The Show Must Go On
John:
My kids were refusing to eat the purple potatoes, so I had to make them do a blind taste test, and they couldn't tell the difference.
John:
So I'm like, ha, eat your stupid potatoes.
John:
It's not burned.
John:
It's purple.
John:
Just eat it.
Casey:
So as chief summarizer-in-chief, that job is usually quite delightful.
Casey:
But on rare occasions, it is anything but delightful.
Casey:
And we are recording the night of November 9th, 2016.
Casey:
Last night, our country...
Casey:
made a very peculiar choice that none of the three of us agree with.
Casey:
And we were debating what to do about the presidential election and how we should handle it and what we should say about it, what we should talk about.
Casey:
And the conclusion the three of us came to is we wanted to acknowledge that it is a thing and it happened and were upset.
Casey:
But otherwise, we
Casey:
carry on.
Casey:
It's going to do me some good to forget about this for a little while.
Casey:
I think it's going to do you guys some good to forget about this for a while.
Casey:
And genuinely, no snark intended, it's our hope that it'll do you, the listener, some good to not think about that for a little while.
Casey:
I'm upset, I'm frustrated, and I'm angry, but really, I'm going to get over these Mac Pros soon, or the MacBook Pros soon.
Casey:
I ruined my own joke.
Casey:
Look at that.
Marco:
That's how upset and angry I am.
Marco:
We're off?
Casey:
Yeah, we're going to totally fix that in post.
Casey:
But anyway, but no, seriously, though, no, all kidding aside, we're all frustrated.
Casey:
We're all upset.
Casey:
And I'll give you guys a chance to weigh in if you have anything to add.
Casey:
But it's going to be business as usual around here.
Casey:
And we're going to try our best to just move along.
Marco:
And I do want to clarify, I'm not for a second going to forget that this just happened.
Marco:
And I'm not going to pretend that it didn't happen.
Marco:
I'm not going to forget what this means, what this signifies to so many Americans.
Marco:
This is not going to be forgotten at all.
Marco:
But we have a tech show to do, so we're going to do the tech show.
Marco:
And hopefully that can help us and our listeners temporarily get a reprieve from what has happened.
John:
The show must go on, as they say.
John:
We've talked about this before.
John:
We will touch on social topics as they intersect with tech and this potentially intersects with everything.
John:
But I think this falls more into the category of what we mentioned on a past show that if something really big happens, it would be weird if we didn't acknowledge it.
John:
But by the same token, especially with how all three of us are feeling today and how a lot of listeners are feeling today.
Casey:
uh the overwhelming consensus is we just want to do a regular show as a brief respite from uh what we've all been dealing with today and we'll be dealing with going forward so there you have it yeah so let's start with some follow-up um isaco writes in to say apple did not ship an ed ram slash iris pro sky lake on the 15 inch macbook it is hd 530 uh is that we're talking about video cards is that right
John:
Yeah, that was in my reference to what I was talking about on a past show where I said that Apple kind of puts itself in a difficult position by demanding the highest and fanciest version of all the chips, especially with the biggest GPU embedded in them.
John:
It would be better if they went with the wimpier chips and just used the discrete, but that's what they actually did on the 15-inch.
John:
I mean, it's not wimpy.
John:
The HD530 is one of the better ones, but it's not the one with the embedded DRAM and the Irish Pro things.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And no, I'm not saying Irish Pro, which is what everyone hears and probably what I say half the time.
John:
But I'm trying to say Iris Pro, but it's difficult.
Casey:
Goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving along.
Casey:
The touch bar apparently registers past the screen area, particularly on the left-hand side where the escape key – well, I guess it's not a key anymore.
Casey:
The escape button would be –
Casey:
Can we talk about how we know this or should we not talk about how we know this?
John:
Uh, there was a French website that posted something that someone, a listener translated for me.
John:
Um, but the, the, the, this is when we were discussing, like, it's a shame that they didn't have the touch park all the way to the left because you can reach the upper left hand corner and feel for it.
John:
Um,
John:
and but that part is not screen we knew that for a fact from the from day one that part is not a screen you can't draw the escape button up against the left end of the bar the question was all right so there's no image there but is it touch sensitive and the answer is it's about half touch sensitive like so if you just take the blank space where you can't show any pixels on the left side of the touch bar
John:
and divide it in half vertically, the left half of it does nothing.
John:
You hit it, doesn't do anything.
John:
It's not touch sensitive.
John:
It's not pressure sensitive.
John:
It doesn't light up or anything.
John:
The right half of the blank region doesn't light up, but does register your touch in some way.
John:
And because it's about the width of your finger, you can pretty much take your finger and jam it on the left side of the touch bar, and it will activate the escape key.
John:
In fact, it will activate the escape key even if no part of your finger is actually touching any of the pixels that make up the escape key.
John:
or the picture of the escapee or whatever.
John:
So it's kind of a weird compromise.
John:
Like they almost got it to go edge to edge, but not quite.
John:
And I guess maybe when I fix it, does it tear down?
John:
Maybe they'll figure out why, like, uh, how do the touch sensors extend that far?
John:
How far does the, you know, the screen go and so on and so forth.
Marco:
Have either of you done with the simulated touch bar on an iPad yet?
John:
No.
John:
Have you seen that app that does that?
John:
Yeah, but it's the wrong size, isn't it?
John:
So it doesn't seem like it would be much of a test of anything.
Marco:
It's interesting.
Marco:
I ran that way yesterday for a while while I was working, and it's actually...
Marco:
Kind of interesting.
Marco:
I guess we'll put the link in the show notes.
Marco:
I forget the URL offhand, but Stephen Troutensmith has been tweeting it a lot here and there and different things.
Marco:
And basically, you have to have Xcode.
Marco:
You have to install the special build of 10-12-1 that isn't the real 10-12-1, but it's a new 10-12-1 with a different build number.
Marco:
You have to download separately on a family's website.
Marco:
It's kind of a mess to get it working.
Marco:
And then you have to get it running on an iPad, which means you have to have a signing provisioning profile and everything.
Marco:
But if you can get past all of that, which is a lot, it is interesting to see.
Marco:
and so you know i just i placed my 9.7 inch ipad pro right you know on top of my keyboard kind of in the right spot where it should be and um it's interesting that like you know so as you mentioned it is significantly smaller than the real touch bar like i've been able to estimate from pictures that the real touch bar is 11 inches long or 10 inches long or something like that and
Marco:
And the iPad 9.7, the side of the screen, is like 7 point something inches long.
Marco:
So it's substantially smaller.
Marco:
And you can tell.
Marco:
The touch targets do feel a little bit small when you run the simulator.
Marco:
But it is really cool to see, as you move throughout the OS, just to see what the touch bar actually does and how it responds, the different things that are available.
Marco:
As I mentioned at the end of last show...
Marco:
This really is showing that Apple's putting a lot of effort into the Mac, and the Mac is not just some totally dead platform to them, because they have a lot of stuff built for the Touch Bar already.
Marco:
So many of the built-in apps already support the Touch Bar.
Marco:
With some pretty useful stuff, like there's like one, there's like an iTunes widget that's kind of always showing whenever iTunes is doing anything.
Marco:
It looks like a little equalizer, and you can tap that, and it converts the whole bar into basically an iTunes scrubber with a couple of play-pause buttons.
Marco:
And you can just leave that open the whole time you're working.
Marco:
If you like to scrub through songs or to see your progress through a song, which is important when you listen to such incredibly lengthy songs as I do, it's actually kind of nice to see.
Marco:
And you can play with all this stuff on this iPad thing.
Marco:
It actually works pretty well.
Marco:
I would say if you are curious about the touch bar and if you have the patience and skill required to use Xcode to open some open source thing and provision it to actually run on an iPad, it's kind of cool to see.
Marco:
But again, I'm not sure I would recommend it for full time use unless you have a 12.9x iPad Pro because that actually would be big enough.
Marco:
uh i think i think that'd be about the right size but on 9.7 it's it's pretty tiny but it's cool to see and it works surprisingly well like it's responsive the animations are fluid it's surprisingly good for this like two day two day old hack basically it's pretty amazing to have this running on an ipad
Marco:
And I will say, though, having run this on this little thing above my keyboard on my desktop, I think John's concerns last episode about the the ergonomics of like looking up and down so far between a desktop screen and the front of your keyboard and that that distance being way further than how you how you adjust your eyes on a laptop.
Marco:
That is a real problem.
Marco:
And it's a problem enough that it's.
Marco:
I'm not entirely sure the touch bar on desktop is ever going to make a lot of sense just because that really is odd and kind of uncomfortable.
Marco:
I will say, though, that now that I've seen how well this works, it is kind of an interesting idea that what if Apple made an external touch bar that was just it by itself that didn't include a keyboard necessarily?
Marco:
Maybe you can get a keyboard that had one with it, but maybe they also sell an external one.
Marco:
I mean, this is wishful thinking.
Marco:
I don't think they actually would do that.
Marco:
but this like once you use an ipad like this you see like oh this actually does work it is kind of useful and there could be something here if it was done well where would you put the external touch bar above your keyboard same place i put mine but isn't that that's the same problem with the whole desktop thing of like the focal distance change and everything like what have you solved by having just a random external touch bar
Marco:
Well, you have quick access to, you know, it's kind of like having media keys on your keyboard, but, you know, on steroids.
Marco:
But you have to look at them.
Marco:
I have to look at most of my media keys most of the time, too, because I never remember what's what.
John:
Well, they don't, you probably just have to glance, maybe, because you know you're going for somewhere around the middle, like, but you're not, it's the difference between reading and just, like, you know, glancing to see where it is, but...
John:
well but they're always in the same spot like you know like when if you use something if you use a frequent item a lot it's always going to be right there i mean yeah as long as that app is front most like that's that's the tricky bit how did you find that in terms of the context switching because if you have a particular especially for media keys and stuff like i'm used to hitting play pause on my keyboard to you know to pause itunes at work but it doesn't matter what app i'm in i'm on my text editor
Marco:
i can hit play pause and it stops the music you know if someone comes over to my desk or something but i'm never actually in itunes well i wasn't using um any third-party apps i was only using apple ones that have support for this but uh things like having like when i mentioned the expanded itunes view with the scrubber that stays up even if itunes is not front most
Marco:
Which is kind of cool.
Marco:
It's one of the modes.
Marco:
There's all these buttons on the side that you can... The control strip part, you mean, that's always there?
Marco:
Yeah, the thing on the right.
Marco:
You can toggle on certain modes that persist until you change them.
Marco:
And that's just one of those modes.
Marco:
One of them is the old function keys.
Marco:
One of them is the iTunes thing.
John:
You guys never used the real control strip, did you?
John:
nope nope i did and it was awesome congratulations it was it was pluggable too you could buy third-party things that would add new tiles to the control script and you could you know configure it how you wanted yeah it was really nice um so it's come back but now it's on my keyboard and it comes from the other side by default actually you can't move the control step can you you can't make it come from the left right it's always on the right side
Casey:
I'm sure there'll be a P-list entry for you, John.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
No, you can't even pin the dock to the edge anymore.
John:
Are you kidding?
Casey:
This is why you never mess with those sorts of things, kids.
Casey:
This is why you embrace the defaults.
John:
Anyway, as for the big scrubber, that's one of my frustrations with QuickTime Player and one of the many reasons why I still have QuickTime Player 7 installed and hope it never breaks is...
