Thermal Corner
Casey:
Can't innovate anymore, my ass.
John:
Thank you.
Casey:
Today we're going to talk about important things like me driving my dad's 1970 Dodge Dart yesterday.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Marco:
What about... I was wondering, John, do we have any follow-up?
John:
We actually do, and we should actually do it.
John:
There's only two items.
John:
Only two.
Casey:
Okay, mark the timestamp, kids, because it's only two items, and by my clock, we're seven and a half minutes into the call.
John:
After follow-up, we can also talk about t-shirts, I suppose.
Casey:
Okay, Dad.
Casey:
Why don't you kick us off, Dad?
Marco:
Can't we just eat our dessert first?
Casey:
No, I support... All snark aside, we should get through the follow-up.
Casey:
It shouldn't be very long, hopefully.
John:
All right.
John:
Last week, we talked for the second time about APFS file name encoding, and you wouldn't think there would be more to say about it, and yet here we are.
John:
We're going to talk about it for the third, possibly fourth time.
John:
Are you serious?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yes, because Apple has posted official documentation on their website answering the question, hey, what's the deal with file name encoding on APFS?
John:
And so to summarize, and this is a little bit weirder than I would have expected.
John:
They say APFS has case-sensitive and case-insensitive variants.
John:
We kind of assumed that would be the case, but here you go.
John:
They said it outright.
John:
The case-insensitive variant of APFS is normalization-preserving but not normalization-sensitive, which is pretty weird.
John:
Basically, if you send it a file name normalized however the hell you want it, pick your own Unicode normalization, APFS will preserve that.
John:
but it's not normalization sensitive this is the case insensitive variant it's not normalization sensitive in that if you try to look something up and you say hey do you have a file called cafe with little e over the accent and my reading of this is that you feed it that string in any normalization you want and it doesn't matter what normalization it is in the file system it will find it because the file system is not normalization sensitive but it preserves what you give it really confusing so
John:
Anyway, we'll have to get a case-insensitive variant of this on the Mac and do some tests to see what the deal is.
John:
But the case-sensitive variant is both normalization-preserving and normalization-sensitive.
John:
So that is straightforward.
John:
It's a case-sensitive on iOS.
John:
It's just exactly what we said.
John:
It takes what you give it, and that's it.
John:
And they do clarify here file names in APFS are encoded in UTF-8 and aren't normalized.
John:
So it's not as if you read a directory structure in APFS and you say, I have no idea what encoding this is.
John:
Assuming everybody's following the rules, and I'm not sure if this is enforced at the file system level or not.
John:
they all have to be utf-8 and the file system itself is not going to take your utf-8 string and normalize it like hfs plus does like whatever you give it in utf-8 that's what it's going to stick in the file system both variants will do that but it's interesting that they're saying you know no utf-16 no utf-32 no anything like that um i suppose if you use the lowest level apis you could just jam whatever the heck you wanted into there but they're they're documented here utf-8
John:
uh and they compare with hfs plus which has all of its weird rules um and they say that in uh mac os 10 12 4 the apos developer preview was updated to include the case insensitive variant so this is the first time the case insensitive variant of apfs has been available uh in any version of the operating system um and in ios of course in 10.3 we get the case sensitive variant um
John:
and they give some advice for avoiding bugs i bet there will be wwc sessions about this exact issue because i think it's going to come up a lot they want you to use the high level apis they want you to use ns file manager and ns url and they want you to use the file system representation property of ns url when creating and opening files with lower level file system apis like the posic stuff so um there are high level apis to give you you know a character buffer or whatever to feed into lower level apis
John:
So I'm glad they have some documentation on it.
John:
It's still pretty weird.
John:
This is definitely a case where we're going to need to see a lot of sample code and a lot of sort of best practices and anti-patterns.
John:
And still, I believe when the Mac operating system shifts with a non-developer preview version of this operating system, we will all get to find out which one of our applications are making assumptions that no longer hold in an APFS world as they slowly break.
John:
I'm going to bet on Adobe.
John:
I don't know about you guys.
Casey:
I think that's a pretty safe bet.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We should do a quick bit of follow-up and talk about the situation report for WWDC.
Casey:
We spoke last episode.
Casey:
Marco was 100% dedicated to layers, which, as far as I know, still has availability.
