ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► So I don't want to spoil the uh main chunk of this episode, but

00:00:03 ◼   ► John, you're welcome.

00:00:04 ◼   ► Four seconds is up.

00:00:06 ◼   ► I said I had a four-second pre-show uh before we started recording.

00:00:11 ◼   ► Brutal.

00:00:11 ◼   ► I knew I knew better than to say that to John Syracuse, but here

00:00:14 ◼   ► we are.

00:00:14 ◼   ► Um you're welcome, uh not only for taking longer than four seconds, but also

00:00:19 ◼   ► uh yesterday I wore my Mac Pro Believe shirt, which I have had since

00:00:23 ◼   ► it was new, but have only worn a handful of times.

00:00:26 ◼   ► You didn't wear it enough.

00:00:27 ◼   ► Apparently not enough.

00:00:29 ◼   ► Your fault.

00:00:30 ◼   ► But see, here's the thing.

00:00:31 ◼   ► Here it is.

00:00:31 ◼   ► I think I'm giving you the gift of new computers, and in reality, I'm

00:00:34 ◼   ► I'm getting flack because I didn't give you the gift of a new Mac

00:00:37 ◼   ► Pro.

00:00:37 ◼   ► I see how it is.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Well, t-shirts can last a long time if they're lightly worn, so you know

00:00:41 ◼   ► it could rise again in a decade or something.

00:00:44 ◼   ► Marco, what do you have going on?

00:00:46 ◼   ► I have um a much more victorious situation, and and nobody will care about

00:00:51 ◼   ► this unless it on the off chance you out there, somebody out there, might

00:00:56 ◼   ► care about this.

00:00:57 ◼   ► Wait, wasn't that the uh John Syracuse biography?

00:01:00 ◼   ► Nobody cares about this but me, but I care about it a lot or

00:01:02 ◼   ► something like that.

00:01:03 ◼   ► Kind of sort of close.

00:01:04 ◼   ► I forget anyway.

00:01:05 ◼   ► I mean what can top installing a ceiling fan though?

00:01:07 ◼   ► So let's see.

00:01:08 ◼   ► Same room, same category of general home improvements and and life improvements.

00:01:14 ◼   ► Okay.

00:01:15 ◼   ► I have in my office here, I have casement windows.

00:01:18 ◼   ► Generally, I cannot say I enjoy casement windows.

00:01:22 ◼   ► Now remind me, I I've heard this term, but what does that mean?

00:01:24 ◼   ► It's the kind that rather than being able to open and close up and

00:01:27 ◼   ► down, they have a little crank and they swing out.

00:01:29 ◼   ► Ah, yes.

00:01:30 ◼   ► They open like a book.

00:01:30 ◼   ► Yep, yep, yep.

00:01:31 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:01:32 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:01:32 ◼   ► Um, and there's I know people like these, I don't like these.

00:01:36 ◼   ► Um, but some of the many reasons that casement windows are, you know, a

00:01:40 ◼   ► weird trade-off is like, how do you attach a screen to a casement window?

00:01:45 ◼   ► And they all have these weird little like clips and levers and crap, and

00:01:49 ◼   ► I've never found one that was attached in a good way.

00:01:52 ◼   ► The ones here have these little metal clips that hold them on.

00:01:57 ◼   ► We have to, as part of the warranty for the windows, we have to

00:02:00 ◼   ► get them cleaned every so often, and we have to get them serviced every

00:01:59 ◼   ► so often.

00:02:04 ◼   ► And these screens are taken off multiple times per year for w one of

00:02:09 ◼   ► those two tasks.

00:02:10 ◼   ► The problem is, these little tiny stupid metal clips, first of all, good luck

00:02:16 ◼   ► ever putting one, ever putting a screen back yourself.

00:02:18 ◼   ► And even the window service people don't really do a very good job of

00:02:22 ◼   ► it.

00:02:23 ◼   ► Um secondly, these little clips get lost all the time because they fall out

00:02:28 ◼   ► whenever you try to pop the screen, you know, back in.

00:02:31 ◼   ► Like if you like jostle the clip a little bit, it'll fall off the

00:02:33 ◼   ► window and fall to its doom somewhere and get buried in sand.

00:02:36 ◼   ► And so you never find them.

00:02:37 ◼   ► And every single time I get I have the window servers, I'm like, please,

00:02:39 ◼   ► can you bring like 50 of these?

00:02:41 ◼   ► I'll buy them.

00:02:42 ◼   ► Just please.

00:02:43 ◼   ► We there's never enough clips to hold the screens on, and as a result,

00:02:46 ◼   ► the screens in my office are usually like crooked, or there's like a small

00:02:50 ◼   ► gap somewhere in like between like the screen ridge and the window, such that

00:02:55 ◼   ► mosquitoes can come in.

00:02:56 ◼   ► So I'm just like, okay, this please, for the love of God, I just

00:02:59 ◼   ► need these to be good and to be effective and to be able to

00:03:02 ◼   ► hold my screens against my windows.

00:03:05 ◼   ► I decided to stop waiting.

00:03:07 ◼   ► Stop waiting for the window guys to bring more.

00:03:09 ◼   ► They never do, or they'll bring one, even though I'll say, like, please bring

00:03:12 ◼   ► 50.

00:03:13 ◼   ► I'll pay for them.

00:03:14 ◼   ► Like, they're just little metal clips.

00:03:15 ◼   ► These are the most scarce items in my house.

00:03:20 ◼   ► I can now 3D print them.

00:03:23 ◼   ► I took it upon myself a few days ago to replicate the shape of

00:03:27 ◼   ► one of these clips using some uh some semi-rigid TPU, the the bamboo TPU

00:03:33 ◼   ► for AMS, so it is very easy to print.

00:03:35 ◼   ► It is a little bit rigid, but it's a little bit flexible and very

00:03:37 ◼   ► strong.

00:03:38 ◼   ► And so that means I can now have as many of these as I

00:03:42 ◼   ► want.

00:03:42 ◼   ► I printed 30 of them earlier tonight, and my screens are being held up

00:03:44 ◼   ► perfectly, and I have tons of them, and they're a little bit flexible, so

00:03:50 ◼   ► that when I'm attaching the screens, I don't cut my fingers, and they're actually

00:03:54 ◼   ► it's actually like a reasonably pleasant experience.

00:03:57 ◼   ► And instead of having three of them on one window, because I have to

00:04:00 ◼   ► conserve them.

00:04:00 ◼   ► I have eight of them on this one.

00:04:02 ◼   ► It's amazing.

00:04:04 ◼   ► Again, people wonder like, how do I what do I use my 3D printer

00:04:07 ◼   ► for?

00:04:07 ◼   ► It's little crap like this.

00:04:09 ◼   ► Like we have uh we have a gate, and sometimes the wind will blow

00:04:13 ◼   ► the sliding piece so that it kind of blows it half open, and then

00:04:16 ◼   ► deer can get can get in and eat all of our plants.

00:04:19 ◼   ► Um and so I made a little clip out of again a 3D little

00:04:24 ◼   ► custom 3D printed thing, and I just made a little clip that holds the

00:04:28 ◼   ► two pieces of the gate together.

00:04:30 ◼   ► So the wind does not blow them open.

00:04:32 ◼   ► That's the kind of thing I love having little solutions to little problems like

00:04:37 ◼   ► this.

00:04:37 ◼   ► It is so incredibly satisfying.

00:04:39 ◼   ► So that that's my victory lap.

00:04:40 ◼   ► I know John has a bit of a different victory lap, maybe coming up

00:04:43 ◼   ► later, but well, if you can call it victory.

00:04:45 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

00:04:46 ◼   ► Maybe it might be a complex emotion, but um, but at least this for

00:04:52 ◼   ► almost no money, I solved a very big problem.

00:04:55 ◼   ► That's incredible.

00:04:56 ◼   ► That's what that's super cool.

00:04:57 ◼   ► Uh I'm a little surprised that plastic does the trick.

00:05:01 ◼   ► Like for some reason I feel like this should be metal, but I'm not

00:05:03 ◼   ► trying to argue with you.

00:05:04 ◼   ► If it works, it works.

00:05:05 ◼   ► So that's that's really great.

00:05:07 ◼   ► So it's and there's there's obviously like different um forgive me, I'm gonna get

00:05:10 ◼   ► briefly very nerdy about 3D printing, but I swear it's gonna be brief.

00:05:13 ◼   ► Is it gonna be four seconds?

00:05:15 ◼   ► No.

00:05:15 ◼   ► Long enough.

00:05:16 ◼   ► There's a lot of different properties that you can optimize for with both the

00:05:18 ◼   ► material selection and the design of a print.

00:05:21 ◼   ► So like even just things like what direction on the plate that you print,

00:05:25 ◼   ► like these prints standing up because the layer adhesion between layers is usually the

00:05:29 ◼   ► weakest bond in a 3D printed part.

00:05:32 ◼   ► And and also I'm by using a TPU material, I also have very strong

00:05:37 ◼   ► layer adhesion.

00:05:38 ◼   ► And by it being flexible, it makes it actually pretty difficult to, you know,

00:05:42 ◼   ► destroy or crack or you know otherwise break it.

00:05:45 ◼   ► I will say for those of you out there who who were 3D printing

00:05:48 ◼   ► people, don't sleep on the uh the bamboo TPU for AMS filament.

00:05:52 ◼   ► If you go into it expecting it to be very, very flexible, like TPU,

00:05:56 ◼   ► you're gonna be disappointed, but it's incredibly easy to work with.

00:05:59 ◼   ► It is, as the name suggests, compatible with the AMS, so it's very easy.

00:06:02 ◼   ► And it is surprisingly useful.

00:06:05 ◼   ► I it is one of my most used filaments because if something can be

00:06:08 ◼   ► a little bit flexible, you can make it almost indestructible if you make it

00:06:12 ◼   ► out of this stuff.

00:06:13 ◼   ► And to answer your question, Casey, like whether it can be metal or not,

00:06:15 ◼   ► the only the advantage of the metal clips is that they can be very,

00:06:18 ◼   ► very thin.

00:06:20 ◼   ► And there's part of the clip that like like the kind of the part

00:06:23 ◼   ► that goes like vertically up and down between like in the middle of it,

00:06:27 ◼   ► that has to be very, very thin because the thicker that is, I'd be

00:06:31 ◼   ► creating a gap between the screen and the window frame.

00:06:33 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:06:34 ◼   ► So with metal, that can be very, very thin.

00:06:36 ◼   ► I c this is as thin as I can make it with it with

00:06:38 ◼   ► a printer like like the one I have, but uh that is the trade-off.

00:06:41 ◼   ► But it so so far, mosquitoes cannot get through that gap, so I'm very

00:06:44 ◼   ► happy still.

00:06:46 ◼   ► You know what else is exciting is a new HP member special, which we

00:06:50 ◼   ► have.

00:06:50 ◼   ► We have your August member special.

00:06:52 ◼   ► This is ATP movie club Nausica in the of the Valley of the Wind.

00:06:57 ◼   ► This is a Miyazaki film.

00:06:58 ◼   ► Uh John, why don't you tell us a little more about this, please?

00:07:01 ◼   ► This is the I think the third one we've done in uh our series

00:07:05 ◼   ► on Miyazaki introducing both of you to it and seeing what your reactions are.

00:07:09 ◼   ► Uh uh tune in to find out how it went and what the future

00:07:13 ◼   ► holds for Studio Ghibli slash Miyazaki Club on ATP Movie Club.

00:07:17 ◼   ► We haven't the last one we did was a while ago, so um we

00:07:20 ◼   ► don't do them very often, but uh yeah, we might come back to this

00:07:24 ◼   ► well uh in the future.

00:07:25 ◼   ► So and if you like these kind of movies and you want to hear

00:07:27 ◼   ► uh two newbies watch it for the first time along with uh an old

00:07:31 ◼   ► grizzled veteran, uh that's me.

00:07:33 ◼   ► Uh tune in and definitely watch the movie.

00:07:36 ◼   ► Like all these things, obviously we talk about the whole movie and everything that

00:07:38 ◼   ► happens in it.

00:07:39 ◼   ► So the idea is that you should watch the movie before listening to the

00:07:42 ◼   ► episode.

00:07:42 ◼   ► And you may think I'm never gonna listen to what uh watch this movie,

00:07:45 ◼   ► but hopefully we do some kind of job of making you at least interested

00:07:48 ◼   ► in the movie.

00:07:49 ◼   ► So watch it ahead of time.

00:07:50 ◼   ► Uh it's a good one, I think.

00:07:52 ◼   ► Yep, you should check it out.

00:07:54 ◼   ► Uh Marco, if one is not a member, but this sounds deeply appealing.

00:07:57 ◼   ► What should one do in order to become a member and get access to

00:07:59 ◼   ► this and all of our other member specials?

00:08:01 ◼   ► Just go to atp.fm slash join today, right now it's atp.fm slash join.

00:08:06 ◼   ► ATP.fm slash join.

00:08:08 ◼   ► Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.

00:08:10 ◼   ► So many of our sponsors want us to repeat the call to action three

00:08:13 ◼   ► times.

00:08:13 ◼   ► And normally one of them is spelled out in this case, well, I guess

00:08:16 ◼   ► slash J-O-I-N.

00:08:17 ◼   ► I can say if I could it's already it's already spelled out otherwise.

00:08:20 ◼   ► Yeah, and uh the and yeah, if you want to hear the back catalog,

00:08:23 ◼   ► like obviously we have tons of member specials and we've done a bunch of

00:08:26 ◼   ► movies, and you can listen to the other movies as well if you want

00:08:28 ◼   ► to get caught up on our uh you know Miyazaki Studio Ghibli run through.

00:08:33 ◼   ► Yeah, we don't have a count of all the member specials on slash specials,

00:08:36 ◼   ► do we?

00:08:37 ◼   ► We have the list of all of them.

00:08:38 ◼   ► No, we don't.

00:08:39 ◼   ► I think it's like 35, 40 now.

00:08:41 ◼   ► I don't know, something like that.

00:08:42 ◼   ► Yeah, I'll have to uh file a ticket with the uh website administrator, the

00:08:45 ◼   ► webmaster, if you will.

00:08:46 ◼   ► Maybe we can burn a bunch of AI tokens somewhere trying to count up

00:08:49 ◼   ► rows on a page.

00:08:52 ◼   ► All right, let's do some follow-up.

00:08:53 ◼   ► And we have some more macOS 27 UI tweaks.

00:08:57 ◼   ► And starting starting with Mario Guzman, who writes Golden Gate got redesigned window control

00:09:02 ◼   ► buttons in beta six.

00:09:03 ◼   ► They sort of grow and shrink when you click.

00:09:05 ◼   ► And uh Mario included a video.

00:09:07 ◼   ► John, tell me more about this, please.

00:09:09 ◼   ► So, first of all, uh Golden Gate's coming out soon, as we'll soon find

00:09:14 ◼   ► out in this episode.

00:09:14 ◼   ► But like, you know, fall is approaching.

00:09:16 ◼   ► This is really late to be changing the window widgets, don't you think?

00:09:20 ◼   ► Like this is the type of thing that like when they first introduced the

00:09:24 ◼   ► OS, like these are the window widgets, and maybe they tweak them slightly, but

00:09:27 ◼   ► usually not at all.

00:09:29 ◼   ► Really late for UI change.

00:09:30 ◼   ► Not that I'm complaining, like it's cool and fun or whatever.

00:09:32 ◼   ► But anyway, the window widgets look more glassy uh than they did.

00:09:37 ◼   ► They used to be kind of just the their regular, you know, uh red,

00:09:41 ◼   ► yellow, and green colors, and now they look like little red, yellow, and green

00:09:44 ◼   ► gems.

00:09:45 ◼   ► Um there was also a video posted of someone like presumably I can't see

00:09:50 ◼   ► I don't think you can see the cursor in it, but clicking on them

00:09:53 ◼   ► and then dragging and they stretch out a little bit like they're flexible, like

00:09:56 ◼   ► they become ovals instead of circles, and then they spring back.

00:09:59 ◼   ► I haven't been able to do that.

00:10:01 ◼   ► Uh well, we'll link to the video in the notes and you can see

00:10:04 ◼   ► what it's supposed to look like.

00:10:04 ◼   ► But I even tried it on touch, even went to macOS 27, beta six.

00:10:08 ◼   ► I connected my iPad through sidecar because that's all like the app get touch

00:10:12 ◼   ► controls and everything are exposed if you use a uh that's that's how they

00:10:15 ◼   ► presented at WWDC.

00:10:16 ◼   ► Hey, support sidecar, not touch max.

00:10:19 ◼   ► Anyway, um, I tried it with my finger, it didn't do it.

00:10:21 ◼   ► So I'm not sure where the dealers of that video, but you can watch

00:10:24 ◼   ► it and see.

00:10:25 ◼   ► Maybe in a future beta, they'll start getting all squishy and uh it'll be

00:10:29 ◼   ► the equivalent of what is it, Casey?

00:10:31 ◼   ► The uh the fried egg headlights on the uh what which the model is

00:10:35 ◼   ► that the 996 that had the fried egg headlights?

00:10:37 ◼   ► Oh god, it's broken.

00:10:39 ◼   ► Broken egg headlights for all the car people are yelling at us.

00:10:41 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

00:10:42 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:10:42 ◼   ► I'm so triggered by this because the group chat that I've brought up many

00:10:44 ◼   ► times on the show, I and I think I talked about this when I

00:10:47 ◼   ► was in my car search.