John:
frequently if i mean i should probably just use a real audio editor like vision or something and sometimes i do but sometimes you just want to open up an audio file and scrub to a particular time stamp and it's a really long file because it's like a podcast or something and you just can't do it in like when the the audio window is small so i open it in quick time seven
John:
And I stretch the audio window to really wide.
John:
And suddenly I have a scrubber that's the entire width of my screen to give me the resolution.
John:
I suppose I could do that with the other QuickTime player too.
John:
But the point is I'm making a window bigger on a non-visual medium.
John:
And the only reason I'm making the window bigger is because I want more precision in the scrubber.
John:
This brings us back to our old discussion about ideas of zooming and scrubbing and stuff.
John:
But anyway, if you have a screen that is the width of a QWERTY keyboard, that's a pretty good scrubber length.
John:
And you probably get decent resolution there.
John:
Not as big as you get maybe on like a giant 5K display where you make it the entire width of the thing.
John:
But, you know, I mean, at a certain point, you need to just open an audio editor and zoom in on the waveform.
John:
I understand that.
John:
But it's one of those hacks that you do.
Casey:
So in summary, Marco, touch bar tentatively optimistic.
Casey:
I mean, you sound pretty pleased with it in principle.
Marco:
I mean, again, I didn't get to try a real one yet.
Casey:
Sure, sure, sure.
Marco:
Time will tell on this again.
Marco:
It seems pretty cool.
Marco:
I think if I were buying... Again, I think what I said last episode... If you were buying again your laptop.
Marco:
If I were buying a laptop, a Mac laptop today...
Marco:
and i intended to use it as my primary computer i would get the touch bar because it will i think it will probably end up being really great um reviewers seem to have them now so we should hear fairly soon from people who have actual hands-on experience for more than 10 10 minutes um we should hear from them how these are in practice and then hopefully sometime soon people will actually start being able to own these things i mean
Marco:
I don't think any of the initial orders have shipped yet because they all had that two to three week ship date estimate at first.
Marco:
So I don't think anybody actually has one yet except a couple of reviewers.
Marco:
But I do look forward to hearing what they say, having used the real one, not some iPad approximation of it.
Marco:
But the iPad approximation was pretty good.
Casey:
That's awesome.
Casey:
I'm really looking forward to trying this one day, eventually, maybe.
Casey:
John, tell me about the next Mac Pro.
Casey:
Is it going to be an all-in-one?
John:
This is a topic that has come up on lots of past shows and has been gaining steam as people hear us moan about the Mac Pro and Marco wrote a big piece about the advantages of Pro and all that.
John:
And it's seeming to me, you know, probably many months out from any potential movement on this front.
John:
That if Apple is not going to make another Mac Pro in the style that we expect it to be, as in a computer that doesn't have a monitor, like if they're not going to make another trash can, if they're reimagining the Mac Pro as something other than a trash can, the most likely reimagining is what everyone keeps referring to as an iMac Pro, which is the big 5K screen.
John:
with a bunch of computer crap stuck to the back of it and the only difference would be that the computer crap stuck to the back of it is more pro-ish and so there's a question like can you fit a Xeon in there can you actually put a decent graphic card in there
John:
um there's a lot of room behind a 5k display obviously they wanted to be super skinny and they're kind of like their own self-imposed constraints especially on the back of the display because like you don't even see that when you're looking in the front it doesn't need to be portable except for that guy who brings his iMac to uh Panera Bread to play World of Warcraft natural yeah uh so you know realistically you could totally do that now if Apple did it I assume they would make their life more difficult by still trying to make it thin and using all their
John:
uh skills uh honed by working on these super slim macbook pros and on their i devices to continue to make it skinny and use clever heat routing and venting and special fans and whatever to make it so it doesn't melt um and so these days as i dwell about the mac pro in bits and pieces um
John:
I start thinking about a Mac Pro that looks like an iMac and thinking they could fit some pretty good stuff in there.
John:
Maybe they won't even go with Xeon.
John:
Maybe they'll just try to use better desktop chips and have a higher RAM ceiling and a bigger GPU.
John:
Maybe it really literally is named iMac Pro.
John:
Or maybe it's just called Mac Pro and the new Mac Pro is an all-in-one.
John:
You know, like...
John:
i guess this is the bargaining stage here i'm like i was just about to say that get out of my head oh my gosh make me a matte black mac pro shaped thing with a decent gpu and a xeon and ecc ram with the high limit i'd buy it
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I would love that myself.
Marco:
I would absolutely love that.
Marco:
And the thing is, again, this totally is bargaining.
Marco:
But at this point, I'll take what we can get.
Marco:
If they can make something that is Mac Pro-like, that happens to be an all-in-one, that will cut out certain use cases.
Marco:
That will make certain people who would have bought a Tower Mac Pro not buy it.
Marco:
And that will possibly hurt its sales.
Marco:
But if that's what Apple has to do to make it palatable to Tim Cook and Johnny Ive, then I guess we'll, you know, I would take that over no Mac Pro, you know.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
But I think the question of what you could put into that depends entirely on the cooling setup.
Marco:
If you look at the way the Tube Mac Pro is set up, which, by the way, and I didn't mention this too much in the post, but the Tube Mac Pro has a serious problem that the GPUs die frequently.
Marco:
And this has never really been much in the public eye because not a lot of people own these machines, relatively speaking.
Marco:
But there's a massive GPU death flaw in the Tube Mac Pro.
John:
I brought this up about your article, and you didn't add it to your article, did you?
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, here's the thing.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
A lot of people have first asked me the question of, like, why do I presume the Mac Pro is dead?
Marco:
And I'll tell you right now, we have heard tips from so many different sources, and they all conflict with each other.
Marco:
Every single tip we've heard is different from a different one we've heard.
Marco:
Some of them are in direct contradiction.
Marco:
I've heard that the Mac Pro is already dead.
Marco:
I've heard that the Mac Pro is on hold.
Marco:
I've heard that the Mac Pro is not dead, but going to take a different form.
John:
that the mac pro is very much alive and that the mac pro is coming between last month and next summer but see i think all of those i think all of those things the reason i'm big on the mac pro is because i think it fits all of them because the people saying it's dead what they really mean is the trash can is dead check people say it's coming but in a new form
John:
that's that's the imac pro form factor the dates nobody knows those so forget about it well what i haven't heard is anything like is it sky like e or not because that's really i think that is really about the death of the mac pro if it's if it's not the xeons if it's just a desktop chips with a better c view then it literally is just a better imac which you know hey we'll take what we can get but but anyway getting getting back to cooling like one of the things you listed on on your article of why we should have a mac pro is so it doesn't you know how like a laptop when you push it hard and the imac doesn't how like a laptop
John:
It kind of moans like an iMac.
John:
Like, it's not as quiet as a Mac Pro.
John:
And I have to say, that's not a... I keep using, like, luxurious or elegant or whatever, but, like...
John:
If you have hardware empathy, empathy for the machine, which I think I've talked about on past podcasts, and you try to do something that stresses your computer, and the fans are just going, you hear it whirring, there's a certain baseline level of anxiety that I feel about that.
John:
I mean, it's kind of an annoying sound, first of all.
John:
And second of all, you're like...
John:
Is this, is everything okay?
John:
Am I, you know, is it good to do this?
John:
What if your laptop sounded like that, you know, eight hours a day while you worked?
John:
Like, it can't be good for the thing to be, and it is an annoying sound.
John:
It feels better to get a big honking machine that you can stress to its limits.
John:
And it, you know, and it doesn't make a big racket.
John:
And so the iMac does not fulfill that criteria.
John:
And the reason I brought up to Marco about his article is like, that is an advantage of the Mac Pro processor.
John:
the the idealized mac pro or of course the 2008 mac pro that i'm sitting next to which is humongous and weighs 50 pounds but the trash can mac pro fulfills the quietness ideal but not so much the not melting ideal which is an important part of the power and elegance formula for the mac pro is you can be quiet and have good cooling but that also means the parts that are inside of you can't die from excessive heat
John:
And so the current trash can won.
John:
Current.
John:
The 2013 trash can has had a history of perhaps not doing so well on removing the heat.
John:
But it's pretty quiet.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But anyway, I wrote this article with the presumption that the Mac Pro is either dead or, quote, on hold, whatever that means.
Marco:
And the point of this article is not to...
Marco:
keep people's hopes up that it's not dead yet the point of this article is to help convince the people at apple that if this thing is truly either dead or postponed or on hold or whatever to try to convince them that i don't think that's the right move and and basically please don't do that and it has gotten a large response very large response and and so i think
Marco:
I think I've hit on something here, and when you see the article in that way, that's why, at the beginning, I assume that it's gone.
Marco:
And I didn't bring up, like, you know, here's why the current trash can overheats the GPUs, because, you know, that is a real problem, but...
Marco:
that didn't really need to be in there.
Marco:
I did mention, here's why the current trash can sales might not be very good and why you shouldn't use that.
John:
Yeah, I think the overheating is one of them.
John:
Like that's, I think like highlighting, you know, it's not that we, you know, you did bring this up.
John:
It's not that we, nobody liked the Mac Pro.
John:
It's that you changed it so much and the ways that you change it
John:
were maybe not palatable to all the people who buy mac pros and it's not as if you know well the mac pro is not for you it's like well it's got to be for somebody and apparently the trash can mac pro was not for enough people so and one of the things is reliability you know you said one of the things you expect is quietness able to handle high load and reliable that's why you got the ecc ram that's why you have the you know workstation class components whatever the hell you want to call them and you know that is not super duper overclock that is supposed to be a reliable piece of hardware and
John:
The trash can never quite fulfilled that.
John:
So it's yet another reason to add to the pile of why the trash can might not have been successful.
John:
That is not, oh, you know, there's no market for a pro Mac anymore, because I think there still is.
John:
It's small.
John:
It's as small as it's ever been.
John:
But you have to actually serve that market if you want to sell into it.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
But anyway, so in summary, my article was basically a letter to Apple.
Marco:
presuming that they've killed the mac pro trying to trying to shoot down reasons that they might be using internally why they shouldn't make this computer anymore and it just so happened to be also wrapped up in some other things that pros might like and everything else because that's how i feel uh and and my love for mac os and not wanting to leave mac os because like what am i gonna do go use windows no windows is horrible sorry all the people who responded to me saying that that's a stupid thing to say no oh it's true see it's true casey is an official windowser
Casey:
Well, I was, I was, and then I wasn't.
Casey:
More recently than me.
Casey:
Yeah, oh yeah, because I installed Windows 10 just two weeks ago or something like that.
Casey:
What happened?
Casey:
Are you okay?
Casey:
Don't even get me started.
Casey:
I installed Windows 10, and I was genuinely, like, hand on heart, I'm not trying to be funny, I was kind of looking forward to it in a way, because everyone, anytime I'd ever seen anyone talk about Windows 10, I'd always heard, oh, you know, it's really good now, it's good, it's good, you know, it's not bad at all.
Casey:
um and i installed it and it is just as bad as everything has always been and i think we talked about this already on the last show so i won't belabor belabor it anymore but it's terrible don't believe otherwise it's terrible so anyway uh moving on so one of you put this in the show notes and this is a genuinely great question uh what external monitors are apple employees using with laptops
John:
Well, for now, they're probably using Thunderbolt displays, but this this question or idea was brought up in many different forms that a surprising number of supposedly, you know, presumably completely independent people came up with this one scenario.
John:
Hey, Apple's got the new spaceship campus with the cool looking office that's shaped like a ring and all this, you know, open seating or whatever.
John:
And they were trying to say, like, what would it be like to walk into this?
