

00:38:53   That is, that's in line with these prices.

00:38:55   Like, it's not, it's not out of step with, with this technology.

00:38:58   So, I really hope they do that someday, but Apple's statements is them trying to say, we're not going to do that, just buy this monitor.

00:39:05   So, should I buy this monitor?

00:39:07   I don't think I have any justifiable reason for it, but I kind of want it really badly.

00:39:11   I think you would enjoy it, because you, you are a 5K monitor enjoyer, and this is a better 5K monitor than all your other monitors.

00:39:17   But it's just, it's probably too much money for somebody who's already got three perfectly serviceable 5K monitors.

00:39:22   So, you know, it's, I'm not saying wait and the price will go down, because it won't.

00:39:27   Nope, nope.

00:39:28   In, in two years, the specs on this will still be pretty good, because this is, again, and not in the gaming realm, 120 hertz and these brightness figures are going to be competitive for several years in the realm of somebody who's looking at windows on their, you know, computer screen and pictures that they take.

00:39:45   You know what I mean?

00:39:46   Like, outside of the gaming realm, there's not this big brace to, to crank these specs up.

00:39:51   The brightness is going to continue to increase, and it's going to fall behind the competition, probably, but it's going to be competitive for several years.

00:39:57   So, I don't think you need to have a, you know, run out and get this one.

00:40:01   You can wait two or three years, and it will still be a good monitor in two or three years, and it'll be the same price.

00:40:05   Yeah, I think also, like, you'd have to, you'd have to be concerned, you know, you're a many monitors person, and this would be, like, the promotion especially would be such that this monitor would make your other ones look bad.

00:40:20   Just put it in the middle.

00:40:22   Well, that's the thing is, the current studio display is in the middle, and my LG Ultra Mez's are on either side, and so I would do a similar trickle down with, as I would with the Apple TV, where this would go in the center, and the current studio display, or the old, now, studio display, would go to one side, and then I would be down to one LG Ultra Mez.

00:40:40   But I'm not going to lie, for a fleeting moment, I thought to myself, should I get three of these?

00:40:45   And the answer was immediately, absolutely not.

00:40:49   They're like, I just saved myself from buying a car, I mean, this...

00:40:51   That thought was my second thought, Marco.

00:40:53   Yeah, I'm just not sure this is going to...

00:40:55   I would, I mean, you know, we'll get to this probably in a little while, but, like, I would maybe bank some of this for a new MacBook Pro in a few, maybe, like, six months, you know, like, that kind of, like, when...

00:41:07   Yeah, the OLED ones, you know, you probably want one of those.

00:41:09   Like, when, if that, if those rumors are correct, that those are coming, you know, sooner than normal for an upgrade cycle after the ones that just came out, that is probably something that you're going to want.

00:41:19   to spend a bunch of money on, too.

00:41:20   And so, if you're, if you're, like, you know, in this budget mindset of, like, all right, I just saved myself from buying a car.

00:41:25   Why don't you take your family on a vacation?

00:41:27   And then, in, you know, eight months, when there's amazing MacBook Pros out, go get one of those.

00:41:32   Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:41:34   All right, so, I feel like there was more to talk about here.

00:41:37   I mean, how are you two feeling?

00:41:38   I know you're grumbly about this, but, like, what are you going to do if you ever have to update your monitor?

00:41:42   Never do it?

00:41:43   I'm mostly just feeling protective of my XDR and in fear of the red line designs that Underscore has, because if it dies, my options are now, try to find a used one on eBay that isn't, doesn't have the same problems.

00:41:56   Or, like, downsizing monitors, and that's just not, that's just not a thing computer nerds are used to, like, getting, like, over time, again, computer nerds are used to their monitors getting bigger.

00:42:05   Like, I, you know, I started out with a nine-inch screen, now I have 32-inch.

00:42:09   It's basically been a progression only upwards.

00:42:12   I don't think I've ever regressed, because once you get used to more screen real estate, it's hard to go back.

00:42:18   And because I am a one-monitor person, not a multi-monitor person, it's just been my one monitor getting bigger and bigger, I would not want to go back to 27-inch.

00:42:26   So I'm just, I'm just sending good vibes to my XDR, say, just hang in there, keep going for probably only one more decade when Apple will release a new monitor that's bigger than 32-inch.

00:42:36   Yeah, that's, that's the thing, like, when you are a user of something that gets discontinued, you know, see also the Mac Pro probably pretty soon.

00:42:45   God willing.

00:42:47   It's never a good feeling when the only company that makes the product that you use or can use or want to use stops making it, because that tells you, like, your needs don't matter.

00:42:59   Also, your needs can no longer be satisfied with new products.

00:43:03   So, like, that's never a good place to be.

00:43:05   It's never a good place to feel, and it's never a good place to have your needs be, because what are you going to do?

00:43:11   So in this case, like, you know, the XDR, it's not going to be easy to find a used XDR or a new one in any kind of reasonable condition within a year, because this was never a high volume product to begin with.

00:43:23   It's not like this was super popular and you'll be, you know, if you wanted, like, a mint, brand new in box, you know, MacBook Air from a few years ago, you'll find them, because they make a ton of MacBook Airs, and they sell a ton of MacBook Airs, and people stock them.

00:43:38   That's not the case for something like the Pro Display XDR.

00:43:40   This is never a high-stocked, high-volume product, especially after six years of being out.

00:43:46   And so, if you want an XDR and you don't already have one, it's going to be hard to get one.

00:43:52   You know, you might be able to get one this week, maybe, but, like, otherwise, it's going to become difficult.

00:43:57   And so, if your XDR breaks in two years, what the hell are you going to do?

00:44:02   Like, what are you going to do?

00:44:05   And the answer is, like, I guess either get one of the third-party ones, which, as an Apple user, is always going to provide an inferior experience and an uglier case and an uglier, you know, situation, or downsize to this one.

00:44:20   So, spend, you know, $3,500 to have what you will perceive as a monitor that is better in some ways, but worse in some pretty significant ones.

00:44:29   And that's not a good feeling either.

00:44:31   So, I just, I hope my XDRs stick around and last.

00:44:35   And, you know, if I eventually have to replace them, I would probably, with a heavy heart, get this monitor.

00:44:43   But I hope I don't need to anytime soon.

00:44:45   Yeah.

00:44:46   And it would look good and everything.

00:44:47   It's just less pixels.

00:44:47   You just want to get used to the room.

00:44:49   Screen space is really nice.

00:44:50   Yeah.

00:44:51   If you had bought a Pro Display XDR last week, the one you got was probably manufactured three and a half years ago.

00:44:57   I think they stopped making these ages ago because the volumes were just so low.

00:45:01   And I think they were just draining them out slowly but surely.

00:45:03   And the used market is like, it's tough because I think a lot of the ones you would find would be like things that were used in like video editing studios or VFX houses or like other things like that that have essentially been used in a professional environment.

00:45:15   They get kind of beat up, you know, things that have been in and out of a Pelican case a lot because those are the ones that are going to end up going on the market.

00:45:21   Individual people are going to keep them until they die and then they're going to, you know, get recycled or whatever.

00:45:26   Who is selling working XDRs?

00:45:27   It's like, oh, well, you know, some Hollywood studio had a whole bunch of these and they just swapped in a bunch of new monitors.

00:45:33   And so these are now.

00:45:34   But those are always beat to hell because they're not treated gently.

00:45:38   Like it's not like, you know, old lady just drove to church on Sundays.

00:45:41   It's really worked hard.

00:45:43   And so, yeah, finding and especially if they have some kind of flaw in them, like the red line happens after X number of years.

00:45:48   If that's been sitting in a box in a warehouse for three and a half years and you buy it, quote unquote, new, it could have the exact same, you know, problem with the red line or whatever other components are going to fail.

00:45:57   I don't want to say anything too loud.

00:45:59   Like mine is mine is fine.

00:46:00   It's been problem free.

00:46:01   But like, hang it.

00:46:03   Hang in there, XDR.

00:46:04   So if you had to if your XDRs, both of you died today, Marcos, you said you would hold your nose and get a new XDR.

00:46:13   John, what would you do?

00:46:14   I would thoroughly research the 6K options and see if there are any of them that I could tolerate the appearance of probably.

00:46:20   And if there wasn't, I would get the studio spikes there.

00:46:23   Yeah, I would I would wait a week, see what John found out about the other 6K options and then figure something out.

00:46:31   Like because I don't doubt that there are 6K monitors out there that are really good.

00:46:35   It's just a question of me.

00:46:36   Like, do I think the case is ugly?

00:46:37   And that may seem silly to you, but that's that's, you know, that's what I like.

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00:48:25   All right, M5 MacBook Air.

00:48:30   The CPU is 10 core, which is 4 performance, 6 efficiency.

00:48:35   All of the cores are working.

00:48:38   The GPU is 8 or 10 core, 10 cores with all the cores working.

00:48:42   RAM, 16, 24, 32 gigs.

00:48:45   SSD starts at 512.

00:48:47   There's no more 256 option.

00:48:49   1 terabyte, 2 terabyte or 4 terabytes, which is new.

00:48:53   It also has the N1.

00:48:54   It supports up to two external displays, each of which can be either 6K at 60 hertz like your ancient pro display XDR or 4K at 144 hertz.

00:49:05   Or you could go one display up to 8K at 60 hertz, 5K at 120 hertz, or 4K at 240 hertz.

00:49:13   The environment story is same as the M4 we talked about earlier.

00:49:17   What was that, the iPad?

00:49:19   The same as the MacBook Air M4.

00:49:20   Oh, I'm sorry.

00:49:20   Thank you.

00:49:21   And so anyways, and then new with the environmental stuff is that it's manufactured with 50% renewable electricity.

00:49:30   Pricing, $1,100 for 16 gigs RAM, half terabyte SSD, a core GPU, which is down $100 from the M4 with half terabyte SSD, which is stunning.

00:49:41   And up $100 from the M4 with 256 gig SSD.

00:49:47   Yeah, I mean, so this pricing is like, as we'll see when we get to the Neo, obviously, this was released a day before the Neo, but it's like, this is definitely leaving room for a lower priced computer below it.

00:49:56   So it is cheaper to get into a 512, but you could get into any MacBook Air for $100 less.

00:50:02   You just got the crappy 256.

00:50:03   So I think it's a reasonable move at the bottom of the pricing.

00:50:06   And we're not going to go into this much pricing detail with the other computers, because I feel like once you get up into higher amounts of pricing, it gets more difficult.

00:50:14   But this is the low end, well, other than the Neo, this is a lower priced item.

00:50:17   And what counts the most is like, what does it take for me to get into one of these?

00:50:20   What is the base price?

00:50:21   Is the base config good?

00:50:23   And this base config is $1,100, 16 gigs RAM, 512 gig SSD.

00:50:28   That's a pretty good base config, and it's $100 less than that same config with an M4.

00:50:33   So you're getting a better, a better SOC.

00:50:35   All the other specs are the same, and it's $100 less.

00:50:38   So I think that's a good deal.

00:50:39   Even if it is, there is no more like $1,000, 999 pricing option for this computer.

00:50:46   Right.

00:50:47   And then RAM upgrades seem to be priced the same as before.

00:50:50   To go from 16 to 24 is an additional $200.

00:50:53   To go from 24 to 32 is an additional $200.

00:50:56   Yep, they held the RAM upgrades.

00:50:58   Their normal ridiculous price is old.

00:50:59   Now that RAM is ridiculously increasing, they're not as ridiculous as they were.

00:51:04   As I said when we discussed this ages ago, like Apple, we don't know the details of Apple's

00:51:08   deals, but very often they have made deals where they lock in a price for a certain volume

00:51:15   of components for a certain period of time.

00:51:16   And it is plausible that every computer that we're talking about today still benefits from

00:51:22   a price they locked in before RAM prices went crazy.

00:51:25   But that's not going to be true forever.

00:51:27   They will have to eventually negotiate new deals for new periods of time for new RAM at

00:51:31   new prices.

00:51:31   And if the prices haven't dropped by then, I would expect some changes.

00:51:36   Not necessarily to those changes to be reflected in the RAM upgrade prices, but for Apple to shift

00:51:41   around other things to make sure that they try to maintain margins.

00:51:44   You'll hear that on their earning calls.

00:51:46   We don't talk about their earning calls, but they always talk about what their margins are.

00:51:49   But of course, they talk about their like overall margins.

00:51:51   They don't break it down.

00:51:52   And services are incredibly high margin.

00:51:54   Hardware is less so.

00:51:56   So when they say, oh, our margins were like 50% or whatever, it doesn't mean they have 50%

00:52:01   margins on their hardware or all their hardware or any specific hardware.

00:52:04   It just means overall across the entire things they sell, phones, services, you know, Apple

00:52:09   care warranties, like everything.

00:52:11   Our overall margins were 50%.

00:52:13   I'm sure some products have margins that are higher than that.

00:52:16   I'm sure some products have lower ones.

00:52:17   And of course, services, I'm sure their margins are really high.

00:52:20   So it's hard to back solve to see what they are.

00:52:22   But I would imagine that if, you know, next year at this time, if RAM prices have not come

00:52:27   back to sanity, we're going to be looking at products and trying to figure out where Apple

00:52:31   buried the massively increased RAM costs.

00:52:34   Right now, I'm not even sure Apple is experiencing massively increased RAM costs

00:52:39   because of their long-term deals and because of when these might have been manufactured.

00:52:43   So, you know, looking, looking at the MacBook Air M5, it looks a lot like the MacBook Air

00:52:48   M4 updated for with it, with the M5 and with some new specs.

00:52:52   And it's nice that it gets the N1 because again, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

00:52:56   It looks just like a straight up good upgrade.

00:52:59   The iPhone, MacBook Air M4 was a great computer.

00:53:04   The MacBook Air M5 is also a great computer and the price is reasonable.

00:53:07   All right, they've also announced the M5 Pro and M5 Max.

00:53:11   The M5 Pro and M5 Max are built using a new Apple-designed Fusion architecture.

00:53:15   The innovative design combines two dies into a single system on a chip, which includes a

00:53:20   powerful CPU, scalable GPU, media engine, unified memory controller, neural engine, and

00:53:23   Thunderbolt 5 capabilities.

00:53:25   The M5 Pro and Max feature a new 18-core CPU architecture.

00:53:29   It includes six of the highest-performing core design, now called Super Cores, that are

00:53:34   the world's fastest CPU core.

00:53:35   Alongside those cores are 12 all-new performance cores optimized for power-efficient multi-threaded

00:53:42   workloads.

00:53:42   Can you please?

00:53:43   Oh, my God.

00:53:44   So, okay.

00:53:44   So, performance cores are now Super Cores and efficient cores are now performance cores,

00:53:48   basically?

00:53:49   Mm-hmm.

00:53:50   What?

00:53:50   Why?

00:53:51   Come on!

00:53:52   The industry-leading Super Core was first introduced as performance cores in M5.

00:53:59   We didn't even know it!

00:53:59   Mm-hmm.

00:54:00   Which also adopts the Super Core name for all M5-based products.

00:54:05   So, they've retconned the plain-jane M5.

00:54:07   So, they've just, like, they've just renamed the slow cores Fast Cores.

00:54:12   No, they didn't, though.

00:54:14   So, here, well, first of all, I'll just do this clarification from Andrew Cunningham from

00:54:17   Ars Technica, who says that Apple's spec pages still draw a distinction between the efficiency

00:54:22   cores in the M5 and the non-super performance cores in the M5 Pro and M5 Max.

00:54:26   So, basically, there's three kinds of cores from Apple's marketing perspective.

00:54:29   There are Super Cores, which are essentially the most powerful cores in the M5 line.

00:54:34   Those are called Super Cores.

00:54:36   That's, I mean, that's just a marketing thing.

00:54:38   You could have just called them Power Cores there.

00:54:39   Whatever the most powerful cores are inside a line of chips, Apple now calls them Super

00:54:44   Cores in the M5 line, and it's true across the entire line.

00:54:46   Then Apple says that they have a new kind of core, which is the performance core.

00:54:53   So, in some M5 chips, there's the Super Core, and then there's a new kind of core,

00:54:59   core, called the performance core, which is not the same as the efficiency cores in the

00:55:04   plain Jane M5.

00:55:06   So, every chip has two kinds of cores, big ones and little ones.

00:55:09   It's actually called big little in our parlance, right?

00:55:11   The big ones are called Super Cores in the M5, but the little ones have two different names.

00:55:16   Now, does that mean that the little cores in the M5 are different than the little cores in

00:55:21   the M5 Pro and M5 Max?

00:55:22   Probably, yeah.

00:55:22   Probably they're actually different cores.

00:55:24   So, having two different names to them makes sense.

00:55:27   The names themselves don't make any sense, but having these three names, Super, Efficiency,

00:55:35   and Performance, those three names refer to three actual different hardware things.

00:55:40   And I think the reason they're different is, as we noted when we talked about the M5 chip,

00:55:44   the M5 is not made using what Apple is calling their fusion architecture.

00:55:49   We were talking about it in TSMC terms as a S-O-I-C-M-H siliconon, I forget what it stands

00:55:55   for, but it was like hyphen molding horizontal.