00:10:44 ◼   ► All they do is send 911s back and forth to each other.

00:10:52 ◼   ► And one of the two people in the group, or one of the two

00:10:54 ◼   ► other people in group chat hates the fried egg headlights.

00:10:58 ◼   ► I understand what you're saying.

00:10:59 ◼   ► I don't know what generation it was, and I don't care.

00:11:02 ◼   ► I'm not a 9-11 headline.

00:11:04 ◼   ► I think I got it right.

00:11:04 ◼   ► 996.

00:11:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:11:05 ◼   ► There you go.

00:11:06 ◼   ► Anyway, the if you want window widgets that used to be circular but become

00:11:10 ◼   ► not circular when you poke at them with something, maybe that'll come in a

00:11:14 ◼   ► future beta.

00:11:15 ◼   ► But yeah, real real late for changes in Mac OS look and feel, but

00:11:18 ◼   ► they're tweaking it down to the last minute.

00:11:20 ◼   ► And honestly, I think this is I mean, so far it seems like they're

00:11:24 ◼   ► not really breaking it by doing that.

00:11:26 ◼   ► Uh no, I mean they're just cosmetic changes, really.

00:11:28 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think like this to me is this bodes very well, I

00:11:33 ◼   ► think, for the future of Apple's design, their software design, because you know, I

00:11:37 ◼   ► I think obviously, you know, Steve LeMay's uh ascent to power here, uh and

00:11:42 ◼   ► whether it's related to John Turnus's own ascent to power, maybe who knows.

00:11:46 ◼   ► Um, this is all like relatively recent, and so some of these changes I

00:11:51 ◼   ► think are kind of coming in hot, but they're good.

00:11:53 ◼   ► Like so far, all the changes they've made in Golden Gate, uh to Liquid

00:11:56 ◼   ► Glass and to the system design, they've all been for the better.

00:11:59 ◼   ► I can't think of a single change they've made that's been that's been worse.

00:12:01 ◼   ► Um, the little Siri blob that's next to everything or the text all the

00:12:05 ◼   ► time.

00:12:06 ◼   ► Although I just saw someone post how to get rid of that, so maybe

00:12:08 ◼   ► that'll be next week's episode if I try it and it works.

00:12:10 ◼   ► Yeah, those little like Siri like flaps that are next to all the text

00:12:13 ◼   ► areas, that has to go.

00:12:15 ◼   ► Like those are awful.

00:12:16 ◼   ► And to have no option to turn them off.

00:12:19 ◼   ► No, there is.

00:12:20 ◼   ► That's what I was saying.

00:12:21 ◼   ► I think there's uh an option to turn them off.

00:12:22 ◼   ► I just uh system-wide?

00:12:24 ◼   ► Like Yeah, yeah.

00:12:25 ◼   ► Uh someone just posted about it.

00:12:26 ◼   ► Um I haven't had a chance to test it yet because it was literally

00:12:29 ◼   ► like minutes before we sat down.

00:12:30 ◼   ► But apparently it's screen time content and privacy settings and turn off Siri writing

00:12:34 ◼   ► assistance.

00:12:34 ◼   ► And that removes them, supposedly.

00:12:29 ◼   ► I haven't tried it yet.

00:12:36 ◼   ► I'll confirm for next week.

00:12:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:12:39 ◼   ► Anyway, so uh I I think it's I think it bodes well because these

00:12:43 ◼   ► changes are all like not only are they good, but I think they show

00:12:49 ◼   ► more more of a return to what we love about Apple and the design

00:12:53 ◼   ► of what used to be called OS 10.

00:12:55 ◼   ► Like it is getting a little bit more aqua y, but like a modern

00:12:59 ◼   ► version of Aqua.

00:13:00 ◼   ► You know, last year when when 26 series OS came out and Liquid Glass

00:13:04 ◼   ► was debuted and it was very controversial because it was some ways good and

00:13:07 ◼   ► some ways bad.

00:13:08 ◼   ► There was a lot of it that we liked.

00:13:10 ◼   ► There were and a lot of it was like, oh wow, this is nice

00:13:12 ◼   ► to have a modern look.

00:13:13 ◼   ► We just didn't like a lot of the implementation details of it.

00:13:16 ◼   ► And granted, some of the foundations of it, I think needed to be rethought

00:13:21 ◼   ► or thrown away, but there was good stuff there.

00:13:23 ◼   ► And I think what we're seeing in the 27 generation now is the design

00:13:28 ◼   ► team not getting rid of all the problems of 26's design, but of actually

00:13:34 ◼   ► giving us like here's the best of Liquid Glass.

00:13:37 ◼   ► Here's here's like the promise of it being better realized.

00:13:41 ◼   ► It still is modern, it still is glassy, it still has some of some

00:13:45 ◼   ► of the good things that Liquid Glass brought, but they're sending off a lot

00:13:49 ◼   ► of the rough edges, they're getting rid of a lot of the worst of

00:13:51 ◼   ► it and evolving it in a direction that not only is more Mac like

00:13:57 ◼   ► in a way, but is also just better overall and has a lot fewer

00:14:01 ◼   ► of those major downsides.

00:14:03 ◼   ► Moving right along with more UI stuff, macOS 27 also has the new preview

00:14:07 ◼   ► icon in beta six.

00:14:08 ◼   ► Yeah, and this preview icon, I'm not a big fan of it, but it

00:14:11 ◼   ► is better than the one that came before it.

00:14:13 ◼   ► So yeah, moving in the right direction.

00:14:14 ◼   ► All right.

00:14:16 ◼   ► Then uh last episode, I think it was, we were talking about how uh

00:14:20 ◼   ► LLMs are not deterministic, and you had made it a kind of off-handed comment,

00:14:25 ◼   ► if I recall correctly, that even a temperature zero, they're not entirely deterministic.

00:14:28 ◼   ► Well, no, I I gave a temperature zero example of them being deterministic and

00:14:31 ◼   ► how that's not pleasing.

00:14:32 ◼   ► We talked we're talking about the the uh AI watermarking thing, like anthropics AI

00:14:36 ◼   ► watermarkings thing.

00:14:37 ◼   ► That was the topic.

00:14:38 ◼   ► And uh yeah, we have discussed uh the role of temperature and LLMs in

00:14:42 ◼   ► past episodes, including temperature zero, but we have some more feedback on that now,

00:14:46 ◼   ► which is just uh basically reiterating something we discussed before, but we didn't mention

00:14:49 ◼   ► it last week.

00:14:50 ◼   ► Right.

00:14:51 ◼   ► So uh when it comes to setting the temperature to zero, you know, things

00:14:54 ◼   ► are still non-deterministic.

00:14:56 ◼   ► Uh, you need to consider that floating point is all over these things, and

00:14:59 ◼   ► floating point is weird.

00:15:01 ◼   ► Uh and there's also a really good uh blog post that John pointed us

00:15:05 ◼   ► to, uh, John Syracuse pointed us to by Horace He, hey, uh who uh

00:15:09 ◼   ► at thinking machines.ai, who writes one common hypothesis is that some combination of floating

00:15:14 ◼   ► point non-associativity and concurrent execution leads to non-determinism based on which concurrent core finishes

00:15:21 ◼   ► first.

00:15:21 ◼   ► While this hypothesis is not exactly wrong, it doesn't reveal the full picture, and

00:15:25 ◼   ► there's a very long blog post that follows that.

00:15:27 ◼   ► That's very good.

00:15:28 ◼   ► Uh additionally, you can check out the IEEE standard for floating point arithmetic, which

00:15:32 ◼   ► is IEEE 754, which we'll link in the show notes.

00:15:34 ◼   ► That talks about why floating point is weird.

00:15:37 ◼   ► Yeah, we got this feedback after maybe the first time we talked about LLMs,

00:15:41 ◼   ► and someone said, hey, even at temperature zero, they're not deterministic because of weird

00:15:44 ◼   ► floating point errors in the hardware.

00:15:45 ◼   ► And you're like, oh, yeah, that totally makes sense because I mean a not

00:15:48 ◼   ► a floating point arithmetic being non-associative when the mathematical operation is theoretically associative is

00:15:54 ◼   ► a problem.

00:15:54 ◼   ► Floating point in general is really weird.

00:15:56 ◼   ► The more you know about how floating point works on computers, the more you

00:15:59 ◼   ► think how does anything ever work?

00:16:01 ◼   ► It's just you know, there are finite resources.

00:15:59 ◼   ► We have to come up with a way to represent floating point numbers that

00:16:06 ◼   ► can span a huge range, and there's just it's kind of like hashing, like

00:16:10 ◼   ► that you can't get blood from a stone.

00:16:12 ◼   ► Like you want to uh hash all the world's data into this number of

00:16:16 ◼   ► buckets, well, you're gonna have hash collisions, right?

00:16:18 ◼   ► And with floating point, it's like you want to represent how many numbers in

00:16:22 ◼   ► what range, and how many bits do you have to do it?

00:16:24 ◼   ► Well, guess what?

00:16:24 ◼   ► There's going to be holes, and not only are there gonna be holes, there's

00:16:27 ◼   ► gonna be weird because there are holes, there's gonna be weird rounding, and there's

00:16:30 ◼   ► gonna be mathematical operations that aren't associative.

00:16:32 ◼   ► I mean, you occasionally see this when someone naively programs a calculator and they

00:16:36 ◼   ► use floating point, and you can do certain additions and subtractions of simple decimal

00:16:39 ◼   ► numbers that an elementary school student could do, but your calculator will get it

00:16:42 ◼   ► wrong because of the magic of floating point.

00:16:44 ◼   ► Well, uh, all LMs are doing is just tons of math all the time,

00:16:48 ◼   ► and it makes sense that these floating port weirdnesses would accumulate.

00:16:52 ◼   ► Uh, so yeah, temperature zero theoretically means completely deterministic according to the algorithm that

00:16:57 ◼   ► LLMs are running, but practically speaking, because of the realities of the hardware and

00:17:01 ◼   ► floating point representations, and possibly also due to concurrency, it's not actually the case.

00:17:07 ◼   ► It's almost deterministic, but not quite.

00:17:10 ◼   ► All right, so with regard to the new photos shared album where you can

00:17:14 ◼   ► get like full resolution photos in that in uh in all the OS's 27.

00:17:17 ◼   ► Tim Hardwick at Mac Rumors writes for years now, Apple has allowed you to

00:17:21 ◼   ► store up to 5,000 photos and videos in shared albums without impacting your iCloud

00:17:25 ◼   ► storage limit.

00:17:25 ◼   ► That's no longer the case in iOS 27.

00:17:27 ◼   ► Perhaps more significantly, if you invite someone to a shared album and they add

00:17:30 ◼   ► their own photos and videos to it, as the owner, this too will count

00:17:32 ◼   ► against your iCloud storage limit.

00:17:35 ◼   ► On the plus side, uh the OSS 27 and introduce a free alternative, you

00:17:38 ◼   ► can create temporary shared albums that allow users to collaborate on short-term projects without

00:17:43 ◼   ► eating into your iCloud storage.

00:17:44 ◼   ► But after 30 days, any photos and videos not saved in your library are

00:17:47 ◼   ► deleted.

00:17:48 ◼   ► Apple has made it easier to invite people to shared albums.

00:17:50 ◼   ► The company says friends and family can now join and collaborate on the web

00:17:53 ◼   ► even without an Apple account or Apple device.

00:17:55 ◼   ► Existing shared albums are unaffected by the changes, but the Photos app does include

00:17:59 ◼   ► an upgrade shared album option for those who want to improve the quality of

00:18:02 ◼   ► its contents at the cost of iCloud storage.

00:18:04 ◼   ► Friend of the show, Greg Pierce also writes it's worth noting that if you

00:18:08 ◼   ► create a shared album on iOS 27 or any of the OSS 27, it's

00:18:11 ◼   ► not shareable with devices on older OS versions.

00:18:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:18:14 ◼   ► I mean, I I think all these trade-offs are a reasonable and acceptable, although

00:18:18 ◼   ► it has always annoyed me that the way they count storage is I think

00:18:21 ◼   ► well it doesn't say it here, but I'm assuming they're continuing the practice of

00:18:24 ◼   ► counting it towards everybody's storage.

00:18:26 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:18:26 ◼   ► Like, oh, it counts towards your storage, but I think it also counts towards

00:18:29 ◼   ► their storage, and even though we know Apple's only storing one copy of this.

00:18:32 ◼   ► Anyway, um, yeah, I had totally forgotten that those 5,000 photo limits don't count

00:18:37 ◼   ► against your iCloud uh limit.

00:18:38 ◼   ► So they were lower resolution and they didn't count accounts against your limit.

00:18:42 ◼   ► So Apple didn't have to, you know, give you too much free storage.

00:18:45 ◼   ► But now that you get full res, uh it's back on you, and uh

00:18:48 ◼   ► it's because it's encouraging more people to buy more iCloud storage.

00:18:52 ◼   ► You know, one of these days we'll get more than five gigs, right?

00:18:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:18:55 ◼   ► Right.

00:18:56 ◼   ► Not this year, I don't think.

00:18:58 ◼   ► Probably not this decade.

00:18:59 ◼   ► I mean, well, honestly, like when you have a new CEO, this is on

00:19:04 ◼   ► his list.

00:19:05 ◼   ► Like, you know, Tim Cook had like a list of things that he changed

00:19:08 ◼   ► immediately, like the like the charitable giving, you know, stuff like that.

00:19:10 ◼   ► Like maybe that's on Turnus' list.

00:19:13 ◼   ► I doubt it.

00:19:14 ◼   ► I can't imagine.

00:19:15 ◼   ► I really can't imagine, but you never know.

00:19:17 ◼   ► Say say they change it.

00:19:18 ◼   ► Say they make it, they multiply it by five.

00:19:21 ◼   ► So you get twenty-five.

00:19:22 ◼   ► Doesn't that really make it?

00:19:23 ◼   ► I mean, it's embarrassing they haven't changed it in a long time, but basically

00:19:26 ◼   ► the way it exists is you get a non-zero amount for free, but that

00:19:29 ◼   ► non-zero amount is basically useless if you really start using it for any of

00:19:29 ◼   ► its intended purposes, in particular using it for backups.

00:19:36 ◼   ► So it's like it's like they they they want you to have storage, but

00:19:39 ◼   ► not enough to do anything particularly useful with like if you if no matter

00:19:43 ◼   ► how stingy you are with storage, if you use Apple's anything, uh like if

00:19:46 ◼   ► you take photos on your phone, like you'll you'll fill it and then they'll

00:19:49 ◼   ► want to get money from you.

00:19:49 ◼   ► So I don't think they're ever gonna give you so much storage that it

00:19:52 ◼   ► changes how many people need to buy the storage.

00:19:54 ◼   ► It will just change the timer on how long it takes before their phones

00:19:57 ◼   ► fill up and they get frustrated.

00:19:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:59 ◼   ► So what's gonna happen first?

00:20:00 ◼   ► Uh Apple is carbon neutral by 2030, or we get more than five gigs

00:20:04 ◼   ► of iCloud storage.

00:20:05 ◼   ► Carbon neutral.

00:20:06 ◼   ► Easy.

00:20:07 ◼   ► Yeah, honestly, I think you might I mean one is a lot easier than

00:20:11 ◼   ► the other.

00:20:11 ◼   ► Um, but they're not gonna do the easy one because it'll be too expensive.

00:20:15 ◼   ► Yeah, like the because they haven't done it in so long.

00:20:17 ◼   ► Obviously, nobody cares.

00:20:17 ◼   ► I mean, again, maybe if it's on Ternus's day one list, then that's the

00:20:20 ◼   ► only way it'll happen.

00:20:21 ◼   ► But if it's not on his day one list, I don't see that bubbling

00:20:23 ◼   ► up to his attention in the first five years or so that he is

00:20:27 ◼   ► that he's CEO.

00:20:28 ◼   ► Hey, you know what?

00:20:29 ◼   ► This is our last episode with Tim Cook as CEO.

00:20:32 ◼   ► It is.

00:20:32 ◼   ► Oh, that's true.

00:20:33 ◼   ► I didn't even think about that.

00:20:34 ◼   ► Uh huh.

00:20:34 ◼   ► So we don't even know the day one list could literally be in time

00:20:37 ◼   ► for our next episode.

00:20:39 ◼   ► Like some stuff could start happening.

00:20:41 ◼   ► I mean, it's unlikely that we would hear about it or that it would

00:20:43 ◼   ► be done that fast, but yeah, you wouldn't think there would be anything happening

00:20:45 ◼   ► until like after the iPhone event, which we'll get to, but uh yeah.

00:20:48 ◼   ► Some people did ask if we wanted to do like an exit interview for

00:20:51 ◼   ► Tim Cook.

00:20:52 ◼   ► We already did.

00:20:53 ◼   ► Yeah, I kind of think like we've covered that well.

00:20:56 ◼   ► Um I I think mine would kind of be more like a uh, you

00:20:59 ◼   ► know, don't let the door hit you kinda kind of thing.

00:21:01 ◼   ► But uh Yeah, we should find maybe for next week we'll try to find

00:21:04 ◼   ► the episodes.

00:21:04 ◼   ► But we did we basically did an exit of your interview of Tim Coke

00:21:07 ◼   ► over multiple episodes.

00:21:08 ◼   ► We really covered this topic thoroughly once we knew he was out the door.