John:
this spaceship campus and see the apple engineers diligently working as if you would actually be able to see where they work because you probably can't because it's badge entry but anyway this is these are people writing and like and presumably those people would have laptops because hey apple doesn't make desktops anymore and who who would use an iMac and whatever whatever
John:
But, you know, people with laptops, as we mentioned, even Apple laptops, when they're sitting at a desk might like to have a bigger screen to do stuff on.
John:
Right.
John:
Because it's one of the advantages of sitting down or standing at a standing desk or whatever.
John:
You can have a much bigger screen or multiple screens or whatever.
John:
And for all these people asking this question, they couldn't envision a scenario where Apple's headquarters was filled with people using Apple laptops connected to non-Apple monitors.
John:
Is it because non-Apple monitors are ugly?
John:
Is it because they wouldn't match?
John:
Is it because it wouldn't fit their ideal of these architect sketches of this beautiful, pristine Apple place where everything is all Apple-y and perfect and the tables are made from one giant continuous piece of wood painstakingly manufactured in Germany or whatever?
John:
that's probably part of it but the practical consideration is you know it was brought up before apple's monitors for a while have been made to connect to laptops if they don't make any monitors which it seems like they're not anymore and if the mac pro either disappears or becomes an all-in-one um what are all the laptops going to connect to and i guess the other connected question to this is the question of target display mode for imacs which used to be a thing and then wasn't
John:
uh but now with the advent of thunderbolt 3 which we'll talk about it in a little bit um in theory you can buy an iMac and just use it as a monitor when you sit down and connect your laptop to which would be like the world's most expensive monitor not really actually because the apple 30 inch is probably still more money but it would be a very expensive monitor a total waste of the internals but technically it is possible and that would be an out to let
John:
Apple's campus photos continue to be completely Apple-y from top to bottom.
John:
Realistically speaking, as for the campus pictures, you're not going to see any except for a reception, and those are going to be IMAX, and they're going to be all in one, and they're going to have a big Apple logo on them, and it'll be fine.
Casey:
I think I speak for all of us in saying we have some friends at Apple, and one of my friends at Apple I know for a fact is rolling the Dell 5K display as, I believe, a child to his 5K iMac at the office.
John:
The LG?
Casey:
No, the Dell.
John:
The double cable one?
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
Maybe this is his home machine.
Casey:
So I might be lying unintentionally, but I am almost positive that this is his work machine.
Casey:
It's a 5K iMac connected to this double cabled to this Dell 5K display.
Casey:
And so in the future, I would expect it would be the LG 5K display.
John:
And you're never going to see that because he can't take you to see his office anyway.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
I have no idea what an Apple developer office even looks like.
Marco:
I don't think I've ever seen a single picture of one, of anybody's ever.
John:
You should go look up what they looked like in the 90s.
John:
They were awesome.
John:
The giant 840 AVs with the CRT monitor with two big speakers on the bottom.
John:
Because they would hoard the fanciest Mac hardware.
John:
I think it was more of a big deal back when Macs were just...
John:
so much more expensive they are now again if you look at the original purchase price of the mac 2 fx and convert it to 2016 dollars you will be very surprised um so but if you worked at apple you got access that stuff so i remember a lot of like cubicle farm pictures from the 90s they had offices not cubicles but anyway very sort of you know if if you are listening to this and you are a 90s era apple employee and have photos of your cool setups in your offices send them a couple of them uh send us a couple of them because i love seeing those
John:
And I'm sure they're not quite what they look like today.
John:
I have not actually seen the inside of an actual human working person's office at Apple in recent years, so I don't know what they're like, but I do know that Apple right now has many different buildings that vary widely in...
John:
how nice they are how modern they are when they were built what the accommodations are like and the spaceship will be yet another iteration i think of the spaceship they have a bunch of mock-ups you can see pictures of what they expect the work areas to be like and the offices to be like but there is no like what does an apple office look like because apple's campus is so much bigger than the giant one infinite loop building it's so many other buildings scattered all over the place and they are very different from each other
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So tell us, speaking of displays and cabling, tell us about DisplayPort.
John:
Someone wrote in with a bunch of facts about DisplayPort.
John:
And we've talked about all these bits and pieces before.
John:
We've talked about how we didn't think there was going to be an external 5K display for a long time because...
John:
Uh, you couldn't run it over display port at the current standard.
John:
We were on display part 1.2 and you didn't have, you can only do up to 4k.
John:
Um, and we're like, well, maybe when display port one more three comes, but that's not going to be out for a long time.
John:
So what are they going to do?
John:
We found out the answer to that, um, was that they're going to do this, uh, you know,
John:
what they do with the lg display it's one cable it's not two cables and they just stream multiple display part 1.2 streams over it um but this information we got sent as a summary uh brought home another reality which is that even when display part 1.3 comes it still is not your savior not that we need to save your network because we have a solution but it is not your savior for connecting your 5k display because display part 1.3 only does 5k at 60 frames per second at 8 bits per component
John:
Whereas DisplayPort 1.2 goes up to 4K at 60 frames per second at 10 bits per component, which is important if you're doing fancy photo and video work and don't want to see color banding and all of that crap.
John:
And also, the Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt chipset can't receive that DisplayPort 1.3 input anyway, so it's kind of a moot point.
John:
um so we are going to be in the world of two display point 1.2 streams being tunneled over firewire for a while because that's the only way you can get uh 5k at 60 frames per second at 10 bits per component um so maybe display point 1.4 will do it in a single stream i don't know
John:
um and as for thunderbolt the thunderbolt angle is thunderbolt one could send two display part 1.1 streams thunderbolt 3 can send two display part 1.2 streams obviously we know it can do that because it does it with the lg display um and when thunderbolt 3 does that it still leaves 10 gigabits per second of bandwidth left over for other stuff so that is the magic that makes the uh laptops being connected to lg display work and that is like
John:
if you were to take that back in time and show that to someone like 15 years ago, you're going to say, you're going to output how much video over this skinny little thing?
John:
You know, when we had, we were just connecting like the ADC connector or DVI or these big hunk and multi pin parallel things with big thick cables at resolutions that are, you know, a tiny fraction of the current one.
John:
And now we're able to do this, you know,
John:
which is still kind of a hack, taking those two DisplayPort 1.2 streams and streaming them over this one cable because the standards don't have enough to fill the whole screen and then putting them back together with the display controller and everything.
John:
That's very impressive.
John:
And we mentioned multi-streaming, sometimes abbreviated MST.
John:
That actually refers to the part of the DisplayPort 1.2 spec that lets you tunnel two DisplayPort 1.1 streams over it.
John:
And I keep saying DisplayPort 1.2, 1.1, and 1.3, but...
John:
The abbreviation that's used frequently is HBR, which hopefully stands for high bit rate.
John:
And DisplayPort 1.1 is HBR.
John:
DisplayPort 1.2 is HBR2.
John:
And DisplayPort 1.3 is HBR3.
John:
I don't know if that adds any clarification, but that's how it's referred to in this email and some of the literature.
John:
Clear as mud.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, anyway, it's a good thing we didn't have to wait for DisplayPort 1.3, and it's really cool what Apple did to get the external 5K display working just in time for them to not introduce a new Mac Pro.
John:
And finally, somewhat tangentially related to this, we got an anonymous, as yet unconfirmed tip that no, the LG display does not have a GPU in it.
John:
which makes sense in light of the display port stuff because why would it need a gpu if they can output two display port 1.2 streams over the single cable the lg display can just receive them and make one image out of them and bob's your uncle as they say okay uh and then and as a final note and this is clearly for john tell me about the macbook pro as the naked robotic core if you please
John:
this is another topic that many listeners have brought up the naked robotic core for brief review is the idea for the i devices specifically the iphone that apple wants to make the smallest skinniest thing possible even if it doesn't function as a complete phone and then allow people to augment it either by with cases or battery cases or colors or whatever that they don't sell you the entire phone they tell you the naked robotic core and then you dress it up to be the phone that you really want it to be because if apple made those choices and put a
John:
a rubberized rugged case on that thing for you or made it thicker and bigger and ruggedized the people who wanted a skinny little silver thing couldn't have it and the people who wanted a different color couldn't have it and so on and so forth so they're like here you go here's the naked robotic core add to it whatever you want that's uh strategy has been discussed a long time as a you know it's trying to get into apple's head about why they keep making their phones thinner and slippery and all that stuff um and so a couple people brought that up for the macbook pro
John:
is the macbook pro a naked robotic core and my initial instinct of a say was no because you don't put a case on your thing although a battery case for a macbook pro would be awesome but you don't like they do have external batteries for it but it's not it's not like you put a flowery case on it so when you accidentally drop it it doesn't get dinged like it's not it's a different size class of item than a phone it doesn't seem like they're selling you the skinniest thing possible and allowing you to bulk it up by adding stuff to it although i suppose you could do that and i'm sure someone out there makes a case for the macbook pro
John:
But I thought about it a little bit more.
John:
One aspect of it does seem kind of naked robotic, Corey, and it gets into the idea of the Thunderbolt 3 ports that, again, as I discussed last show, I'm in favor of going to a bunch of uniform, very small multipurpose ports that can do everything.
John:
They're cool.
John:
They're multipurpose.
John:
They can do a lot of things, but one of the aspects of Thunderbolt ports that makes them so multi-purpose is they're like an externalization of PCI or PCI Express.
John:
That necessitates the externalization of certain components.
John:
For example, like this one little tiny plug, I can plug in here and I can do video out to DVI, to VGA, to Mini DisplayPort, to Thunderbolt Display, HDMI.
John:
Look at all these different options I have.
John:
I don't have to put 17 different video ports on the side of my Mac.
John:
I can just have this one little skinny port.
John:
But the price for doing that is that you have externalized all the circuitry required to make HDMI output work, to make DVI output work, because as we've discussed and seen in the past, lots of these adapters have chips in them.
John:
And those chips aren't just like optional and will go away, you know, once the world gets fixed.
John:
It's because the thing that's coming out of that port that lets you do that is not video if only my projector could understand it.
John:
It is an externalization of the PCI bus.
John:
So there needs to be some chips to deal with that.
John:
That's not true for all things.
John:
Like USB, you could connect right to it.
John:
So when we all convert to USB-C on all our devices everywhere, we won't have that problem.
John:
But certain devices still have some part that could have been inside the computer if there was a big honking port.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
logic some active logic outside of their computer case used to be in the inside and now they're giving you the naked even less robotic core because some of the roboticness has been moved outside the case so i've been i've been thinking about that and thinking is there a future where you plop down your super skinny mac laptop and the only thing you ever plowed into it is super skinny beautiful slender cables and
John:
none of which have a big white dongle brick that contains the impossibly small active chip to do some sort of translation.
Marco:
And one thing that I think is a necessary regression of this move, though, of the move to externalizing all of these different little things and pouring all of the...
Marco:
complexity and capability of adapting to different ports and protocols and adding different things you know onto external devices one of the downsides of this is that the ones that you put in the computer you could control the quality of and oftentimes they came for free with the intel chipset or whatever else or you know and you could make pretty good things like usb controllers and hdmi outputs and everything else in the current way of doing things uh of externalizing to all these dongles and adapters and stuff
Marco:
you are basically forcing people to buy something from someone who knows who and who knows who's making the thing on the inside to get the capability it used to get with nice, reliable, built-in stuff.
Marco:
And some of the... Or many of the things that you are adding on to are these cheap no-name brands from Amazon or eBay or whatever.
Marco:
And then...
Marco:
I feel like it's going to be a similar problem as finding a good USB hub, which is very difficult.