00:55:57   Anyway, TSMC has a tech where you can take multiple dies and put it onto a thing and make

00:56:02   a chip out of it, and we were talking about how that's better because you can make a bunch

00:56:05   of littler dies and stick them together instead of trying to make one big one.

00:56:07   The M5 doesn't do that.

00:56:08   The M5 is all one die.

00:56:10   It does not use this chiplet, you know, Apple Fusion architecture.

00:56:15   So the M5 one is different, like physically different, manufactured in a different way

00:56:20   than the M5 Pro and M5 Max.

00:56:22   So there is a bifurcation in the line.

00:56:24   Whole M5 line has the super cores, which, fine, is a renaming of the most powerful cores, but

00:56:30   the M5 has the efficiency cores that presumably are similar to the efficiency cores in the M4

00:56:35   line.

00:56:35   And the M5 Pro and M5 Max have essentially better efficiency cores, which are bigger and more

00:56:41   powerful, and they're called performance cores.

00:56:42   It's Apple, they really messed up the naming, but what they're going for is name different

00:56:49   things differently.

00:56:49   Now, there is an argument to be made that across the M1, M2, and M3, they kept calling

00:56:53   them efficiency cores.

00:56:54   Obviously, the efficiency cores change.

00:56:56   The M1 efficiency core is not the same as the M4 efficiency core.

00:57:00   We just kept calling them efficiency cores, but we always understood within the context of

00:57:04   the M whatever line, these are the efficiency cores.

00:57:07   Now with the M5 generation, there's two different kinds of efficiency cores.

00:57:11   And as Jason Snell pointed out, every time you talk to an Apple executive for years, and

00:57:15   at WWDC, they would say this, like, I've heard people say this to me in person, literally.

00:57:19   You know, the efficiency cores are actually pretty good.

00:57:23   It's like, Apple, you name them efficiency cores.

00:57:25   If you don't like people calling them that, because they were like, oh, I want to be on

00:57:27   the power cores.

00:57:28   Like in every WWDC session where that shows you how to use, like, core affinity and stuff

00:57:31   like that.

00:57:32   They're like, and don't be afraid to use the efficiency cores.

00:57:34   They're actually really powerful.

00:57:35   And people are like, well, no, of course, my code is important.

00:57:37   And so it needs to be on the power cores.

00:57:39   Like, I get where Apple is coming from, but it's like, we didn't choose the names, Apple.

00:57:44   You could have called them.

00:57:45   But again, the ARM nomenclature for the first chips it did is Big Little, where big is an

00:57:50   all lowercase and little is in all caps, I think, which is also funny.

00:57:54   But like, it's a marketing thing with the tech behind it, because they don't want people to

00:57:59   feel like they're having lesser cores.

00:58:00   And as we'll see when we start looking at what's in these chips, the renaming also makes

00:58:04   sense in the context of how they design them.

00:58:07   But this is actually one of the most interesting years for the M chips in a long time.

00:58:12   Not because the M5 line is, you know, super amazing and everything.

00:58:14   It's good.

00:58:14   Like, it's better than the M4.

00:58:15   But like, the Pro and Max are just plain manufactured differently.

00:58:19   And having the CPU and GPU as like separate dies, I get Apple didn't release pictures of

00:58:25   what this looks like.

00:58:25   But as soon as someone gets these and slices it open, I'll love to see what's going on

00:58:28   inside there.

00:58:29   A, it opens up the possibility of something even cooler for the M5 Ultra.

00:58:32   So we'll see if that ever materializes, or even anything beyond that.

00:58:35   But B, it is a split line.

00:58:37   Plain M5 is essentially built differently than the Pro and the Max.

00:58:42   Yeah, and what's really interesting to me, and this is why I, like, I don't think we

00:58:47   have benchmarks of these yet, do we?

00:58:48   We do.

00:58:49   Well, no, not for the Pro and the Max.

00:58:51   Yeah, that's, I really am curious to see those once those start coming out on Geekbench and

00:58:54   stuff, because what they have done is a dramatic drop in the number of performance cores on the

00:59:01   big chips.

00:59:02   No, that's not what they're called anymore.

00:59:03   Jesus.

00:59:04   Yeah, anyway, so the number of the big cores.

00:59:08   Well, it's actually, you can read Apple's base, like, overall performance claims before

00:59:13   we get to the specs.

00:59:14   So this is what they're saying, like, for the line of chips.

00:59:16   All right, so CPU, up to 30% faster, quote, for pro workloads.

00:59:21   And the M5 Max has 15% higher multi-threaded performance.

00:59:25   The GPUs, up to four times the peak GPU compute for AI compared to the previous generation, and

00:59:31   up to 35% faster, quote, for apps using ray tracing.

00:59:34   That 4X1 is the biggest number they've thrown at, because otherwise, like, 30%, 15%, like,

00:59:39   it's a generation, you know, the M5 is faster than the M4 in the usual amount, which is good,

00:59:42   like, 30%, 15%.

00:59:43   Those are fine numbers for a generation.

00:59:45   Four times, that is a big thing, presumably due to improvements in the, I forget what they

00:59:52   call it, like the neural whatever crap that they put into their GPU cores in the previous

00:59:57   generation.

00:59:57   That's something like what they called it.

00:59:59   Yeah, they put some processing stuff in each GPU core that is useful for doing, like, machine

01:00:05   learning AI stuff.

01:00:06   And I'm, and I guess they improved that in, or I don't know if they improved it or have

01:00:12   more of them.

01:00:12   But anyway, Apple is making big claims about the GPU compute performance compared, and when

01:00:17   they say previous generation, they mean, like, I'm assuming they mean, like, the M5 Max

01:00:20   versus M4 Max.

01:00:21   So that's a big number, and that is significant because if you think about where, what kind

01:00:26   of CPU, or, you know, what kind of GPU bound workloads are people doing these days, AI is

01:00:31   right up there, local, you know, on-machine AI.

01:00:33   So, I mean, we'll have to see what the benchmarks bear out and how realistic that 4X number is,

01:00:38   but it is the standout number in everything here.

01:00:41   Yeah, for the most part, like, the regular base model M4 to the regular base model M5, it

01:00:48   was a very similar thing of, like, yeah, about 15% faster CPUs and GPUs got better depending

01:00:54   on what you were doing with them with these different accelerators.

01:00:56   And so we're seeing roughly the same claims here, about 15% faster multi-thread CPU performance.

01:01:02   Okay, let's see.

01:01:03   I mean, again, like, the core arrangement is radically different.

01:01:07   You know, the number of performance cores, sorry, excuse me, the number of large cores has

01:01:15   gone substantially down in these higher chips, and the number of smaller cores has gone substantially

01:01:20   up.

01:01:21   So, it's kind of like a flatter design, so to speak, of, like, you know, the difference between

01:01:28   the two cores probably has been greatly reduced.

01:01:31   Only benchmarks and use will be able to tell us, like, if that makes a significant difference

01:01:37   in either direction.

01:01:38   But it is curious that, like, it's a radically different balance of power, so to speak.

01:01:42   All right.

01:01:44   So, the M5 Pro, the CPU is 15 core, which is five, what, Marco?

01:01:49   Super cores.

01:01:50   And 10 performance cores versus the M4 Pro, which was eight performance, so now there's five

01:01:58   super.

01:01:58   I hate these, all these binned counts.

01:02:00   It's driving me nuts.

01:02:01   Yeah, well, that's how they sell them, but here's what it comes down to, is what Marco

01:02:05   was saying.

01:02:05   The old M4 was eight and four, eight big, four little.

01:02:08   The new arrangement is five and ten, so it's pretty much flipped.

01:02:12   It used to be double the number of really good ones to the not as good ones.

01:02:16   Now, it's the opposite.

01:02:17   It went from eight, four to five, ten.

01:02:19   So, you know, it's really just total inversion, and that's why the naming makes sense, because,

01:02:25   look, when we talk about, like, power cores versus efficiency cores, like, what do we actually

01:02:30   mean on the M-Series chip?

01:02:31   What is it about the P cores that makes them powerful?

01:02:34   How are they different than the E cores and all the other lines of chips?

01:02:38   Well, if you look at the die shot, you can say, well, first of all, I can see that the

01:02:40   P cores are literally bigger.

01:02:41   Like, they're a bigger square on the chip.

01:02:44   Why are they bigger?

01:02:45   What is in that thing that makes them more powerful?

01:02:47   And there's a bunch of answers to that.

01:02:49   There could be, and probably is, more execution units.

01:02:52   How many parts of the chip can add numbers together?

01:02:54   You can have two adders, three adders, four adders.

01:02:57   How many units are there for floating multiplication?

01:03:00   Like, you can literally put more execution units, more things that can munge numbers.

01:03:05   You can add more of them, because it's parallel dispatch.

01:03:07   Like, it's not just one line through.

01:03:09   So that's a way you can make them bigger.

01:03:10   Another way you can make them bigger is you can add more cache, more L1 cache, and stuff

01:03:15   like that.

01:03:15   That takes up die space.

01:03:17   That's what makes the power cores bigger.

01:03:19   You can have a more sophisticated branch predictor.

01:03:21   You can have all sorts of stuff that makes it make up, take up more room on the chip

01:03:26   and more power and more transistors and more parts that makes it a power core.

01:03:31   And then the efficiency cores, they have less of that stuff.

01:03:34   They take up less room.

01:03:35   They take up less power.

01:03:36   But the question always is, for a given workload, when you're sending something through like a

01:03:43   power core, what if you're not, don't have that many floating point multiplications?

01:03:47   Those extra floating point multiplication units are just sitting there not being used

01:03:51   because most of the workloads you're doing aren't doing lots of floating point stuff.

01:03:54   So they're not doing anything useful.

01:03:55   And at that point, if you had sent that same load through a quote unquote efficiency core,

01:03:59   it would have been just as fast or maybe even faster if the pipeline is shallower or something

01:04:04   like that, right?

01:04:04   So you never quite know what the trade-offs are of like, should I send this to the bigger

01:04:10   core and waste time running through that machinery if it's not going to take advantage of most

01:04:14   of the stuff that's there?

01:04:15   And what it looks to me like is in the M5 Pro, and we'll see in the M5 Max as well,

01:04:19   I think what they did is made the smaller cores bigger enough so that it makes more sense to

01:04:27   have twice as many of them as the power cores.

01:04:29   Before it was twice as many of the big cores as the little.

01:04:32   Now it's twice as many of the little as the big.

01:04:34   And I think the way they did that, and we'll have to wait for a die shot to see if this theory

01:04:38   bears out, is that they made the little cores big enough to essentially be the best choice

01:04:44   for almost everything you do and only really, really specialize the bigger cores for jobs

01:04:51   that are actually going to use all the machinery they have, that need the more sophisticated branch

01:04:54   prediction, that need the deeper pipeline, that need the extra execution units, that need the

01:04:58   more L1 cache.

01:04:59   And there's five of them.

01:05:00   It's not like there's just one of them or something.

01:05:01   There's five of them.

01:05:02   There's plenty.

01:05:02   But I mean, and Apple knows this.

01:05:05   I bet Apple looks at like workloads of like, what do people actually do with Macs?

01:05:09   And how can we make that more efficient?

01:05:11   And so we'll see, like, especially we'll see what like the performance, the power numbers,

01:05:17   the battery usage and stuff.

01:05:19   If they were able to flip this arrangement going from twice as many big to little to twice as many

01:05:23   little to big and still get a performance increase, that I think says to me that they have made the

01:05:29   correct trade-off because they are presumably using less space.

01:05:34   They're getting more cores.

01:05:35   Like, so, you know, 15 is more than 12, right?

01:05:38   So they got three extra cores, similar power envelope, I would hope, and better performance.

01:05:44   So I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt now and say this total inversion of big to little

01:05:48   was a smart move and it is suitable.

01:05:52   It fits what people do with Macs, like, because that's the whole thing.

01:05:54   They have the app store.

01:05:55   They know how people use, they have the OS.

01:05:59   They make the hardware.

01:06:00   They make the silicon.

01:06:01   Like, their whole deal is we can figure out how best to serve the workloads that people

01:06:05   actually use our Macs for and then make a chip that does that better than the previous one.

01:06:09   I think my major concern here, assuming that they have kept performance good, you know,

01:06:15   when you need it, which, you know, the benchmarks or as the quoted metrics suggest that they probably

01:06:21   have, we'll see what happens with the benchmarks, but there was a side effect that I'm not sure

01:06:26   was intentional, but there was a side effect of having the low power cores be very low power.

01:06:33   And that is that, you know, if you recall back in the days of everyone having these Intel Mac laptops,

01:06:39   you would sometimes get one core at, you know, being used 100% by some background process,

01:06:47   whether it was, you know, MD worker indexing, Dropbox, like, you know, whatever, you know,

01:06:52   Chrome's weird updating things, like, whatever it was, like, you would often get a case where some

01:06:57   kind of common app on the Mac or common background service would use 100% CPU, like, forever.

01:07:03   And back on those old laptops, what that would do is make your laptop run hot, have crappy battery

01:07:08   life and have the fans kind of running all the time, because it's some one thing in the background

01:07:14   was using a bunch of CPU and keeping one of the cores really hot.

01:07:17   When we moved to Apple Silicon, and we had these, these, like, small low power cores as one of the

01:07:22   options in the chip, Mac OS was very smart about how to dispatch things to them. And one of the things

01:07:26   that Mac OS did was, as I think, everything running in the background would run only on the low power

01:07:33   cores. A side effect of that is that when you would have one of those, like, runaway 100% CPUs,

01:07:39   which background processes, it was only running on these low power cores. And they just didn't,

01:07:45   they were so small on low power, that even if you were maxing one out forever, it would have almost

01:07:51   no noticeable effect on battery life, heat or fan noise. If they make the smaller cores bigger,

01:07:59   I hope they've somehow accounted to keep that still be the effect, like, maybe background processes

01:08:06   still get, you know, lower maximum thermal use, maybe, you know, maybe that maybe the background

01:08:10   processes still, you know, get their wattage limit or CPU usage over time, maybe they're running at a

01:08:16   lower clock speed when they're in the background. Who knows, there's all sorts of advanced things they

01:08:20   can do with power management now. But I hope that that effect of limiting the damage done to the user

01:08:27   experience by runaway background processes, I hope that is maintained now that the smaller cores have

01:08:34   gotten bigger. I mean, I think they've gotten bigger, maybe in terms of transistor count. But remember,

01:08:39   this is a shrink as well. So they might not have gotten physically bigger. I suspect-

01:08:43   This is not a shrink. The next generation is a shrink.

01:08:45   Oh, versus the M3, I guess. I forget if this one, well, we don't know, because this is the new,

01:08:52   I don't know if the process is the same N3 whatever as the M5, because it is the chiplet thing.

01:08:58   Is it just the packaging different, or are they actually on-

01:09:00   I don't, I don't actually know. I don't know if there, if there is like an N3 letter that I don't

01:09:05   know that it applies to the chiplet thing. But anyway, we'll see when they cut the dye thing off

01:09:08   of them. But-

01:09:09   Yeah, I think the, the, the process shrink isn't coming until the M6 generation.

01:09:13   Not, not like to two nanometer, obviously. These are all three nanometer. I'm just saying,

01:09:17   is it N3P versus N3, whatever. Um, but we'll see because they do, they did go from four to 10 of

01:09:24   these. So I bet they're still pretty small. Um, and who knows if my theory about them being bulked up

01:09:30   to, to be good for the majority of tests is correct. It could be that they were already best for the

01:09:34   majority of tests. And they just learned that by like low, you know, seeing real world usage on the

01:09:39   M4s. Again, we'll see when they, they, someone slices these chips open and we'll, they'll map out

01:09:43   like here all the different cores and we can just physically measure them. Do they look about the

01:09:46   same size as the old efficiency cores? Are they a little bigger? How much bigger? Also, there may

01:09:51   be improvements in parts of the efficiency cores that can be turned off. As you said, there's clock

01:09:55   throttling and everything, but like, you know, as we see, the specs say the performance is better.

01:09:59   The battery specs say that this performs about the same as the M4 one. So I'm optimistic that,

01:10:06   I mean, it's not going to, it's not going to be a big, impressive thing. This is just like a

01:10:09   transitional phase of like, we have a new tech for building chips. Uh, can we do

01:10:13   that tech transition at the same time as maintaining our normal year over year improvements while also

01:10:19   doing this complete inversion of the ratio of our big cores to our little cores? And according to

01:10:25   everything Apple has released, they're basically saying they've done it. We'll wait to see what

01:10:28   the benchmarks are. All right. The GPU is either. Actually you skipped the 18 core one was this is

01:10:33   the interesting thing. These come in 15 and 18 core. Um, and the 18 core is just with everything

01:10:38   enabled direct. It's six super and 12 performance. And so instead of being like the M4 was,

01:10:43   10 big, four little, and this is six big, 12 little again, total inversion, but the 18 cores

01:10:49   are the ones with everything working. GPU 16 core or 20 core with enhanced shader core with second

01:10:55   generation dynamic caching and hardware accelerator accelerated mesh shading. There is 307 gigabits

01:11:02   per second memory bandwidth. This will become relevant soon. This is up 12 and a half percent over

01:11:06   the M4 pros, 273 gigabits per second. For external displays, you can do three, each of which can be

01:11:13   6k at 60 Hertz or 4k at 144 Hertz, or you can do two in a variety of different combinations. I'm not

01:11:20   going to read out and it supports up to three external displays over a single thunderbolt port.