00:21:11 ◼   ► And since then he hasn't done anything additional worthy of discussion, I feel like.

00:21:15 ◼   ► All right, continuing with follow-up, uh, with regard to last week's overtime, where we

00:21:19 ◼   ► spoke about Stephen Robles's video uh showing how his son uses his first iPhone.

00:21:24 ◼   ► Uh a lot of people wrote in to say, oh, well, clearly that was

00:21:27 ◼   ► sped up because in the the implication being nobody could use an iPhone that

00:21:30 ◼   ► quickly.

00:21:31 ◼   ► Uh Steven wrote to us and said, I didn't speed up anything.

00:21:34 ◼   ► I blurred some things for privacy, but everything was 1x, uh, which was incredible

00:21:39 ◼   ► to me.

00:21:39 ◼   ► And then additionally, uh, a lot of people thought it was very interesting, his

00:21:43 ◼   ► son's preferences with regard to lowercase i versus capital I, especially in combination with

00:21:47 ◼   ► the fact that uh autocorrect was turned off.

00:21:49 ◼   ► And Steven said also on lowercase i versus uppercase i, that's not a text

00:21:53 ◼   ► replacement.

00:21:54 ◼   ► He actually presses the shift key to capitalize it manually every time.

00:21:58 ◼   ► But I told him about text replacement, and he seemed intrigued.

00:22:02 ◼   ► We are sponsored this week by Tail Scale.

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00:23:06 ◼   ► I already run WireGuard or I already run OpenVPN or I already run and

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00:23:12 ◼   ► Well, Tailscale is WireGuard, yes.

00:23:14 ◼   ► And so strictly speaking, it's kind of sort of a VPN, but it's a

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00:24:06 ◼   ► All right, we got some news earlier today as we record this.

00:24:08 ◼   ► The Apple event surprise and shine has been announced for Wednesday, September 9th at

00:24:14 ◼   ► uh 1 p.m.

00:24:15 ◼   ► one true time zone.

00:24:16 ◼   ► Uh your three intrepid hosts will be watching at home as per usual.

00:24:20 ◼   ► Uh and I don't know, I don't have too much more to say about

00:24:23 ◼   ► that.

00:24:23 ◼   ► I don't know what you guys have.

00:24:25 ◼   ► Herbert pointed out that the reason it's on Wednesday instead of Tuesday is because

00:24:27 ◼   ► of Labor Day.

00:24:28 ◼   ► So when Labor Day falls on the Monday, they shift it.

00:24:31 ◼   ► Uh, so that's uh why it's one day off.

00:24:33 ◼   ► I it's a surprise and shine thing.

00:24:34 ◼   ► Like, I mean, this event, I've as usual with September events these days, like

00:24:38 ◼   ► everyone knows every single thing that's gonna be announced except for like minor stuff

00:24:41 ◼   ► that nobody cares about.

00:24:42 ◼   ► Um, you know, right down to the the specific size measurement appearance, potentially the

00:24:47 ◼   ► colors, everything about the foldable phone.

00:24:44 ◼   ► If it's not name ultra, that'll be a surprise.

00:24:51 ◼   ► But anyway, here's the invitation here.

00:24:54 ◼   ► What's the surprise and shine?

00:24:56 ◼   ► Like, I get it's a rise and shine pun, but like, is there anything

00:24:58 ◼   ► particularly shiny or involving light that is supposed to be announced?

00:25:02 ◼   ► Is there anything even surprised?

00:25:03 ◼   ► I mean, this is the least surprising Apple event of the entire year, usually.

00:25:06 ◼   ► Like, yeah, we almost we can almost always predict, like it's almost to the

00:25:10 ◼   ► day, if not exactly to the day when it will be.

00:25:12 ◼   ► We know pretty much everything that's going to be announced in it.

00:25:16 ◼   ► Like, it's like because the iPhones leak more than anything else leaks.

00:25:19 ◼   ► And even the leaks of like a the AirPods with the cameras gonna be

00:25:21 ◼   ► there.

00:25:21 ◼   ► German says no, they're delayed until next year.

00:25:24 ◼   ► So anyway.

00:25:24 ◼   ► Uh, but yeah, I don't I don't know what shine.

00:25:26 ◼   ► I don't know what the shine is about.

00:25:27 ◼   ► I don't I don't quite get are the screens really bright or something.

00:25:30 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:25:30 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:25:30 ◼   ► I mean, in the sun, they can they can be reflective, which is actually

00:25:34 ◼   ► not a great thing usually.

00:25:35 ◼   ► But yeah, I don't know.

00:25:36 ◼   ► I mean, I mean, I guess the main uh there's Garmin had a whole

00:25:39 ◼   ► big story about uh people who had supposedly used the foldable phone, but like

00:25:43 ◼   ► you know, but uh we're not ever gonna cover it because by the time

00:25:45 ◼   ► we do another episode, they'll they'll have been announced.

00:25:48 ◼   ► Uh but one of the open questions, it's not that much of a question,

00:25:52 ◼   ► but anyway, like uh the foldable phone, the crease, what is the screen feel

00:25:56 ◼   ► like?

00:25:56 ◼   ► I mean, the expectation is that it will be like all the other phones

00:25:59 ◼   ► that use all the same components that Apple's using, and that they don't have

00:26:02 ◼   ► anything special that anybody else doesn't have.

00:26:03 ◼   ► By this point, Samsung has already come out with their own, exactly like the

00:26:07 ◼   ► Apple foldable phone phone, you know, like the same size and shape, you know,

00:26:12 ◼   ► that same form factor, presumably using the same screen technology they're selling to Apple,

00:26:16 ◼   ► unless Apple has some kind of exclusive deal.

00:26:18 ◼   ► So that'll be interesting.

00:26:19 ◼   ► Like, does Apple even make uh an announcement that, like, oh, our foldable phoney

00:26:23 ◼   ► is better than the other ones because of X, Y, and Z?

00:26:25 ◼   ► Because at this point, like, not only is it leak so much, their competitors

00:26:28 ◼   ► have had time to already release their iPhone fold clones.

00:26:32 ◼   ► And Apple hasn't even released theirs yet.

00:26:29 ◼   ► So when theirs comes out, it's like, oh, that's exactly like the Samsung, whatever.

00:26:37 ◼   ► It's like, yeah, yeah, it is.

00:26:39 ◼   ► Then we have some big and semi-breaking news.

00:26:42 ◼   ► This all happened yesterday.

00:26:43 ◼   ► Thank you, Apple, for considering ATP's recording schedule.

00:26:46 ◼   ► New Mac minis, new Mac Studios.

00:26:49 ◼   ► So we'll put links to the newsroom posts in the show notes.

00:26:52 ◼   ► Uh, but John, I figured you were going to want to drive this.

00:26:55 ◼   ► I will just try to quarterback as best I can.

00:26:57 ◼   ► And you wanted to start with the chips.

00:27:00 ◼   ► So there are a bunch of new chips announced, including the M6.

00:27:03 ◼   ► Into interrupt me when you're ready.

00:27:05 ◼   ► Uh, this is two nanometer.

00:27:07 ◼   ► It has dual 16 core neural engine, up to two times the peak compute

00:27:13 ◼   ► over previous generations.

00:27:15 ◼   ► This is one of the most interesting things about the M6.

00:27:17 ◼   ► Again, this is the plain M6, and remember, there's not going to be, according

00:27:19 ◼   ► to the rumors, there's not going to be an M6 Pro and M6 Max

00:27:22 ◼   ► or M6 Ultra.

00:27:22 ◼   ► This is it.

00:27:23 ◼   ► This is the only M6.

00:27:24 ◼   ► And there are a bunch of interesting things, interesting things about this.

00:27:27 ◼   ► But I think Apple basically led with this, is like they doubled the neural

00:27:30 ◼   ► engines.

00:27:31 ◼   ► And I think this is the only one with double, other than obviously the

00:27:34 ◼   ► ultras, which are two Macs stuck together, so then you get double neural engines.

00:27:37 ◼   ► But uh, yeah, the littlest no suffix plain M6 has double the amount of

00:27:42 ◼   ► neural engines in it.

00:27:43 ◼   ► I mean, it makes sense.

00:27:44 ◼   ► Like they use them a lot.

00:27:45 ◼   ► AI is popular.

00:27:46 ◼   ► What can we do to beef up the plain M6 on AI tasks without

00:27:51 ◼   ► putting on a honk and GPU that would make it too big, too hot,

00:27:54 ◼   ► too expensive?

00:27:55 ◼   ► The neural engine is not that big.

00:27:56 ◼   ► Put two of them in, and so they did.

00:27:58 ◼   ► And again, this is the very first two nanometer chip from Apple.

00:28:01 ◼   ► So maybe that gives them a little bit of room and leeway to put

00:28:03 ◼   ► in a second neural engine.

00:28:05 ◼   ► Red Other have 12 core CPUs, which is two more cores than the plain

00:28:10 ◼   ► M5.

00:28:11 ◼   ► There are two super cores.

00:28:13 ◼   ► If you recall, we talked about this a few months ago.

00:28:14 ◼   ► Uh, that's two less than the M5's four super cores.

00:28:19 ◼   ► But they the M6 has four performance cores, which is the same as the

00:28:24 ◼   ► M5.

00:28:25 ◼   ► Or excuse me, I'm sorry, with the M5 has none.

00:28:27 ◼   ► And then six efficiency cores, which is the same as the M5.

00:28:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I remember the confusion about this.

00:28:33 ◼   ► Like I wish I I got myself confused and had to regoogle for all

00:28:36 ◼   ► this again.

00:28:37 ◼   ► When we say performance cores in 2026, we mean the M cores, the medium

00:28:43 ◼   ► ones.

00:28:43 ◼   ► They're in between.

00:28:44 ◼   ► The super cores are the big ones, the efficiency cores are the little ones,

00:28:47 ◼   ► the performance cores are the medium ones.

00:28:49 ◼   ► And so this has fewer big cores, a bunch of medium ones that the

00:28:54 ◼   ► M5 didn't have, and then same number of the small ones.

00:28:57 ◼   ► I still hate this naming of these cores terrible.

00:28:59 ◼   ► So much we should we should just say big, medium, and small.

00:29:03 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, so this the M6 has really thrown a monkey wrench into

00:29:06 ◼   ► what I hope would happen, which is like, oh, there's this transition period where

00:29:09 ◼   ► they renamed them and some of them have the old ones and new ones,

00:29:11 ◼   ► but like eventually they'll get all on the same page and we'll be back

00:29:14 ◼   ► to two sizes, the big and the little.

00:29:15 ◼   ► But nope, nope, they're keeping three sizes.

00:29:17 ◼   ► They're keeping three sizes with the same stupid names.

00:29:19 ◼   ► We're never going to escape it.

00:29:21 ◼   ► It's just it's big, medium, and small.

00:29:23 ◼   ► If they had just called the medium one something with medium in it, like

00:29:26 ◼   ► they're called M cores under the cover.

00:29:27 ◼   ► So it's clear someone was thinking medium, but alas, that is not the case.

00:29:31 ◼   ► So we have this these stupid names are going to be with us for

00:29:34 ◼   ► a while because they're pumping out chips with three different tiny cores, and it

00:29:37 ◼   ► seems like they're not going to stop.

00:29:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:39 ◼   ► And and it just it still bothers me that like the P cores used

00:29:43 ◼   ► to be like like the big used to be the big ones, and they

00:29:46 ◼   ► renamed them.

00:29:47 ◼   ► The M five used to have the M5 was announced with P cores, but

00:29:50 ◼   ► those same cores changed names to super cores once Apple decided the big ones

00:29:53 ◼   ► have to be called super cores.

00:29:54 ◼   ► Oh my god.

00:29:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:55 ◼   ► But anyway, I I I think I don't mind there being three different kinds

00:29:59 ◼   ► of cores.

00:29:59 ◼   ► Just, you know, there's the same thing.

00:30:02 ◼   ► Yeah, the temporary uh and by temporary, I might mean like years long weird

00:30:06 ◼   ► transition period of us getting used to what these names now mean because they

00:30:09 ◼   ► now mean something different.

00:30:10 ◼   ► But actually having three different cores, I don't think we I don't think we

00:30:15 ◼   ► really know yet how much this matters.

00:30:17 ◼   ► Like is obviously like, you know, as you say, the the M6 has actually

00:30:21 ◼   ► reduced the number of its largest cores uh from four to two.

00:30:25 ◼   ► But then it has four of the mediums and it had no mediums before,

00:30:28 ◼   ► and the mediums are pretty capable.

00:30:30 ◼   ► So like how does this I mean in this arrangement, like Apple presumably knows

00:30:34 ◼   ► what kind of workloads do these chips experience and what's the best combination of

00:30:38 ◼   ► cores to handle those workloads with the minimum power.

00:30:40 ◼   ► So I trust them.

00:30:41 ◼   ► This doesn't look like a ridiculous combination for a plain no suffix M chip.

00:30:45 ◼   ► Uh I think this will be good, especially with the two neural engines, but

00:30:48 ◼   ► um yeah, we'll we'll see when people start getting these.

00:30:50 ◼   ► Yeah, because I as far as we know, there's no benchmarks out anywhere yet,

00:30:53 ◼   ► right?

00:30:53 ◼   ► I haven't I wasn't able to find any.

00:30:54 ◼   ► I I haven't seen them leave.

00:30:55 ◼   ► Maybe they leaked while we're recording this, but I haven't seen any yet.

00:30:58 ◼   ► Yeah, because so we we really have no clue how this actually performs besides

00:31:01 ◼   ► Apple's kind of you know lofty claims, which app Apple's claims for performance usually

00:31:07 ◼   ► are correct, but maybe narrow, and like it's hard to get a really good

00:31:11 ◼   ► idea of how it performs broadly until you actually see it in in lots

00:31:15 ◼   ► of different applications.

00:31:16 ◼   ► All right, so uh there uh is a quote from Apple the world's fastest

00:31:21 ◼   ► single threaded performance and up to one point two times faster multi threaded performance

00:31:25 ◼   ► as compared to M5.

00:31:26 ◼   ► And that makes it sound like the supercores are exactly the same speed as

00:31:30 ◼   ► the M5 supercores, because the only thing they're touting in terms of like a

00:31:34 ◼   ► an increase is 1.2 times faster multi-threaded.

00:31:37 ◼   ► So you know, it's the world's fastest, just like the M five was, which

00:31:40 ◼   ► is fine.

00:31:41 ◼   ► Single core was good in the M5, it's good in the M6, and a

00:31:43 ◼   ► little bit faster in multi-threaded.

00:31:44 ◼   ► And a little bit faster in multi-threaded is like it does have two more

00:31:47 ◼   ► CPU cores.

00:31:48 ◼   ► Granted, it has two fewer big ones, but it has four mediums, so it

00:31:44 ◼   ► works out to be better.

00:31:52 ◼   ► Again, that's I think that's a reasonable claim.

00:31:54 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, because well, it says the world's fastest single thread of performance, but

00:31:58 ◼   ► that could technically be true, even if it's tied with the M5.

00:32:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:32:02 ◼   ► I mean, it's probably a little bit faster, but uh who I mean, it

00:32:05 ◼   ► depends.

00:32:06 ◼   ► Like, you know, they they have a process shrink here.

00:32:08 ◼   ► How did they, you know, how did they quote spend, you know, the additional

00:32:12 ◼   ► uh capacity of a process shrink?

00:32:14 ◼   ► They probably, you know, they added cores, it looks like, you know, so they

00:32:18 ◼   ► they probably spent some of the some of the gain just putting more transistors

00:32:22 ◼   ► down and having more cores.

00:32:23 ◼   ► Um, but you know, did they also ramp up speeds in any different ways,

00:32:27 ◼   ► or is there more cache somewhere on the chip?

00:32:29 ◼   ► You know, that I think that all remains to be seen.

00:32:31 ◼   ► High yield on Blue Sky, right?

00:32:34 ◼   ► What's out in Apple S core or an all new P Core?

00:32:37 ◼   ► While size isn't everything, silicon area per CPU core can tell you a lot.

00:32:41 ◼   ► That's why I made this handy chart, and we'll put a link in the

00:32:44 ◼   ► show notes.

00:32:45 ◼   ► Uh the E core is roughly square, maybe a little bit less than square

00:32:50 ◼   ► than and not that big by comparison.

00:32:52 ◼   ► The P Core is another, like, I don't know, third bigger.

00:32:54 ◼   ► And then the S Core is, I don't know, another 40% bigger than the

00:32:58 ◼   ► P core, maybe more.

00:32:59 ◼   ► These are quite different in size, uh, especially the difference between the E core

00:33:03 ◼   ► and the S core.

00:33:04 ◼   ► Quite a big difference.

00:33:05 ◼   ► There is a 12 core GPU, which is two more cores than the M5,

00:33:09 ◼   ► which is a roughly 30% increase in peak GPU compute for AI as compared

00:33:13 ◼   ► to M5.

00:33:14 ◼   ► 50% increased geometry rates for complex graphics.

00:33:18 ◼   ► It also includes updates to the shader core architecture, dynamic caching, and hardware accelerated

00:33:22 ◼   ► ray tracing.

00:33:24 ◼   ► You can get up to 32 gigs of RAM with 170 gigabytes per second

00:33:29 ◼   ► memory bandwidth, which is up 10% from the M5.

00:33:34 ◼   ► Additionally, SME replaces AMX in the M6.

00:33:38 ◼   ► John, can you make heads or tails of this for me, please?