Marco:
Good USB hubs do exist, but they're so hard to find reliably that they basically don't exist.
Marco:
And so USB devices, in practice, once you need more of them than what your computer has ports for...
Marco:
they just become less reliable because your hub is probably less reliable and it's very hard to find one that isn't or very hard to diagnose that problem.
Marco:
Um, and once you require, uh, fairly pricey Apple dongles, and we will get to this, uh, but fairly pricey Apple dongles, uh, to, to do basic things everyone needs like, you know, or not everyone, basic things that a lot of people need like USB, a adapters or HDMI or things like that.
Marco:
Uh, because the first party ones are so expensive, uh,
Marco:
Many people in reality are going to go buy third-party ones from Amazon or whatever, and they're going to be less reliable.
Marco:
They're going to be less controllable.
Marco:
They're going to be less predictable in many cases.
Marco:
Not all, but many cases.
Marco:
And I feel like that's kind of a step backwards in a lot of ways.
Marco:
We used to have these nice, reliable internal ports for all these things.
Marco:
And while it's great to have the versatility of these kind of everything ports now, and while it's great to save the thickness of them if you want a thinner laptop...
Marco:
It is definitely a step backwards to have to rely on some like 50 cent chip inside of a God knows who made it cable for something that you find pretty important to getting your work done.
Casey:
Well, okay, that's certainly possible, but I don't know if the sky is really falling yet, Chicken Little.
Casey:
No, I didn't say it was.
Casey:
We don't know what the quality of these things is going to be, and I think that in general—USB Hub is a good counterargument that I don't have a good answer for, but in general— Well, the USB is built in, though.
John:
That's the—
John:
The USB will be inside the thing.
John:
It's when you externalize PCI Express and say this adapter works by pretending it's like a device on the PCI bus and it has a chip for translating the video, you know, pulling the video off.
John:
And what was that one that had like, well, the iPad one had like an H.264 encoder thing in there, a tiny little iOS device and...
John:
like that kind of stuff goes on that's where you're moving stuff outside usb should be just a matter of everyone please update your connectors to not be those big old things like i see i see a light at the end of the tunnel for the usb angle but i see less light for things like display adapters or even something as people mentioned like ethernet which is very common and standard and you expect to just work but if there has to be a chip in your ethernet adapter then it's like marco said you are kind of at the mercy of uh
Casey:
the the quality of the adapter the bright side is if it breaks unlike the little chip break on your motherboard you just buy a new adapter so there's up up and downsides yeah and i'm i don't think that we should go and assume that the quality is going to be subpar right out of the gate and certainly there will be one or two of any kind of device one or two ethernet adapters one or two sd card readers etc that will be crappy but
Casey:
I think it's a bit premature to just assume that anything outside of the case is going to be crap.
Casey:
And even if there's a glut of things that are crappy, I mean, that's in principle why Amazon has reviews and why you can ask your friends, hey, does this one work for you?
Casey:
And hopefully Apple would only carry things that they feel are of a decent quality, even if it doesn't have the Apple logo on it.
Casey:
It's certainly possible that this stuff will all be crap, but I think it's way too soon to get worked up about.
John:
Well, Apple will make stuff anyway.
John:
So if you just want the Apple-quality ones, Apple will make them and sell them to you for way too much money.
Marco:
But there's an interesting side effect to that, too.
Marco:
If you noticed, they've outsourced a lot of the current ones to Belkin.
Marco:
They've outsourced the Ethernet to Belkin.
Marco:
Dual Lightning.
Marco:
Yeah, the Dual Lightning, that horrible splitter that lets you charge and listen to your Lightning headphones.
Marco:
That's the worst thing ever.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You pay like 40 bucks for this thing, this giant thing that has two lightning ports out, one lightning port in, so that you plug it into your iPhone, you have this giant dongle, and then you also have to have the headphone dongle to plug that into the second lightning port.
Marco:
Why couldn't they just have it be lightning out and headphone out?
Marco:
Why did...
John:
that's another angle i was like i would mind the chips and the adapters and the externalization externalization of all this all active logic less if it was smaller that adapter in particular is comically large for the function just like i understand you have to have active logic ideally it would be like the little you know the what do you call lighting the headphone adapter where it's like i didn't even know there was a chip in there it's so darn small like that's how they should all be when it's a giant white brick
John:
then it is you know that's it makes me feel bad about externalizing it and i assume that stuff will go down over time and they'll shrink and they'll get better and so on and so forth so there is some light at the end of the tunnel there um but i still do think about the pushing of the chips outside of the laptop case especially since on a 15 inch laptop that's a pretty big case so at some point uh if we can't get the world to get on board with putting these chips in their devices and we still have to have an adapter with a dongle
John:
It would be nice to maybe move one or two of the most often used ones to the side of that thing.
John:
Or if you're not going to do that, put like three more of those ports on the side because there's so much room on the 15-inch MacBook Pro.
John:
Things are looking kind of lonely there with just those two tiny little openings.
Marco:
We're sponsored this week by Eero.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
We have speakers, we have thermostats, we have light bulbs, front door locks, security cameras, all this stuff that all has Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Wi-Fi is probably the technology we depend on the most, the core of the utility of a 21st century home.
Marco:
Now, Wi-Fi is broken because it doesn't really reach your whole house most of the time or your whole apartment most of the time because there's walls, there's dead zones, you know, you have one room that's too far away from it or whatever else.
Marco:
eero is designed to change all this they make a single device it's a small elegant box and you can buy any number of these to cover your house you know you can buy just one but they recommend that you buy two or three and here's how this works you plug one into your internet connection you plug the other one or two or however many you have just into the wall somewhere further away from it and they all talk to each other on a private mesh network which makes them much better than typical range extenders
Marco:
And then they create one giant Wi-Fi network that just blankets your entire place in Wi-Fi.
Marco:
And setting this up could not be easier.
Marco:
Normally, there have been solutions that are kind of like this for a while, but they've been a pain to set up or they depend on things like range extensors, which are very, very slow.
Marco:
Eero gets around this.
Marco:
It is not like range extenders because it has that backend network that they talk to each other off of the regular network so it doesn't clog it up.
Marco:
And their app makes setup such a breeze.
Marco:
It is so ridiculously easy to set up multiple access points with Eero.
Marco:
And then when you have multiple broadcast points...
Marco:
your home gets covered so much more effectively than it does if you just have one router.
Marco:
No matter how many crazy antennas that router has on it, multiple points of Wi-Fi cover your house way better.
Marco:
And Eero makes so much other stuff easier.
Marco:
They have things like parental controls.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So once again, go to Eero.com, E-E-R-O.com for an amazing Wi-Fi setup and use code ATP to make overnight shipping free.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Eero for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Since the last show, Apple has made a very curious move.
Casey:
They have cut the prices on USB-C peripherals.
Casey:
And we'll put a link in the show notes to a post on iMore from a friend of the show, Rene Ritchie, that breaks down kind of the price changes that have happened.
Casey:
And so as a couple of examples, the USB-C to traditional USB-C went from $19 to $9.
Casey:
The USB-C to lightning cable went from $25 to $19, etc., etc.
Casey:
But what's particularly interesting about this is that the LG displays, the 4K and 5K displays, are also getting discounted.
Casey:
I don't recall how much the 5K was before.
Casey:
Was it like $1,300?
Marco:
I think it was $1,300, yeah.
Casey:
And now it's $974.
Casey:
Still not available for order quite yet, but it's going to be $974 until the end of the year.
Casey:
And that's how long all these discounts will be going on.
Casey:
That's a really interesting move.
Casey:
And I feel like there's a pessimistic and an optimistic take on this.
Casey:
The optimistic take is Apple's listening, and they're responding, and they're trying to make all of our grumbling...
Casey:
go, well, maybe not go away, but make it easier on us for those of us who are professionals or think we're professionals and need a whole bunch of dongles.
Casey:
And so on the plus side, Apple's listening and they're trying to react.
Casey:
That's one way of looking at it.
Casey:
And I'm assuming that you guys will have alternative ways of looking at it.
Marco:
Well, I think it's damage control to some degree.
Marco:
I think it's pretty clear that Apple released these new MacBook Pros.
Marco:
I think the reaction to the new MacBook Pros has been less positive than Apple expected.
Marco:
I think that's pretty safe to say.
Marco:
And you can read between some lines on that.
Marco:
And I think Phil even came just about to saying that in some interview somewhere.
Marco:
basically the reaction has been you know not as positive as they wanted and so they're trying to do damage control and that's what you know they begin all their statements basically by saying how well this macbook pro is selling um that's great and there's all these qualifiers like it's the best selling pro laptop that we've ever had on our website and you know so all these qualifiers and everything but obviously it's selling well it's not going to be a flop or anything but
Marco:
they are getting a lot of criticism for it.
Marco:
So this is obvious damage control.
Marco:
And I think Gruber's note about it, I think on Twitter somewhere, was that he thinks maybe they don't want it to appear like a money grab.
Marco:
The reason they moved to USBC, they don't want it to appear like it was purely for profit reasons to sell a bunch of adapters and stuff.
Marco:
And I believe that.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
you know i'm sure apple is not sorry that they're going to make a lot more money from adapters and stuff than than before i think that's a happy side effect i don't think that was the primary reason why they did it i think the primary reason they did it was to make the laptop thinner lighter and simpler save on component costs internal to the laptop make it easier to engineer by having fewer ports on the outside easier to service fewer things that will die or break or have things stuck in them or or you know otherwise need warranty service and then finally of course because they believe in the future of whatever
Marco:
I believe those are all reasons why they made only USB-C plus a couple of headphone jacks, why they made those things all the standard ports and nothing else.
Marco:
However, you could very easily look at this and you could say, well, you know, they did this just to make money on adapters.
Marco:
So I think that was probably one of the things they were trying to combat with this.
Marco:
I think they were also just trying to...
Marco:
apologize maybe to power users in in a very small and relatively inexpensive inexpensive way that doesn't admit any faults about anything you know like it's basically it it's a pr feel-good move similar to the free bumper case for the iphone 4 with antenna gate like it's a it's a pr like make you feel better and make make it look like we're not just being greedy for adapter prices that being said these dongles and stuff are still very expensive like they're still apple prices and
Marco:
They're still more expensive than they need to be.
Marco:
And I think it's weird that the price cuts are temporary.
Marco:
The fact that it only runs until the end of the year, if they really wanted it to not look like it was about dongle profits, they should have made the price cuts permanent.
Marco:
Because these price cuts are not...
Marco:
They don't appear to be unsustainable.
Marco:
Knowing roughly what margins tend to be at retail, things like this, and knowing that most of these probably have very few parts in them and are probably very inexpensive and are probably very profitable to begin with, it wouldn't surprise me if most of these had at least a 50% margin and probably a larger one.
Marco:
And they've cut the prices by like, you know, 25 to 50 percent basically.
Marco:
So I would be very, very surprised if any of these things were actually losing money at the current prices.
John:
That's not sustainable by Apple standards because they need 40 percent margin on everything.
John:
I agree that the margins are probably way over 40 percent for accessories and they've cut them down to what I think is below 40 percent.
John:
although i think they should maybe revisit that because if they if they can't make them like if they're getting 50 margins on these things they're spending perhaps too much money making them not that i'm saying they should make them crappier but then 50 that was being that was a conservative estimate i'm guessing the margins are more like 80 it's there a lot on this kind of stuff usually they they do make like all their stuff they make their even their little adapters very carefully
John:
Not so much in terms of reliability, as a million people who will send us pictures of their totally destroyed things will come.