Casey:
So you might want to check that out.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
John and I had put our names in the hat for WWDC.
Casey:
John, did you win the lottery and win the opportunity to give Apple $1,600 of your money?
John:
I did.
John:
I'm a winner.
John:
All right.
John:
Congratulations.
John:
I was very excited.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I remember the interminable wait in years past for when other people are getting their emails.
John:
And this time I was distracted enough that by the time I looked at my email, there it was.
John:
Success.
John:
Very happy.
Casey:
Delightful.
Casey:
I also won the lottery this year, which is very exciting because I did not win the lottery last year.
Casey:
So I will also be at WWDC, which I'm very, very excited about.
Casey:
Before we're asked, since all three of us will be in town, we are not going to do a live in front of people ATP.
Casey:
We never really have.
Casey:
The closest thing we came was when we were on the talk show.
Casey:
We don't do that because even though some of us would enjoy doing so, absolutely zero of the three of us want to have anything to do with planning it.
Casey:
And so that is why it's not happening.
Casey:
But all three of us will be in town.
Casey:
I'm sure we'll talk about this more on the episode before WWDC.
Casey:
But if you see us, please say hi.
Casey:
We always enjoy it.
Casey:
We may not be able to talk for very long, depending on the situation, but we always enjoy it if you could say hi.
Casey:
Any other quick thoughts about WWDC kids?
John:
No.
Casey:
Good talk.
John:
Everybody wear your ATP shirts.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, and wear your ATP shirts.
Casey:
It is all but guaranteed.
Casey:
You will get a high five hug or some other interaction from at least me, if no one else, if I spot an ATP shirt.
Casey:
And if I remember, I'll have some ATP stickers printed, which I'll probably forget.
Casey:
But if I remember, I'll have some printed.
Casey:
And if I see an ATP shirt, you're getting a sticker.
Casey:
And then finally, on a very, very brief but somber note, I just wanted to quickly recognize that a member of our community, Jason Seifer, who is a fellow podcaster, a Ruby developer, and for a long time a teacher at Treehouse, passed away unexpectedly and tragically over the weekend.
Casey:
And I just wanted to acknowledge that and say that I know I'm, and I'm
Casey:
Pretty darn sure I speak for everyone.
Casey:
The three of us are very sad to hear, and we were really bummed about it.
Casey:
Mike and I talked about it on the forthcoming episode of Analog that won't be out until the weekend, so probably several days after this episode.
Casey:
But we're really bummed out, and we're really sad about it, and we just wanted to take a pause to say that.
Casey:
all right big week a little bit i think it's been some some things have happened so uh this morning there appears to have been some sort of an embargo that had dropped about a meeting that happened sometime i guess in the last day or two um with regard to the mac pro of all things yeah i mean who had this on the bingo card for this week right like certainly certainly not me
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
This this was a quite a big surprise, a pleasant surprise, but certainly a sizable one.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So there were a handful of people that were invited to Cupertino to discuss.
Casey:
I believe it was phrased as a roundtable to talk about the Mac.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
A small roundtable discussion about the Mac.
Casey:
So as per John Gruber, it was he, Matthew Panzarino, Lance Ulanoff, Ina Frey.
Casey:
How did I shoot?
Casey:
I pronounced that wrong, didn't I?
John:
You're asking the wrong people.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, that's right.
Casey:
I'm so sorry if I got that wrong.
Casey:
Anyway, and John Pagzowski, I believe that's pretty close to right.
Casey:
I should have made somebody else read those names, so I didn't have to.
Casey:
Anyway, the group of them went to Cupertino to have a roundtable discussion about the Mac and including about the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Not even including the Mac Pro.
Marco:
I would say it was primarily about the Mac Pro.
Right.
Casey:
That's absolutely right.
John:
It's interesting how they phrase this, like, come out, come out to Cupertino, we'll have a roundtable discussion about the Mac.
John:
Who knows what they actually told the people about what they were going to do, but their characterization, we're just going to hang out, we're just going to talk about the Mac a little bit, right guys?
John:
And...