00:33:40 ◼   ► Yeah, this was from a bunch of other people.

00:33:42 ◼   ► I hadn't really thought about this, but there was a post uh from uh

00:33:45 ◼   ► Taras Sakaro saying the M4 was the first Apple chip to support ARM scalable

00:33:50 ◼   ► matrix extensions.

00:33:51 ◼   ► That's SME scalable matrix extension.

00:33:53 ◼   ► Uh although Apple has included matrix accelerator in its devices since 2019, it used

00:33:57 ◼   ► a proprietary instruction set called AMX.

00:33:59 ◼   ► The developers had to use Apple provided numerical frameworks to take advantage of the

00:34:03 ◼   ► hardware.

00:34:04 ◼   ► The M4 chip with SME changed this by allowing programmers to write low-level code

00:34:07 ◼   ► that directly targets the matrix hardware.

00:34:09 ◼   ► So AMX has been around forever.

00:34:11 ◼   ► And that has been a frustration of everybody.

00:34:12 ◼   ► It's like, oh, AMX is a secret instructions.

00:34:14 ◼   ► You can't know about them.

00:34:15 ◼   ► It's Apple matrix instructions, but you're not allowed to like write to them.

00:34:18 ◼   ► Like, yeah, the CPU supports it.

00:34:20 ◼   ► But I think they might reject you from the App Store if you directly

00:34:22 ◼   ► use them.

00:34:23 ◼   ► Obviously, you're outside the App Store, you can do whatever you want, but they're

00:34:25 ◼   ► like, don't use these instructions.

00:34:27 ◼   ► Like they're private.

00:34:28 ◼   ► We reserve the right to change them.

00:34:30 ◼   ► What you're supposed to use is Apple has frameworks that under the cover use

00:34:33 ◼   ► the AMX instructions, and they're like Apple's just use these frameworks.

00:34:36 ◼   ► But obviously that's somewhat limiting, uh, especially if you're doing really low-level stuff.

00:34:40 ◼   ► SME is ARM, like the people who make the architecture that the Apple chips

00:34:44 ◼   ► are based on.

00:34:45 ◼   ► The ARM company, they have their own scalable matrix extensions.

00:34:49 ◼   ► And those are not specific to Apple.

00:34:51 ◼   ► They're on any ARM chip, they're available to anybody who wants to make them.

00:34:54 ◼   ► And Apple has incorporated them, and now they're basically replacing AMX.

00:34:58 ◼   ► So Longhorn on uh Mastodon said, Goodbye, Apple AMX.

00:35:01 ◼   ► It was certainly interesting, but SME takes things further from here.

00:35:04 ◼   ► M4 and M5 both had both uh SME and AMX present hardware.

00:35:09 ◼   ► But AMX and uh SME run on the same compute units, but support for

00:35:13 ◼   ► the AMX uh instruction set has gone in the M6.

00:35:16 ◼   ► So they have this transition period where the chip supported both of them, but

00:35:19 ◼   ► the M6 is say goodbye to the AMX instruction set.

00:35:22 ◼   ► It's all SME from here out.

00:35:24 ◼   ► And I think the reason Apple did AMX is like either the SME wasn't

00:35:27 ◼   ► available or wasn't satisfactory to them, so they made their own thing.

00:35:30 ◼   ► And they said and part of the reason they were trying to keep it

00:35:32 ◼   ► private is like we would prefer to maybe switch to the standard the ARM

00:35:36 ◼   ► standard matrix uh instructions when they're available.

00:35:39 ◼   ► And so they kept AMX on and they kept it private.

00:35:41 ◼   ► They said, please you go through this framework, and presumably now if you use

00:35:44 ◼   ► the framework on a chip that doesn't support AMX, it will just use SME

00:35:47 ◼   ► under the covers.

00:35:48 ◼   ► So uh a pretty good technical transition for Apple, but it's worth noting uh

00:35:52 ◼   ► that M6 is the first one that no longer supports AMX at all.

00:35:55 ◼   ► So if you did write directly to the AMX instruction set and uh broke

00:35:58 ◼   ► Apple's rules, your thing is not gonna run on M6.

00:36:02 ◼   ► So a very quick side quest introduction here.

00:36:05 ◼   ► We are asked, or people imply to us on a regular basis, you know,

00:36:08 ◼   ► you know that all the people at Apple listen to this show, and we

00:36:12 ◼   ► know that there are some people at Apple that listen to this show, and

00:36:14 ◼   ► my understanding is most of them are you know engineers that are just trying

00:36:18 ◼   ► to get their job done.

00:36:19 ◼   ► I don't think we have any like executives that listen to us or anything

00:36:21 ◼   ► like that.

00:36:22 ◼   ► Oh, but then I don't know.

00:36:23 ◼   ► Well, I don't know.

00:36:24 ◼   ► We have I mean we've had executives on the show, but yeah, I don't

00:36:27 ◼   ► know if we still do, but I know we have.

00:36:30 ◼   ► All right, well, either way, occasionally something will happen in the world of Apple,

00:36:35 ◼   ► and uh occasionally it makes me think, huh?

00:36:39 ◼   ► That's weird.

00:36:40 ◼   ► So Daniel Luce points out uh with a very, very specific chart from Apple.

00:36:47 ◼   ► M6 compared to previous Mac mini models.

00:36:50 ◼   ► Faster long form audio transcription, Mac Mini with M6, 10.3x, Mac Mini with M4,

00:36:57 ◼   ► 4.8x, Mac Mini with M1, not very good.

00:37:00 ◼   ► I guess that's 1X.

00:37:01 ◼   ► This, I genuinely have no idea if this is pointed at Marco slash us

00:36:59 ◼   ► or not.

00:37:06 ◼   ► But man, that is conspicuous.

00:37:08 ◼   ► No, it's not.

00:37:09 ◼   ► I mean, the reality is that long form audio transcription done at large scale

00:37:16 ◼   ► is a problem that not just Overcast has.

00:37:19 ◼   ► Although I will say I for earlier today I was I was um looking

00:37:23 ◼   ► at some of my numbers, and uh Overcast transcribes about 30,000 hours of audio

00:37:29 ◼   ► per day.

00:37:29 ◼   ► Gracious.

00:37:30 ◼   ► Um so it's it's kind of um a lot that I do, but um

00:37:35 ◼   ► ultimately like there are lots of problems out there that that need long form

00:37:40 ◼   ► audio transcription as part of their problems.

00:37:43 ◼   ► Think about like think about how many business meetings there are and how many

00:37:47 ◼   ► products there are out there to try to take your business meeting notes and

00:37:52 ◼   ► summarize them.

00:37:53 ◼   ► And every, you know, Zoom and all those different platforms that host video conferencing

00:37:57 ◼   ► and everything, they all have this.

00:37:58 ◼   ► Like, this is a very common need.

00:38:01 ◼   ► Um, what about don't forget the entire, you know, the intelligence community.

00:38:05 ◼   ► Um if they they might have uses for this.

00:38:08 ◼   ► Yeah, there's lots of uses that are that are less than above board, uh,

00:38:12 ◼   ► but there's a lot of need for long form audio transcription.

00:38:16 ◼   ► And it's a it's a pretty exciting, you know, recent thing that computers recently

00:38:20 ◼   ► have gotten a lot better at than they used to be.

00:38:22 ◼   ► Um plus chances are it probably shows off the capabilities of the new, you

00:38:29 ◼   ► know, the new neural engine architecture or the new GPUs, like you know, whatever

00:38:33 ◼   ► it is.

00:38:33 ◼   ► Like they that that probably happens to be a very, very strong benchmark for

00:38:37 ◼   ► these chips, and that's probably why they chose it.

00:38:39 ◼   ► Not because, you know, and Lal Shampy listens to this show and decided to

00:38:44 ◼   ► do this for this part of the thing.

00:38:44 ◼   ► Like, probably not.

00:38:46 ◼   ► Yeah, and this is the biggest benchmark for this because like uh M6, uh,

00:38:50 ◼   ► well, I mean, they're comparing it to M4, I guess, but like it's double

00:38:53 ◼   ► from M4.

00:38:54 ◼   ► They don't compare it to M5, but it shows that they are getting dividends

00:38:57 ◼   ► from that second neural engine, uh, presumably, because I don't think this this could

00:39:01 ◼   ► come from the CPU and GPU changes alone, but who knows?

00:39:03 ◼   ► Maybe it does.

00:39:04 ◼   ► Like that's the thing about these benchmarks.

00:39:07 ◼   ► It's like, does uh audio transcription use the neural engine at all?

00:39:11 ◼   ► Does it depend on what engine you're using?

00:39:13 ◼   ► We just see the bar charts.

00:39:14 ◼   ► We don't have the real benchmarks from people yet, so we'll wait and see.

00:39:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:39:17 ◼   ► By the way, it doesn't take 48 Mac minis to transcribe 30,000 hours of

00:39:21 ◼   ► audio a day.

00:39:22 ◼   ► Um, it turns out I have dramatically overprovisioned how many Mac minis I need.

00:39:27 ◼   ► Uh well, because remember I mentioned like during the story that at some point

00:39:30 ◼   ► I fixed a bug that was causing repeat work to be in queued?

00:39:33 ◼   ► Well, when I did that, the usage dropped by like two thirds.

00:39:37 ◼   ► Well, luckily those Mac minis are just going up in value.

00:39:39 ◼   ► So basically it's like getting a bunch of solid gold bars.

00:39:42 ◼   ► Well, the reason I was doing these numbers earlier, I was trying to figure

00:39:44 ◼   ► out like, you know, what how can I best use this excess capacity that

00:39:48 ◼   ► I have?

00:39:49 ◼   ► So should I do things like you know, summarization and auto chapterization?

00:39:54 ◼   ► You know, what does that look like?

00:39:55 ◼   ► How how can I do that on a bunch of 16 gig M4 machines?

00:39:59 ◼   ► Like, what are my options for that?

00:40:00 ◼   ► Should I outsource it?

00:40:01 ◼   ► You know, do and that's that's why I was doing that kind of that

00:40:04 ◼   ► that math.

00:40:05 ◼   ► All right, let's talk M5 Ultra.

00:40:08 ◼   ► There is now an Ultra for the M5 generation, which uses Ultra Fusion to

00:40:13 ◼   ► connect two dual die M5 Max chips to form the quad die architecture.

00:40:19 ◼   ► Now, is that the same as the M3 Ultra or is that different?

00:40:24 ◼   ► Well, the the M5 is the first one that uses the chiplets, the M5

00:40:27 ◼   ► Max and M5 Pro.

00:40:28 ◼   ► They separate the CPU and GPU dials die.

00:40:31 ◼   ► So this is this is really just a sort of cruel twist of fate

00:40:33 ◼   ► of like, oh, you finally got the quad.

00:40:29 ◼   ► No, not the way we wanted.

00:40:36 ◼   ► It's still just two maxes stuck together.

00:40:38 ◼   ► It just so happens the max itself split into two pieces into a CPU

00:40:41 ◼   ► and GPU die.

00:40:43 ◼   ► So they do tout it as a quad die architecture, which is accurate, but

00:40:46 ◼   ► it's still two maxes.

00:40:48 ◼   ► They just can't stop sticking those maxes together.

00:40:50 ◼   ► They love it.

00:40:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:40:51 ◼   ► I was briefly very excited, and then I'm like, oh wait, no, that's that's

00:40:55 ◼   ► not what I want it to be.

00:40:57 ◼   ► All right.

00:40:57 ◼   ► This has a 36 core CPU.

00:41:00 ◼   ► The M3 Ultra has 32, 12 super cores, 24 performance cores, uh, no efficiency

00:41:09 ◼   ► cores, which is just like the M5 Max's that it's comprised of.

00:41:13 ◼   ► The M3 Ultra has 24 of the old performance cores and eight efficiency cores.

00:41:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know why there were so many efficiency cores in the Ultra

00:41:21 ◼   ► back in the day, but it's it's it's such a weird comparison.

00:41:23 ◼   ► I mean, setting aside what Apple compares to, they love to compare things to

00:41:25 ◼   ► the M1 to show big numbers or whatever, but they also compared to the

00:41:28 ◼   ► M3 Ultra because that's the previous Ultra.

00:41:31 ◼   ► There never was an M4 one.

00:41:32 ◼   ► So you get some weird comparisons like like the core names in the comparison

00:41:36 ◼   ► don't even match anymore.

00:41:37 ◼   ► So uh yeah, and and uh you know, I it's pretty easy for the

00:41:41 ◼   ► M5 Ultra to beat up on the M3 Ultra because you know it's a

00:41:43 ◼   ► two-generation later, those maxes that are stuck together, but it sure does.

00:41:47 ◼   ► Compared to the M3 Ultra, up to 1.25 times higher single threaded performance, up

00:41:54 ◼   ► to 1.3 times higher multi-threaded performance, which is not bad.

00:42:00 ◼   ► Uh, in terms of GPU, it is the same as the M3 Ultra, 80

00:42:05 ◼   ► cores, 80 cores, which is bananas, up to four and a half times the

00:42:10 ◼   ► peak GPU compute for AI versus the M3 Ultra.

00:42:13 ◼   ► So that's such a like you look at the other numbers, 1.3 times 1.25

00:42:17 ◼   ► times for the CPU.

00:42:17 ◼   ► It's like, all right, the CPU is better, but like you know, not that

00:42:14 ◼   ► much better.

00:42:20 ◼   ► But then you get to the GPU thing, same number of cores, up to

00:42:24 ◼   ► four times.

00:42:24 ◼   ► That's because all these the cores have like the neural accelerators in them, and

00:42:28 ◼   ► it's a totally different GPU architecture.

00:42:30 ◼   ► This is the big leap in the M5 Ultra is that the GPU, even

00:42:33 ◼   ► though it looks even though it has quote unquote the same number of cores,

00:42:35 ◼   ► those are not the same cores at all.

00:42:37 ◼   ► And there's a big difference in that, you know, the in the Apple's press

00:42:40 ◼   ► release, like, oh, everything's great for AI and local AI and blah blah blah.

00:42:43 ◼   ► And yeah, the M5 Ultra is going to be a lot better at at

00:42:45 ◼   ► that stuff with its GPU than the M3 was.

00:42:49 ◼   ► There is a quote unquote more capable media engine.

00:42:53 ◼   ► It has dedicated hardware enabled H264 and HEVC encode to code, four ProRes encode

00:42:58 ◼   ► to code engines, hardware accelerated AV1D code only.

00:43:02 ◼   ► But John, what's up with that?

00:43:03 ◼   ► Yeah, I read that in the press release and I was trying to figure

00:43:05 ◼   ► it out.

00:43:06 ◼   ► And then I went to Apple's compare page and it was like, this is

00:43:08 ◼   ► exactly the same as the M3 Ultra.

00:43:10 ◼   ► Like they do say, like, oh, they're better or updated or improved, but like

00:43:14 ◼   ► on Apple's own compare page, they use literally the same text for the M3

00:43:18 ◼   ► Ultra's media engine and the uh M5 Ultra's media engine.

00:43:21 ◼   ► Maybe the media engines are the same, maybe they just have the same number

00:43:24 ◼   ► of components, but those components are clocked tire or are more capable.

00:43:27 ◼   ► Again, we'll find out with the benchmarks.

00:43:29 ◼   ► Then there is up to a half terabyte of RAM with 1.2 terabytes per

00:43:34 ◼   ► second memory bandwidth.

00:43:36 ◼   ► So that means you can dump all of your RAM in a second.

00:43:39 ◼   ► Is am I reading that right?

00:43:41 ◼   ► Uh I mean, sure, yeah.

00:43:43 ◼   ► But dump it where into the CPU and out of it again.

00:43:46 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

00:43:47 ◼   ► I mean, it's just the point is that you can move it so much,

00:43:49 ◼   ► you can move faster than all of the than reading.

00:43:53 ◼   ► Well, one second is enough because if it would only goes up to five

00:43:55 ◼   ► twelve gigs and it would does double that per second of memory bandwidth, yeah.

00:43:58 ◼   ► That's bananas.

00:43:59 ◼   ► Uh anyway, Apple says that it's 50% higher than before.

00:44:03 ◼   ► Uh the M3 Ultra, John, you noted in our show notes the M3 Ultra

00:44:06 ◼   ► was 819 gigs per second.

00:44:08 ◼   ► So this is roughly 32% faster by John's math.

00:44:11 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know where they're getting the 50% higher than before.

00:44:13 ◼   ► Maybe I'm doing the math wrong, maybe they are, but again, we'll see when

00:44:16 ◼   ► the benchmarks come out.

00:44:17 ◼   ► I think we are, though, before we leave this this little segment, I I

00:44:20 ◼   ► think we are kind of seeing, though, maybe why we're not getting the quad

00:44:25 ◼   ► chip that we wanted, which I guess now would be the Octo chip uh

00:44:28 ◼   ► with this new construction method.

00:44:29 ◼   ► Um, because when you look at how the CPU performance is scaling between the

00:44:35 ◼   ► max and the ultra, the M3 max to ultra, instead, you know, it didn't

00:44:40 ◼   ► get 100% faster by doubling the number of cores with that whole second chip.

00:44:43 ◼   ► It got about 58% faster on geekbench.

00:44:47 ◼   ► So if that's whatever that's representative of, you know.

00:44:49 ◼   ► So, you know, there is some losses as as you scale up.

00:44:52 ◼   ► It doesn't scale linearly with CPUs.