John:
But in terms of tolerances and industrial design, they are precision-engineered products.
John:
There's not a lot of plastic mold lines on them.
John:
All the edges are straight and crisp.
John:
They look like little pieces of art, which also makes them bad adapters in many cases.
John:
But I'm just saying, like, it costs money to do that.
John:
And they come in a little... And the reason I know this is I bought a bunch of them.
John:
I'll get back to the temporary pricing in a second.
John:
they come in little rectangular boxes that are beautiful origami folded and you know they're just they're they're not just like a little plastic bag that you get like with amazon basics and the frustration free packaging of just this cable thrown in there right and you know and like i said in terms of how they perform as actual adapters i don't think they're actually better than the other ones but i do see that where some of the money is spent on them so i think they would in general they would be better off
John:
finding a way to manufacture their adapters for less money, giving up some of the beauty and elegance, and at the same time making them more reliable adapters.
John:
And the reason I bought a bunch of them is what you're getting at, the temporary pricing.
John:
It's, you know, if you want a pessimistic take, this is what I thought when I saw it.
John:
Oh, it's nice.
John:
They're doing something to, you know...
John:
be nice to all those people who are like posting horror stories that i bought a new macbook pro and also 300 worth of adapter so i could use the damn thing right that's a bad look for apple so like now you won't have to spend 150 worth of adapters but only until the end of the year so what happens at the end of the year by the end of the year has everyone updated all their offices to have connectors that don't require these dongles no they just go back to the old pricing the old pricing which was really really expensive especially for some of the simpler adapters
John:
The reason I bought, I bought those, uh, the USB-C to plain old USB-A because that's going to, I don't even have a computer with ports that require that.
John:
I mean, I got my Apple TV.
John:
I suppose I could plug it into it, but it would do nothing.
John:
Um, but someday I will have a computer that does that.
John:
And they were half off, basically.
John:
It was like $19 to $9.
John:
So I bought two of them because I'm going to use them.
John:
And $9 is a price I will pay for that little adapter.
John:
Will I pay $20 for that adapter?
John:
Hell no.
John:
I will not pay $20.
John:
I'll go to Monoprice and find whatever, you know, Amazon Basics was mentioned.
John:
I'll find a cheaper one because it's not worth that much money.
John:
$20 for a USB-C to USB-A adapter?
John:
No.
John:
So...
John:
I bought them because they were temporary.
John:
Maybe their system is working, adding some urgency or whatever.
John:
But it would be much nicer if they didn't see this as a PR thing that needs to be addressed in the short term, but rather as a long-term issue.
John:
Because I think they're going to be selling dongles for a long time.
John:
And that's going to be factored into the price of people buying laptops, especially the next laptop that people buy after this one.
John:
Because they'll know, oh, when you buy an Apple laptop, also reserve $100 for dongles, maybe more.
John:
And if the price is just going to go right back up, it's not a good situation.
John:
I mean, they kind of get away with the iOS devices where it's like, oh, you can buy the iOS devices.
John:
You want the one with lots of memory.
John:
We're just going to add a couple hundred bucks.
John:
And you want AppleCare, and then you want the front case and the back case on your iPad.
John:
It adds up really fast.
John:
But for some reason, and maybe this is illogical, the adapters seem like...
John:
you know relatively more expensive and maybe it's because i don't see the little chips in there and don't understand how expensive it is to get them all integrated into that but this is a problem of apple's own making and when i see third-party ones that can come in for less especially for the simpler adapters it makes you think that apple is choosing the wrong trade-offs when it comes to making its own adapters they're too expensive too precious uh and not sturdy enough
Casey:
It's funny you say that you went and picked some of these up because on my to-do list this week, which I haven't had time for, is I wanted to go to the Apple store and pick up a handful of these adapters because I have the exact same thought.
Casey:
I probably won't have a MacBook Pro or a Mac that uses USPC for at least a year or two, but that time will come.
Casey:
So why not just pick up a few of these?
Casey:
And I intend to do that very thing sometime soon.
Marco:
The reason I'm laughing is that I did that very thing.
Marco:
All three of us did this.
Marco:
So none of the three of us have one of the new MacBook Pros or have ordered one or likely are planning to buy one.
Marco:
Well, you briefly ordered one.
Casey:
I did.
Marco:
You briefly ordered one.
Marco:
And I ordered it with two adapters, a USB C to A and a C to Lightning.
Marco:
Those both shipped and arrived before I even canceled the laptop.
Marco:
So and I'm like, well, I could return them, but well, I'm going to use them anyway.
Marco:
And then the price drop was announced and they credited me the difference.
Marco:
I'm like, OK, that's even better.
Marco:
And so I went I bought I now have two C to A adapters, the light, the C to Lightning, Gigabit Ethernet, the SanDisk card reader and the Thunderbolt 2 adapter because I have I have an external sound device that I that we record at WBC with that is Thunderbolt.
Marco:
I made all the exact same calculations as you guys.
Marco:
It's like, well, I'm going to need these eventually, and they're probably not going to get cheaper over time.
Marco:
I'm going to need these soon.
Marco:
Probably within the next two years, I will need these adapters.
Marco:
and think like things like the seat of lightning cable that's just the new lightning cable i need tons of lightning cables they're all over the place like i so like to pick up one of these at whatever it is 19 instead of 25 i get that was a small price drop on that one but like well i'm gonna need these so i might as well get one or two you should make like a paper craft macbook pro and plug all your dongles into it
Marco:
you'll have like a pretend computer yeah but but i again i do admit though i agree john that it is very strange these price drops are only temporary on the dongles because again like they're still not making them like mono price level pricing or anything like they're still they're still expensive compared to the no-name ones and that's fine they are they are better they drop them down to the same price as
John:
good quality third-party peripherals like that's all they did it's not like it's a super duper bargain it's just like oh this is the price i would expect to see if i found whatever the best third-party one is out there a similar price to this and like they botched the pr on this too because they did the right thing and credited everybody
John:
but the way we found that out was like oh they're dropping the prices but what about the people who already ordered them and then we had to wait for people to start getting credit that's got to be part of your message yeah we've lowered all the prices and by the way if you bought one in the past x days we're going to credit you which they obviously did like they did the right thing like when you're going to do the right thing apple tell us about it because it's good pr like and don't leave people wondering like
John:
oh now i feel bad that i bought them hey but what happened to the poor suckers who bought them or whatever and you know we found out a couple hours or a day later that apple did the right thing but why like that was another drop ball yeah but i i don't know regardless this is a good move
Marco:
I wish they would make the price cuts permanent.
Marco:
They might still do that.
Marco:
They said until the end of the year, they could change their minds, or they could cut the prices later, after some period of time, again.
Marco:
The funny thing about the end-of-the-year thing is that I was honestly tempted to order the LG display, too, the big 5K display, because...
Marco:
Well, that is only going to be available for ordering at this $300 discount for a couple of weeks maybe because you can't even order one yet.
Marco:
The website currently says it'll become available in December and the price drop is till the end of the year.
Marco:
So you're going to have like a few weeks in December when you can actually order this thing at a discount.
Marco:
Who knows when it would actually ship and arrive.
Marco:
And I'm thinking like, well...
Marco:
Will there ever be a time like if they make a new Mac Pro next year, I'm going to want one of those displays if it's still a standalone Mac Pro.
Marco:
But but I'm not confident enough that it will be a standalone Mac Pro that will exist that will be out next year to actually order one of these things like six months ahead of time.
John:
You just hook that up to your Papercraft MacBook Pro and you'll have a complete setup except for the computer part.
John:
You'll have the dongles.
John:
You'll have the screen.
John:
It'll be beautiful.
John:
You can use your iPad as the pretend touch bar.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
You'll have the whole computer except the screen, the keyboard, and the trackpad, and the CPU, and the GPU.
Marco:
Yeah, it's going to be... Once we get to the other side, we're in these heavy transitional eras.
Marco:
First, we went Retina and SSD, and we still have not finished those transitions.
Marco:
We're close, but we still have not completed those two large transitions completely.
Marco:
You can still go out and buy not even just one, but many Mac models that either don't have Retina, don't have SSDs by default, or even both, which is...
Marco:
But those transitions are almost done.
Marco:
Once you have a Retina computer with all SSD storage, not Fusion Drive, all SSD storage, it is a thing of beauty.
Marco:
It is amazing.
Marco:
It's such a good computer from that point forward.
Marco:
And USB-C is going to be the same thing for ports.
Marco:
It's like we have this kind of cumbersome, annoying transition that's going to break a lot of things like old monitors that you won't be able to use anymore.
Marco:
It's putting up this big barrier, changing all the ports, requiring this dongle sale and everything else.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Once we get to that promised land of all USB-C ports and all or mostly USB-C peripherals, it's going to be really nice.
Marco:
And the benefits of the new MacBook Pro, like being able to charge it on both sides, that's cool.
Marco:
That's a useful thing.
Marco:
It's going to be a really nice world when we get there.
Marco:
But the transition is going to be uncomfortable, just like all these other ones have been.
John:
Our new thing in our future world will be confusion about the USB-C to lightning cable, which end is which, because they're different sizes, and you can tell if you look at them.
John:
But if you're not paying attention and you just pick the skinny little cable up with a too skinny little lens, we don't have the problem of like USB-A where you keep flipping it over three times to get it in right because they're both bi-directional.
John:
But you might find yourself sticking the lightning plug into the side of your MacBook Pro maybe just once or twice before you realize what's going on.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
We had talked, I think, briefly last week, and then we ended up shelving it so we could discuss this week, about the thought of ARM processors on the Mac.
Casey:
And I think I might have brought this up because I was saying that, you know, if you look at a lot of the angst that's been floating around the community with regard to the MacBook Pro...
Casey:
and the mac pro there is a way that you can blame a lot of these troubles on intel not to say that apple's blameless by any stretch of the imagination but you can paint a picture in which intel holds a lot of the blame and it's in apple's it's apple's modus operandi to control everything you can and so it controls the chips on the ios lines and
Casey:
Why wouldn't it make sense for them to try to control the chip on the MacBook Pro or really just the Mac lines?
Casey:
And so that makes you think, well, why wouldn't they use an ARM chip like they have in the iOS lines and throw that on?
Casey:
It's presumably...
Casey:
uh going to be very low power and you know the the modern ios devices are nearly as fast as modern macs and so it seems on paper to make sense why wouldn't they give it a shot i mean the transition would stink but we've already done this once with the transition from power pc to intel and fat binaries and blah blah why not try again twice right so why not try again
Marco:
We need like an old Mac sound effect whenever John schools us on something that came across the Mac before 2004.
John:
PowerPC transition was awesome.
John:
Graphic calculator was a miracle.
Casey:
We could use a startup chime since it's not a thing anymore.
John:
there you go so we discussed this arm and the mac thing so many times and we're probably going to say all the same things here but the reason i think it was worth bringing up again the reason we delayed it to this show is because like things change surprisingly quickly in the world of arms dpus and just like to briefly summarize all the things that we've said in the past x86 is important for windows compatibility how important is that still but it is a thing um
John:
Why would Apple spend money producing ARM chips for the Mac?
John:
Because the Mac doesn't sell enough volume to be worth creating your own chips, whereas the iOS chips do.
John:
And that leads to, okay, well, all you got to do is wait until you can do the investment, design your own fancy ARM chip that you use in your iOS devices.
John:
And basically use that same chip or the same architecture, maybe with more cores and more fancy stuff.