01:11:26   You have three, 6k displays. If only Apple can still sold one of those.

01:11:28   If only that would be like what? $20,000 worth of displays.

01:11:33   Yeah, I guess even my third party ones, but yeah, but the display is the port continues to be really

01:11:37   good. And the two display support is weird because you have to pick like one of these monitors and

01:11:42   then one of these other set of monitors. So it's like mixing, but the bandwidth is what it is. You're

01:11:46   just slicing and dicing. How much bandwidth do you have with display stream compression to just,

01:11:50   but the point is this is what we're reading you now is the M5 pro. Remember really good display

01:11:56   support because the M5 pros, as we noted before, when Apple said the M5 pro and the M5 max feature

01:12:02   new 18 core architecture, guess what? The M5 pro and the M5 max are basically the same except for GPU

01:12:09   core. So it's going back to the M1 and M2 generation when the pro and the max, the pro was just the max

01:12:14   with some GPU cores lopped off. Now this is not, I don't think it's a lopping off thing. We'll have to see

01:12:18   what, you know, again, cause that the whole architecture is different with separate dyes

01:12:21   inside the package and stuff, but that's the upshot that the pro, this is a good pro year. If you don't

01:12:27   care about GPU, the pro has all the same goods as the max essentially, uh, modulo binning, uh, and you

01:12:35   just have fewer GPUs inside there. Yeah, that's, this is a great, like, I mean, geez, I've been really

01:12:39   been, uh, eating some crow on this, on my pro opinions the last couple of weeks, but like, this is

01:12:44   actually, this is a great year for the pro buyers. Um, and in fact, like, I think if I

01:12:49   were buying today, um, and if the amount of RAM I wanted was available in the pro, I would buy the

01:12:57   pro. No question. How much RAM do you want? Well, all of it. We'll get to that when we get to the

01:13:02   computers. We're still just doing the SOCs, but anyway, uh, the max, it only comes in 18 core. So

01:13:07   that's just, you know, market segmentation. They could make it with, you know, the 15 core in it,

01:13:11   but they don't. So you get the M5 max, you get it with everything working. So again,

01:13:14   it's six big cores, 12 little ones. There's no wondering which one you're going to get. All

01:13:18   the maxes have everything working. You do get a choice in the GPU. You can get the, uh, even

01:13:24   bigger that is that the pro has a 20 core, 16 core or 20 core GPU. The max has 32 or 40. Those are

01:13:31   your two choices. So the big, the big GPU thing has twice as many cores as the pro. Again, if you don't

01:13:36   care about GPU, the CPU parts are the same if you get them like not the non-binned ones. Um, so yeah,

01:13:42   good year, uh, memory bandwidth, memory bandwidth, interestingly, varies based on the number of GPU

01:13:48   cores. I don't know if it's related to the GPU, GPU cores. It might be, but because they need to be

01:13:53   fed, but it might just be a segmentation. But anyway, the M5 max, all the CPU cores always work,

01:13:58   but when you pick how many working GPU cores, what you want, if you get the 32 GPU core one,

01:14:03   you get four 60 gigabytes per second, which is 12.2% increase over the similarly been 32 core M4

01:14:10   maxes GPU. And if you get the 40 core GPU, you get 614 gigabytes, which is again, 12.5% over the 40

01:14:17   core M4 maxes GPU. So be aware of those differences there. And the display support is just ridiculously

01:14:24   good. Um, this, this is the only one that says just native display port 2.1 speeds. I don't think

01:14:30   they said display port stuff for the other ones, but anyway, um, four displays, you can do four 6k

01:14:37   displays if Apple sold them. Um, or, you know, two displays varying, right? It's a huge amount of

01:14:42   display bandwidth. You won't have any problem with this supports up to four external displays over a

01:14:47   single Thunderbolt port. Uh, it's pretty amazing. It's a pretty beefy GPU for what we'll, as we will

01:14:52   see is a laptop GPU, uh, good chip. Yeah, this is really impressive. Uh, I'm not in the market for a

01:14:58   new MacBook pro and let me tell you, I priced one and it was over $6,000 the way I would probably

01:15:03   build it, which is a lot. Um, but the thing that, the thing that I'm very curious about, and we don't

01:15:09   necessarily need to cover this now, but I wonder if I would want to pick a max, which is what I've had.

01:15:15   I had an M1 max and M3 max right now, but I want to pick the max for the increased memory bandwidth.

01:15:19   And I don't, maybe not. No, not for what you do with it. Absolutely not. Fair. All right. Well, that answers

01:15:24   that. Well, that's why it's a good year for people who do not care about GPU. This is the year to get

01:15:28   the pro because it's back at the old days where you're all you're, all you're giving up. If you don't get

01:15:32   the bin one is you're giving up GPU that you aren't going to use anyway. And Hey, that's less heat and

01:15:36   everything. So it's, it's a win. I mean, the real question when with picking, I guess we'll get to this

01:15:40   maybe a little bit later, but the real question with picking these is like, will, how much will this

01:15:45   matter for AI stuff in the near future? Like during the lifetime of this laptop,

01:15:49   how much will it matter for AI stuff? Cause that's obviously like a major thing going on right

01:15:54   now. I'm sorry, everybody. Yes, I'm talking about it. And so, you know, there's a question of like,

01:15:58   well, what if I wanted to run local models? What we have seen so far is that while we can run local

01:16:06   models on some of the higher end max, if we shove enough RAM into them for a million dollars,

01:16:11   that's not really a mainstream thing. That's not really a thing that most of us need to do or will do

01:16:16   or will be able to do in a way that is competitive with what the, what the big server side models are

01:16:22   able to do for us. Will that change over the course of owning your next laptop? If you're looking to

01:16:28   buy one of these, I don't think anybody can really say, uh, but like how much are you willing to throw

01:16:34   down, you know, thousands of dollars for really high specs that you might end up barely using because

01:16:40   what you're mostly using your big grunt CPU power is like happening in data center somewhere.

01:16:45   Yeah. I would bet against it. I mean, there is a possibility because these companies are highly

01:16:49   motivated to reduce the cost of inference. So basically, can we get a way to run models with

01:16:56   less power, like less CPU power that would, they're, they're highly motivated to do that because it saves

01:17:01   them a lot of money, right? If there is a breakthrough in that area, if they say, Oh, we've found a way to run

01:17:07   models that work like our current ones, but use half the RAM or something like that is the only way that you

01:17:12   should, that you will be, get the benefits of like future benefits of running local models. Cause right now,

01:17:18   unless you already know that you want to run, if you're, you know, if you're not already running local models,

01:17:23   don't buy a machine for the purposes of running local models. Cause if you buy this machine today, right now,

01:17:29   models are just getting bigger and bigger and harder and harder to run locally. If you're talking about the

01:17:34   lead bleeding edge models, if you care about the bleeding edge models, don't run them on your

01:17:38   laptop, right? And you have to run them in a server because you just, a lot of them, you just literally

01:17:42   can't run because you're not going to have enough memory, right? So unless there's a breakthrough in

01:17:45   that, or unless you're very interested in running small local models, again, you're probably already

01:17:50   doing that. So if you're not currently running local models, do not buy an M5 Mac pro based on your

01:17:59   ability to run local models, because if you're not already doing it in the future, it's, you're just going to be

01:18:03   less likely to do it because the models are just going to get bigger and more demanding. And

01:18:07   honestly, if you know, most people probably should be using the bigger models because they're just

01:18:12   more capable and you don't want to run them yourself. Like they're so demanding. Like there's a reason

01:18:17   those, you know, those GPUs that they're running them on costs like 60 grand or whatever. And there's

01:18:21   multiple ones. You don't want to be doing that yourself unless you're already doing it. Cause if

01:18:26   you're already doing it, then, you know, and what you should probably do is get like an M5 pro Mac

01:18:29   mini or something someday. Cause that's what you want. It's like maximum bang for small amount of buck or

01:18:34   whatever. So yeah, I wouldn't like, it's just, I just feel like we're, it's such early stages is like, okay,

01:18:41   maybe you can run like some local model today, but in three years, that local model is going to be garbage.

01:18:46   Like, what do you care? Yeah. All right. The M5 pro and the M5 max both support, uh, memory

01:18:51   integrity enforcement, which we've talked about on and off over the last few months. Yeah. And it was,

01:18:55   that was introduced with the A19 series and the M5 and just clarifying all the whole M5 family supports

01:19:00   it. And, and the, everything before that in the M family does not. All right. The M5 pro and M5

01:19:06   max MacBook pros 14, 16 inches, just as before the M5 pro, you can get the 15 core CPU, 16 core GPU

01:19:14   with 24 or 48 gigs of Ram. You can get the 18 core CPU, 20 core GPU at 24, 48 or 64 gigs Ram,

01:19:22   which is new. That was what forced my hand on the max in the past is that I always wanted 64 gigs Ram.

01:19:28   And now I wouldn't have to, to, to both of your points earlier, uh, John Gruber pointed out that this

01:19:34   means the price for a MacBook pro with 64 gigs of Ram, if that's your main concern, hello, dropped by over

01:19:40   by $800 year over year. Last year, you needed to buy one of the high end M4 max chips to get the 64 gigs.

01:19:46   That's very good news. However, it comes with an SSD of one, two or four terabytes, no half terabyte

01:19:53   option, which means for me and my fancy lad eight terabytes, I'm back in the M5 max.

01:19:58   Yeah. I mean, this is the thing, like Apple does have to sort of segment these, like, I, you know,

01:20:02   again, doing 24 and 48, like, all right, well, 24, 48 and 64, like the segmentation makes some sense,

01:20:10   but like the SSD is really not particularly related to the SOC in a way that explains the lack of an eight

01:20:16   terabyte. It's just market segmentation. And then the M5 max you can do with a 32 core. Do you get 36 gigs

01:20:25   of Ram and you will like it for the 40 core? You can do 48, 64 or 128 gigs of Ram SSD in two, four or

01:20:32   eight terabytes. And then between the two of them, all of them share the same screen, which is unchanged

01:20:38   for the M4 pro and max a thousand nits, uh, up to 1600, uh, peak on HDR, 120 Hertz nano textures, 150 bucks

01:20:45   has the N1 with wifi seven and Bluetooth six, uh, size and weight is unchanged ports unchanged. Uh,

01:20:52   battery is largely unchanged, although slightly different, uh, amounts of video streaming and

01:20:58   wireless web, which is their, you know, ridiculous, uh, metrics. Yeah. And mostly like, so the, the,

01:21:02   the M5 pro gives you two more hours of video streaming. So that's, I mean, that's a measurable

01:21:07   increase over the M4 pro, right? So that's, that's reasonable. M5 max is down an hour with wireless

01:21:13   web and down an hour with video streaming. So that's interesting. Um, and the, the battery sizes are

01:21:18   unchanged on these models. The 14 inch is still 72.4 watt hour for both of them, I believe. So

01:21:23   it seems like basically a wash, but again, I want these, these, the numbers that Apple always gives you

01:21:28   with battery is like, we don't know how you perform these tests. What the heck is wireless

01:21:31   web? Like, what are you doing? So as usual, battery testing, well, I'm sure we'll be all over the place,

01:21:37   but, uh, it will be instructive to see how these new, uh, uh, we keep saying chumplet architecture.

01:21:42   It's probably the wrong term, but it's, it's a nice way to visualize more than one die inside the

01:21:47   package. How will they behave in terms of thermals, battery life to Marco's point? How does the change

01:21:53   in ratios of big to little cores affect things? You're not going to tell from looking at these

01:21:57   battery numbers. We'll have to wait for people to test them. All right. And then the microphone

01:22:01   quotes, voice isolation and wide spectrum microphone modes for enhanced voice clarity in audio and video

01:22:06   calls. Oh yeah. You skipped over the 16 inch battery. It's interesting that the 16 inch battery is exactly

01:22:11   the same for the M five pro, but the 16 inch battery is plus two hours on wireless web and plus one hour

01:22:18   on video streaming for the max. I don't understand. Like they didn't change the battery size at all.

01:22:22   So why does the max and the 14 inch go down an hour and the max and the 16 inch goes up an hour?

01:22:28   Like it's, it's very weird. I just, I don't quite understand if they had changed the battery sizes.

01:22:32   This would make sense to me, but I mean, it's the same, it's the same chip in a 14 inch and a 16 inch

01:22:38   laptop. And it seems to get different performance. All right. The environment story is basic,

01:22:42   most largely the same as the M four pro and max. However, new is that it's made with 45% recycled content

01:22:48   and manufactured again with 50% renewable electricity. The price for the M five pro and

01:22:53   M five max starts at $1,700 for the 14 inch and $2,700 with 16 inch. I had to set check that like

01:23:00   three times. I'm like, this has to be wrong. I must have the wrong windows open. How can the starting

01:23:04   price for the M five pro and M five max be exactly the same? And the answer is, I think that they're just

01:23:08   like, it's not apples to apples because they're, you know, different number of cores are disabled,

01:23:13   different amount of RAM. Like the base configs are different, but I believe, I mean, triple check

01:23:18   me. They, they both start at $1,700, whichever chip you pick pro or max. Um, that does seem a little

01:23:26   bananas to me on the 16 inch, maybe on the 14 inch. Are you sure? Cause I'm seeing it triple check me,

01:23:31   it might be wrong. I'm seeing it say M five pro is from 23, 49 M five max is from 37, 49. Yeah.

01:23:39   It's, it's 37 for like the M five max dramatically ramps up everything. Let me see.

01:23:44   All right. Maybe I'm, maybe I did it wrong. That's why I doubted myself. I'm going to do it. I'm going

01:23:48   to check it. Yeah. I think he did. Cause it's, it's like, it's like $1,300 for the max.

01:23:53   All right. Shop. I'm going to go 14 inch. As Casey was saying earlier, like they really have

01:23:59   restricted a lot of the high memory and SSD configurations to the max chip. Even like if you

01:24:06   want the eight terabyte SSD, you can't just get a max. You have to get like the highest

01:24:13   like it's just, everything is like you, you have to really max out the processor to get the

01:24:19   most Ram or maybe I was just clicking on the wrong things. All right. Set that aside. That's

01:24:23   not true. All right. Well, do we, do we want to reboot this whole thing then? No, you can leave

01:24:26   in my mistake. Like I swear I checked it like three times. You know what it is? They've changed

01:24:30   the product configurator. There was a story about this a while of like how you don't pick like

01:24:33   good, better, best. You just basically go into the configurator, but the way they've

01:24:37   made like the clicking of like, you know, you have to like pick a color first or we won't

01:24:40   let you pick anything else. Now pick a screen. It won't let you pick anything else. When you

01:24:44   get down to the chip section, they have these sort of collapsing set of round racks. And I

01:24:47   think they've bamboozled me because when you click on the chip, like there's another rectangle

01:24:51   that appears where you have to pick like the number of cores and stuff. And I just think I

01:24:55   got confused. My bad. Anyway, that's why we, that's why I double check correct in real

01:24:58   time. The max is super duper expensive. Sorry about that.

01:25:01   All right. So yeah. So basically there, the max is, as you said, super duper expensive,

01:25:06   but the Ram upgrades seem to be price same as before. Same basic story as before. We don't

01:25:11   need to enumerate them, but you know, all the, all the pricing doesn't really change.

01:25:15   Like, like when you go to a higher Ram level, you're paying the same ridiculous prices you

01:25:18   were always paying. They just seem less ridiculous now because Ram prices are really high everywhere.

01:25:23   But the point is Apple didn't actually increase their Ram upgrade prices. They were so ridiculous.

01:25:28   Unless they were able to absorb the changes or they locked in their prices before and they're

01:25:32   to get exactly the same margins they always did.

01:25:34   And I think what's interesting about this too, is like, you know, Apple historically does not

01:25:39   change these prices during the lifetime of that product. So what they, you know, by keeping the

01:25:45   prices the same, what they are communicating is not only probably is this, you know, a, a, a comparable

01:25:54   buy now than it was before. Um, you know, and, and relative to the rest of the market,

01:25:58   it's becoming a better buy, but also Apple seems most likely to expect that they will not have to

01:26:04   change this price at all, at least until the next MacBook pro comes out. That's impressive. You know,

01:26:10   given the current environment, you know, we, we always hear that Apple establishes long-term

01:26:15   relationships with suppliers and they guarantee themselves a certain amount of stock and certain

01:26:19   good price terms and everything. But we've also been hearing recently, and I think this is probably

01:26:24   true that Apple is no longer like the darling customer of some of the big chip fabs and memory

01:26:30   suppliers and things, because all of these component orders coming in from all the AI companies, you know,

01:26:37   they, they're like all of a sudden like the new good customer for TSMC. And, and like, you know,

01:26:43   like Nvidia is buying a whole bunch of chips from TSMC and you know, everybody making their own AI

01:26:48   accelerators. Like they're all buying a bunch of chips from TSMC. Everyone's buying a bunch of memory

01:26:52   from the memory companies besides Apple now. So like Apple is no longer necessarily like the only

01:26:58   or the biggest significant customer to the fabs and the component suppliers. So you would think based

01:27:04   on all of that, you would think that Apple would not be able to get as good of terms from everybody

01:27:10   for them, for their supplies and their pricing and their availability and everything as they are

01:27:13   accustomed to getting. So either they still are getting great terms or they just think like it

01:27:20   will be able to weather whatever temporary blip there is. And then, you know, in a few years when

01:27:25   things are more calm, maybe, you know, we'll, we will absorb it. But that's, none of that is what

01:27:31   we expected. We all expected memory prices would go up with the new generation.