00:44:54 ◼   ► GPUs scale a lot better.

00:44:55 ◼   ► CPUs really don't.

00:44:57 ◼   ► Um by that math, though, with Apple's claim here that it's up to 1.3x

00:45:03 ◼   ► higher multi-threader performance, when you compare the performance of the M5 uh Max, which

00:45:08 ◼   ► we do have benchmarks for, that's actually scaling worse than the M3.

00:45:13 ◼   ► Well, how can you yeah, I think you have to do more math to

00:45:15 ◼   ► figure that out because this is this is compared to the M3 Ultra.

00:45:17 ◼   ► It's 1.2 times faster than the M3 Ultra and 1.3 times faster in multi-threaded

00:45:21 ◼   ► than from the M3 Ultra.

00:45:22 ◼   ► And then you have to go, all right.

00:45:23 ◼   ► So the M3 Ultra had 32 cores and this is 36.

00:45:26 ◼   ► I haven't done all this math to figure out.

00:45:28 ◼   ► Well, that's what I was doing when you were talking about memory bandwidth.

00:45:30 ◼   ► So instead of listening to that, I did this.

00:45:32 ◼   ► Um, so it 1.3 times the the M3 uh ultra multi-threaded performance would be

00:45:39 ◼   ► about 50,000 on Geekbench, but the same ratio scaling up from the M5 Max

00:45:44 ◼   ► would be about 55,000.

00:45:46 ◼   ► So it's actually scaling, I think, kind of significantly worse in that way than

00:45:51 ◼   ► the M3 Max did if this math is all right and if these claims

00:45:53 ◼   ► line up to what what they should.

00:45:55 ◼   ► But we'll know more with the benchmarks.

00:45:56 ◼   ► But it does seem like the ultra similar to how the ultra has always

00:46:01 ◼   ► been, the ultra really scales CPU performance fairly poorly.

00:46:06 ◼   ► And so if what you need is maximum CPU, that's it's not a very

00:46:10 ◼   ► efficient way to get that.

00:46:12 ◼   ► It's much more efficient to cover larger resources and larger GPU tasks.

00:46:17 ◼   ► But like what Apple does with the Ultra is they always say this, and

00:46:19 ◼   ► it's true.

00:46:20 ◼   ► Where else are you gonna go?

00:46:21 ◼   ► It's our fastest chip.

00:46:22 ◼   ► Like, yeah, it's not as efficient as it as you could imagine.

00:46:24 ◼   ► It doesn't scale linearly, but it's still is the fastest.

00:46:27 ◼   ► So if you want the best performance, this is what you have to buy.

00:46:30 ◼   ► And it's a shame, and I don't agree with it.

00:46:32 ◼   ► That's why I was hoping so much that this would be the year that

00:46:34 ◼   ► the ultra would not be two maxes stuck together, but it totally is.

00:46:37 ◼   ► And with all the trade-offs and compromises that brings, and Apple gets away with

00:46:41 ◼   ► it because it still is their fastest chip.

00:46:44 ◼   ► It is faster than their previous fastest chip.

00:46:46 ◼   ► And if you want the most performance, this is the thing that gives it

00:46:48 ◼   ► to you.

00:46:49 ◼   ► So tough luck.

00:46:50 ◼   ► High yield has another diagram uh this time with a visual explanation of how

00:46:55 ◼   ► the M5 Ultra is designed.

00:46:56 ◼   ► Uh, we will put a link to that in the show notes for you

00:46:59 ◼   ► to check out.

00:46:59 ◼   ► I don't know if this is based on knowledge, but it shows basically the

00:47:01 ◼   ► GPU sides touching each other.

00:47:03 ◼   ► So you got a CPU die and a GPU die on your max, and

00:47:06 ◼   ► you take the two maxes and you stick them together, and it seems like

00:47:08 ◼   ► the GPU side is the side that's touching with the silicon interposer.

00:47:12 ◼   ► Presumably this is known because you could look at the interposer on the maxes

00:47:14 ◼   ► or something, but anyway, that's this is the only diagram I saw of this,

00:47:17 ◼   ► so I included it.

00:47:18 ◼   ► All right, the Macs.

00:47:19 ◼   ► Uh both will ship with macOS 27 Golden Gate, as you would expect.

00:47:23 ◼   ► As you would expect, maybe not, because that OS is not done yet.

00:47:25 ◼   ► So now that puts a timeline on all this stuff.

00:47:27 ◼   ► It's like they're gonna ship with a with a beta OS.

00:47:30 ◼   ► No, they're gonna ship with the release version of the OS, which means Apple

00:47:33 ◼   ► has to finalize the release version of the OS in time to stick it

00:47:36 ◼   ► on these computers in time to stick them in boxes in time for them

00:47:38 ◼   ► to be sale on their for sale date, which we'll get to in a

00:47:40 ◼   ► little bit.

00:47:41 ◼   ► So this puts a line in the sand and says, hey, Mac OS Golden

00:47:44 ◼   ► Gate, it's shipping soon.

00:47:46 ◼   ► All right, so they will have or the Mac Mini will have the M6

00:47:50 ◼   ► or the M5 Pro.

00:47:52 ◼   ► In the M6, you can get uh with regards to RAM 16, 24, 32

00:47:56 ◼   ► gigs, or with the M5 Pro, you can get 2448 or 64 gigs.

00:48:00 ◼   ► Storage for the M6, 256, 512, 1TB, 2TB for the M5 Pro 512, 124,

00:48:07 ◼   ► and 8 terabytes.

00:48:09 ◼   ► I mean, as you go through these, you can see the strangeness that Apple

00:48:12 ◼   ► has brought on themselves, which is the one with the higher number after the

00:48:15 ◼   ► M is the low end Mac Mini.

00:48:17 ◼   ► It's the M6 and the M5 Pro.

00:48:20 ◼   ► But the M5 Pro is the more capable, more powerful, more expensive, has more

00:48:24 ◼   ► RAM, has more uh storage.

00:48:26 ◼   ► The M5 Pro is the quote unquote good Mac Mini, but it doesn't have

00:48:30 ◼   ► the double neural engines and the other, you know, differences we just talked about.

00:48:35 ◼   ► So there may be some benchmarks I can imagine that might actually run faster

00:48:38 ◼   ► on an M6 than on M5 Pro if they take advantage of the neural

00:48:41 ◼   ► engines.

00:48:41 ◼   ► That'll be interesting to see the benchmarks as well.

00:48:43 ◼   ► But yeah, the M5 Pro is the fancy, good, expensive, more capable Mac Mini,

00:48:49 ◼   ► even though it's got a five after the M instead of a six.

00:48:52 ◼   ► With regard to connectivity, both have the Apple N1, which is Wi Fi 7

00:48:55 ◼   ► Bluetooth 6.

00:48:56 ◼   ► They both have two and a half gig Ethernet, but 10 gig is available.

00:48:59 ◼   ► Two USB 3 front ports, uh, then the M6 has three Thunderbolt 4 back

00:49:06 ◼   ► ports.

00:49:06 ◼   ► The M5 Pro is three Thunderbolt 5 back ports.

00:49:09 ◼   ► This is usually the case with the NoSuffix M chips, they don't get as

00:49:12 ◼   ► much like PCI E lanes or whatever, so they have you know lesser Thunderbolt

00:49:16 ◼   ► capabilities, and so you get an M6 with Thunderbolt 4, but an M5 Pro

00:49:21 ◼   ► with Thunderbolt 5.

00:49:22 ◼   ► Uh that's the way it shakes out.

00:49:25 ◼   ► Yep, which means that my if I get more base model Mac minis with

00:49:28 ◼   ► the M6, I still can't do that thing where they cluster together to run

00:49:31 ◼   ► big LLMs.

00:49:32 ◼   ► Yeah, they want you to get a studio for that.

00:49:34 ◼   ► Or an M5 Pro version, which I which can also work, yeah.

00:49:38 ◼   ► Uh with regard to video, Tim Hardwick had a really good summary over at

00:49:41 ◼   ► Mac Rumors.

00:49:42 ◼   ► The M6 Mini can run two displays at up to six K60 or 4K

00:49:46 ◼   ► 165 Hertz, up from 144 Hertz in the M4, plus a third display at

00:49:51 ◼   ► up to 5K 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt or 4K 60 Hertz over HDMI.

00:49:56 ◼   ► The M5 Pro can run all three displays at up to 6K60 or 4K

00:50:00 ◼   ► 165, which is up from 144 again.

00:50:03 ◼   ► In a two-monitor setup, the M5 Pro model's second screen now supports 5K120 or

00:50:08 ◼   ► 4K200, whereas the M4 Pro supports 6K60 or 4K 144.

00:50:14 ◼   ► The M5 Pro Mini supports all three displays through one Thunderbolt port, while the

00:50:18 ◼   ► M6 supports two per port.

00:50:21 ◼   ► Uh single display support is unchanged.

00:50:23 ◼   ► Both M6 and M5 Pro support AK60, 5K120, or 4K240.

00:50:27 ◼   ► I like that Apple continues to push this.

00:50:29 ◼   ► Like, oh, we did one uh 44 Hertz last time.

00:50:31 ◼   ► Now we're up to 165.

00:50:32 ◼   ► Yeah, keep going.

00:50:33 ◼   ► But Apple sells nothing to help them.

00:50:35 ◼   ► Like they they are not Apple is not selling 240 Hertz displays, 200 Hertz

00:50:41 ◼   ► of sprays, 165 Hertz displays, one they don't sell any of that at any

00:50:44 ◼   ► price.

00:50:45 ◼   ► Other people do, and you can connect them to your Macs, but it's fascinating

00:50:48 ◼   ► that like the people who work on the video on Macs on the video

00:50:50 ◼   ► drivers and the video hardware are just like pushing as much as they can,

00:50:54 ◼   ► increasing the specs, you know.

00:50:55 ◼   ► And these are again these are these aren't minis.

00:50:56 ◼   ► This is not a video powerhouse, but like they keep increasing the numbers, meanwhile,

00:51:00 ◼   ► the team that makes the displays is like 60 hertz is probably fine for

00:50:59 ◼   ► everybody.

00:51:04 ◼   ► All right, if you have 3,000, you can get 120.

00:51:08 ◼   ► 3500.

00:51:09 ◼   ► I forget how much that one costs.

00:51:10 ◼   ► It's so much.

00:51:11 ◼   ► Uh luckily the rest of the monitor market exists.

00:51:14 ◼   ► With regard to pricing, the M6 starts at 900 bucks, which is 200 more

00:51:18 ◼   ► than the M4 Mac Mini.

00:51:20 ◼   ► The M5 Pro starts at $1,700, which is $200 more than the M4 Mac

00:51:25 ◼   ► Mini.

00:51:26 ◼   ► And uh there's some people have done some science and mathematics with regard to

00:51:30 ◼   ► the quote unquote best config uh available for pre-order.

00:51:33 ◼   ► Uh the M5 Pro, 64 gigs RAM, eight terabyte SSD, $6,800.

00:51:37 ◼   ► There's also a chart uh with pricing.

00:51:40 ◼   ► Just pause that for a second.

00:51:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:42 ◼   ► A six thousand eight hundred dollar Mac Mini.

00:51:44 ◼   ► What's what are we doing here?

00:51:46 ◼   ► Like I mean, I could figure out some things to do with it.

00:51:48 ◼   ► The Ramageddon is really just like distorting products beyond all reason.

00:51:54 ◼   ► Because like in the old days when you know when RAM and storage were

00:51:57 ◼   ► not inflated by uh multiple times their normal price, the Mac mini kind of

00:52:03 ◼   ► stayed within a Mac mini-ish range, no matter how you spec'd it, because like

00:52:07 ◼   ► they were just they would confine the options, right?

00:52:09 ◼   ► And you couldn't make a Mac mini that expensive, but now it's like I'm

00:52:12 ◼   ► sorry, if just you know, as you add RAM and uh storage, it very

00:52:17 ◼   ► quickly just dwarfs everything else that has to do with this product, and the

00:52:20 ◼   ► prices become ridiculous.

00:52:22 ◼   ► Yeah, and and as usual with the Mac mini, uh the base model has

00:52:26 ◼   ► always been by far the best value.

00:52:30 ◼   ► And as you try to scale things up, like you very quickly explode the

00:52:35 ◼   ► price of that computer into something way larger than the than the initial price

00:52:39 ◼   ► uh suggests that it's like in the class of.

00:52:42 ◼   ► Um, but I mean that this is why I own a very large number

00:52:45 ◼   ► of base model Mac minis, and almost none.

00:52:44 ◼   ► I I think oh, I have one.

00:52:49 ◼   ► My one that I use as like my archive uh server in my house

00:52:53 ◼   ► has like the 512 SSD.

00:52:56 ◼   ► And that's it.

00:52:56 ◼   ► Like I have only base models because the base model is a great value

00:53:01 ◼   ► compared to everything else.

00:53:02 ◼   ► And you spec it up at all, and that starts quickly becoming less of

00:53:05 ◼   ► a good value.

00:53:06 ◼   ► Uh 95 Mac also has a really great uh chart of pricing history, which

00:53:11 ◼   ► is worth checking out.

00:53:12 ◼   ► And then John, you took the liberty of doing inflation adjusted versions of that

00:53:15 ◼   ► same chart.

00:53:16 ◼   ► Uh again, both of these will be in the show notes.

00:53:18 ◼   ► Yeah, so the like the pricing on the Mac Mini, it's started at 499,

00:53:22 ◼   ► which is the lowest that it's ever been, but that was back in 2014,

00:53:25 ◼   ► right?

00:53:25 ◼   ► And the the chart just showing the number shows it goes up and then

00:53:28 ◼   ► down and then it goes back up again, and you're like, wow, it's the

00:53:30 ◼   ► highest that has ever been, or the base model being 899.

00:53:33 ◼   ► And it makes sense, you know, the RAM crisis, storage, blah, blah, blah.

00:53:36 ◼   ► The highest it's ever been.

00:53:37 ◼   ► And that's why I was interested in doing an inflation adjusted one.

00:53:39 ◼   ► Inflation adjusted shows that no, the 2018 model was the highest that it's ever

00:53:43 ◼   ► been.

00:53:43 ◼   ► Inflation adjusted, the 2018 base model is 1,076.

00:53:48 ◼   ► And uh, yeah, that's that's higher than the current 899.

00:53:51 ◼   ► But yeah, it has gone up and down.

00:53:53 ◼   ► The the the lowest price ever base model is 712 in today's dollar.

00:53:57 ◼   ► So the actual lowest one is a 2024 model and inflation adjusted at 650.

00:54:02 ◼   ► Um, so I mean, that's change that's kind of the changing face of what

00:54:05 ◼   ► the Mac Mini is and how much it costs to field any kind of

00:54:08 ◼   ► computer with any kind of chip, especially Intel chips in it.

00:54:11 ◼   ► But um, yeah, the base model is still trying to be a good deal,

00:54:15 ◼   ► but just everything is every every uh reasonable uh concept of pricing is thrown

00:54:21 ◼   ► out the window because RAM and storage are the only thing that matters anymore

00:54:24 ◼   ► in terms of pricing.

00:54:25 ◼   ► Then uh this Mac Mini is not available for lease uh through Apple Upgrade.

00:54:30 ◼   ► Is that right?

00:54:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I checked.

00:54:29 ◼   ► I saw people saying that I went to the Apple upgrade page, and there's

00:54:29 ◼   ► no Mac minis there.

00:54:36 ◼   ► So I don't know why they're not again, it can go up to like

00:54:38 ◼   ► $7,000, but nope, can't lease it.

00:54:40 ◼   ► That could be a yet thing.

00:54:43 ◼   ► Maybe.

00:54:43 ◼   ► I mean, I checked a couple times today.

00:54:44 ◼   ► Maybe by the time you hear this episode, it'll be on there, but it

00:54:47 ◼   ► wasn't when I checked.

00:54:48 ◼   ► You can pre-order right now as we record this.

00:54:50 ◼   ► Uh uh you could pre-order that same day when it was announced.

00:54:54 ◼   ► Uh they arrive starting on September 22.

00:54:56 ◼   ► So there you go.

00:54:57 ◼   ► Uh MagOS 27 Golden Gate.

00:55:00 ◼   ► I'm assuming it will be uh released to the general public by September 22nd.

00:55:05 ◼   ► If not, people who get uh Apple hardware uh with a golden gate on

00:55:09 ◼   ► it are going to have their own private copy of Golden Gate that nobody

00:55:13 ◼   ► else has and nobody else can get.

00:55:15 ◼   ► Uh so I would imagine, yeah, that's that's their deadline.

00:55:18 ◼   ► You know, assuming people get their hardware on day one, which is September 22nd,

00:55:21 ◼   ► uh Golden Gate should be released to the public by then.

00:55:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm guessing we'll learn to the public probably on September 18th or somewhere

00:55:27 ◼   ► around there.

00:55:28 ◼   ► Because you know, we have, as we mentioned, like the iPhone event is September

00:55:31 ◼   ► 9th, and usually they give us yeah, maybe about a week between the iPhone

00:55:35 ◼   ► event and the OS releases.

00:55:36 ◼   ► So I'm guessing, yeah, sometime around September 18th, probably for Golden Gate and all

00:55:40 ◼   ► the 27 releases.

00:55:42 ◼   ► All right, with regard to pricing, uh the CPU for the new Mac minis.