John:
But basically like the work you did for your iOS devices transfers directly to the Mac.
John:
And then you solve the investment problem because you're like, oh, I'm doing this work anyway for the next iPhone.
John:
It doesn't cost that much more to make a bigger, more parallel version of it and throw it in to a Mac type thing.
John:
It solves the problem of relying on Intel like Casey was getting to.
John:
It's been a bad run lately with delays and everything like that.
John:
Apple's the master of its own destiny.
John:
uh and you just have the x86 compatibility stuff to deal with and the reason i think it's worth revisiting again is because just one year since last time we probably discussed it the chip that's in the latest iphones is i think faster than some macs and
John:
it's clocked lower in most cases and like i think we're kind of at that not quite at the point but getting close to the point where the work they do for the iphone cpu is directly transferable to the mac in terms of you know what kind of performance could you get out of it and you know with you know making a bigger version clocking it higher maybe putting in a couple more cores i think we're there for the low-end macs and if they don't even make any high-end macs anymore maybe it doesn't matter so
John:
it you know as this equation keeps changing and as we depressingly look at the geek bench scores for the latest phone and compare them to whatever mac we're sitting in front of and go what is going on here you know the world is upside down uh the the balance of all those factors that i discussed at apple have to be changing um it really depends on the weight you give to them to decide is this the go or no go moment and again we all just assume that apple has you know
John:
has either been working on or understand the challenges of converting mac os to arm if it hasn't done so already um but like and especially with the integration of the arm chip for the touch id the viability and desirability of an arm-based mac to both apple and consumers only increases over time and i feel like this has to come to head eventually unless intel gets back in gear and there's another two process levels ahead of everybody else um
John:
And I guess the wild card is that 3D X point stuff, which I don't know if it's like proprietary in any way or tied to Intel in any specific way.
John:
But there are many ways that Intel could ensure that it keeps Apple's business.
John:
But especially with this recent delay and the new MacBooks and looking at the scores for the new iPhones, in my mind anyway, things are shifting much more towards the possibility of ARM Macs in the future than I would have thought of even just a year ago.
Casey:
I completely agree with you.
Casey:
And it's worth noting, as I have in the past, that to switch to ARM would incur some pretty significant costs for a lot of developers, which admittedly are a very, very, very small part of the market.
Casey:
But doing virtualization on an Intel box for Windows, which is really now only running on Intel again—
Casey:
that's easier than trying to do some sort of cross-compilation from X86 to ARM.
Casey:
So if old me, the me that was still writing code in Windows, which actually happened earlier today, but we'll leave that aside, the old me that was doing it professionally 40-plus hours a week,
Casey:
I would probably have to go back to a PC because presumably it would be just awful to have to cross-compile or really... What's the term I'm looking for?
Casey:
It's not cross-compile.
John:
Emulate?
Casey:
Yeah, really, emulate is what I'm looking for.
Casey:
To emulate x86 on top of ARM.
Casey:
I mean, maybe it would be quick, but I would assume that it would not.
Casey:
And, you know, as we've spoken about in the past, I remember even as a not Mac person, I remember hearing about the, you know, PC on a daughter board that some people plugged into their Mac so they could run Windows on them.
Casey:
And so there are definitely costs to this.
Casey:
There's costs in software, pain.
Casey:
You would have to have some sort of emulation layer for x86.
Casey:
What was the thing they did for PowerPC on top of Intel?
Casey:
What was the name of that?
Casey:
Rosetta.
Casey:
Rosetta, thank you.
John:
I've got just a solution for you, Casey.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's a dongle, and inside it is a Raspberry Pi.
John:
I mean, you just mentioned basically a PCI card.
John:
I think it was Anubis card.
John:
Yeah, you're right.
John:
Like, you could...
John:
fairly easily put a reasonably powerful x86 computer inside a dongle connected to a thunderbolt 3 port and the only people who'd have to have that dongle are the people who need to do that and there's i mean it's not just that it's like also people who want to you know use people who want to run software on there if you just want to run like i ran into this at work recently which is depressing docker does not run on my mac at work because it's too old
John:
Because it doesn't have the hypervisor stuff or whatever.
John:
But anyway, Docker is not going to run.
John:
Docker for deploying on x86-based servers is not going to run on ARM Mac.
John:
And so I would need to get that dongle too.
Casey:
Yeah, fair enough.
Casey:
I didn't think of it that way.
Casey:
Also, doing a quick search, it looks like the first time that we spoke about this that I could quickly find was episode 35, almost exactly three years ago on October 18 of 2013, where we discussed how Touch ID could be used in Macs and whether our MacBooks would be worth the transition costs.
John:
So does that make this follow-up?
John:
We crossed over into topics, believe it or not, when we talked about the peripheral price cuts.
John:
Everyone in the chat room wants to tell us all that Thunderbolt is an Intel thing.
John:
All things are solvable with money, though.
John:
I truly believe this.
John:
It's like we talked about last week.
John:
Apple could make x86 chips and get off the Intel bandwagon.
John:
There's lots of possibilities here involving money changing hands and licensing deals and so on and so forth.
John:
Another thing that factors into this, I forgot to mention in the little summary, is that
John:
For a long time, Intel has had this massive advantage that they were on the new process size before everybody else, sometimes like a year or more before everybody else.
John:
So everything they made had just like a built-in advantage of you being lower power and smaller, you know, and like they...
John:
they were first at whatever the the process size is and lately i don't i've been seeing lots of stories and collecting them in the show notes then eventually like deleting them or aging them off lots of stuff about like well intel is not going to be first to 10 nanometers or intel already is in first 10 nanometers like no those are just promises intel will still be first and intel is the only one who's going to be able to proceed beyond that because they've done the deep r&d and like
John:
for back in that show 36 or whatever one of the topics we probably talked about is like does does intel just want to be a fab for everybody else because they have the best process wouldn't it be great if apple could have intel fab all of its you know a series chips on their fancy new process and you know intel is making uh some of the chips and phones but not the the big one not the a series chip they're just making more like a radio chip that is not as good as the uh the qualcomm one yet but anyway that's the one i have that doesn't work
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Well, I don't know if that's why you're having your drop calls.
John:
But either way, like it used to be that Intel was unquestionably the best place to fab your stuff.
John:
It's because Intel was like, we're not going to just fab your stuff.
John:
We want to sell you chips that we make because we make way more money off those.
John:
We're not going to just be a stupid fab.
John:
That's not what we are.
John:
We're not just a fab.
John:
We're Intel.
John:
We make chips.
John:
I'm not going to say that Intel is losing its lead in fab tech, but it seems less clear cut to me as a fairly casual observer of the, uh, Silicon chip industry that Intel's lead on process is no longer as big as it used to be.
John:
And I forget what, what are the eight 10 being made at?
John:
Is it, is, are they 14 nanometer?
John:
i forget what size they are but i keep reading stories about you know taiwan semiconductor will be at 10 nanometer before intel is and all stuff like that nanometer is it 16 yeah maybe they still have a lee but it just doesn't seem as big to me as it used to be and also intel seems to be more open now to fabbing things for other people there was some other story i had in the show notes about that a while back so add that to yet another set of variables that are slowly shifting and
Marco:
more towards being in favor of our max i don't think any of this stuff is a tipping point yet but when we revisit this topic in a year it may be a slam dunk yeah i mean at this point i would say that the the processor itself is probably no longer the reason why they're not doing it it's everything around the processor you know it's all the like the memory controllers and the thunderbolt if they want you know they have to move move away from thunderbolt now in all likelihood which by the way like
Marco:
yeah i mean apple did just make a pretty big bet on thunderbolt with the usbc transition like that that's a big bet but apple changes their mind when they need to like they they can totally say you know what thunderbolt was great last year this year we can't do it anymore too bad buy new dongles well they don't have to change their mind like i said this like these are all solvable problems with money like i'm sure intel could come to some agreement
John:
with apple involving exchanges of money that would allow someone somewhere to build an arm chip with like i don't think there's anything specifically x86 specific about even if it's like byte auto crap like these are solvable problems technically and monetarily it could be another barrier and that's another variable like on the against side and maybe it's a big barrier because intel is like no we're never going to license it and you know tough luck like we don't know we don't know the constants that apply to all these different uh factors but i don't i don't say it rules it out
Marco:
I wouldn't say that Intel is incredibly flexible on things like that.
Marco:
The other thing, too, is it would be possible, although I don't think it would last very long, I think it would be a transitional thing, but it would be possible to only make some models with ARM chips, like only the MacBook 1, or only the MacBook 1 and Escape.
Marco:
And so you keep the Pro models on Intel so they could just say, you know what, if you need to virtualize Windows or whatever, you could use the Pro model.
Marco:
And if you need Thunderbolt, use the Pro model.
Marco:
And if you are willing to get the smallest, lightest thing that doesn't have all the Pro features, then you can have these two models that are ARM-based.
Marco:
Maybe the Mac Mini becomes ARM-based as well.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
They have lots of options there if they wanted to go that route.
Marco:
I don't know if... Again, I don't know if they will.
Marco:
I don't know if it makes sense for them to put so much effort into this transition if they're not really hurting badly from Intel.
Marco:
But I think there have been times over the last couple years where they have been really hurting badly because of Intel.
Marco:
And I... Especially... I mean...
Marco:
If they care about the Mac Pro more, it would be even more pressing there because the Mac Pro has been historically even more limited by Intel, even before Apple started skipping generations.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
Money does solve a lot of things.
Marco:
They could make a deal.
Marco:
But Intel really is pretty inflexible on certain things these days.
Marco:
And it doesn't seem like Apple is a large enough or profitable enough Intel customer for Apple to be able to dictate terms to them anymore, if they ever were.
John:
Apple's big bargaining chip, though, is that they could say, hey, Intel, I know you don't want to be a fab, but if you were going to fab something, the A-series chip that's in our iOS devices, it's pretty good volume there.
Casey:
Fair point.
Casey:
Also, to go back a half step, Marco, you had said you could make just the MacBook One have the new ARM chip just for the sake of discussion.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I agree with you, but wouldn't we run into the same sort of problem with this USB-C transition where if the MacBook One is running ARM but nothing else is, what is incentivizing the software developers to rebuild their apps for the ARM platform and make fat binaries and blah, blah, blah, if only one...
Casey:
presumably low-volume Mac is on ARM, and everything else is still on Intel.
John:
The Mac App Store rules, if only Mac developers actually sold things for the Mac App Store anymore.
John:
But I mean, I'm sure they would do that.
John:
That would be their thing.
John:
They would mandate it in the Mac App Store, and honestly, developers would do it, if it's as easy as just changing some settings and filling some stuff around.
John:
Like, at this point,
John:
most conscientious mac developers should not have architecture specific code and like they still have wwc sessions say how to tell if you're doing something that relies on you know word size or byte order and especially with swift and stuff with this stuff being abstracted away and not having to worry about c ints and shorts and whatever the hell those are right you know on different architectures and all that crap i think it wouldn't be that bad and developers would do it because if you want to sell to those people you'll do it right like
John:
maybe the people making pro apps wouldn't because they don't want to sell to the macbook escape people but it is surmountable and i think there are incentives for people to get on board as time goes on it becomes less and less difficult to make relatively portable code like
Marco:
We have moved up so many layers of abstraction in so much of our code.
Marco:
We do so little custom assembly or by order assumptions or binary operations at that level at all anymore that it's less and less work now.
Marco:
I think developers are going to do more work to support the touch bar than they would need to do to make an ARM version of almost any app.