01:27:35   I didn't expect that. I would have bet with Gruber on this.

01:27:37   Good job.

01:27:39   Because like, again, because like the long-term contracts, the fact that these, these, these

01:27:43   are products are still well within a reasonable window of a long-term contract. And if any company

01:27:48   on earth has room in its RAM margins to absorb a RAM increase, it's Apple because their prices have

01:27:53   been like, we did the math on it a while ago. It was like 6.5 times market prices or something.

01:27:59   Like they had room, they had room in there. And you know, I mean, if I, I just think these,

01:28:05   these products, this generate, even though they're being released now, these have been in the pipeline

01:28:10   for a while. I just think these don't, these are, we don't see a reflection of the, of the changes that

01:28:15   you just described, Marco, in these products. Um, and, and if they do need to like, again, with like

01:28:20   the OLED models, if they do need to, uh, absorb that cost somewhere, I feel like they'll shave the

01:28:25   cost somewhere else and leave their RAM prices somewhere. We'll see. And this is another

01:28:28   quite slightly baffling one. The storage prices have gone down a little bit, which is only baffling

01:28:33   because we're in the weird world of Apple, like everywhere else in the industry, of course,

01:28:36   storage prices go down year over year because you can get bigger SSDs for less money over time.

01:28:40   Cause that's how technology progresses, right? Not an Apple land. They just keep the same prices

01:28:44   forever and ever. The only reason the prices change is like eventually one of the sizes falls

01:28:48   off the end because it becomes too embarrassing even for Apple to ship. And that did happen. Like

01:28:52   they dropped some of the lower configs, but here on the MacBook Pro, M5 Pro and M5 Mac MacBook Pros,

01:28:57   a config with a one terabyte SSD is now $100 cheaper than it used to be. And going from one

01:29:01   to two is $200 cheaper than it used to be. And going from two to four is $200 cheaper than it used

01:29:06   to be. And this is also true for the M5 MacBook Pro, not just the M5 Pro. And I think they adjusted

01:29:12   those storage prices as well. So storage prices went down slightly. Again, their storage prices are also

01:29:18   ridiculous. And like, you know, going from one terabyte to two terabytes is not a $200 increase

01:29:25   in most scenarios, but you know, uh, we, we accept those prices because it's the only, we have no other

01:29:32   choice and it's nice to see them go down. So as, as Casey found, if you spend a while in that

01:29:37   configurator clicking on these round racks and watching things collapse and whatever and build

01:29:41   the computer of your dreams, it will cost the price of your nightmares, I guess it's not going to work

01:29:48   out well for you, especially since Apple does. I mean, they have to have some reasonable number

01:29:52   configs. They drive you towards stuff. Like again, if you get the M5 max, no, there's no bend option

01:29:56   for you. You get the one with everything enabled and you pay for it and you have no choice. And if you

01:30:01   want a larger amount of Ram, tough luck, you can't get the lower power CPU. If you want that extra

01:30:05   about a Ram, you got to, you know, so that's just the way it is. And honestly, I think the

01:30:09   configurability of in particular, the M5 pro and M5 max Macbook pros is pretty okay. There are a lot

01:30:16   of options, but no, there's not infinite options. You can't, you know, as we surmise like, Oh, if

01:30:20   there's a chiplet architecture, they can mix and match the CPUs and GPUs. Yeah. Apple can mix and match

01:30:25   them, but it's not like it's going to be a configurator where you pick how many cores and they

01:30:28   manufactured on demand for you or something. They just picked a bunch of configs that they think fit the

01:30:32   lineup and they spread them out. And I think it is reasonable. And maybe the most egregious thing

01:30:37   is like limiting of the Ram on the, on the, the, the chips with less GPU, but they kind of always do

01:30:41   that. But in the grand scheme of things, it is a better year than normal because the pro chip has

01:30:47   the same CPU as the max chip, as long as you don't need that extra Ram.

01:30:51   Yeah. So if you need or desire an eight terabyte drive, you are looking at $6,250 fun. My goodness.

01:31:02   Yeah. With 64 gigs Ram for what it's worth, but yikes.

01:31:05   I mean, and to be clear, like these, this is like top of the line performance, top of the line,

01:31:13   everything like, you know, they, this is a laptop, but you know, this is exactly the kind of thing I use

01:31:19   a laptop as a desktop for. Like I have a high spec'd MacBook Pro, you know, mine's the M3 generation.

01:31:25   So two years older than this, but, or two generations older than this rather.

01:31:29   Um, but if you are trying to have like a Mac pro, so to speak, this is a really good way to do it for

01:31:37   most people. And so that's what we're talking like when, when you, when you look at like, what did it

01:31:42   cost to spec out like an iMac pro or, you know, other Mac pros before they were what, whatever the

01:31:48   heck the monster of there is now. Um, you know, it was always in like, you know, if you, if you wanted

01:31:53   the highest Ram config, the highest processor config, the highest storage config, you were always like,

01:32:00   you know, five to $7,000 like that, that's always roughly where that got you. Um, so for what this

01:32:06   is getting us, I don't think this pricing is unprecedented and necessarily even unreasonable.

01:32:13   Um, it's just, this is a very high end product and we're talking about very high end resource levels,

01:32:20   um, for, for what it is.

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01:34:14   And then finally we have what we all were expecting the low cost MacBook with a name that we weren't

01:34:25   expecting until yesterday when it was leaked. Uh, but that's okay. Uh, it was leaked, uh, yesterday.

01:34:32   Like I said, there's a article at Mac rumors, which we'll link, uh, also Buck points out that, uh,

01:34:38   Cupertino and Apple have kind of sort of stolen a name of a surface. The surface Neo is an unreleased

01:34:45   dual touch screen two in one PC that was unveiled by Microsoft on October 2nd of 2019. Whoopsie doopsie.

01:34:52   I mean, I think at this point, I think if they, I think they're allowed to steal a name that's

01:34:56   seven years old from something that never came out.

01:34:59   usually you see like Apple, you know, for better or for worse, mostly for setting naming trends,

01:35:05   like pro and max, which suddenly appeared on every other thing in the universe, Apple, Apple started

01:35:09   using them, not because they're good names, but just because Apple essentially made them

01:35:12   have good values associated with them by naming their products. So then, yeah, but in this case,

01:35:18   they're bringing Neo is, you know, has been in product names for ages, even yes, even before the

01:35:22   matrix. Um, and it is again, but, uh, if this trend catches on and people start calling their

01:35:29   products in the, Oh, I think people will attribute it to Apple, but other people have been out there

01:35:32   first. It's just a question of like when Apple does it, it seems cool. And people copy it.

01:35:35   All right. So what do we got a 18 pro the CPU is six cores to performance, but not super right.

01:35:44   Because it's only in the M five and everything except for the M five pro and max, the old name

01:35:49   still apply. All right. So two performance for efficiency, that is not bins. The GPU is five

01:35:56   core, which six core would be unbinned. There is no fan, John, uh, the benchmarks with the iPhone 16

01:36:03   pro max as a stand in, uh, pretty good. I mean, John, how would you like to, there's a lot of numbers

01:36:08   in our show notes here, but so like the iPhone 16 pro is the max is the stand in because it's got the

01:36:12   same thing. It's got an 18 pro and I picked the pro max instead of the pro figuring like it's the

01:36:17   biggest. So it's the closest analog to a laptop because I don't know there's more room inside it

01:36:20   or whatever. So we'll have to see what the actual benchmarks are, because for all we know, it is

01:36:24   clocked higher. It has better cooling and that we don't know. We don't, we don't, but the using just

01:36:28   the phone pro max is a stand in, which I think is a reasonable kind of like conservative estimate of

01:36:34   how this chip is going to perform in the laptop scenario, assuming they didn't really screw up the

01:36:38   cooling. Uh, here's what it looks like. Uh, single core CPU is 19% slower than an M5, 30% faster than

01:36:47   an M1 and 90% faster than the M2 ultra and the Mac pro. Oh, so not even your Mac pro. No, this is the

01:36:56   current Mac pro. It is 19% faster in single core than the current $7,000 Mac pro that you can buy right

01:37:05   now at apple.com. This, the, the Mac book pro Neo has 19% faster, single core performance.

01:37:12   That's amazing. And it is, it is 2.5 times faster than the single core performance of my Mac pro.

01:37:16   Cause I know you want to know that just FYI multi-core. It is 1% faster than the M1 or 1% slower.

01:37:24   Again, the caveat with a geek bench stores, if you look them up, geek bench has like a leaderboard

01:37:29   and I like pulled from that. But if you look at individual results, they vary all over the place.

01:37:33   Cause I don't know people are putting their things on ice packs or like, who knows? Like

01:37:36   the numbers always vary by a few percent. So don't like, when I say 1% faster, just assume

01:37:40   it's like, it's a wash. But these are the numbers that I pulled out of the top charts. Right. So

01:37:44   I have the exact numbers here in the document, but you know, who knows how exactly they are?

01:37:47   Because again, it varies. Um, it's two times slower in multi-core than the M5. It's 2.5 times

01:37:53   slower than the M2 ultra and the Mac pro. So the $7,000 Mac pro is 2.5 times as fast

01:37:59   in multi-core than Apple's cheapest phone chip powered laptop.

01:38:04   Costs about as much as one wheel on the Mac pro.

01:38:06   Yeah. And my Mac pro is 20% faster in multi-core. So go my Mac pro. Uh, it's ridiculous. Uh, GPU

01:38:14   wise, it is 2.2% slower than the M1. So I would call that a wash. It is 2.3 times slower

01:38:21   than the M5, seven times slower than the M2 ultra and the, and the current Mac pro and

01:38:26   four times slower than my, uh, Radeon pro Vega two. So Jason Snell has some, has some charts

01:38:31   that we'll link. You can see his numbers are slightly different than mine. Cause again, when

01:38:35   you look up geek bench stuff, there's lots of individual, there's you, you run the geek

01:38:38   bench app and you upload your results to the website and tons of people doing that. You get

01:38:43   wildly varying numbers, depending on what was going on in their system, what temperature things

01:38:46   were all sorts of variables that are not on your control, but geek bench does publish

01:38:50   like, I don't know how they do it. They average it or something. They've published like top

01:38:54   charts where, you know, organized by machine and CPU. And that's where I was pulling mine

01:38:59   from. And I don't know if Jason's numbers are slightly different, but here's what it boils

01:39:02   down to. This thing for single core is actually better than the M1. And for multi-core and GPU,

01:39:09   it's about the same as the M1. So if you want to characterize, what is it going to be like

01:39:13   to use a Mac with the A18 Pro? The specs say from geek bench, which again is just a benchmark

01:39:19   or whatever that the specs say that it should be roughly like using an M1 that is a little

01:39:25   bit peppier in single core and single core does make a difference for people just doing, you

01:39:30   know, dorking around on their computer and doing stuff because the, you know, the main thread

01:39:33   in your application, the thing you're interacting with, that's probably that one single thread

01:39:38   is probably going to be in a power core because it's an interactive thread and all this other

01:39:41   stuff. And the, you know, that core single core performance is faster in the A18 Pro

01:39:46   than it is in the M1 by, by a significant amount. 19% is not like within the range of variability

01:39:52   of geek bench scores. So that's good. Now there are some unknowns as we get to more of the specs

01:39:57   of here, like, okay, but there's more to an SOC's performance than just CPU, GPU, single core,

01:40:02   multi-core. Like there's more to it than that. There's more of the whole system performance.

01:40:05   So we'll have to wait until somebody gets one of these and starts actually benchmarking

01:40:09   it to know, because the phone is not a good stand-in in other ways, but just pure CPU benchmarks.

01:40:15   That's how I would characterize the A18 Pro is it's M1-ish. Um, RAM is eight gigs. There's

01:40:22   no choice. No other option. It's just eight gigs is eight gigs. Uh, you got to save money

01:40:27   somewhere, but like, I imagine that the main reason it's eight gigs is I don't think the A18 Pro

01:40:32   can handle more than 18, eight gigs. I don't think it's ever shipped with more than eight gigs. I

01:40:38   don't, I guess they didn't modify it. Like, so I'm guessing, I mean, not saying they wouldn't have

01:40:42   gone eight gig anyway, but they did just bump everybody up to 16, including the M1 MacBook Air.

01:40:48   Uh, they bumped up that configuration as well and not the Walmart one, but, um, this has eight gigs and I

01:40:54   don't think they're trying to do it to be stingy. I just think like you can't do more than that with

01:41:00   the A18 Pro. The A19 Pro I think can do 12. Yes. So I suspect if you do see a bump in this, like next

01:41:07   year or the year after or whatever, next time they make a new MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro in it, I bet

01:41:13   it will have 12 and not 16, but we'll see. But like, if you're disappointed about the RAM, I think it is a

01:41:19   side effect of Apple deciding to make a low cost MacBook and essentially being forced to use one

01:41:28   of the chips that already exists. And that chip was never really designed to be a Mac chip. So

01:41:32   either doesn't support more than eight gigs or it's difficult to get it to support more than eight

01:41:36   gigs. And that topic will come up in a little bit when we talk about more things, memory bandwidth,

01:41:40   60 gigs per second, which is one 10th as fast as the top spec in five max to characterize that,

01:41:47   but it is 12.5%, uh, slower than the M1. So it is again, ballpark, how much memory bandwidth does this

01:41:55   have? It has M1 ish memory bandwidth, a little bit less, a little bit less. Um, SSDs is a real wildcard

01:42:01   for me and benchmarks. Yeah. So it comes to a 256 or 512 with some important differences. We'll get

01:42:05   through in a second. I don't know what the SSD speeds are going to be like. Cause honestly,

01:42:08   I don't know what the SSD speeds are like in phones. And I imagine the A18 pros interface to

01:42:15   storage is the bottleneck here. Like however fast an A18 pro can talk to storage. That's how fast this

01:42:22   is going to go. Even though max, like any of the M chips are probably designed with faster storage,

01:42:26   especially like the modern ones are designed with faster and faster access to storage, whether it's

01:42:32   higher clock speed or wider buses or both, we'll have to see what the SSD performance is like

01:42:38   on the A18 pro. Cause I don't know how to, how to like handicap that. So like if your workload,

01:42:44   uh, depends a lot on, you know, big sequential reads of high bandwidth stuff, maybe it won't perform

01:42:50   like an M1 for you, but if it doesn't need to do that and it's just like CPU bound, it should perform

01:42:56   kind of like an M1 to you. I mean, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if you know what RAM

01:43:01   is, if you know what memory bandwidth is, and if you know what SSD performance is, this is probably

01:43:09   not a computer that's really targeted at you. Uh, and that's fine. Like when you look at like, you

01:43:15   know, this is, this is a, an iPhone chip performing very competitively, like in, in certain ways, very

01:43:23   competitively. Um, and in certain ways, of course it's restricted and lower, but that really says a lot

01:43:28   about the iPhone. It's like the, the iPhone can do a lot here. Like if, if the power that we're

01:43:34   carrying in our pockets every day is enough to run like a, uh, a somewhat competitive, like entire

01:43:42   laptop, that's amazing. It's also kind of amazing to think like if you like, you know, build and run

01:43:48   from Xcode on this computer to an iPhone 17 pro, the phone that you're running it on is going to be

01:43:57   faster than the computer you're building it with. Well, keep in mind that if you buy one of the new

01:44:01   displays, either one, it has a more powerful SOC. Oh gosh. Because the studio display has an A19 and

01:44:09   the studio display XDR has an A19 pro and this is an A18 pro. So yes, if you buy this and attach it to

01:44:14   one of those external monitors, which it will drive, um, yeah, your monitor has a better SOC.

01:44:20   I wonder if it has more RAM too. Yeah, but you could buy like seven of these for the cost of one

01:44:24   of those monitors. Yes, that, that is definitely true. All right. So size wise, if you were hoping

01:44:29   for the return of the MacBook one, and yes, many people point out the MacBook Neo is an anagram of

01:44:33   MacBook one. Uh, it doesn't have one port, which we'll get to in a little bit, but B, this is not

01:44:38   a ridiculously skinny laptop. It is essentially MacBook air sized. It is actually 1.5 millimeters

01:44:44   thicker than the MacBook air. And it is six millimeters, uh, less wide and eight millimeters

01:44:50   less deep, but it is actually thicker. So it is not a skinny little thing. It is not a wedge. It is not

01:44:55   smaller than that. But just again, think of this as essentially MacBook air sized a little bit smaller.