00:55:47 ◼   ► This is over if you want to get the M5 Pro instead of the

00:55:50 ◼   ► M6, that's adding $800 for the binned one or a thousand dollars for the

00:55:54 ◼   ► unbinned one.

00:55:55 ◼   ► That's a difference of 20 bucks over the M4 Pro.

00:55:59 ◼   ► RAM, 24 gigs is plus $200.

00:56:02 ◼   ► Uh 400, excuse me, 32 gigs is plus $400, $48 gigs is plus six

00:56:07 ◼   ► hundred dollars.

00:56:08 ◼   ► Uh that one is sixty dollars more than it was for the M4 Pro.

00:56:11 ◼   ► And so those other ones you're reading, like those offsets.

00:56:13 ◼   ► Apple did, I think, a good job of cranking the prices on the previous

00:56:17 ◼   ► model so that now we get the new ones, and it's like, well, the

00:56:19 ◼   ► upgrades are ridiculous, but they're they're almost the same as they were in the

00:56:23 ◼   ► previous one.

00:56:24 ◼   ► Like that you'll see this in a lot of the pricing comparisons.

00:56:27 ◼   ► It's $20 more expensive than the upgrade was to the Pro chip before.

00:56:32 ◼   ► $20?

00:56:33 ◼   ► What?

00:56:33 ◼   ► And this is $60.

00:56:34 ◼   ► You can see Apple, like Apple likes round numbers, but they're they're also trying

00:56:39 ◼   ► to like hold the line on these increases.

00:56:41 ◼   ► So again, it's not increasing by you know $47 or something, but $60 and

00:56:46 ◼   ► $20 are weird increases.

00:56:48 ◼   ► And it's only the $48 gig upgrade that is $60 more expensive than it

00:56:52 ◼   ► used to be.

00:56:53 ◼   ► Um but yeah, it's it's like I I see that and I see like

00:56:57 ◼   ► Apple's pricing wizards struggling to try to like because I think their plan was

00:57:02 ◼   ► hey, we'll we'll increase the prices on everything.

00:57:04 ◼   ► And then when the new models come out, we don't have to increase them

00:57:06 ◼   ► again because we already did it.

00:57:07 ◼   ► That's not true of the phones, by the way.

00:57:09 ◼   ► But but for the Macs, they did they did increase all the prices.

00:57:11 ◼   ► But it turns out they couldn't actually hold the line.

00:57:13 ◼   ► And for some of like the larger RAM configuration, they're like, no, actually, we

00:57:17 ◼   ► undershot a little bit.

00:57:18 ◼   ► RAM prices still go up.

00:57:19 ◼   ► We have to be $60 more expensive than that upgrade used to be.

00:57:22 ◼   ► Uh with regard to storage for the M6, uh, over the base 256 gigs,

00:57:28 ◼   ► it's $200 for a half gigabyte, excuse me, half terabyte, $500 for a terabyte,

00:57:33 ◼   ► which is $30 more than it was for the M4, and a thousand dollars

00:57:37 ◼   ► for two terabytes, which is eighty dollars more over the M4.

00:57:40 ◼   ► For the M5 Pro, this is over the base five, 12 gigs, a terabyte

00:57:45 ◼   ► is 300, 2 terabytes is 800, 4 terabytes is 1800 and eight terabytes.

00:57:49 ◼   ► If you're a fool and did that last time when you bought a computer,

00:57:53 ◼   ► that is now three thousand eight hundred dollars, which is three hundred and eighty

00:57:57 ◼   ► dollars more than the M4.

00:57:58 ◼   ► Yeah, and look at these deltas.

00:58:00 ◼   ► $30, $80, $180, and $380.

00:58:02 ◼   ► This is some weird numbers.

00:57:59 ◼   ► Some weird increases.

00:58:05 ◼   ► But like that's that's what the that's what the market will bear at this

00:58:08 ◼   ► point.

00:58:08 ◼   ► They would have liked to have kept these increases the same as they were

00:58:11 ◼   ► before, but they couldn't.

00:58:12 ◼   ► And you know, again, eight terabytes, it's gonna be $380 more than it used

00:58:15 ◼   ► to be for a nice round $3,800 added to the price of your Mac

00:58:19 ◼   ► Mini.

00:58:20 ◼   ► And to be fair, eight terabyte SSDs from Apple have always been absurdly expensive.

00:58:25 ◼   ► This is more expensive than I think they have been, but yes, it is.

00:58:30 ◼   ► But not by like, I mean, what's the I mean it's fine.

00:58:32 ◼   ► I think it used to be $2,400, wasn't eight terabytes.

00:58:34 ◼   ► I forget what it was, but here's the thing.

00:58:35 ◼   ► Or maybe maybe $3,000.

00:58:37 ◼   ► I mean, I think I think when they first were introduced, they were probably

00:58:40 ◼   ► actually near this price, but uh they've always been like multiple thousands of dollars.

00:58:44 ◼   ► So this is more than they were, but it's not we're not talking 10

00:58:49 ◼   ► times more.

00:58:49 ◼   ► We're not, you know, we're not talking that level of a difference here.

00:58:52 ◼   ► Well, well, when this was first happening, everybody's RAM prices and storage prices were

00:58:55 ◼   ► going up, but Apples weren't yet because they hadn't done their their price increase.

00:58:58 ◼   ► It was like, hey, Apple's prices are starting to seem reasonable, but Apple fixed

00:59:02 ◼   ► that.

00:59:03 ◼   ► All right.

00:59:04 ◼   ► With regards to Ethernet, you can get 10 gigabit for 100 bucks, which is

00:59:07 ◼   ► uh 10 bucks more than it used to be.

00:59:09 ◼   ► Uh with with regard to Mac mini pricing, Gruber writes if you configure an

00:59:13 ◼   ► M6 Mac mini with two terabytes of storage, the SSD upgrade alone, which is

00:59:16 ◼   ► a thousand bucks, costs more than the entire base model computer, which is 900

00:59:21 ◼   ► bucks.

00:59:22 ◼   ► So too, with the four terabyte SSD upgrade for the M5 Pro Mini, which

00:59:26 ◼   ► is an eighteen hundred dollar upgrade for $1,700 computer.

00:59:29 ◼   ► Cool.

00:59:30 ◼   ► Just because you want more storage, you're like, oh, the price will go up

00:59:32 ◼   ► a little bit if I add storage.

00:59:33 ◼   ► And now it's like if you s touch that storage tier thing in the

00:59:36 ◼   ► configurator, you double the price of your computer as soon as you touch it.

00:59:39 ◼   ► Don't do it.

00:59:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:59:41 ◼   ► Uh there's also a new Mac mini ad, which is like the stop motion

00:59:44 ◼   ► thing, which is very cute and very cool.

00:59:45 ◼   ► Um, there's also a behind the scenes uh Instagram reel reel, which you should

00:59:49 ◼   ► check out.

00:59:44 ◼   ► Uh good stuff.

00:59:51 ◼   ► I really enjoyed those.

00:59:52 ◼   ► All right, Mac Studio.

00:59:53 ◼   ► Maybe this will be John's future computer.

00:59:55 ◼   ► The SOC is an M5 Max or M5 Ultra that with regard to RAM,

00:59:59 ◼   ► the M5 Max comes in 364864 or 128 gigs with different CPUs uh for

01:00:05 ◼   ► the 4864128 that requires the big boy CPU.

01:00:09 ◼   ► M5 Ultra has 96 gigs, 256.5, 12 gigs, uh if you have the M5

01:00:14 ◼   ► Ultra with the 80 core GPU.

01:00:17 ◼   ► Additionally, a five twelve the five 12 gig memory option for the M5 Ultra

01:00:21 ◼   ► is coming in late October for reasons.

01:00:24 ◼   ► Well, yeah, it's not available in the configurator now.

01:00:26 ◼   ► You can't even see how much it's gonna cost.

01:00:28 ◼   ► The answer is more than you want to pay.

01:00:30 ◼   ► Exactly, right.

01:00:31 ◼   ► If you have to ask, it's too much.

01:00:32 ◼   ► Yeah, and they and so this is when I was doing this price comparisons,

01:00:35 ◼   ► like obviously the like the Mac Studio, the configurations that you could get the

01:00:39 ◼   ► Mac Studio in have just been disappearing over the past month or two, right?

01:00:43 ◼   ► And when I went to do the comparison, it was like there was nothing

01:00:46 ◼   ► left of the M4 uh based Mac Studio.

01:00:48 ◼   ► It's like you get like one RAM configuration per CPU and that's it.

01:00:51 ◼   ► And the M5 model has uh increased your options again, but you're still constrained.

01:00:56 ◼   ► So if you want the binned M5 Max, which is like the one with

01:00:59 ◼   ► uh 32 core GPU, you get one RAM choice and that's it.

01:01:03 ◼   ► The second you want any more RAM, you just got to go with the

01:01:06 ◼   ► unbind one, which increases the price a lot.

01:01:07 ◼   ► So a lot of people have been tripped up by this.

01:01:09 ◼   ► Gruber had a poster where he's like, oh, I my math on the the

01:01:11 ◼   ► pricing was wrong because it says, oh, add $300 for this CPU choice.

01:01:14 ◼   ► Oh, I should do that.

01:01:15 ◼   ► That that's a good deal.

01:01:15 ◼   ► But as soon as you touch that option, it's like, well, a bunch of

01:01:18 ◼   ► other stuff is changing too.

01:01:19 ◼   ► Uh you can't have the binned one uh thing anymore.

01:01:21 ◼   ► And yeah, anyway.

01:01:22 ◼   ► Um, but there are more, all I'm saying is there are more options than

01:01:25 ◼   ► there used to be, but there's still not as many options as there was

01:01:27 ◼   ► back in the day when RAM and storage wasn't messed up.

01:01:30 ◼   ► But it is a relief from the the end of the M4 days, which

01:01:29 ◼   ► is like you got choices of like two computers, and that was it.

01:01:36 ◼   ► With storage, M5 Max gets five 12 gigs, one, two, four, or eight terabytes.

01:01:41 ◼   ► The M5 Ultra gets one, two, four, eight, or even sixteen terabytes.

01:01:45 ◼   ► I it I shudder to think about how much 16 terabytes will cost.

01:01:48 ◼   ► We'll find out in a little bit, but yes, the answer is too much.

01:01:51 ◼   ► All right, connectivity, Thunderbolt 5 in RDMA, which is remote direct memory access.

01:01:55 ◼   ► That's the thing where you can chain them together, right?

01:01:57 ◼   ► To make like uh put a big stack of Mac Studios and connect them

01:02:01 ◼   ► together so they can run a model bigger than any single one of them

01:02:03 ◼   ► could run.

01:02:03 ◼   ► It works on Thunderbolt 5.

01:02:05 ◼   ► That's what you can do with your Mac Studios if you have a lot

01:02:07 ◼   ► of money.

01:02:09 ◼   ► The next generation SSD architecture is built on PCI Egen 6, according to Apple.

01:02:14 ◼   ► Apple's N1, as we said, Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth 6.

01:02:17 ◼   ► These are the first time this and the mini are the first time these

01:02:19 ◼   ► have come into Mac.

01:02:20 ◼   ► Uh, up to eight displays or up to four studio display XDRs at who

01:02:25 ◼   ► who even cares about those anymore.

01:02:26 ◼   ► Anyway, at full 5k resolution and 120 hertz.

01:02:30 ◼   ► Actually, by the way, on that topic, oh no.

01:02:32 ◼   ► On on one of my XDRs, I actually don't even know which one it

01:02:35 ◼   ► is, whether it's the the land the uh mainland John one or the Beach

01:02:39 ◼   ► one, but um I'm still paying for the annual Apple care renewal because I

01:02:43 ◼   ► have it like on the annual you should.

01:02:45 ◼   ► I wish I had not let mine lapse.

01:02:47 ◼   ► It's like 180 bucks a year.

01:02:49 ◼   ► I'm like, and I'm wondering like what happens if it breaks.

01:02:52 ◼   ► Like, do they give me a new one somehow?

01:02:54 ◼   ► I bet they have parts.

01:02:56 ◼   ► Maybe like I I'm just I'm gonna keep paying it as long as I

01:03:00 ◼   ► can.

01:03:00 ◼   ► Like, how long will they let it go?

01:03:02 ◼   ► I I have no idea.

01:03:03 ◼   ► Yeah, I I really wish I was still paying for that, but I'm I

01:03:06 ◼   ► let it lapse, totally forgot about it, and now I'm just living in fear.

01:03:10 ◼   ► Great.

01:03:11 ◼   ► Uh, let's see.

01:03:12 ◼   ► This also supports Genlock over USB C for precise synchronization between a display and

01:03:16 ◼   ► a professional camera capture like the iPhone 17 Pro.

01:03:14 ◼   ► I think the Mini does too.

01:03:20 ◼   ► I think Genlock might have done beyond both models, but yeah, this is not

01:03:23 ◼   ► a feature that I'm interested in, but they're touting it on their new Macs.

01:03:26 ◼   ► Quote from Apple Some it's simultaneously, play up to 33 streams of 8K Pro

01:03:31 ◼   ► Res 422 at 30 frames per second on M5 Ultra, which is cool.

01:03:36 ◼   ► Pricing the M5 Max starts at 2500 bucks, which is 200 more than the

01:03:41 ◼   ► M4 Max.

01:03:42 ◼   ► The M5 Ultra starts at $5,500, which is $600 more than the M3 Ultra

01:03:48 ◼   ► Max Studio.

01:03:49 ◼   ► Uh lease pricing, M5 Max starts at $49 a month.

01:03:53 ◼   ► M5 Ultra starts at $110 a month.

01:03:56 ◼   ► The quote unquote best config available for pre-order.

01:03:59 ◼   ► Everyone better sit down.

01:04:06 ◼   ► The just eminently affordable $18,300.

01:04:12 ◼   ► Holy balls.

01:04:13 ◼   ► That is an expensive computer.

01:04:15 ◼   ► I do wonder, I mean, we're not aware of these prices because we don't

01:04:18 ◼   ► shop for these things.

01:04:18 ◼   ► And two of us don't.

01:04:20 ◼   ► No, no, not these prices.

01:04:21 ◼   ► The prices about to say like the the prices that uh people pay for

01:04:25 ◼   ► like the big giant cost as much as the car NVIDIA things that run

01:04:30 ◼   ► LM training and inference, you know, those things, those have always been tens of

01:04:33 ◼   ► thousands of dollars.

01:04:35 ◼   ► But I'm assuming those have also increased.

01:04:37 ◼   ► I mean, I don't I don't know how it works, but like the whole

01:04:38 ◼   ► reason the RAM crisis is there is because they bought up all the RAM

01:04:41 ◼   ► for those, so maybe those prices are steady.

01:04:42 ◼   ► But anyway, when I see like an $18,020 M5 Ultra config and it's only

01:04:47 ◼   ► got $256 gigs of RAM, I'm like, well, if I have $20,000 and I

01:04:50 ◼   ► want to do LLM stuff, why don't I buy like one of those rack

01:04:53 ◼   ► mount LVD NVIDIA things that has way more RAM and is way more powerful,

01:04:57 ◼   ► and then that's like $30,000.

01:04:58 ◼   ► Maybe you're getting more bang like if that's what you care about.

01:05:01 ◼   ► If running obviously, like they don't run Mac OS, like you can't use them

01:04:59 ◼   ► as your desktop computer, so I get it.

01:05:06 ◼   ► But if these prices, once you start saying $18,000 for $246 gigs of RAM

01:05:12 ◼   ► and 16 terabyte SSD, which is probably you know the main thing is inflating

01:05:15 ◼   ► this price, it's like that's not that great a deal if you just care

01:05:18 ◼   ► about AI stuff.

01:05:19 ◼   ► You're and you know, to like to Marco's point earlier, you're probably better off

01:05:22 ◼   ► getting some lesser uh M5 something Mac Studios and connecting them together with that

01:05:26 ◼   ► RDMA thing than buying the one big Honkin one.

01:05:28 ◼   ► But if you want to, Apple will sell it to you for almost 20,000.

01:05:31 ◼   ► Your pre-order now uh arrives September 22nd.

01:05:35 ◼   ► Grober has some comments here as well.

01:05:37 ◼   ► It kind of stinks that there are no RAM options for the studio between

01:05:40 ◼   ► the 96 gig base and the $4,000 256 gig upgrade.

01:05:45 ◼   ► Jesus.

01:05:46 ◼   ► I mean, 96 gigs is basically enough for anybody who's using it as a

01:05:49 ◼   ► desktop computer, but if you want to use it for AI stuff, that extra

01:05:52 ◼   ► RAM really pays, and yeah, you jump from 96.

01:05:55 ◼   ► Next choice in the little configurator is add $4,000 to go up to 256.

01:06:00 ◼   ► Which again, 256 gigs of RAM used to not be that obscene.

01:06:04 ◼   ► Like the computer I'm sitting next to in theory supports 1.5 terabytes of RAM.

01:06:08 ◼   ► Obviously, uh a lot slower than the RAM that they're talking about here, but

01:06:12 ◼   ► still, if just you know, we're I hate going backwards.

01:06:15 ◼   ► I hate having things that are the numbers are lower than they used to

01:06:19 ◼   ► be, even if again it's not the same kind of RAM.

01:06:21 ◼   ► And the prices are way higher, so that's not great.

01:06:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I recently was looking uh like I was looking earlier, like, I wonder,

01:06:27 ◼   ► could I with my next purchase, could I fit comfortably into 96 without noticing

01:06:31 ◼   ► a degradation of performance?