John:
Except for game developers, they'd be screwed.
Casey:
What gets delivered to the App Store?
Casey:
Because I haven't looked at this in a while, but doesn't Swift compile to its own intermediate language, then gets compiled to like an LLVM intermediate language?
Casey:
Is that what gets pushed to the App Store?
Casey:
And then that's what BitCode is all about?
John:
I think you're mixing BitCode up with the SIL stuff, which is a whole different thing.
Casey:
I think you're right.
John:
I forget what the BitCode policy is.
John:
Do you remember, Marco?
Marco:
Bitcode is required on the watch, I believe.
Marco:
I think it's optional for iPhones still.
Marco:
And I don't know if the Mac App Store, may it rest in peace, even supports it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, but Bitcode... A number of people have looked at it and basically determined that Bitcode...
Marco:
is probably not a very good way to just automatically generate like a whole ARM thing because bit code I think is too low level.
Marco:
It's beneath the compiled level and so basically like assumptions about byte order and stuff would not translate automatically.
Casey:
Gotcha.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
But you see where I'm driving at though.
Casey:
I wasn't sure if this could solve that problem for you.
John:
i'm pretty sure bitcode is not the answer to like an automatic arm build of everything in the store yeah what was it was it mostly i forgot i used to know this about bitcode but not writing these always 10 reviews for a long time lets you forget all these things i don't remember the details but like apple's motivation for doing it was it so they have more flexibility with like fiddling with instructions from one generation to the next of like the s1 chip or the s2 and so on and so forth that because you're not delivering machine code that they just
John:
run as is they have some flexibility if they change an instruction or remove an instruction and replace it with another one that's slightly different that they can do the final final machine code generation uh business anyway uh developers were all antsy about it and who knows how long it will be a thing but on the watch that's the one i was thinking on the watch like it is a thing it has been from day one right everything for the watch is delivered as bit code which gives apple more flexibility with hardware design than they would have if everyone was shipping just binaries that are run as is
Casey:
Yeah, I thought that the pitched reason for BitCode was that this way, as a user, you would only download the version of the binary that's built for your platform rather than having to get, kind of building on what you were saying, rather than having to get the A6 version, A7 version, A8 version, or what have you.
Casey:
You would just have the version of the app built against the processor that you have.
Casey:
And thus it would be a smaller download.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
I will say that a lot of apps involve a large quantity of advertising and tracking SDKs, and those can actually add a non-trivial amount of binary size.
Marco:
And a lot of their size is assets as well, but a lot of those can get pretty sizable and make the binary pretty ridiculous.
John:
The Swift Standard Library, which I think still has to ship with the applications because they haven't worked out the ABI compatibility yet, is another big thing that's in there, but
John:
for you know for applications of appreciable size when you're thinking of things like you know a one gigabyte game that's not code that's all that's all assets
Marco:
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Marco:
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That's Betterment.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Betterment, investing made better.
Casey:
There's been a couple of calls for a terrifying strategy from the past to come back.
Casey:
John, should there be Mac clones again?
John:
This was mentioned last show as a measure of exactly how deep the dissatisfaction in some quarters was about the new MacBook Pros.
John:
They're saying, look, if you're not going to make the pro Mac that I want to make, how about letting other people make Mac hardware?
John:
That way, Apple, you don't have to worry about it anymore.
John:
Someone else will address my needs immediately.
John:
and everyone will be happy isn't that great mac cloning it was done we did it once before we can do it again just license the mac operating system and i will gladly buy from some other company that actually cares about my needs and will make me the big honking computer that i want um and we've been down this road before uh in the past for most of apple's history with the mac people have been clamoring for them to clone it because that was ibm's
John:
half accidental strategy.
John:
IBM and Intel and Windows, like that whole big mess, the way it ended up through no particular grand plan of anybody except perhaps Microsoft was that you could buy a PC from companies other than IBM.
John:
They're IBM compatible.
John:
um and they all would suit your needs they could all run ms dos and microsoft windows eventually and all that other stuff and so the hardware vendors would compete with each other and have their own little race to the bottom until they all went out of business except for dell lenovo and anyway blah blah blah um
John:
everyone was saying during the gogo late 80s early 90s hey apple ibm microsoft whoever eating your lunch because they let anybody make hardware and they have competition and capitalism and yay 80s um you should license your operating system and apple said no we're not gonna license our operating system and every time apple did something that someone didn't like it was i see if you just license your operating system you'd be doing much better uh
John:
In the end, eventually, I think Apple, now making so much more money than the other PC makers, has come out the other side and saying, I guess our strategy was pretty good.
John:
But in the middle there, a couple of Apple CEOs were convinced that this is a good idea.
John:
I think Spindler started it, maybe?
John:
I forget.
John:
I'm blaming the wrong CEO for starting Mac cloning.
John:
They said...
John:
When Apple was getting increasingly desperate, they still didn't have a new operating system, and Windows 95, 98, and so on and so forth were taking over the world, and they hadn't yet bought Next.
John:
One of the panic plans they made was, all right, people keep saying license in the Mac operating system.
John:
Let's do that.
John:
And they did that.
John:
with predictable results because apple was not licensing from a position of power it allowed a bunch of third parties to make mac clones very often based on mac or apple derived reference hardware design so these clone companies sometimes didn't even have to do the hard work to build their own hardware they could just sort of make hardware that was like apples but a little bit better and do a little bit of work in addition to that
John:
uh it didn't help apple make more money the license fees did not make up for the loss in hardware sales when steve jobs came back was yeah i think when steve jobs came back uh he canned it many women can before then should have been canned before then uh and the brief mac clone experiment ended and for most people looking backwards on it they're gonna be like oh mac clone that was such a big mistake it didn't actually help apple actually hurt apple uh
John:
Uh, and it was kind of cruel to do Mac clones.
John:
And then, uh, a year or two later say, Oh, just kidding.
John:
No more Mac clones.
John:
And so all those companies sprung up around making Mac clones had a brief moment in the sun and then had to disappear because their entire business was gone.
John:
Motorola even made them for crying out loud.
John:
Motorola made Mac clones.
John:
Um, and so I would imagine for you people who didn't live through it, you silly millennials, it just seems like a cautionary joke.
John:
But to me, who lived through it, I do have some fond memories.
John:
And I think most Mac users who lived through the clone era do have some fond memories of it for just the reasons we just talked about, like with the MacBook Pro and dissatisfaction.
John:
There was a time when if Apple didn't make a Mac that was like you wanted to buy, like it didn't have the right balance of features and price and so on and so forth, there was a chance there would be another company that would.
John:
And these companies, the Mac clone makers were no dummies, they...
John:
tried to fill market niches that Apple didn't want to.
John:
And so they would clock their CPUs a little bit higher.
John:
They would make boring-looking tower boxes that were nevertheless much more expendable than Apple's designs.
John:
They would sell computers for less money than Apple.
John:
They would do all sorts of things that Apple wasn't going to do, or just giving you different combinations of size and hard drive space and video capabilities in, you know...
John:
It was actually a fairly exciting time to be a Mac user.
John:
And I know a lot of people actually bought those clones.
John:
And were they as nice as Apple's computers?
John:
No.
John:
And the companies weren't around very long because Apple stopped cloning.
John:
But for a brief moment there, we were in that world where if you were an enthusiast who liked to run the Mac operating system, you had more choices.
John:
And it was kind of fun.
John:
Now, this doesn't mean we should...
John:
do it again now it's a silly overreaction to a new product that some people were mildly dissatisfied with but like i guess maybe just my main point in this is to say that mac clones weren't actually all bad and if apple ever loses total interest in either the mac entirely or the high end of the mac market
John:
some kind of limited licensing plan could work like just like the lg monitor is currently the only one you can buy that works for the macbook pro and i assume there will be other ones but imagine if like one company was blessed as the company that makes the pro mac hardware and it was blessed by apple and it was the only it was it was no it's not like you had 50 more choices but merely you had two choices where before you would have zero uh or before you would just have one
John:
That's a thing I think pro users would find reasonably acceptable and Apple might find advantageous.
John:
Why don't we make some money off this market and let someone else do the heavy lifting without increasing our support burden too much?
John:
Obviously, this is totally outside the realm, philosophically speaking, of I think anything that Apple would ever consider.
John:
But from a consumer perspective, it seems viable to me.
Casey:
I don't see the Apple of today doing it, but everything you just said does make sense.
John:
Craig Hockenberry had an article about it.
John:
Apple should pull Lenovo and this exact thing.
John:
Just have one company do its hardware stuff if Apple's not interested anymore.
John:
I think mostly it's just an overreaction.
John:
Like, oh, you're not going to make the hardware I want?
John:
Why don't you let somebody else do it?
John:
Like, totally an overreaction.
John:
But...
John:
they're kind of like the arm on the mac like there's something to it uh and it's not the time to do it now but we'll check back in five years and see how things have changed so for reference i have configured a mac pro like workstation at dell.com i'm so sorry if you've
Marco:
If you've tried to configure anything complicated at Dell.com recently, wow, my goodness.
Marco:
So I have a few errors in my configuration that need to be fixed according to this popover dialogue.
Marco:
Now, one of those is the PCIe solid-state drive boot drive requires the hard drive to be the PCIe boot drive.
Marco:
Please update as needed.
Marco:
Of course, it can't update for me.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
The PCIe solid-state drive is not compatible with the dual video card.
Marco:
Please update the internal hard drive configuration.
Marco:
Requires a PCIe boot drive and a PCIe solid-state drive.
Marco:
Boot drive, please update as needed.
Marco:
Please be sure to update the selection for boot drive hard drive and also the selection of boot option from the PCIe solid-state drives.
Marco:
That being said, if I could somehow make this configuration work, I have configured...
Marco:
what I think would be a modern version of the high-end Mac Pro, the 12-core Mac Pro.
Marco:
Now, the current 12-core Mac Pro, which is three years old and slow, 64 gig, one terabyte PCI Express SSD.
Marco:
Base video card, which is the D500-ish, that is $8,800.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
for this and that d500 by the way i think is now less powerful than the gpu in the ipad pro or maybe it's close probably yeah so the similar dell with a brand new broadwell e uh xeon oh crap i'm sorry i had the eight core selected let me change switch the mac pro to eight core all right mac pro is 7300 in the eight core config 7300 for the mac pro
Marco:
5400 for the for the dell with the brand new parts that are faster um so it there is a substantial price gain here for for uh you know if if you wanted to do pc hardware that was similar and in many ways better but don't let dell do it i would like lenovo or even hp or anybody else would be better
Marco:
No, the only reason I went to Dell on this was because I checked earlier in the week and HP does not seem to offer the Broadwell easy-ons yet.
Marco:
They're all the V3s and the Broadwell's V4.
Marco:
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Marco:
But yeah, for the purpose of building Hackintoshes or workstations or anything else, man, if Apple licensed the OS to clone makers, even if they charged like $300 for it, like some large price for the OS, it would still be pretty price competitive to go with a clone maker.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But that's probably the reason they're not going to do it.
Marco:
Now, that being said, you can look at what they're doing.
Marco:
As I mentioned earlier, it is very noticeable that they are outsourcing some of their dongles to Belkin, that they are outsourcing their new monitor to LG.
Marco:
I think it's very clear that Apple is trying to get themselves out of businesses.
Marco:
They're exiting businesses.
Marco:
They're exiting the display business.
Marco:
They're outsourcing that.
Marco:
They're exiting some of these dongles, outsourcing that.
Marco:
And the Belkin Ethernet adapter box, it looks like an Apple product.