01:45:00   Um, the weight is exactly the same as the MacBook air. So if you wanted a two pound thing, this ain't it.

01:45:06   It's 2.7 pounds. Okay. I have some questions about the weight because, okay, this is roughly the same

01:45:13   size computer as the MacBook air. It's a little bit smaller. Yeah. A little bit, but it barely

01:45:18   smaller. It is thicker. Yeah. But so it's a roughly a MacBook air 13 inch sized computer. It is exactly

01:45:25   the same weight as the MacBook air. It has many of the same types of things in it as a MacBook air,

01:45:31   except it has a much smaller battery and batteries are heavy. Why is it the same weight?

01:45:40   I, my guess, here's my guess. Um, one of the rumors that they talked about this Apple alluded to it

01:45:46   vaguely in their video is that they have come up with a less expensive way to make a aluminum unibody

01:45:51   chassis. And it's possible that less expensive way does not remove all the material that could

01:45:57   be a move re removed for the most efficient weight. That's my guess. Oh, so like thicker aluminum,

01:46:03   basically. Yeah. Like, cause like when you're the more expensive one, like, you know, there's a bunch

01:46:08   of aluminum there that's not serving a role structurally and removing every ounce of that may require more

01:46:12   machining and precision and so on and so forth. And whatever the new technique is that I don't remember

01:46:17   the details of the rumors or this is just rumors of like, they've found a way to make a unibody

01:46:22   aluminum construction for less money than like the M1 MacBook air. That's my only guess. Cause

01:46:27   you're right. The battery is less. That's a pretty good guess. Um, the, the display, no notch, which I

01:46:32   like, like, I feel like that's an advantage over the MacBook air. I mean, it's because they have big

01:46:37   bezels around the screen. Like that's what it comes down to, but you know, no notch. If you didn't like

01:46:41   the notch, just don't have one. Um, it's a 13 inch IPS LCD, uh, as opposed, I think the MacBook

01:46:47   air is 30.6 inches. Uh, the resolution it's 219 pixels. The resolution is actually less than the

01:46:54   MacBook air. It's 24 0 8 by 15 0 6 versus 25 60 by 16 64. It is also by the way, significantly less

01:47:01   than the iPhone 16 pro max that this came from the iPhone 16. Remember the iPhone 16 pro max is 3X

01:47:08   instead of 2X. The iPhone 16 pro max is 28 68 by 13 20 at 460 PPI. So if you're worried, like, how is

01:47:14   this phone chip going to drive the display? It has so many pixels. Don't worry about it. The phone that it

01:47:19   came from has more pixels. That's awesome. It's 500 nits. Uh, it's only sRGB. So no P3, no true tone,

01:47:26   no ambient light sensor. Uh, the ports, this is where the a 19, uh, 18 pro comes in again. It has

01:47:33   one USB three that does 10 gigabits per second for charging and display port, but it can do one display

01:47:38   at four. I guess it can't do a 6k. It has one external display at 4k at 60. So it couldn't do the 6k

01:47:42   display, but it can do the 4k display. It can't do the 5k display either, which is a bummer anyway.

01:47:46   And then the other port, thank God it has more than one. So it is not a MacBook one. The other port,

01:47:51   which is also USB C is USB two at 480 megabits per second. And why, why the hell does it have

01:47:57   a USB three port and a USB two port? Because that I think is what the a 18 pro can support. I think

01:48:06   Gruber mentioned this in one of his things I've, or someone, he, he, he said in his piece that he

01:48:10   actually asked somebody in Apple PR and they, they basically said like, it was really hard to even

01:48:14   get that port in there. They could like the, in other words saying like, normally they expect to

01:48:19   have one port as a phone chip. So you have one port in the phone, right? Just to get the second USB

01:48:25   port at all. I think they probably had to add like another USB controller somewhere to the board and

01:48:29   wire it in. And that was a pain. And so, yes, Apple did this to themselves, but like, again, when the

01:48:35   a 18 pro was made there, I don't think there was any expectation that this ship would appear in a Mac.

01:48:39   It is ill suited to be in a Mac based on the peripheral stuff. And so it is disappointing.

01:48:45   I mean, come on USB two, like what century is this? It's ridiculous, but would you rather only have

01:48:50   one port? I sure as hell wouldn't. So there is the good port, the quote unquote good port, which is

01:48:55   only USB three at 10 gigabits. And then there is the horrendously slow port, but it's still better to

01:49:01   have two ports because there is no mag safe. These two ports are it. Well, you know, charge in one of

01:49:05   them connect a peripheral and another when the a 19 or a 20 or whatever powered version of the

01:49:13   MacBook Neo comes out. I'll bet these changes are less bad or I'm hoping in the future. Apple says,

01:49:19   OK, if this product is a hit, we need to make chips that we know will work in this. This is a

01:49:23   disappointing technical thing, but it's not because Apple is being mean to you or being cheap. I just

01:49:29   think they didn't have a way to do this because this was never designed to be a Mac chip. And people

01:49:34   think that manifests like, oh, it was never designed to be a Mac chip. Its performance will be bad. It's

01:49:37   not the performance. It's stuff like this, like how many ports can you support? How many external

01:49:41   displays? Because those are not important things for a phone that has one hole in the bottom of it

01:49:47   and generally doesn't spend a lot of time hooked up to external displays. So it is what it is.

01:49:52   Headphone port, it does have that. It doesn't support high impedance headphones like the MacBook Air

01:49:57   does. Again, no mag safe. Also, the headphone port placement is a little odd. It's really far down.

01:50:03   Like it's very close to your wrists. Yeah, I want to see what the inside of this thing looks like.

01:50:07   I mean, the speakers are weird, too. The speakers are side firing and they're towards the front.

01:50:11   Yeah, they're also. Yeah, they're right there, too. It's yeah. So I'm I really I think what we are

01:50:16   seeing here with some of these decisions is like, you know, Apple went all out designing this from

01:50:21   scratch to be significantly less money. And there's all this stuff like, you know, like case design

01:50:27   that we don't even really think about as like possible ways to save weight because we don't know

01:50:31   how to manufacture of this kind of stuff. But there's all sorts of little details like this that are like

01:50:37   different or missing or a little bit a little bit off. And, you know, it all adds up.

01:50:42   Yeah, I wonder if the side firing speakers like like because if you're gonna like if you're gonna save money on the speakers,

01:50:47   maybe use fewer speakers, lower quality speakers, but having them be side firing and towards you to like sort of bounce off

01:50:53   the surface like I like I feel like the placement is very intentional to essentially make the speakers sound better

01:50:58   like for if we're gonna use these speakers and we're gonna put them in this laptop actually shooting them out of the sides

01:51:04   from the front is the best way to do it because if we had put them like facing up and bouncing off the screen or whatever

01:51:10   they wouldn't sound as good like I'm I'm guessing this is very intentional

01:51:13   and is actually the best place to put these speakers which are presumably less expensive and fewer speakers.

01:51:19   Yeah, I mean we'll see because like I because what I'm I got I got out my old M2 MacBook Air here

01:51:23   and I'm pretty sure it's fire speakers at the screen hinge, right? Like out of the screen hinge towards the screen.

01:51:29   Yeah, I think so.

01:51:30   But like one of one of the major differences between the MacBook Air and the 14-inch MacBook Pro

01:51:36   is the bet the much better speakers you get in the MacBook Pro.

01:51:40   It's like it's such a difference and I wonder like are they like from from the reviewers that that were there at Apple's event today

01:51:46   You can't hear anything in that room. Yeah, but so far the impression is the speakers are decent, you know

01:51:50   Like for what they are. Yeah, I think the comparison is like compared to the speakers you would get in a similarly placed PC laptop. They're better

01:51:56   You know, I wonder if maybe because like if you think about the the

01:52:00   The arrangement inside of these maybe that maybe that's one of the things they were able to do with a smaller battery

01:52:06   Is move the speakers into the wrist rest because before like the battery would be under that entire palm rest area

01:52:12   I know the batteries are pretty the speakers are pretty skinny like in the iFixit teardowns

01:52:16   Like even the MacBook Pro they're skinny. I don't want to wait to see when people tear this down

01:52:19   But i'm what i'm guessing is like again because I don't think there's

01:52:21   The room is that tight in there because they did make the battery smaller

01:52:24   I'm i'm guessing this layout is very intentional and other positions would be worse but

01:52:29   um

01:52:29   Again external displays is just one at 4k display part 1.4

01:52:33   um

01:52:35   and gruber says

01:52:36   If you plug in an external display and you put it in the wrong usb port

01:52:40   You get a software notification telling you to plug it in the other one

01:52:42   Because basically if say you've got a 4k display and you're going to plug it in

01:52:45   The two ports are not the same

01:52:46   You cannot plug a 4k display into usb 2.0 port, right?

01:52:49   So if you do plug it in there the os says yeah, that's not the right one

01:52:52   Put it in the other one. I don't think they're labeled in any way. They just they look identical

01:52:57   It's just one of them is the fast one. One of them is the slow one

01:52:59   Um connectivity this does not get the n1

01:53:02   It has wi-fi 6e and bluetooth 6 so that the standards are you know fine. It's not wi-fi 7, but whatever

01:53:08   But it is bluetooth 6. I would I think they use like a media tech chip or something

01:53:12   It's not apple's n1 in there again saving money because whatever that whatever chip

01:53:16   They use is presumably cheaper than the m1

01:53:18   The camera is 1080 no center stage or desk view also no indicator light on the camera

01:53:24   It's a little green light that you know turns on next to the camera when the camera is recording instead

01:53:28   They're just relying entirely on the software thing the little, you know

01:53:31   FaceTime ish icon that appears in your menu bar when it's going on

01:53:35   That's a weird one to cut

01:53:36   I don't know about the security implications of that because the apple used to brag about how

01:53:40   There's no way in software. You can disable the green light. Obviously, there's definitely a way in software where you can disable the thing in the menu bar

01:53:47   I would presume although maybe a system integrity protection and all sorts of stuff presents it tries to stop that but we'll see

01:53:53   Sound again dual speakers dual mic array instead of three mics from the macbook air

01:53:58   Does not support spatial audio with dynamic head tracking and air pods, which is fine with me because I hate that feature

01:54:03   Yeah, I was gonna say can I turn that off like universally across all of my devices?

01:54:07   Yeah, I wish I always turn it off

01:54:09   Um, the battery as marco said is 36.5 which is 32 percent smaller than the macbook air is 53.8

01:54:16   So that is a big read because again, this is the same size computer and there's essentially a third less battery in it

01:54:21   So that is big and why is there a third less battery in it a because it seems like they could for power and be

01:54:27   Smaller batteries cost us money. I mean, that's what it comes like that's what it comes down

01:54:31   And and if if if the theory about like a thicker case is correct

01:54:34   Maybe they actually just didn't have room for a bigger battery

01:54:36   Yeah, we'll say if it's thicker it could be like millimeters, but we'll see we'll see what it looks like when they tear it down

01:54:41   Um up to 16 hours video streaming which 11 percent less than the macbook air

01:54:45   And up to 11 hours of wireless web, which is 26 percent less than the macbook air

01:54:51   So it does take a battery life hit in exchange for that one-third smaller battery, but

01:54:56   The battery life still seems acceptable. So 16 hours for video streaming and 11 hours for wireless web

01:55:02   It is fine

01:55:02   But again, if you were hoping this was going to be either an ultra thin laptop or a laptop that had insane battery life

01:55:08   Because it uses a phone chip. Neither one of those things are true

01:55:10   What is true is it costs doesn't cost a lot of money, which we'll get to in a bit

01:55:13   Charging it comes with a 20 watt charger which should tell you

01:55:16   Don't expect fast charging of this because it doesn't support it

01:55:19   So that 20 watt charger will supply i'm assuming will supply power to this thing as fast as it is willing to take it

01:55:26   So don't bother trying to get a higher wattage charger. It seems like it's not going to charge it any faster

01:55:30   Again cost savings no keyboard backlight

01:55:33   No touch id on the model of the base model

01:55:37   If you want touch id you have to check the only option you have aside from color

01:55:41   Which we'll get to in a little bit which is 512 gig ssd

01:55:44   So if you get the two the base model 256 gig ssd no touch id

01:55:48   And as apple says lock and wake your screen and power your laptop on and off with the lock key

01:55:54   You know where the touch id key is on the keyboard now

01:55:56   There's just a regular key there with a lock on it

01:55:58   And as many people pointed out if you're buying these for schools, for example touch id is pointless in schools for the most part

01:56:03   Unless it's a one-to-one program and even then I don't think the kids are going to register their fingerprints or whatever

01:56:07   So it is not unreasonable to lack touch id as someone who's sitting in front of a computer that right now that does not have touch id

01:56:14   I tell you it is possible to use a mac without touch id. It does work

01:56:17   Yeah, it's miserable though

01:56:18   Well, you know

01:56:20   Anyway for if you want the basest of base models the 256 gig version of of this macbook neo

01:56:27   You do not get touch id. Why because it saves money of the trackpad

01:56:32   It is not a haptic trackpad. The trackpad actually moves. So we're going back in time

01:56:37   You can still supposedly according to apple click anywhere on its surface

01:56:43   I'm, not sure how that works. I've seen video of people pressing it

01:56:46   It does indeed move like like in the olden days when the trackpad used to move when you press them

01:56:51   And like on a lot of pc laptops, they still move

01:56:53   Does it just does it move like a diving board? Does it move like a trampoline?

01:56:57   Does it move like an elevator? I don't know how it moves

01:57:01   We'll have to wait for people to get these to you know review them

01:57:04   Um, i've seen people say that it also doesn't support force touch. I'm not sure what they mean

01:57:08   Do they just mean that it is a physically moving trackpad?

01:57:12   Or do they mean like the thing where you press hard and it knows that you're pressing harder?

01:57:15   Yeah, I think that's what they mean is that you can't press through you know how

01:57:19   Uh, well, you're not a trackpad person

01:57:21   But you can still do that on a mac? I thought that ended years ago

01:57:23   I thought they got rid of that

01:57:24   No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no on a mac. That's absolutely still possible

01:57:27   It was like where you get what do you what is that bound to by default is like dictionary lookup or something or

01:57:31   On words, it's a dictionary lookup. I forget what it is in other places, but yes, I'm doing it right now, you know

01:57:37   Well, anyway, this this don't have it

01:57:38   All right, so the colors silver blush citrus indigo

01:57:44   Uh, they're color coordinated keyboard and feet

01:57:47   Uh, jason who is by his own admission

01:57:50   Relatively colorblind says bluish

01:57:53   Excuse me blush

01:57:54   Is pink enough that even I a person who has a hard time seeing pinks can tell you it's pink

01:57:58   Indigo sort of like the macbook airs midnight color lightened up a few notches and citrus is a bright yellow gold that nobody's going to mistake for some other apple laptop

01:58:05   Yeah, I think this is a pretty nice looking color setup for this like

01:58:10   It's not super bold. It's not super varied

01:58:14   Um, I think they should have been even more

01:58:18   Like made an even bigger statement and not even offered it in silver

01:58:21   Okay, I think it should have just been only colors

01:58:24   You gotta offer a silver one

01:58:26   Yeah, what do you like I think they I think what they missed out on is there

01:58:30   There's no green. That's my disappointment, but you know, uh, the colors are visible to the naked eye

01:58:35   Even from a colorblind person. So we have to say thumbs up on that

01:58:39   It is kind of funny like if you configure the like if you go into like the macbook compare

01:58:42   Specs page on their on their website and you set up like a macbook neo a macbook pro and a macbook air

01:58:49   As the three like, you know it like and you put them in in

01:58:53   Price order

01:58:54   It almost looks like you have them in the reverse order for how nice computers are

01:58:58   It's like, you know, if you if you look at like cars, you know, the really really cheap car model of a model line

01:59:05   Is like only available in white right and then like, you know, you go a little bit higher and it's like, okay, you can get a few more colors here

01:59:11   And like you go to like the luxury cars. You get a lot of color options there

01:59:14   The the macbook lineup is the opposite like the nicer the mac computer is the fewer color options you have

01:59:22   Yeah, maybe they'll learn the the iphone 16 pro orange lesson

01:59:26   But not for these because that was there would be too late to learn for these but yeah

01:59:29   And the color coordinated keyboards and feet like it's it's kind of hard to sell tell in the pictures because as people point out

01:59:34   Like white balance adjusting of your eyes wise you're like well all the keyboards are white, aren't they?