01:06:33 ◼   ► Because I currently have 128 because when I bought this, you know, M3 Max

01:06:37 ◼   ► MacBook Pro, whatever it was three years ago, like 128 at that time was

01:06:42 ◼   ► a lot, but it wasn't like obscene.

01:06:44 ◼   ► It was like just, oh, that's a that's like a high-end desktop.

01:06:47 ◼   ► Um, and I currently use about 92 gigs most of the time.

01:06:52 ◼   ► So it's like, well, I can I can fit into 96.

01:06:54 ◼   ► Like I it would it would still feel like annoyingly like a downgrade, though.

01:06:59 ◼   ► So I I just uh what a what a shame to have to buy

01:07:02 ◼   ► a computer in this day and age, John.

01:07:04 ◼   ► Yep, it must really suck.

01:07:06 ◼   ► Uh then before we move on, there's a new Mac Studio ad, which I

01:07:10 ◼   ► actually kind of liked.

01:07:11 ◼   ► Um, and they do a lot of like play with the the words on

01:07:15 ◼   ► the screen.

01:07:16 ◼   ► It's a brief ad, and I think you should check it out.

01:07:18 ◼   ► Not as fun as the Mac mini one, but still not bad.

01:07:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that Mac mini mat is really fun and interesting.

01:07:23 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know how how well it sells the computer or even

01:07:26 ◼   ► relates to the computer, but it's a cool looking short piece of animation.

01:07:32 ◼   ► Uh do we want to save your trip down the configurator for overtime?

01:07:36 ◼   ► No.

01:07:36 ◼   ► I'm kidding.

01:07:37 ◼   ► I'm kidding.

01:07:38 ◼   ► I'm kidding.

01:07:38 ◼   ► Yeah, most of our listeners don't care about this, right?

01:07:41 ◼   ► Right.

01:07:41 ◼   ► I'm so tempted to legitimately do that, but I'm not that evil.

01:07:44 ◼   ► Uh so John, all right.

01:07:46 ◼   ► Uh you can handle this however you choose.

01:07:48 ◼   ► I know I speak for me and probably Marco to say I am dying

01:07:50 ◼   ► to know if you've pre-ordered anything.

01:07:52 ◼   ► Um I I did ask you to walk us through your thought process with

01:07:57 ◼   ► regard to configurations.

01:07:58 ◼   ► If you want to jump to the end and tell us what you've done,

01:08:00 ◼   ► or if you want to walk through Wait, wait, wait, before he does, Casey,

01:08:03 ◼   ► do you want to take bets on what he did, if anything, and what

01:08:06 ◼   ► and you know the specifics of that?

01:08:07 ◼   ► Oh I I do, I do, but I'm not prepared to answer this question,

01:08:11 ◼   ► so I'm gonna have to walk through the configurator real, real fast.

01:08:14 ◼   ► Hold on.

01:08:14 ◼   ► Let's do it together.

01:08:15 ◼   ► Okay.

01:08:15 ◼   ► So first of all, I I'm gonna bet that he did place an order

01:08:20 ◼   ► today.

01:08:20 ◼   ► Or at least, hmm.

01:08:22 ◼   ► He probably okay so indecisive.

01:08:24 ◼   ► He's going to buy this Mac Studio, but he probably wants to wait until

01:08:29 ◼   ► somebody gives him some kind of like insider discount.

01:08:31 ◼   ► And that might not be available yet this second.

01:08:29 ◼   ► That might that might take like a week or two or something.

01:08:36 ◼   ► I'm guessing though, he has decided he will buy this, and he has decided

01:08:39 ◼   ► what configuration he will buy.

01:08:42 ◼   ► So let's step through this the configurator now together.

01:08:45 ◼   ► Um I think M5 Max, not M5 Ultra.

01:08:50 ◼   ► Oh, I disagree.

01:08:51 ◼   ► He'll absolutely go for the M5 Ultra.

01:08:52 ◼   ► Really?

01:08:53 ◼   ► Well, let's let's see.

01:08:54 ◼   ► Before we get there, let's see, because like maybe some of his storage options

01:08:56 ◼   ► might require it.

01:08:57 ◼   ► Okay, so I'm gonna say memory.

01:09:00 ◼   ► I'm gonna say he probably won't wait on John.

01:09:03 ◼   ► How much memory is in your Mac Pro?

01:09:04 ◼   ► Are you clicking?

01:09:05 ◼   ► You should both be clicking on the options because as Marco said, the stupid

01:09:07 ◼   ► configurator changes stuff all the time.

01:09:09 ◼   ► It throws up oh, you want to change that?

01:09:11 ◼   ► Well, you gotta change these.

01:09:12 ◼   ► It's exactly like buying a car.

01:09:13 ◼   ► Yeah, you need the premium package now.

01:09:15 ◼   ► Um my Mac Pro has 96 gigs of RAM.

01:09:18 ◼   ► Yeah, so I'm I'm gonna say he went either 96 or 128.

01:09:22 ◼   ► Let me see.

01:09:23 ◼   ► Well, there is no 128.

01:09:24 ◼   ► There is 128 on the max chip, not on the ultra.

01:09:27 ◼   ► Okay.

01:09:28 ◼   ► Uh so I'm gonna say he went 128 max.

01:09:31 ◼   ► I disagree.

01:09:32 ◼   ► I think he's going 256 uh ultra.

01:09:35 ◼   ► What are you clicking on the you clicked max, but then you have to

01:09:38 ◼   ► pick.

01:09:38 ◼   ► I hate this.

01:09:39 ◼   ► You have to pick options before the other one's like ungray.

01:09:41 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:09:41 ◼   ► Which did you click?

01:09:42 ◼   ► Did you click on the bind or unbind max?

01:09:44 ◼   ► I I click I think I just clicked unbid because I think unbind is

01:09:46 ◼   ► required to hit 96 or to hit 128.

01:09:49 ◼   ► See, if he goes, the problem is if he goes, let's see, if he

01:09:53 ◼   ► wants 96, he has to get the ultra.

01:09:56 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:09:57 ◼   ► I'm telling you, he's going ultra and it's unjust.

01:10:00 ◼   ► Just like cars, man.

01:10:01 ◼   ► You need the you need the leather package and the all-weather package if you

01:10:03 ◼   ► want the heated mirrors, but if you want the heated steering wheel, you can't

01:10:05 ◼   ► get the sunroof.

01:10:06 ◼   ► No, you're exactly right.

01:10:07 ◼   ► All right, so Casey, you're so you're you're betting ultra unbend with 256 gigs.

01:10:13 ◼   ► Okay.

01:10:14 ◼   ► And eight terabytes.

01:10:15 ◼   ► That's my vote.

01:10:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I think the eight terabytes is probably a given.

01:10:14 ◼   ► Um, either way.

01:10:20 ◼   ► So you're gonna go, you're going ultra unbend.

01:10:24 ◼   ► I already lost track.

01:10:26 ◼   ► 256.

01:10:27 ◼   ► 8 terabyte.

01:10:28 ◼   ► What's your total on that?

01:10:29 ◼   ► Wait, wait, wait.

01:10:30 ◼   ► What about trade in?

01:10:31 ◼   ► Are you clicking the trade-ins thing?

01:10:32 ◼   ► Uh we're we're gonna skip that for now.

01:10:34 ◼   ► Well, you can't skip that.

01:10:35 ◼   ► That's an essential part of the thing.

01:10:36 ◼   ► Well, I don't have your like serial number and all that jazz.

01:10:38 ◼   ► I'm gonna say no.

01:10:39 ◼   ► You don't you don't trade anything in, you keep it in the attic.

01:10:41 ◼   ► Oh, that's true.

01:10:41 ◼   ► Yeah, either way, you're not gonna trade in.

01:10:43 ◼   ► Yeah, uh so mine says buy for $14,300.

01:10:51 ◼   ► And it's so funny to me because John is the cheapest.

01:10:55 ◼   ► Sorry, one of the more frugal people I know, but when it comes to

01:10:59 ◼   ► this and only this, John knows no limits.

01:11:03 ◼   ► And so I think we are looking at at least $14,300 for his computer.

01:11:09 ◼   ► It would not surprise me if he actually spends more than that.

01:11:13 ◼   ► All right, I'm gonna go with M5 Max, Unbind, so the 18 core and

01:11:19 ◼   ► 40 core.

01:11:20 ◼   ► It's like the the best M5 Max, because I don't think John can accept

01:11:23 ◼   ► a bin chip.

01:11:24 ◼   ► I think he wants the best version of whatever chip he has.

01:11:27 ◼   ► So, M5 Max, full cores, 128 gigs, eight terabytes for $8,059.

01:11:37 ◼   ► That is a much better deal bang for the well, it's both of these

01:11:40 ◼   ► are hilariously overpriced.

01:11:42 ◼   ► No one's getting a good deal here tonight.

01:11:44 ◼   ► No, no, no.

01:11:44 ◼   ► But given that you are at a little bit less uh or a little

01:11:47 ◼   ► bit more than half of what I've got, that's a much better choice.

01:11:51 ◼   ► But I know, I feel like I know John, and I feel like as

01:11:54 ◼   ► frugal as John is, there is no turning back when it comes to his

01:11:58 ◼   ► computer.

01:11:58 ◼   ► And this is how he's going to get over the fact that there is

01:12:01 ◼   ► no Mac Pro anymore, is by buying a truly asinine Mac Studio.

01:12:06 ◼   ► So, all right, we will I will leave the configurator up because I knowing

01:12:09 ◼   ► me, I will forget what I've selected in the next five minutes.

01:12:12 ◼   ► John, walk us through what your thought process was.

01:12:14 ◼   ► If you are ready, or if you'd like to take this a different direction,

01:12:17 ◼   ► that's fine too.

01:12:17 ◼   ► All right.

01:12:18 ◼   ► Well, so the first thing I did was I looked at the configurator as

01:12:21 ◼   ► you were doing and and got frustrated with the limitations and the options.

01:12:24 ◼   ► But anyway, I immediately went to the storage section to see like what are

01:12:26 ◼   ► the storage options.

01:12:28 ◼   ► Uh and the storage options on both of the models of uh Mac Studio

01:12:33 ◼   ► are unchanged in price.

01:12:34 ◼   ► Like if you want a four terabyte, it's at 1800 under 1800 bucks.

01:12:37 ◼   ► If you want an eight terabyte, it's at 3800 bucks if you get the

01:12:40 ◼   ► max, and the ultra is add fifty at 1500 and at 3500 because of

01:12:44 ◼   ► the vague reset.

01:12:44 ◼   ► But anyway, these are exactly the same as they were for the M3 Ultra

01:12:48 ◼   ► and the M4 Max.

01:12:50 ◼   ► So storage prices for the Mac Studio are the same as they have ever

01:12:54 ◼   ► been.

01:12:54 ◼   ► They're awful, but when Apple increased the storage prices on the M4 Mac M4

01:13:00 ◼   ► slash M3 Ultra Mac Studio before, they were able to hold the line on

01:13:04 ◼   ► those.

01:13:05 ◼   ► And so they're not worse than they were, but they're not good, obviously.

01:13:09 ◼   ► Um for the um for for the the CPU and stuff, mostly unchanged, like

01:13:16 ◼   ► is there are things tied together.

01:13:18 ◼   ► So if you get like an uh an unbin 64 gig with four terabytes,

01:13:22 ◼   ► um, it's like 5300 bucks or eight terabytes is 7300 bucks.

01:13:26 ◼   ► If you bin the chip, you get minus 300 for the bin CPU, which

01:13:30 ◼   ► is not that big of a savings, but then you have to go down

01:13:31 ◼   ► to 36 gigs of RAM.

01:13:33 ◼   ► Like you can't, you know, the RAM is tied to the it's just it's

01:13:36 ◼   ► super annoying.

01:13:37 ◼   ► Um for the M5 Ultra.

01:13:39 ◼   ► Uh, uh if you go with the binned M5 Ultra, it's seven grand, which

01:13:43 ◼   ► is more than the M3 Ultra was.

01:13:45 ◼   ► If you go bin 96 gig, it's seven grand.

01:13:47 ◼   ► These are configs that I was trying.

01:13:43 ◼   ► Um, it's 200 more than the M3 Ultra config was.

01:13:52 ◼   ► And if you go eight terabytes, it's nine grand, which is again 200 more

01:13:55 ◼   ► from the M5 Ultra.

01:13:56 ◼   ► So these combos of like bin 96 gig, if you want an ultra, but

01:14:00 ◼   ► you're not gonna get the fancy one, but you want 96 gigs of RAM,

01:14:03 ◼   ► like it that's 200 more.

01:14:05 ◼   ► And then unbined 96 gig, the prices are the same as they were on

01:14:09 ◼   ► the M3 Ultra, which is nice because like M3 Ultra to M5 Ultra is

01:14:12 ◼   ► a big upgrade in the CPU.

01:14:13 ◼   ► Um, you know, four terabytes is 8300 and eight terabytes is uh 10,300.

01:14:18 ◼   ► So these are these are like the configs I first looked at m5 max,

01:14:22 ◼   ► binned uh unbined 64 and bin 36 because I have to like I'm never

01:14:26 ◼   ► gonna get a bin 36, but just FYI, but they make you do that.

01:14:29 ◼   ► Um, and then M5 Ultra, bin 96 and unbinned 96, and then I looked

01:14:34 ◼   ► at all those numbers and then I looked at everything over.

01:14:36 ◼   ► Um like I I don't know.

01:14:39 ◼   ► I mean, I thought about this a lot before these computers came out, but

01:14:41 ◼   ► it really depended on what the prices did, and having the prices not move

01:14:44 ◼   ► too much with the exception of a couple of 200 more expensive options.

01:14:48 ◼   ► Um, and again, those 200 more expensive options are for a big upgrade from

01:14:52 ◼   ► an M3 Ultra to an M5 Ultra.

01:14:54 ◼   ► Like, I'm you know, I didn't buy the the M4 Mac Studio because I

01:14:59 ◼   ► waited too long.

01:14:59 ◼   ► By the time I realized there was gonna be nothing else by the time

01:15:02 ◼   ► the Mac Pro was killed, so on and so forth.

01:15:04 ◼   ► Uh by the time I realized nothing new was coming anytime soon, it was

01:15:07 ◼   ► like, well, now it's too late to get an M4 Mac Studio.

01:15:10 ◼   ► Although I tell you, I did think about it a lot because for reasons

01:15:13 ◼   ► I'll get into later in the show.

01:15:14 ◼   ► Like I'm doing a bunch of development stuff.

01:15:17 ◼   ► Mac OS 27, I have to test my things on.

01:15:20 ◼   ► I can't do it on my Mac because Mac OS 27 doesn't run on

01:15:22 ◼   ► my Macs.

01:15:23 ◼   ► And I had 27 on the MacBook Air, and then as we discussed in

01:15:25 ◼   ► the earlier episode, now I've got 27 my wife's computer, so I'm using her

01:15:28 ◼   ► computer and she doesn't like that.

01:15:29 ◼   ► I love like you could solve this problem by buying a MacBook Neo, and

01:15:32 ◼   ► you won't do that.

01:15:34 ◼   ► Well, I thought, I mean, that's what I'm saying.

01:15:35 ◼   ► I thought about that.

01:15:36 ◼   ► I was looking at Mac minis.

01:15:37 ◼   ► What's the cheapest ARM Mac Mini?

01:15:39 ◼   ► I was looking at eBay, like M2 Mac minis, you know.

01:15:42 ◼   ► Like, I was looking for like literally anything.

01:15:43 ◼   ► They're not that cheap.

01:15:44 ◼   ► You'd be surprised.

01:15:45 ◼   ► I know that's what I'm getting at.

01:15:47 ◼   ► So, and even and even the Neo, like the Neo, yeah, it's it's like,

01:15:50 ◼   ► is that the cheapest R Mac?

01:15:51 ◼   ► Even that one increased in price, and I don't want that with a laptop

01:15:53 ◼   ► and they come with not a lot of RAM.

01:15:54 ◼   ► And if I'm gonna be doing stuff, I mean, you know, I just the

01:15:57 ◼   ► Neo was kind of out, and the minis like I again, I'm looking for

01:16:01 ◼   ► like used Mac minis.

01:16:02 ◼   ► Like I don't care.

01:16:03 ◼   ► I just needed something ARM on my desk that I could just plug into

01:16:06 ◼   ► my monitor and have a thing.

01:16:07 ◼   ► But they were just not that they're super expensive, but it's like, well, if

01:16:10 ◼   ► you're thinking about getting a new computer sometime soon, don't spend 800 bucks on

01:16:14 ◼   ► a computer you're gonna use for two months, you know what I mean?

01:16:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:16:16 ◼   ► But I'm kind of desperate for something ARM.

01:16:19 ◼   ► I need something ARM in my life.

01:16:21 ◼   ► Um, and the price is not changing, is like, oh, this actually kind of

01:16:24 ◼   ► makes it more difficult because, like, I don't know.

01:16:27 ◼   ► Like, I mean, a couple things make this more difficult for my decision making.

01:16:30 ◼   ► One, that the M5 Ultra is just two Macs stuck together, so it's not

01:16:34 ◼   ► interesting or novel.

01:16:35 ◼   ► The scaling is not better than it used to be.

01:16:38 ◼   ► It's you know, it's not exciting.

01:16:39 ◼   ► It's the kind of chip that's probably not going to get uh chip design

01:16:43 ◼   ► on the back of a future t shirt.