Marco:
It looks like an Apple product box.
Marco:
It looks like the product itself.
Marco:
This is clearly like Apple is trying to get themselves out of these non-core, maybe unprofitable businesses.
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me if they actually did do some kind of weird partnership with IBM or something or HP or whatever to offer something like this.
Marco:
I mean, it seems crazy to tell Mac people that Apple would ever do some kind of clone program again.
Marco:
But if you look at what they're actually doing today...
Marco:
That isn't totally out of the question.
Marco:
Now, I still think it's incredibly unlikely.
Marco:
I do.
Marco:
I would not count on it because I would assume that if Apple wanted a computer like this to exist, they would just make it themselves.
Marco:
But there is now precedent in what they're doing in their lineup to effectively outsource less interesting parts of their business to other companies to make it their problem whenever something needs service or to manage the margins or whatever else.
John:
That's the most interesting part of their business to some people, though, like the high end hardware.
John:
It's kind of like getting back to the halo car thing, like they should be making that in-house business as a even just as a motivational tool for their for their internal tech team and for their customers.
John:
But I think it would have to be it couldn't just be like a licensing arrangement because it's not just that Apple wants to make like 300 bucks in each one they sell.
John:
there's a support burden to every new model that's out there they have to support with the os and everything so i think it would have to be more of a partial ownership profit sharing type thing which would probably mean that these machines would not be like the mac clones they wouldn't be less expensive for the same hardware they would be just as expensive as if apple made it the only difference would be like you said that apple outsources some portion of it and with stuff like the belkin connector and like i said the early mac clones you wonder how much of that
John:
is belkin's work and how much of it is apple's a lot of the original mac mac clones were apple reference designs modified and a lot of companies do that give you like a reference board and then you can tweak it and add your thing but like for for the belkin on the lg display how much involvement did apple have in the creation of those peripherals was it purely
John:
here you go company you are now allowed to make this here are the specs figure it out or did apple cooperate with them very closely surely for the software integration for the lg screen they had to do something was there any cooperation at the hardware level like you don't really know what goes on in these relationships but as i said before like monetary deals could be worked out and i would hope the apples today bargaining from a position of strength and not from a position of michael spindler
John:
would make the arrangement so that it is very profitable to apple and that the company that they're partnering with just feel itself lucky to even be allowed to work with apple because apple is so awesome and that apple would come out ahead on it financially while removing whatever burdens they feel are put on them i think by the way for the high end is totally wrong move because apple should totally be doing the high end in-house because
John:
you know we've discussed this i think we mostly discussed it in slack but all i'm just doing is reiterating my halo car thing in seven different ways to get people to understand how this works and having them complain to me even casey was like i don't buy my car because there's a high-end car from the same maker i don't know i don't have the discussion again but we'll go that's what i sound like
John:
Yeah, and Slack.
John:
You don't know you have that voice plugin put on?
John:
Wow.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yikes.
Marco:
That's unfortunate.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I think that's it for this week.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Betterment, Eero, and Hover.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
So long.
John:
Sorry for the people waiting for Server Studio and Switch.
John:
I think we have actually exhausted all of the follow-up and tangential topics related to the MacBook Pro announcement now.
John:
And I'm not going to take all the blame for this because people keep sending us feedback about it.
John:
So it's not just us that's like, well, you've got to get off this MacBook Pro issue.
John:
The listeners are still talking to us about it, but I think we're through it all.
John:
So next week, for sure, unless something big happens, Microsoft Server Studio, Nintendo Switch.
John:
When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?
Casey:
That's a Simpsons thing, isn't it?
Casey:
You got it.
Casey:
Good job.
Casey:
The only reason I got it is because you've used that on us like seven times.
Casey:
Way more than seven.
John:
Way more.
Casey:
So what else is going on other than the obvious that we'd rather not discuss?
Marco:
I will say, you know, thank you, audience and you guys.
Marco:
This has been nice to, you know, get my mind off of that stuff.
Casey:
yeah i agree uh grand tour is coming back not not this coming saturday friday but a week from this coming friday that's coming back has it already yeah sorry no no no no i that was a poor choice of words it's uh it's starting when i i say coming back because i think of it as top gear again but uh but anyway that's that's a week from friday so that's super exciting
John:
Yeah, you need to remind me of that or I wasn't going to miss it.
John:
Is it Amazon only, right?
Casey:
It's Amazon.
Casey:
I don't know what time of day it's happening, but it is the 18th of November.
Casey:
They're streaming one episode per week for six weeks, and I believe there's going to be two seasons per calendar year.
Casey:
So presumably we'll have a spring and a fall season since we're getting kind of a fall season now.
Casey:
I'm really looking forward to it.
Casey:
It should be good.
John:
speaking of tv although i don't want to get onto uh depressing politics stuff but one of the one of the analogies and the and the jokes and the snarks that has been made in involving this election has been the show black mirror which is a show in the uk i don't want to say it's a bbc show because then you get yelled at because it's not there's other places to me anyway whatever it's a show made in england and it's like uh you guys remember amazing stories maybe you're too young for that
John:
we're too young but i've seen i've seen some of black mirror episodes and i think given what just happened it's going to be a long time before i'm in the mood to watch any more of them yeah so like uh amazing stories is like the twilight zone is the older reference like every week there's a new episode and it's a usually sci-fi related premise and there's no carryover characters there's no you know through line stories just like here's a little side it's like sci-fi short stories for tv
John:
Twilight Zone had a particular bent to it, and so did Amazing Stories, which is a Spielberg-esque thing.
John:
Black Mirror's bent is sci-fi-ish, independent stories that are usually really depressing.
John:
Like, it's Black Mirror.
John:
It's right in the title, right?
John:
And so, like Marco said, maybe you're not in the mood to watch them right now.
John:
And Black Mirror, me personally...
John:
i find it a little bit silly and overblown because i've seen all these same ideas and stories before and they take them to the nth degree and it just gets a little bit ridiculous but sometimes there's fun ones whatever i'm not as big a fan as other people are but on the specific topic this current season of black mirror season three that they come out all at once not like the uh the grand tour but they're not you know they make them ahead of time um and it's a scripted show
John:
More scripted than... Anyway, whatever.
John:
There is one episode of this season of Black Mirror, this third season of Black Mirror, which is, like all the previous seasons, just a grim, terrible slog of overblown sci-fi, but there's one episode that I think...
John:
actually i watched it and i felt good after watching it i'm not gonna say it's happy and you can judge for yourself whether it is like you know the feel-good story of the century but i think it would be safe for people to watch even if you're feeling bad and that episode is san junipero which i was my favorite episode of black mirror ever which probably means that i just don't like black mirror because it is the least black mirror of any black mirror episode and
John:
but i would encourage you if you're looking for a sci-fi short story on tv and don't want to be super depressed black mirror season three san junipero which is episode wait seven seconds for the chat room to look it up for me episode number four episode number four casey beat them to it because he's listening to me in real time cheating
John:
And there's the chat room.
Casey:
And so what was the summary of this episode?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I'm not going to tell you anything about it.
John:
You're not supposed to know anything about Black Mirror episodes.
John:
You just start watching them.
John:
So nothing.
John:
You don't want to tell us anything.
John:
No.
John:
You can't.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
It ruins it.
John:
No.
John:
No spoilers for Black Mirror.
Casey:
My goodness.
Casey:
My mistake.
Casey:
so uh i forget who it was shoot it was one of the new york city based developers and i'm drawing a blank which one it was um it might have been brian iris had uh guilted me into watching um one of the episodes black mirror and the one that i watched this was a couple years ago now was about the british prime minister being black episode one that's the first episode oh
Casey:
Yeah, I had no desire to ever go back.
John:
None.
John:
That sets a tone for the show that is the appropriate tone for the show, basically, except for San Junipero.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's a bad show.
Casey:
I'm just saying I watched that, and I was like, this is not for me.
John:
No, thank you.
John:
Did you watch all of season three yet, Marco, or no?
John:
no i've i've i don't think i'm even all the way through season two i think we watched all of season one at least well it's a good thing like you can skip to any episode at any time because there is no through line so you can just pick one out but i get some of the season three episodes are just so grim like it just it's it's almost a parody of itself at this point um but sandra de perro thumbs up
Marco:
It's the kind of show, it's such a downer and it's so dark that if you have anything bad or stressful going on in your life, it's not a good show to watch.
Marco:
And so I've had not a ton of opportunities where I really wanted to watch shows like that recently.
Marco:
And that's not going to change in the next few weeks, that's for sure.
John:
Like I said, try this episode.
John:
It is not...
John:
yeah i think you will watch it and not curse my name after you watch it i think it will make you feel better a high bar okay that's right you will feel you will improve your mood right okay i will give i will maybe give it a part of the reason part of the reason it improves your mood is like the context was like wait this is a black mirror episode it should be terrible and grim and it's not i feel awesome about it it's like you expect the worst and then you get this thing that is like it like it like redeems the rest of black mirror briefly
Marco:
Who would have thought that this episode would end with a recommendation of an uplifting Black Mirror episode?
John:
Yeah, I was as surprised as anyone.
John:
I got to the end.
John:
I even went to the internet to say, maybe it's not actually uplifting, and I'm reading it wrong.
John:
And so you go on the internet, people are like, no, actually, it's super dark.
John:
Here's the ending.
John:
But the creators of the show were like, no, it's actually uplifting.
John:
Just accept it.
Casey:
I wouldn't be opposed to watching an uplifting one, but after having watched the very first episode, like I said, I decided it was not for me.
Casey:
Not to say it's not for you or anyone else, it just wasn't for me.
Casey:
I have enough to be depressed about.
Casey:
Poor choice of words.
Casey:
I have enough to be sad about.
Casey:
I don't need to be sad while I'm watching television as well.
Marco:
Yeah, that's why Tiff and I, for our current casual series, we just restarted The Office tonight.
Marco:
We just need something that's not... Even Parks and Rec is too political now.
Marco:
It's like, oh God, I can't even do that yet.
Marco:
I just need something light that is just not going to add to anything bad.
John:
You used to watch some Miyazaki movies, which you've probably never seen any of.
John:
That's true.
John:
Because you've never seen anything.
John:
That's correct, yep.
John:
You should be showing Adam Totoro by this point.
John:
I feel like you're neglecting your duties as a parent.
John:
Yeah, I still don't know what that is.
John:
Totoro, you'll find it.
John:
Just find it and show it to Adam, and the whole family can watch it together, and you'll be happy.
Casey:
Yeah, I downloaded Millennium Whatever Whatever when it was available on YouTube.
John:
That's not a Miyazaki movie, but close.
Casey:
It's all the same, John.
Casey:
It's all the same.
Casey:
Can we just start calling them Syracuse movies?
Casey:
Yeah, that's fine.
Casey:
That works for me.
Casey:
So I downloaded that Syracuse movie, the Millennium Whatever, Millennial Whatever.
Casey:
Actress?
Casey:
Millennium Actress, which is probably Millennial Actress.
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
Millennium Falcon?
Casey:
She's not a millennial.
Casey:
She was not born from 82.
Casey:
Oh, my bad.
Casey:
Is that the one with the wings that are like in the X shape?
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Yes, the Y-Wing.
Casey:
the sick thing is we're gonna get so many emails from people thinking that we're serious when we're deliberately trolling john anyway um point is i downloaded that but like forever ago when you and merlin talked about it uh and i still haven't watched it yet so i need to get on that you mean you watched it legally on youtube when it was legally available on youtube yes exactly with commercials with commercials