01:59:38   They're not the pink

01:59:39   Laptop has a pink keyboard the the citrus or yellowish citrus laptop has a citrus keyboard

01:59:45   It's easier to tell on the indigo one because that's very dark and you can see that it has a darker keyboard

01:59:48   But and also the rubber feet that are on the bottom. They're not black all the rubber feet on the macbook air

01:59:52   So and the macbook pros are black. These are color coordinated

01:59:56   So they match so that's a nice touch. That's where some of the money went and as jason snell points out

02:00:00   The apple logo on the back of the screen is not a shiny logo, but it's like embossed like inset

02:00:06   And the the the shiny logos the way those are done and apple talks about this a lot in their videos

02:00:11   I believe even for the macbook air are

02:00:14   They cut out an apple logo shape

02:00:16   And then they sort of inset like wood inlay a different

02:00:21   Material that shiny thing is inlaid into there and they have to make it obviously like a wood inlay

02:00:26   You have to exactly match

02:00:28   This the hole to the thing you're putting in the hole. So it's seamless so you don't see a gap around any part of it

02:00:33   Oh my god, and that's hard to do and they do it. That's how they make that. Yeah, I don't know if I knew that

02:00:37   Um, I I don't know if they do that in all the models or just some of them

02:00:41   But I remember they had a video about it because what they have to do like they're you know

02:00:44   Obviously when you manufacture things there are variances

02:00:46   So what they do is they punch out the apple logo shaped holes

02:00:49   And then they have the shiny apple logos that are going to them and there's variability and they essentially have to match up pairs

02:00:55   Like okay, this hole exactly matches this particular logo

02:00:59   You know like because that's that's what you have to do because there are tolerances and they want them to fit exactly

02:01:03   And it's not like you you know, so you just have you get a very but you get a distribution curve of

02:01:07   The holes and you get a distribution curve of the inserts and then you just match them up and that is time consuming and expensive

02:01:14   you want to save money on a laptop don't do that just

02:01:17   Carve away a little bit of material and there's your apple logo and that's why these are not shiny but are instead inset

02:01:23   I would assume that is a cost saving measure and not so much the cost of the shiny insert

02:01:28   But the cost of like the time and labor to do that expensive and it's computer control like the matching

02:01:33   It's not humans like holding it up and trying to put it in or whatever, but like that's expensive

02:01:37   So that's where they save some money here

02:01:39   I wanted to quickly note that the

02:01:42   Four minute announcement video for this I thought was really fun and really well done

02:01:46   It's worth four minutes of your time to watch. We'll put a link in the show notes

02:01:49   Uh, and it's it shows all the different colors really well and and the way they like edited it with the vfx and stuff

02:01:55   I thought it was really cool. So you should check it out

02:01:57   Yeah

02:01:57   Environment on this one 60% recycled content the highest percentage of any apple product 90% recycled aluminum 100% recycled cobalt in the battery

02:02:05   45% renewable energy across the supply chain and as we alluded to before price

02:02:10   599

02:02:11   For the 256 no touch id model or 499 for education and for the one with touch id and a 512 gig ssd. It's 699

02:02:21   uh

02:02:22   Those prices are lower than some people expected

02:02:25   But like when we have that big long session of like where can you remove price from this thing?

02:02:29   They removed it every possible place

02:02:31   They could place we didn't even think of like did you think removing the indicator light from the from the camera?

02:02:37   Apparently that saves money because you don't have to deal with that circuitry. You don't have another light

02:02:41   Uh removing touch id but only from some of the models

02:02:44   I don't think we would have guessed that but in hindsight it makes some sense because in some context

02:02:48   You don't need touch id or you don't want it or it's not important

02:02:50   um

02:02:51   Yeah, they just removed it everywhere like no backlight on the keyboards like just

02:02:56   Everything they could you know, just they didn't just get it from one big place because again the like the soc

02:03:01   Like how much cheaper are we talking about this or how much cheaper is an a team pro than an m1?

02:03:05   I don't know 30 bucks cheaper like it's not it's not that much cheaper

02:03:10   You need to get the cost from everywhere and they got it from everywhere and I think unlike the 16e the cost they removed here

02:03:18   I think they did a good job of

02:03:20   Spreading that around such that there is no one aspect of this that where you say like

02:03:25   This makes it a garbage laptop the closest I would come to say is the one that may be regretful is the uh

02:03:30   the trackpad

02:03:32   Maybe that saved them a lot of money

02:03:34   But that really feels like apple probably was like oh, I wish we didn't have to do this because you know that the niceness of the trackpads

02:03:39   Is one of the defining characteristics of an apple laptop. It just feels so nice. It works so well

02:03:44   And it's not like the you know, they haven't always had haptic ones

02:03:47   But this is kind of like the 32 to 27 inch regression

02:03:50   It's like we're gonna go back in time a little bit to a day when we didn't have

02:03:53   haptic trackpads

02:03:55   Which means that again when you click on it

02:03:57   It opens up a little gap and maybe a crumb from your scone falls onto the trackpad and it goes

02:04:02   Like you know what? I mean like having it not move is a actually a pretty big boon

02:04:08   I'm, you know

02:04:08   I do wonder how many people are going to be taking these apart and finding crumbs in that part of the computer

02:04:12   I mean, I bet they're used to finding them under the keyboard

02:04:14   But now they're going to be under the trackpad too because it opens up a little crack when you click it or whatever

02:04:18   That's the only thing I can really fault these things on and obviously

02:04:20   The limitations inherent in the a18 pro which i'm not going to say is an apple's fault because they made this computer

02:04:26   But it's not apple making poor

02:04:29   Decisions about what to put into a product. It's apple

02:04:32   Apple of the past

02:04:32   Not having the foresight to realize they needed a chip to go into a low-end

02:04:37   Laptop, right, but that it is what it is

02:04:40   So be aware that some of the limitations of this

02:04:42   Are are to blame on the a18 pro

02:04:45   And there's nothing apple could really do about it short of not short of not rolling out this computer until it has an a

02:04:51   19 or a 20 or something with fewer limitations, but

02:04:54   I think this is pretty good, but I don't know. What do you guys think?

02:04:57   Yeah, I I think this is a really solid computer for people who don't care about computers and I think that comes across very dismissive and I don't mean it that way at all

02:05:07   For us for the three of us and for probably anyone listening to the show

02:05:11   We care a lot about computers. We want nice computers. We want fast computers and

02:05:17   This is not those things and that's

02:05:20   Okay, and I think like you had said john most of the trade-offs I made I think make a lot of sense

02:05:27   It would bum me out to have this computer as a primary computer, but I tell you what as a like

02:05:33   Downstairs computer, which is currently an m2 ipad pro for me

02:05:37   This would fit the bill pretty nicely and if you price out an m or a modern ipad pro with keyboard because for me

02:05:46   I would want that

02:05:46   It's like two or three times the price. Well, I guess you wouldn't have to have you're gonna have one of these in each room, right?

02:05:52   I mean you wouldn't have to have an ipad pro to be fair, but to have an ipad with a nice keyboard with the cantilevered keyboard

02:05:57   The keyboard alone is like 400 bucks. Somebody said this on on mass. Yeah, 350. I think something like that's ridiculous

02:06:03   It's like yeah an ipad keyboard is 350 bucks and this whole ass computer is 600 bucks

02:06:10   I mean my yeah, I believe that and it was I think it was at the bottom of gruber's post to like

02:06:14   Just like the what you get for this

02:06:17   Shows how bad of a value the ipad pro and magic keyboard are by comparison

02:06:22   Yeah

02:06:22   Well, the ipad pro is actually not that bad of a deal because it has a really good

02:06:26   It's just over provisioned has a really good screen has a powerful eyes

02:06:28   I get okay fair less less so on the ipad pro much more so on the magic keyboard like like the magic keyboard

02:06:33   The keyboard is definitely like yeah, that's hard to justify

02:06:36   I think that I do wonder why those cost so much

02:06:38   Maybe it's like low volumes or whatever

02:06:39   But yeah, that doesn't have a lot of computing power in the keyboard and it's just a plastic and then it's not even like they're super durable because

02:06:45   At various times the ipad keyboards have like fallen apart after several years. So that's a tough product

02:06:50   So here's here's the the real comparison

02:06:53   To to think about this because the apple is rolling out this line of low-cost laptops and fun colors

02:06:58   They're trying to go down market. We can we feel like we can feel the laptop at a lower price that is still a good product and here

02:07:03   It is. Uh, it's called the neo

02:07:05   What about the neo?

02:07:07   Versus the walmart m1 macbook air which they have been selling for many years now

02:07:12   It's the macbook air they sell through walmart for six hundred and fifty dollars

02:07:15   And it's just the m1 macbook air as it existed

02:07:18   They just you know, they gave it to walmart to sell when they stopped sort of selling it themselves

02:07:22   um

02:07:23   Here are some comparisons here are the ways in which the neo is better than the m1 macbook air

02:07:28   It is 30% faster in single core and about the same in multi-core and gpu

02:07:33   It has a hundred nit brighter screen

02:07:35   It has one hour better battery life. It has iphone's wi-fi 6e instead of 6

02:07:41   It has bluetooth 6 instead of 5 its camera is 1080 instead of 720

02:07:46   It is 50 cheaper than the walmart one for the 256 gig model and you can actually buy it and it's in stock

02:07:53   Those are the neo advantages. What are the m1 macbook air advantage?

02:07:57   Also, i'd say you can buy the neo anywhere because apple will sell it directly to you

02:08:00   Yeah, you don't have to buy it at walmart

02:08:02   But like even at walmart sometimes it's not always in stock

02:08:04   So I don't I don't like I don't know what the future of the m1 macbook air is

02:08:07   I think maybe they're just going to sell through them because walmart will be selling the neo

02:08:10   So I can't imagine the m1 macbook air sticks around after this

02:08:13   Yeah, maybe they just sell through them

02:08:15   But anyway, here are the m1 macbook air advantages over the neo

02:08:17   And one macbook air has touch id on every model

02:08:20   It supports p3 color

02:08:22   It has true tone with an ambient light sensor its screen is 0.3 inches bigger diagonally and it has about a half a million more pixels

02:08:29   Than the neo it has two thunderbolt 4 usb 4 ports because it is indeed a mac

02:08:37   It has a three micro array instead of two. It has a little light on the camera

02:08:41   It has a haptic trackpad and has a backlit keyboard

02:08:43   So you really see that like the macbook air was never designed to be

02:08:49   The walmart bargain baseman model

02:08:51   It's just that they took what was essentially the best macbook air that they had ever introduced when the m1 came out

02:08:57   And they just kept selling it forever because it was just so darn good

02:09:01   But like it's like when casey goes shopping for used cars

02:09:04   If you want to buy a new car for 45 000 it's not going to have all the same features

02:09:09   As a massively depreciated ev for the multiple years old and you tell you can tell like when you look at the m1 macbook air

02:09:17   Like oh, this wasn't a bargain computer when it was new

02:09:20   It just is now and it was always designed to be a mac again

02:09:24   The biggest thing is like two thunderbolt 4 ports versus usb 3 and usb 2

02:09:30   That is a big difference in terms of bandwidth and usability if you care about the ports p3

02:09:36   Why would this have p3 color? Is it a walmart laptop?

02:09:38   Well, it wasn't always a walmart laptop when it was introduced having p3 color was table stakes for what was then the highest end macbook air ever made

02:09:45   Um, same thing with touch id it's across all the models

02:09:48   Um, but time marches on that's why the neo has a better camera than this thing does right

02:09:53   And the neo is 50 cheaper if you care about that neo has better wi-fi and bluetooth

02:09:57   The neo has better battery life or brighter screen faster single core soc

02:10:01   So like it's not a slam dunk in either direction. It depends on what of those things you care about

02:10:05   Oh, and by the way, I should list this as a pro in the neo

02:10:07   It comes in fun colors and the macbook air does not also

02:10:10   I think one thing to not underestimate is

02:10:12   When the macbook air went from the m1 to the m2 generation

02:10:17   It had a case redesign. Yeah, that's right and the macbook air m2 and forward case feels fantastic

02:10:23   It is delightful to pick up and hold. I think it is a huge tactile upgrade from an anesthetic upgrade from the m1 family

02:10:33   I kind of like the wedge like I see arguments for both because I do have I have you know

02:10:37   We have m we have the new uh, I have a my son has an m2 macbook air

02:10:40   My daughter has an m4 so i'm very familiar with the new case

02:10:43   But I also have an m1 macbook air sitting here. It's like

02:10:45   I don't know if I would put it as a pro in either one

02:10:47   If you like one case better than another then be aware that there is that difference

02:10:50   But I do kind of like the wedge in some ways and to be clear and you know the the neo is not identical to the macbook air case

02:10:56   It is a little bit thicker, you know, so yeah, it's a little it's a little bit different

02:10:58   It's roughly it's similar. It's the biggest difference is like it's 13 inch screen versus 13.6

02:11:04   So if you can imagine what difference that would make in a case like it is, you know

02:11:07   It is slightly thicker but not as long and a lot as wide

02:11:09   Yeah, but like but I do think like the the m1 macbook air

02:11:13   It looked old it felt old it was old and I always had that kind of that question in my mind of like

02:11:20   How long first of all how long are they going to be selling this and then second of all like could could you tell someone

02:11:26   Go buy this five-year-old computer?

02:11:28   What if they like stop supporting the os next year on it?

02:11:32   Like I was always worried about that kind of thing where like this is now a current production model. It's a new model

02:11:37   Well, that's that's a that's the thing that people worry about with the a team pro as well

02:11:41   Like obviously it's a concern with the m1 especially since the n1 doesn't have like all like the uh

02:11:45   The more advanced neural engines and various other things in the gpu cores and crap like that

02:11:48   But people are worried already about the a team pro they're like how long will mac os support?

02:11:54   The a team pro because even though it is a newly introduced computer it is an older chip and it's not really designed to be a mac chips

02:12:01   Like what does the longevity look like like not that it's going to ever get too slow

02:12:04   But like is there going to be like two versions of mac os for now from now they're going to be like, oh, yeah

02:12:08   You can't you know, you can't use the a team pro with that

02:12:11   Like I don't I don't know that's kind of up to apple

02:12:13   How long they want to support this but it is also a concern on the m1

02:12:17   So the reason I think it's not a slam dunk because like I said the the m1 is your used your used luxury car

02:12:22   It's massively depreciated. It's super old. It's no longer state-of-the-art

02:12:26   But when it was new it had more nice stuff and it still does have more stuff

02:12:30   I I was kind of shocked when I looked this up

02:12:32   That the neo has one hour better battery life because I always think of the m1 as having amazing battery life

02:12:36   But these are these are just by apple's measures. I don't know how accurate they are

02:12:39   Um, well the m1's also again. It's a five-year-old chip. It's a five-year-old process

02:12:44   Several processes all what is it seven nanometer if I forget

02:12:47   Yeah, whatever it is. It's it's not it's not the latest and greatest in that way

02:12:50   And so and of course you've had many efficiency gains and in both the physical design of the chip and also like the the like, you know

02:12:56   Cleverness of the chip like, you know, like the the efficiency of the cores is is higher now, too

02:13:01   um, so

02:13:02   Honestly, I think it's

02:13:04   Awesome, uh, even though this is not for me

02:13:08   Um, and I and I think by the way and for anybody out there thinking like should I get this instead of a macbook air for my like, you know

02:13:13   Messing around computer the only thing I would say is like

02:13:16   There's a lot of little

02:13:18   Little like lacks of niceties that I think you might notice if you are accustomed to other macs

02:13:25   This is definitely a slam dunk for people who are coming from pcs

02:13:29   But if you're coming from other macs the lack of certain things like if you've always had backlit keyboards and you suddenly don't like that kind of thing

02:13:36   but

02:13:36   honestly, I think one of the

02:13:38   most significant like

02:13:40   Kind of paper cuts that you might face in real life

02:13:43   Is the lack of the ambient light sensor because what that means you open this thing up no matter where you are and boom

02:13:48   It blasts you with like whatever your screen setting was when you were in brighter light when you know

02:13:52   So like I think that

02:13:54   You're going to be constantly like riding that screen brightness thing

02:13:57   That actually might be the the the biggest paper cut for people like in real use

02:14:02   but um, but I think overall like

02:14:04   when you compare

02:14:05   This to pcs in the similar price range people keep saying this is apple trying to take on chromebooks

02:14:11   I don't think that's significant chromebooks don't cost six hundred dollars no and and like if you're going to try to tackle chromebooks in schools

02:14:17   Those are like two hundred dollar computers. They're garbage. They're disposable and

02:14:23   The appeal of schools getting chromebooks is largely about cost

02:14:29   But there's also other factors like management

02:14:31   Integration with google's classroom crap. Yeah, like there's a lot of other factors that schools

02:14:37   Like and rely on and are very compelling for them that apple is never going to match

02:14:42   So it is partly about cost not entirely about cost and apple is to be fair apple is not mentioning education

02:14:47   In the marketing for this product anywhere that i've seen like they have education pricing for all their computers like just because they

02:14:52   Mentioned it's five hundred dollars to education like this

02:14:55   They're at their videos are not like we see a children everyone every child will have one of these now

02:15:00   They're just trying to sell it to consumers. Yeah, exactly like they're they're going to sell it to students

02:15:04   Like, you know directly like or to their parents like, you know

02:15:07   They're the people who go to school will will buy this or have this bought for them

02:15:12   But not by the school the school is going to keep doing whatever the school was doing before