01:16:44 ◼   ► Just saying.

01:16:45 ◼   ► If they if they had done something exciting, I might have drawn another chip

01:16:49 ◼   ► on the back, but now it's not happening.

01:16:50 ◼   ► There'll still be a shirt though, don't worry.

01:16:52 ◼   ► Thinking I won this bet.

01:16:53 ◼   ► I think you did win this bet.

01:16:54 ◼   ► I'm shocked.

01:16:55 ◼   ► I'm not so uh and then I'm looking at these configs and I'm like,

01:17:01 ◼   ► you know, this is this goes into my well, two things.

01:17:04 ◼   ► One, as discussed on past episodes, I screwed up.

01:17:07 ◼   ► I waited too long.

01:17:08 ◼   ► I made poor decisions.

01:17:10 ◼   ► I think Marco and I have told you that for the last three years

01:17:13 ◼   ► running.

01:17:14 ◼   ► Right, sure.

01:17:14 ◼   ► But like it just like no, I mean, and then the thing is like

01:17:14 ◼   ► Oh my god, Casey, he bought a used M4 version.

01:17:20 ◼   ► The excuse is you know, by the time we saw the AI RAM crisis

01:17:25 ◼   ► coming, it was already too late.

01:17:26 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:17:27 ◼   ► Like by that point, is it wasn't too late to buy, like I could

01:17:29 ◼   ► have bought you know a Mac at that time, but it was too late

01:17:32 ◼   ► for me in the cycle.

01:17:32 ◼   ► It was like I said, it was too late to buy an M4 Mac

01:17:34 ◼   ► Studio because the new ones were coming out.

01:17:36 ◼   ► But it was also like, hey, if you wanted to save money, you should

01:17:39 ◼   ► have bought them before they increased all the prices, right?

01:17:41 ◼   ► So I was I was in a fix, and it was it's like in

01:17:44 ◼   ► a way that I remember everyone on the internet and YouTube are all making

01:17:47 ◼   ► fun of me.

01:17:47 ◼   ► Like, oh, you bought a Mac Pro and then they changed chip architectures.

01:17:50 ◼   ► Haha.

01:17:50 ◼   ► This thing has lasted like a champ, like longer than most people's computers last.

01:17:54 ◼   ► Ironically, Apple transitioning chip architectures was less of a disruption to my normal buying

01:18:00 ◼   ► patterns than the AI induced RAM and storage crisis.

01:18:03 ◼   ► Because that has screwed things up, screwed me over way more than the chip

01:18:06 ◼   ► architecture change ever did.

01:18:07 ◼   ► Do you buy enough Macs to qualify as a buying pattern?

01:18:11 ◼   ► Yeah, I do.

01:18:12 ◼   ► I mean, if you go over from 1984 till now, it you know, it

01:18:15 ◼   ► definitely counts as a pattern.

01:18:16 ◼   ► Um the pattern is I keep them for a long time.

01:18:19 ◼   ► That's the pattern.

01:18:21 ◼   ► Um yeah, I mean, this is this Mac Pro is gonna end up being

01:18:24 ◼   ► like six, seven years, seven years old or so by the time I get

01:18:26 ◼   ► something new.

01:18:27 ◼   ► Um, so all this is to say, kind of like with my constant uh

01:18:31 ◼   ► monitoring of the TV world and the uh the automotive world, this is the

01:18:36 ◼   ► not not the right time to buy a new computer.

01:18:38 ◼   ► It's the from in my from my perspective, you know, from with my rule

01:18:41 ◼   ► set the way I buy computers, I'm always looking.

01:18:43 ◼   ► Is this the right time to buy?

01:18:44 ◼   ► Is this the right, you know, with my TV?

01:18:45 ◼   ► Is this the right one to buy?

01:18:46 ◼   ► Should I wait till the next one, or should I do it?

01:18:48 ◼   ► Like, when is the right time to buy?

01:18:49 ◼   ► For me, this is not the right time to buy a new computer on

01:18:53 ◼   ► multiple fronts.

01:18:54 ◼   ► Even it even before you get into the RAM and storage, you know, crisis

01:18:59 ◼   ► with pricing, it's still not the right time to buy.

01:19:02 ◼   ► Apple kind of agrees that it's not the right time to buy a new

01:18:59 ◼   ► computer.

01:19:04 ◼   ► Because Apple's like, hey, we think the M7 and like the AI stuff we're

01:19:09 ◼   ► doing, according to the rumors, the AI stuff we're doing in the M7 are

01:19:13 ◼   ► so good that we are just, as Casey would say, poop canning the M6

01:19:19 ◼   ► Pro Max and Ultra, just so we can accelerate the timeline on the M7s,

01:19:23 ◼   ► because we think we did such a good job on those that we want

01:19:26 ◼   ► to get those out ASAP and just forget about the M6 Pro Max and

01:19:29 ◼   ► Ultra.

01:19:30 ◼   ► That that's like unprecedented.

01:19:31 ◼   ► And part of that is probably the RAM crisis and chip crisis and blah

01:19:34 ◼   ► blah blah.

01:19:34 ◼   ► But also, I feel like Apple, given the timelines on their chips, like the

01:19:39 ◼   ► whole you know, the uh ascendancy of the importance of doing local inference and

01:19:45 ◼   ► stuff on Macs.

01:19:46 ◼   ► If you extrapolate that timeline backwards for typical silicon design timelines, it makes sense

01:19:50 ◼   ► that the M7 is the first one that's like, oh no, local inference.

01:19:54 ◼   ► Like that's like that's where all we need to spend our transistors.

01:19:57 ◼   ► And the rumor is the M7 is really good at that.

01:20:00 ◼   ► This is exactly the wrong time to buy a new powerful computer because Apple

01:20:04 ◼   ► itself, according to the rumors, is like, yeah, our are good are good super

01:20:09 ◼   ► powerful computers.

01:20:09 ◼   ► This isn't it.

01:20:10 ◼   ► It's great that we upgraded.

01:20:11 ◼   ► It's great that you know we never had the M4 Ultra, but now we

01:20:13 ◼   ► have the M5 Ultra and it's fine and it's good and it's better than

01:20:15 ◼   ► the M3 one, and it is the best, most powerful chip we have.

01:20:18 ◼   ► And if you need one right now, now now this is the best we

01:20:20 ◼   ► have, so tough luck.

01:20:21 ◼   ► But the M7 would be the one that I would want to get.

01:20:24 ◼   ► Are you gonna wait?

01:20:25 ◼   ► Is it not that you're gonna buy a used one, but you're just gonna

01:20:27 ◼   ► keep friggin' waiting?

01:20:28 ◼   ► So I could clearly not choose the wine in front of me, Casey.

01:20:31 ◼   ► He's gonna switch to a desktop laptop and get the uh new ultra touch

01:20:34 ◼   ► screen because you love laptops and touch screens so much.

01:20:37 ◼   ► Yeah, I love them.

01:20:37 ◼   ► I love them so much.

01:20:39 ◼   ► Um so all that said, it it demands a specific strategy from me.

01:20:45 ◼   ► What should I do in this situation?

01:20:44 ◼   ► Again, I screwed up, I'm in a bind, I'm in a tight situation.

01:20:51 ◼   ► This is the wrong time for me personally to buy a new computer, according

01:20:54 ◼   ► to everything that I believe in in terms of new product buying.

01:20:57 ◼   ► Again, cars, TVs, computers, everything.

01:21:00 ◼   ► Uh, and yet somehow I need some new thing.

01:21:02 ◼   ► Should I go back on eBay and find one of those Mac minis and

01:21:04 ◼   ► buy it?

01:21:05 ◼   ► I was scouting, I almost like a lot of these on eBay are scams,

01:21:08 ◼   ► obviously.

01:21:08 ◼   ► So I gotta be careful.

01:21:09 ◼   ► But there was like a and I think it was like an M2 Ultra

01:21:13 ◼   ► Max Studio with a huge amount of RAM and like a like a four

01:21:16 ◼   ► terabyte SSD or something for like a thousand bucks or something.

01:21:19 ◼   ► I'm like, this has to be fake, but I was interested.

01:21:22 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:22 ◼   ► Like, not that I'm, you know, because again, you can't find a mini, like

01:21:26 ◼   ► you feel you feel bad buying a crappy like M2 based mini or something

01:21:29 ◼   ► for like 900 bucks, but then you're like M2 Ultra Max Studio for like

01:21:33 ◼   ► less than two grand, you know, like with a buy it now, but it

01:21:36 ◼   ► seemed like it was a scam.

01:21:37 ◼   ► So, you know, you gotta be careful out there, people.

01:21:39 ◼   ► And if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

01:21:41 ◼   ► Uh but I I looked into a lot of that, and so here I

01:21:44 ◼   ► am.

01:21:44 ◼   ► Should I go back to eBay and find something different?

01:21:46 ◼   ► And let me tell you, things have not gotten better on eBay in the

01:21:48 ◼   ► time since since I've been making these decisions.

01:21:51 ◼   ► Um here's the strategy I came up with.

01:21:56 ◼   ► I need something that I normally never get, which is a laptop.

01:22:01 ◼   ► No, never, which is a short-term Mac?

01:22:06 ◼   ► A tied me over computer.

01:22:07 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:22:08 ◼   ► Oh no.

01:22:09 ◼   ► I need something to just get me over this hump.

01:22:12 ◼   ► We're in a difficult period.

01:22:13 ◼   ► Sometimes when the chips are down, you're gotta do whatever it takes to survive.

01:22:18 ◼   ► Like in Goodfellas, when you're in the slammer, you could do whatever it takes

01:22:21 ◼   ► to survive.

01:22:21 ◼   ► But when you come back on the outside, you gotta leave the junk alone.

01:22:23 ◼   ► So Pauly says, right?

01:22:25 ◼   ► You know, understand you gotta do.

01:22:26 ◼   ► And so I'm I'm in the slammer.

01:22:28 ◼   ► I gotta do what it takes to survive until until my M8 or M9

01:22:35 ◼   ► Ultra Mac Studio, whatever arrives.

01:22:38 ◼   ► Because that's the computer I want to buy.

01:22:40 ◼   ► I don't want to buy an M5 anything Mac Studio.

01:22:43 ◼   ► I want to buy something that's after the M7, after that's like they really

01:22:46 ◼   ► figure out what these things are gonna be for.

01:22:48 ◼   ► Because, like, this is basically the turn here.

01:22:50 ◼   ► Uh, you know, unless something dramatic changes, uh, Apple is still not particularly interested

01:22:54 ◼   ► in gaming, but Apple seems to really be uh pointing their high performance computing

01:23:01 ◼   ► at AI related stuff, which makes sense in the world that we're living in.

01:23:05 ◼   ► And it just so happens that Apple's hardware is actually pretty good at AI

01:23:08 ◼   ► related stuff.

01:23:08 ◼   ► And I can see a future for myself where instead of paying whatever dollars

01:23:12 ◼   ► per month to some company for their uh coding agent, I can run something

01:23:17 ◼   ► that is as good as what I'm currently paying them to run on their

01:23:20 ◼   ► servers on my M9 based Mac Studio at some point in the future, right?

01:23:24 ◼   ► Obviously, by then you're not buying gun, you're not gonna buy a computer for

01:23:28 ◼   ► like five years.

01:23:28 ◼   ► Is that what we're doing getting?

01:23:29 ◼   ► We're getting there.

01:23:30 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:23:31 ◼   ► But this is this is this this is what I'm thinking.

01:23:33 ◼   ► This is my strategy here, which is like obviously by then the ones that

01:23:37 ◼   ► run the servers will be better still, so I'll still probably want to use

01:23:39 ◼   ► them.

01:23:40 ◼   ► But there is a certain baseline utility of like, let's say, like uh uh,

01:23:44 ◼   ► you know, current informal sponsor anthropic fable five level model that you could run

01:23:50 ◼   ► on your Mac locally in some years in the future.

01:23:53 ◼   ► Again, the server ones are are gonna be better by then, right?

01:23:56 ◼   ► But something fable caliber locally, basically, for free, a fable caliber thing can do

01:24:03 ◼   ► a lot of mundane tasks coding wise.

01:24:05 ◼   ► Like, like not maybe your super hard ones, not maybe find the obscure bug

01:24:08 ◼   ► or whatever, but like just run of the mill, like write me this automation

01:24:11 ◼   ► script, do this thing, whatever.

01:24:13 ◼   ► I think that is going to be attainable locally on Macs at some point

01:24:14 ◼   ► in the future, but only for people who have the big honk and Mac.

01:24:19 ◼   ► So it's like, why do you ever buy big honk and max?

01:24:21 ◼   ► My answer used to be so I can run PC games at high frame

01:24:23 ◼   ► rates when I reboot into Windows.

01:24:25 ◼   ► That answer is not the case for so many reasons now.

01:24:29 ◼   ► Um, but my answer in the future, I think will be, and this is

01:24:32 ◼   ► this is a use case that was not a thing before coding agents existed

01:24:36 ◼   ► and were good, right?

01:24:37 ◼   ► Now it's like I would like to be able to run powerful coding agents

01:24:41 ◼   ► locally at some point in my future.

01:24:43 ◼   ► That's the big honkin computer I want to buy.

01:24:45 ◼   ► Again, M M8, M9, M10, like who knows what the future holds.

01:24:49 ◼   ► But I feel like in that timeline, that's the one I want to buy.

01:24:53 ◼   ► But I do have to buy a computer now because I can't keep running

01:24:57 ◼   ► Intel.

01:24:58 ◼   ► I have to.

01:24:59 ◼   ► I have to buy something.

01:25:00 ◼   ► So what do I buy?

01:25:02 ◼   ► I need a tied me over computer.

01:25:03 ◼   ► You bought one of Marco's Mac minis.

01:25:06 ◼   ► No, I he should have probably if I had known it all had all

01:25:08 ◼   ► these spares.

01:25:08 ◼   ► I should have just seen if I get the friend price.

01:25:10 ◼   ► That would have really helped.

01:25:11 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:11 ◼   ► I mean, we could talk about it, but you they're all base models, you

01:25:13 ◼   ► wouldn't want any of them.

01:25:14 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the problem.

01:25:15 ◼   ► That's the problem.

01:25:15 ◼   ► So, and oh, and uh, as we've discussed on past episodes, like I've got

01:25:18 ◼   ► the eight terabyte problem.

01:25:19 ◼   ► Like, I have a four terabyte SSD, and it is absolutely full, which is

01:25:22 ◼   ► why I made a program that saves disk space, and I use my own

01:25:24 ◼   ► program all the time to save me from death constantly.

01:25:28 ◼   ► I'm at the ragged edge of constantly every time we do an episode, it's

01:25:31 ◼   ► another few hundred megabytes.

01:25:32 ◼   ► It's not helping.

01:25:33 ◼   ► Like I'm so close to filling my drive, and I have a four terabyte

01:25:37 ◼   ► drive, and the only choice above four, if you want an internal drive from

01:25:40 ◼   ► Apple is you got to go to eight, and then you're mortgaging your house.

01:25:43 ◼   ► So, how do I deal with this?

01:25:44 ◼   ► Okay, so I'm guessing.

01:25:47 ◼   ► You already had your guess, you don't need to guess now after I explained

01:25:49 ◼   ► everything.

01:25:49 ◼   ► All right, all right.

01:25:51 ◼   ► All right, so here, let me just tell you what I've done.

01:25:54 ◼   ► I have ordered a computer and I ordered it like very early in the

01:25:57 ◼   ► day.

01:25:57 ◼   ► Because I I I had sort of gone through this process in my head

01:26:00 ◼   ► multiple times.

01:25:59 ◼   ► And once I saw the reality, I'm like, it's slotted into one of my

01:26:03 ◼   ► decision trees.

01:26:04 ◼   ► Uh I ordered myself a Mac Studio, because I'm not gonna get a laptop.

01:26:11 ◼   ► We're not gonna get a Mac mini.

01:26:13 ◼   ► I ordered myself a Mac Studio, the M5 Max, because it's a tied me

01:26:19 ◼   ► over computer.

01:26:21 ◼   ► 64 gigs of RAM, which is less wait, which M5 Max, the bin or

01:26:25 ◼   ► unbend.

01:26:26 ◼   ► Well, so I got the unbind because that's the one nice thing I did

01:26:30 ◼   ► for myself.

01:26:31 ◼   ► Because you were correct, Marco.

01:26:32 ◼   ► I cannot you cannot abide a partial processor.

01:26:35 ◼   ► I cannot stomach a bin CPU.

01:26:36 ◼   ► If it comes with parts, they should all work.

01:26:38 ◼   ► Yes, exactly.

01:26:39 ◼   ► So and and in the grand scheme of things, going for bin to unbin

01:26:42 ◼   ► with my other specs wasn't that bad.

01:26:44 ◼   ► So yeah, the the unbid one, 64 gigs of RAM, which is less than

01:26:48 ◼   ► my Mac my Mac Pro has.

01:26:50 ◼   ► But the I mean the thing is my wife's computer has 64 gigs of

01:26:53 ◼   ► RAM, okay?

01:26:54 ◼   ► And so I'm using Golden Gate with 64 gigs of RAM.

01:26:56 ◼   ► It constantly has four people logged into it, all families logged into it, because

01:27:00 ◼   ► we're all home right now.

01:27:01 ◼   ► Um, and with everybody logged into it, and everybody doing what they normally do