02:15:16   um, sir, you know, i'm sure you know, like like when when our kid was when we were living on fire island

02:15:22   Uh year round during during some of the covet lockdowns

02:15:25   Um, the fire island school was very well funded and so every kid gary every kid there got a macbook air

02:15:31   So like if you were like the kind of school that was already buying macs for students

02:15:35   I'm sure many of those will switch to these because they're a lot cheaper. That's great

02:15:38   But if you know for schools that were already buying the 200 chromebooks, they're not going to these but anyway overall like I think

02:15:45   This looks like

02:15:47   I think I think this is going to be very significant

02:15:50   This will

02:15:52   Significantly expand the max market share over time

02:15:57   You know the the walmart m1

02:15:59   Was an experiment I think and as we've discussed like that was never designed to be a super cheap

02:16:07   That was designed to be a medium cheap computer that was never designed to be a super cheap computer

02:16:11   This is now designed for that. It's you know, very much like the approach

02:16:16   This is a total shift in strategy. This is very much like the approach apple took with the iphone 17e

02:16:20   Versus the old se's which were like regular iphones that were kind of cut down after the fact

02:16:26   With you know, medium age and medium sophistication parts

02:16:30   And then you know, when the 16e came out

02:16:34   That was like the first iphone that was designed from scratch to be

02:16:38   Less expensive

02:16:40   Well 5c would like to raise its hand

02:16:42   The 5c that was barely a change from the base model, you know

02:16:47   5 so this is yeah, wasn't it just a 5 with a plastic case like that was the only it wasn't just a 5 with the plastic case

02:16:53   But the plastic case is the whole phone like they really it's a really was significant redesign for a cheaper phone

02:16:58   Okay, anyway, so

02:16:59   This is

02:17:01   A significant strategy shift

02:17:03   This is a significant product that like they really they didn't they weren't just like

02:17:08   We're gonna make this thing a few hundred bucks cheaper than they are because you know

02:17:13   We were all all of us, you know pundits and people we were like

02:17:16   Well, we want it to be like five or six hundred dollars, but there's no way it'll be that cheap

02:17:20   It'll be seven or eight hundred dollars and no it's six hundred dollars like that's great

02:17:24   And that's you know 500 through the educational discount like that and

02:17:28   Over time i'm sure we'll see these like get you know put on sale here and there 50 bucks off

02:17:33   Oh this weekend costco has it for 100 bucks off like, you know, we're gonna see that kind of stuff

02:17:38   That's amazing and this is going to expand the market share of max and for for people who

02:17:44   For people who would never have considered a mac when it was a thousand eleven hundred dollars

02:17:51   Many more of them will consider it at six hundred dollars or on sale on black friday at five hundred dollars and like

02:17:57   That's gonna be a real thing over time and this right now

02:18:00   This is probably the most expensive it will ever

02:18:04   Start you know over time. I guess inflation will eventually push this price up but like

02:18:08   Right now it's six hundred dollars to start

02:18:10   Over time

02:18:12   We're we'll probably see this see them like push a little further down

02:18:16   This is what we've seen on the low-end ipad as well

02:18:19   Um, like you know, it starts out at a certain price then like it fluctuates here and there with updates

02:18:24   But over time it tends to be pushed a little bit downward

02:18:27   And this is great news for people like us who love the mac

02:18:32   Because this means they're gonna sell a lot more macs especially when you compare this

02:18:36   To what we were saying earlier like an ipad with a keyboard

02:18:40   It's a no-brainer. This is a way better option for most people most of the time

02:18:44   Um, this is what many people will choose

02:18:47   So this is and and the walmart one was kind of like apple kind of like dumping old stock

02:18:53   Quietly through some other brand like they did like they didn't want to touch it like brand wise

02:18:59   They didn't want people to know about it. Really. They just kind of were kind of quietly dumping the stuff over here

02:19:03   Well now apple's owning it

02:19:06   Whatever the sales of the m of the walmart m1 macbook air were which were probably not terrible

02:19:11   Um, but whatever those sales were it's going to be much more now because now it's going to be available through

02:19:18   every

02:19:19   apple retailer

02:19:20   Like all their resellers all of the apples all of apple's own stores and direct channels their website like they're going to be promoting it

02:19:29   Like the the m1 macbook air the apple never promoted apple like wanted that as quiet as possible

02:19:34   This they are loudly promoting so a lot of people are going to see this they're making a splash the colors

02:19:41   are making a splash

02:19:42   Yeah, I might pick a few different ones, but hey, you know what I'm happy

02:19:46   I'm proud of them for doing colors on the mac that you can actually see

02:19:51   so

02:19:52   This is this is great news. I'm very happy to see this

02:19:57   I think this is the start of something very very good for the low end of the mac line

02:20:01   The only other thing i'll say is I wish they would do a mac mini like this like a really really cheap mac mini

02:20:06   That is not quite as mainstream a product like as a lot of jason has been pointing this out

02:20:11   Like the mac mini had previously held the crown for the cheapest mac in terms of absolute dollar numbers

02:20:16   Not if not adjusted for inflation that apple has ever sold

02:20:19   But the mac mini if you buy it, you can't actually use it

02:20:22   You have to buy it doesn't even come with a mouse and a keyboard let alone a screen like it is not a complete system

02:20:27   So even though the mac mini was the champ

02:20:29   I think it was like 4.99 was the lowest it ever was just selfishly like, you know, so many people buy mac minis

02:20:35   for you know roles like

02:20:37   File servers or you know more recently running ai agents or whatever but like there's a lot of people who like if if your mac mini

02:20:44   Ran an iphone chip, it'd be fine

02:20:46   Do you want it to come in colors too?

02:20:48   Yes, why not?

02:20:49   Give me a weird mustard colored mac mini because people put their mac minis where they're not even visible

02:20:54   Right, exactly. I feel like the the neo in apple stores

02:20:58   um, I feel like the impression that it's going to give is

02:21:02   First of all, I believe it will be perceived as the smallest laptop because people don't notice a thickness change of

02:21:08   Hat one and a half millimeters, but they do notice length and width wise and I know we're like, oh, it's a smaller screen 13 inch versus 13.6

02:21:14   But that makes the laptop physically smaller and if you're the one the type of person who's like

02:21:19   I don't want

02:21:20   A laptop to take up a lot of space in my life

02:21:24   Like you're in the market for something like the neo anyway, because you're like i'm not a computer person

02:21:28   I want something small that fits in my backpack. Oh, and they come in fun colors

02:21:31   It'll it will so clearly be the most attractive to you product in the store because you're like

02:21:37   Why would anybody buy these other computers? They're bigger? They're uglier and god

02:21:40   Have you seen the prices doesn't make any sense? Why would anyone buy one?

02:21:43   It's like going into a car lot and seeing a cute pink convertible and that one costs less than all the other cars

02:21:49   All the other cars are giant silver four-door sedans. You're like, why would anyone buy one of those?

02:21:54   Like it's a cute pink convertible and like well, you don't understand the cute pink convertible

02:21:57   Has a crappy engine and like it doesn't have a lot of space in the trunk

02:22:01   It's like what are you talking about? I don't know what any of that stuff means

02:22:04   It's just me and like my backpack and I want to go off to school and this is half the price

02:22:09   of I guess it should be a giant silver suv or something or whatever like

02:22:12   For the people who are in the market for this. It's not like they're like, oh, I guess I have to guess this one

02:22:17   Because it's a cheap it it's the it's gonna be the one they want the most anyway

02:22:21   because it fits their desires the most like that's the thing that you know

02:22:25   Computers don't understand is like can you imagine someone not only not caring about computer specs

02:22:30   But finding them a detriment and not understanding what anyone would ever pay for that like

02:22:34   It's I just want it to be small and cute and do the stuff that I needed to do

02:22:39   And if you sit there and explain to them like the differences that we just went through like here

02:22:42   Here are the uh, the things that are different between the neo and the m4 macbook air

02:22:46   And you went through all those things that their eyes would just glaze over like

02:22:48   Especially if as you said marco if they're coming from the pc

02:22:51   That's like they don't like even though there is a difference with the haptic trackpad and like the ambient light sensor

02:22:56   If they're not used to having a haptic trackpad and an apple quality haptic trackpad and ambient light sensor on their pc laptops

02:23:03   They don't know what they're missing. And so you explaining it to them

02:23:06   Is not going to be convincing now. I do feel like if they eventually

02:23:09   You know, this is the great thing about the neo and the great thing about chromebooks for google

02:23:13   If you get kids using a neo when they're younger

02:23:17   As they become older professionals and maybe like, you know, this is my third apple laptop

02:23:21   Maybe i'll try one of those macbook airs

02:23:24   They're they're gonna notice. Oh, no, this trackpad is actually a little bit nicer and oh having an ambient

02:23:29   They won't know an ambient light sensor is but like oh, this one doesn't blast my eyes out like

02:23:32   Just like getting a bigger screen you will because you become more accustomed to the better thing

02:23:36   But people could spend years just using the neo and be perfectly satisfied with it until and unless

02:23:42   Their needs change or their budgets change. So I think this is going to be an extremely successful product assuming there are no

02:23:49   You know

02:23:51   No gates I guess like trackpad gate where all the trackpads break because apple's not used to making ones that move or like some crap like that

02:23:57   like that's always a wild card out there, but like

02:23:59   you know going down like I think the m1 macbook air walmart has probably been really successful apple

02:24:04   Which sort of verified their like desire to do this like okay

02:24:08   We can actually sell this let's do that's as you said marco. Let's own it

02:24:11   And they are and I think this will be I think so will sell incredibly well and people are asking like who is this who can use this?

02:24:18   I think pretty much

02:24:20   Any student can use this unless as part of your like college major or whatever

02:24:26   You need to run demanding local stuff. I was thinking about this for my kids

02:24:29   My daughter could use this in her school

02:24:31   She hasn't actually picked a major yet, but she's probably going to be

02:24:34   Some major that wouldn't require lots of computing power. My son was a computer science major and as part of his classes

02:24:40   He had to run vms

02:24:41   on his local machine

02:24:43   And with an 8 gig machine if you're running like a linux vm plus running a bunch of python stuff locally

02:24:49   Maybe you're pushing it. Maybe not. Maybe it would be fine

02:24:51   But like him having an m2 macbook air I think with more ram

02:24:55   I think did benefit him in his major

02:24:57   I'm saying he couldn't use it, but i'm saying the m4 m2 macbook air was a better fit for his needs

02:25:01   But that's only because he was a computer science major doing computer science crap on his computer pretty much anyone else

02:25:07   Can you write four years worth of papers on this? Yes. Can you browse the web forever on this? Yes

02:25:11   Can you do all your email like it will do all those things because you remember when you're thinking about this?

02:25:16   Don't think of it as like oh, it's a laptop with the phone chip

02:25:18   just thinking of it as the m1 macbook air which used to be

02:25:21   The best most powerful macbook air available and people bought it and loved it and are still buying it today all these years later

02:25:28   So think of it like that. Don't think of it like oh, how can I ever use a laptop with the phone chip?

02:25:33   like I think you know, and this is this is the beauty of this, you know, when you see those uh cost curves like how much things cost over the past like several decades

02:25:40   It's usually shown to show you the health care line like it's inflation adjusted dollars like

02:25:44   Percentage of your annual annual income like how what is how is the relative price of these things change?

02:25:49   College and health care in our stupid country are going

02:25:52   Straight up like a rocket. It's terrible like not again not an absolute values

02:25:55   but in terms of like how much is the cost relative to how much people make

02:25:58   But the cost of tvs

02:26:00   Has gone through this floor because back when my parents were young buying a tv was like buying a new car

02:26:06   And now it's like whatever like i'll get one i'll impulse buy one at costco

02:26:10   Because you can get a you can get a pretty big flat screen tv for a couple hundred bucks, right?

02:26:15   And computing power is like that and apple has been slow slow and reluctant

02:26:20   to

02:26:21   Leverage that but what's happening slowly, but surely is and we've seen it with smartphones is that

02:26:27   the amount of compute needed to do

02:26:30   Basic web browsing and word processing has just been getting cheaper and cheaper because the demands of basic web browsing and word processing

02:26:38   Although especially web browsing has has increased it has not increased as fast as computing power has increased and I would argue for like

02:26:45   Basic word processing and like even like image editing that is kind of like flatlined and that most people

02:26:51   Never need to do any more sophisticated image editing setting aside ai stuff, which is a whole other thing

02:26:56   Uh, then they can do on on any recent laptop and the same thing we're text editing like you're typing and spell checking

02:27:02   That's not really changing that much despite software being sloppier, right?

02:27:06   So it behooves apple and any company to say

02:27:10   You know as gruber was pointing out they apple used to claim and I think they were correct

02:27:14   They could not make a laptop that met their quality standards at a price point

02:27:18   That was competitive with the lowest end of the pc market

02:27:20   They still can't but the low end of the pc market has gone so far down that there is now room below the macbook air for another computer

02:27:27   and I would say that

02:27:28   You know the the apple of old that was more premium

02:27:32   Might say oh the neo doesn't quite meet our quality standards

02:27:36   But like you could see someone arguing saying yeah, but it's really close right and it's still nicer

02:27:40   With a pc laptop so we should ship it and so there's no one there to say

02:27:44   No, i'm never going to ship a mac without an ambient light sensor and a haptic trackpad now that those things exist

02:27:49   But I mean if whoever that was who was doing that whether it was steve jobs or somebody else

02:27:53   They're no longer at apple current today's apple is is correctly I think

02:27:56   Deciding to take advantage of essentially the dividend of computing power outpacing a lot of common tasks

02:28:02   And go down market with the mac and I think they're going to sell a lot of them. I think it's a good idea

02:28:06   I think even beyond that like, you know the framing of it as like, you know

02:28:10   Can people get away with just a phone chip?

02:28:13   Uh for their computer like

02:28:14   I think the the world has changed a lot in recent years and one of the realities that many many people like us maybe

02:28:22   Maybe fail to see or appreciate fully is that for most people their phone is their main computer or their primary

02:28:28   You know or their best computer or their most used computer and might have more pixels than this computer

02:28:31   Right and and so like what what computing has become these days

02:28:37   Is basically what can people do on their phones and instead of thinking about this as like a cut down

02:28:43   Computer, you know with settling for a phone chip think of it as like

02:28:47   It's a phone with a keyboard trackpad and big screen and that's great and a giant battery

02:28:52   Yeah, exactly and that's and that's going to be wonderful like that because that actually is what most people need and use and then also

02:28:59   with

02:29:00   Things moving so much into like cloud-based ai computing powering all the like where the cutting-edge stuff is right now

02:29:07   We're back in the era of thin clients

02:29:10   We're back in the era of like the local computing power being a lot less

02:29:14   relevant

02:29:16   Than than it used to be or at least maybe like

02:29:18   where like the

02:29:20   Where the exciting things are in computing right now

02:29:23   Are not happening with a lot of local resource processing because because there's no one has a local computer with that much ram like

02:29:30   You know, you can't have like hundreds of gigs of ram or whatever like that just the the compute needed to do the current hot thing

02:29:36   Which is ai that just doesn't exist doesn't exist on a desktop doesn't exist in a laptop

02:29:40   Certainly doesn't like it's just not it's just not feasible

02:29:43   That's you know, there are lots of useful local models and apple does run them and they do useful things

02:29:47   but the bleeding edge is so outside the realm of

02:29:50   of a battery-powered laptop currently that it's all server-side and your point about thin clients is true

02:29:56   Although I did see a thread recently of someone describing how the clawed terminal command line application works and showing the usage the

02:30:04   The um the resource usage of it in theory

02:30:08   There's no reason that a thin client that uses a terminal input that just does a text, you know curses style text display

02:30:13   That should be able to be incredibly thin because it's just like I send text to the server

02:30:17   I get text back if the server's doing all the work

02:30:20   I should be both fast and low resource usage

02:30:23   But the stats they showed were not low because they had found this very convoluted way to do a command line application

02:30:29   No, they're not using the uh, well, maybe they are using the curses library

02:30:33   But they're they're like they're running a react app behind the scene and rendering to a 2d backing buffer and pixel pixel diffing it

02:30:39   and then like sending like to you know a terminal escape sequences to like

02:30:44   Anyway, the point is they were showing like gigs of memory usage for what is essentially a node js app or whatever language it's written in

02:30:50   That just sends http requests to a server and gets responses and spits them because you you've all used it like it's a text

02:30:57   It it it's a terminal application. It is not a gui and yet it uses huge resources

02:31:03   So while

02:31:03   In theory and technically you are correct. I'm not sure current software practices are taking full advantage of the thinness of the client right now

02:31:11   Well, but you know, but what most people's experience with ai is a web browser

02:31:16   Yeah, you know, they're they're going to chatgpt.com and or you know, or using their other, you know, other browser-based coding agents or whatever

02:31:24   Yeah, and or they're like, you know, even even people who will be using coding agents. Oh, by the way, um xcodes coding agent support does not work with 8 gigs of ram

02:31:33   Um as steve trant smith pointed out today

02:31:35   But the command line clod executable or code executable does

02:31:38   Yeah, you can you can run the codex app also like codex has a gui app which i've actually been using

02:31:42   Um, and it's it does pretty much what the xcode thing does, but I think honestly a little bit better

02:31:49   Um, anyway, uh, so I think this is this is great and I

02:31:53   It is not the

02:31:55   12-inch macbook replacement that nerds like us were kind of wishing for

02:32:00   But also that was never really rumored for this release this was always rumored to be a lower cost

02:32:06   13-inch

02:32:07   macbook of some kind and

02:32:09   They delivered

02:32:11   Possibly, you know, we none of us have this thing yet, but it sure looks like they delivered really well on that product brief

02:32:18   And I think it's gonna be good for mac one more thing. Um

02:32:21   So this is also a cost saving thing obviously

02:32:24   Um, because you know everything is about cost saving this thing, but there's there's two options

02:32:28   256 or 512 like those are your only choice and color there's color and 256 or 512 and

02:32:34   Obviously that saves cost because you don't need to make lots of variety of these although apple

02:32:38   Has does have to make the colors and whatever ratios they have to kind of guess about that

02:32:42   but the really important thing about that is

02:32:45   Someone who doesn't care about computer specs now does not have a million decisions to make to buy this

02:32:50   They just pick the color they want

02:32:52   And then there's the cheap one and the expensive one

02:32:54   Even if they don't know the differences between the cheap one and the expensive one if they don't care

02:32:58   They're gonna get the cheap one

02:33:00   Like there's literally one choice besides color and that choice is a hundred dollar difference

02:33:04   And I think people can just pick that base

02:33:06   Like oh if you if they say why is this one hundred dollars more you start talking about and they're like, oh, never mind

02:33:10   I'll just have the other one or they're like, oh, I like the touch thing

02:33:12   I guess I have to get the marks, but that's it

02:33:13   Those are the only options on this computer, which is incredibly smart

02:33:17   Even if apple didn't do it for these reasons and they just did it for cost

02:33:20   It is going to make this computer

02:33:22   The easiest mac to buy because you have to make fewer decisions

02:33:26   Uh, you put together the six hundred dollar family of iphone device or excuse me of apple devices

02:33:32   The iphone 17e is six hundred dollars the ipad air with m4 is six hundred dollars and the macbook

02:33:38   macbook neo is six hundred and that is a tiny phone a medium-sized tablet and a kind of small laptop

02:33:45   all cost the same price and

02:33:47   And that's a testament to apple's, uh, you know

02:33:50   Sort of spreading their products across the entire range of shapes and sizes it costs and also a testament to apple

02:33:57   Finally bringing the mac down

02:33:59   Not to the lowest of the low because the plain ipad is cheaper than the ipad air

02:34:02   Obviously and the iphone 17e I don't think is the cheapest phone because you can still buy like older models for less maybe but like

02:34:08   If you have six hundred dollars to spend you can get a phone an ipad or a mac

02:34:12   And all those products that we've listed here are all new newly released this week and are all pretty good

02:34:19   Thanks to our sponsors this episode

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02:34:27   slash join

02:34:28   One of the many perks of atp membership is overtime our weekly bonus topic every week

02:34:34   We have one additional bonus topic it runs about 15 20 minutes

02:34:39   Uh, sorry john, uh, and it's extra topics extra extra things that we couldn't get to in a regular outline

02:34:45   This week in overtime. We're talking about apple's new video podcast support in apple podcasts

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02:35:06   Thank you so much for listening everybody and we'll talk to you next week

02:35:10   Now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental

02:35:19   Oh, it was accidental

02:35:22   John didn't do any research marco and casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental

02:35:30   It was accidental

02:35:33   And you can find the show notes at atp.fm

02:35:38   And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

02:35:48   So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-

02:35:48   So this was late breaking, right before we recorded.

02:36:16   Uh, I had a post, a post break containment.

02:36:20   Do you know what that phrase means?

02:36:21   Like go viral?

02:36:23   Well, get outside your like normal audience would be, is be how I would take it.

02:36:27   Yeah.

02:36:28   So there's, there's two phrases here.

02:36:30   One is break containment, which is what Casey basically said, which is like, so you're on

02:36:33   social media or blog or whatever.

02:36:36   It's some kind of a platform where you publish things that are visible to the world.

02:36:40   And breaking containment means you publish something, a blog post, a toot on Mastodon,

02:36:46   whatever, and it got passed around outside the normal circle of people who watch your

02:36:52   stuff.

02:36:52   So if you're on social media, like a Mastodon, you have people who follow you and they, they

02:36:56   see the things that you toot.

02:36:57   Breaking containment means enough people retuted it or whatever that now people who have no idea

02:37:03   who you are and do not follow you and don't know anything about you start to see this post

02:37:07   because it was popular enough.

02:37:09   And it doesn't take much.

02:37:09   Like this wasn't a very popular post.

02:37:11   It was like barely more popular than my average post, but it was just popular enough.

02:37:15   Like if you did the graph of this, it's like breaking containment.

02:37:17   Yeah.

02:37:18   You ever see those graphs of like who's connected to who in a social network?

02:37:21   There's like these little clusters, like little cities where it's like, well, here's all these

02:37:24   people and they're mostly connected to each other.

02:37:26   But then there are these bridges to these other circles to like, you know, I don't know what

02:37:30   Mastodon look like, but like the Linux people over here and the Apple people over here and

02:37:34   like whatever, like whatever groups they're divided up into the people in the U S here and

02:37:37   then the Europeans here.

02:37:38   And then like the soccer fans here.

02:37:40   And then like just all these different little circles.

02:37:42   And it only takes like the right few people to like retweet something to cross from one

02:37:47   of those clusters to another, that all of a sudden a bunch of people who don't normally

02:37:52   see your stuff are seeing your stuff.

02:37:54   And then the second phrase is context collapse, which we'll link to the Wikipedia page for the

02:37:58   specifically the definition in social media, which is, um, I gotta look at the Wikipedia,

02:38:03   but my, my definition of it is like, it's kind of like the same as breaking containment

02:38:07   and that you're writing something with the expectation that the audience that's seeing

02:38:14   it, like you, you think, you know, what audience you're speaking to, but when something breaks

02:38:18   containment, it's not actually true.

02:38:20   Um, let's see what we can see from the Wikipedia page.

02:38:24   Um, yeah, their definition is not great.

02:38:28   Anyway, we'll link to it and you can look it up.

02:38:30   But basically what it comes down to is people are seeing your stuff and they don't have the

02:38:35   context that the normal people who follow you do.

02:38:37   For example, they don't know who you are.

02:38:39   They don't know that you're on a podcast where you just talked about the thing that you tooted

02:38:42   about or whatever.

02:38:43   They don't know that you're an Apple fan.

02:38:45   They don't know that you live in the United States.

02:38:47   They don't know your political persuasion or whatever.

02:38:49   All they see is the thing that you wrote that arrives into their world.

02:38:55   And so I experienced both of these just before we came to the show and it was for this toot

02:39:01   that I did.

02:39:01   I mean, I, I mostly spent my time in Mastodon, but I do occasionally also post things to Blue

02:39:07   Sky just to see what the difference is.

02:39:08   And often I usually have to edit it because Blue Sky's limit is slower than my Mastodon

02:39:12   server.

02:39:12   So I have to squish things down a little bit, but like the post was what I just said in the

02:39:18   program.

02:39:18   That was, uh, the A18 Pro and the MacBook Neo is 19% faster than the M2 Ultra and the Mac

02:39:22   Pro and single core performance.

02:39:24   A MacBook Neo is 600 bucks.

02:39:26   Mac Pro, which is still for sale is $7,000.

02:39:28   Um, anyone who listens to the show or knows me gets that toot, which is like, isn't it

02:39:35   absurd that they're still selling the Mac Pro with an M2 Ultra in it, but they're still selling

02:39:41   it for $7,000 when the MacBook Neo, the super duper low cost, cheapest Mac, blah, blah, blah,

02:39:48   is 19% faster in single core than the Mac Pro.

02:39:53   This is a, this is a post of me slamming them.

02:39:56   What I'm trying to do is shame Apple into canceling the Mac Pro because it's embarrassing at this

02:39:59   point.

02:39:59   Like it does.

02:40:00   Oh, is that what you want?

02:40:01   Yes.

02:40:02   Stop.

02:40:02   Like they need to poop or get off the pot as they say, like, are we doing this or are

02:40:09   we not?

02:40:09   Because the law, it's like, it's like when the trash can was still there.

02:40:12   It's like, I do want a new Mac Pro, but at a certain point it's just embarrassing.

02:40:15   We got to stop selling the trash can for the same price they've always sold it for.

02:40:19   And then Apple's like, nope, we're going to, we're going to sell it to the day it gets replaced

02:40:22   or something else happens.

02:40:23   So anyway, you know, my audience saw this and was like, Oh, John complaining about the Mac

02:40:29   Pro again.

02:40:30   It is kind of embarrassing that it's still got the M2 Ultra and it is, you know, I'm usually

02:40:34   making fun of my Intel Mac Pro, which is, you know, horrendously slow by modern standards,

02:40:38   but this is the current Mac Pro that you can buy at apple.com today.

02:40:43   They're still selling it with a straight face and the MacBook Neo is statistically significantly

02:40:49   faster in single core.

02:40:50   Now, as I said, in the specs of the show, it is smaller, slower in multi-core than the M2

02:40:54   Ultra GPU, which is way slower than the M2 Ultra.

02:40:57   The M2 Ultra has way more memory bandwidth.

02:40:59   The M2 Mac Pro can be filled with way more RAM, yada, yada, yada.

02:41:02   But any, like, I don't have to explain this to quote unquote my audience on Mastodon because

02:41:07   they all know my attitude towards the Mac Pro.

02:41:09   They all know what the point of this post was.

02:41:12   They all know it's meant in jestiles and it's funny, it's absurd to think about these type

02:41:15   of things.

02:41:16   No one who follows me, you know, they're aware of the situation with the Mac Pro and my opinion

02:41:23   on it.

02:41:23   And if to the extent that they care about the Mac Pro at all, it's probably only as a proxy

02:41:27   through me because they never think about it otherwise, because why would they?

02:41:31   So that's the two.

02:41:31   But when something breaks containment and has context collapse, people start responding

02:41:37   to it in ways that you will find puzzling.

02:41:39   First one that I found puzzling that I, for a while, I was like, did I make a mistake or

02:41:44   something?

02:41:45   I've got a couple of people replying, telling me, oh, you got the price wrong.

02:41:51   It's $1,700.

02:41:51   What?

02:41:53   What?

02:41:54   And like the first time someone did it, I'm like, I just sent them the link to the

02:41:57   MacBook Neopay.

02:41:57   It was like the product just came out.

02:41:59   They don't, you know, you're not, if you're not like a Mac person, you don't know that

02:42:02   the MacBook Neo came out today.

02:42:03   Why would you?

02:42:03   Right.

02:42:04   But like, I did say MacBook Neo.

02:42:06   I'm like, did I spell it incorrectly?

02:42:07   No, I spelled it correctly in the post.

02:42:09   It's in there two times.

02:42:10   But like, if you read fast, you see MacBook three letter word.

02:42:14   You think MacBook Pro.

02:42:17   So then it happened again.

02:42:19   And someone said, uh, the MacBook Pro is $1,700, dude.

02:42:21   Look, you got the price totally wrong.

02:42:24   I don't know what you're talking about.

02:42:25   Like MacBook Neo.

02:42:27   Do people just think that MacBook Neo was like, you just saying like the new MacBook?

02:42:30   Yeah.

02:42:31   I don't, I don't know.

02:42:32   Like, is it just, you know, it's an anagram of MacBook one, but it looks a lot like PRO.

02:42:36   It's got a tall letter and a two long case letter.

02:42:39   So there's that.

02:42:40   So then you're like, does that say you can tell something is broken containment?

02:42:43   Could it be like a translation thing?

02:42:44   Like if, like if something auto translated it as the new MacBook?

02:42:47   These were also English speakers as far as, but like that's breaking containment.

02:42:51   Like people who follow me probably knew the MacBook Neo came out today.

02:42:54   People who have no idea who I am or anything about Apple or anything don't have no idea what

02:42:59   the MacBook Neo came out an hour ago.

02:43:00   How would they know?

02:43:01   Right.

02:43:01   Second thing is context collapse where a bunch of people were real angry thinking that what

02:43:07   I was saying is you should buy a MacBook Neo instead of a Mac pro because it's more powerful.

02:43:11   Like as if this post was like bragging about how powerful the MacBook Neo is.

02:43:17   It's the opposite.

02:43:18   I'm using the MacBook Neo to show how pathetic the Mac pro is that.

02:43:23   I mean, again, you both get this.

02:43:25   Like that's the point of the post is it's the MacBook pro is embarrassing.

02:43:28   What I'm not saying is the MacBook Neo just came out and it's more powerful than the Apple's

02:43:33   most powerful computer.

02:43:34   Hey, Apple's most powerful computer is not the Mac pro and be no way in hell am I saying

02:43:39   that but context collapses.

02:43:40   You need a lot of context to take this post in the way that I meant it.

02:43:44   You need to know my deal that I'm on an Apple podcast.

02:43:47   You need to know my Mac pro enthusiasm, which you would never guess because who is a Mac pro

02:43:51   enthusiast, right?

02:43:52   You need to know so much about me before you can interpret this to the right way.

02:43:57   And lots of people were complaining about both of these things, both breaking containment,

02:44:02   which is a little bit more modern phrasing context collapse in the old in the good old

02:44:05   bad old days of Twitter.

02:44:07   Because it was a problem for people who actually had popular posts.

02:44:09   Like mine was not popular.

02:44:10   Got like, you know, you know, what is it?

02:44:12   Like, I don't know, a hundred retuits, but the people will get like a hundred thousand retuits.

02:44:17   And that basically destroy it.

02:44:19   We used to destroy Twitter for you because once people who have no idea who you are seeing it

02:44:24   and there's thousands of them, everyone's going to be mad about everything.

02:44:27   So in this case, like the number of people who were so mad about this, first of all, people

02:44:31   would not believe that it's 19% faster than single core, but then they would say like,

02:44:34   well, it's certainly, you know, got to be slower in multi-core.

02:44:38   I made the mistake of responding to one person and saying that it is actually similar to the

02:44:41   M1 in multi-core and they got super angry about that too.

02:44:44   It's like, whatever, like, but that's not the, I'm not, you know, that's not the point

02:44:48   of the post.

02:44:48   So anyway, I thought this was a good short instructive after show to just let people, you

02:44:53   know, people who are not familiar with this phenomenon, which is probably young people.

02:44:56   Like this is a thing that can happen to anybody.

02:44:59   If something you write online or post online, some Instagram thing or whatever breaks containment

02:45:05   out of your little circle, you'll know it because you'll start to get replies from people that

02:45:10   are different than what you've been seeing.

02:45:11   Not necessarily worse or more hostile, but just like that, that seem confusing to you because

02:45:16   they evidence a misunderstanding of your deal.

02:45:18   And it's because they don't know what your deal is because they don't have any context.

02:45:21   Um, yeah.

02:45:23   And so that that's this thing that still happens.

02:45:26   I'm, I'm so not used to it happening to me.

02:45:27   Like, this is why I talk about the cross posting to Mastodon and Bluestide.

02:45:30   The reason I do that is I try to gauge, like, where do I get, where do I get more like people

02:45:36   actually responding to my stuff?

02:45:37   Like, where is my audience?

02:45:40   Actually, I prefer Mastodon.

02:45:41   I primarily use Mastodon.

02:45:43   It's the horse I'm backing.

02:45:45   I like it the best.

02:45:46   I like the clients the best.

02:45:47   I like everything about it, but I'm always like, well, Blue Sky is like 10 bazillion times bigger

02:45:51   and lots of people seem to like it over there and I do read stuff over there.

02:45:54   What is it like if I post over there?

02:45:56   And I can tell you from my tiny weird audience, Mastodon is still where my people are.

02:46:00   I get the most engagement from Mastodon.

02:46:01   I get the most good info from Mastodon.

02:46:03   I get the most replies.

02:46:04   People understand my deal on Mastodon.

02:46:06   That's where my people are.

02:46:07   But Mastodon is a tiny little backwater compared to the size of Blue Sky or Threads or obviously

02:46:12   X, which I'm not going near.

02:46:13   But yeah, I do post it over there just just just to check and just to see and just to

02:46:18   see if people are going to engage with things and what kind of things are, you know, work

02:46:22   in different places.

02:46:22   But yeah, breaking containment, it's still it's still a danger.

02:46:27   It's still a thing that can happen.

02:46:28   And it's still for for me, usually not particularly fun, but it's also not particularly dangerous.

02:46:33   It would have been much worse for me if I was anyone other than, you know, an old white

02:46:37   dude in tech because breaking container for me is just people making snarky replies versus

02:46:41   people like coming to my house to kill me or whatever.

02:46:44   So thank goodness for that.

02:46:46   But yeah, that was my afternoon.

02:46:48   And it was a reminder that Internet going to Internet.