John:
like marco said no they're going to talk specifically about one particular mac that's near and dear to all of our hearts except for casey and that's entirely what the thing was about but i guess they can't come out and tell people hey fly out to cupertino so we can tell you stuff about the mac pro they always want to have a little bit of a surprise um yeah i guess they did talk about the imac i mean they talked about a lot of things because you could ask them any questions you wanted and then they could answer them however they wanted but
John:
What the big takeaway from this and most of the headlines, with the exception of a couple that did mention the iMac, were all about the Mac Pro.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So I'm going to do my best to summarize and then I will probably get interrupted and that's for the best.
Casey:
So let me start by reading a little for a little from what Gruber had written.
Casey:
And he says, here's how Schiller broke the news on the Mac Pro.
Casey:
It's worth quoting him at length.
Casey:
So let me now quote Gruber quoting Schiller.
Casey:
With regard to the Mac Pro, we are in the process of what we call completely rethinking the Mac Pro.
Casey:
We're working on it.
Casey:
We have a team working hard on it right now, and we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we're committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system designed for our demanding Pro customers.
Casey:
As a part of doing a new Mac Pro, it is by definition a modular system.
Casey:
We will be doing a Pro display as well.
Casey:
John Syracuse, it is your lucky day.
Casey:
That's me, not Shiller.
Casey:
Anyway.
Marco:
That would be amazing.
Casey:
That would have been amazing.
Casey:
Now you won't see any of those products this year.
Casey:
We're in the process of that.
Casey:
We think it's really important to create something great for our Pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that'll take longer than this year to do.
Casey:
In the interim, we know that there are a number of customers who will continue to buy our current Mac Pros.
Casey:
To be clear, our current Mac Pro has met the needs of some of our customers, and we know that clearly not all of our customers.
Casey:
None of this is black and white.
Casey:
It's a wide variety of customers.
Casey:
Some, it's the kind of system they wanted.
Casey:
Others, it was not.
Casey:
In the meantime, we're going to update the configs to make it faster and better for their dollar.
Casey:
This is not a new model.
Casey:
We're not a new design.
Casey:
We're just going to update the configs.
Casey:
We're doing that this week.
Casey:
We can give you the specifics on that.
Casey:
The CPUs, we're moving them down the line.
Casey:
The GPUs, down the line.
Casey:
To get more performance per dollar for customers who do need to continue to buy them in the interim until we get a newly architected system.
Casey:
So, there is a new Mac Pro.
Casey:
It is not happening in 2017.
Casey:
There is a small spec bump on the existing Mac Pro, but things are happening.
Casey:
And the fact that Apple is addressing this at all, I think is really exciting and really, really good news.
Casey:
I can continue to summarize, but I think at this point we should take a moment and start talking.
Casey:
So, Marco, let's start with you.
Casey:
What do you think?
What?
Marco:
i have like four pages of notes here where to begin um i mean so we will get into some of the specifics but just high level overview i'm incredibly happy to hear this this is awesome
Marco:
Because what this means, you know, for a long time, it has seemed, you know, the neglect of the Mac Pro has been going on for three years if you measure it from the trash can.
Marco:
But actually, the neglect of the Mac Pro started in 2010.
Marco:
the the well the the last like basically in 2010 uh was the last new cheese grater revision they officially did one in 2012 but it was really the same thing with like one more processor option at the top end it was actually very similar to what they just did today but actually what they did today was even less because there are no new options but uh the 2012 mac pro really wasn't a thing the 2010 one was the was the last cheese grater update that mattered and
John:
And if you've ever seen the old logo of our show, by the way, it was a cheese grater Mac Pro with a little new label stuck on it, sarcastically, because we were waiting for the new Mac Pros to be announced at WWC.
John:
We had been waiting for a while, and they did announce new Mac Pros, or maybe it was like a press release update or not even on stage, I forget.
John:
But they were only new conceptually, like, technically, yeah, there's one new configuration, there's one new CPU.
John:
I think that was the very first icon this podcast ever had.
John:
It was.
John:
Right?
John:
um and so this show was founded on dissatisfaction with the uh with the offerings of the mac pro so yeah so the people who date it back to the trash can yeah the trash can has had problems and we'll talk about that but even as far back in the cheese grater it seemed like they took everybody off the cheese grater and said you know we've been steadily updating this cheese grater for a while you know every time there's a new cpu upgrading the gpus every year just like clockwork uh but we're not going to do that anymore and maybe they all went off to make the trash can which is really weird and complicated or maybe they were just
John:
uh you know pulling back a little bit and slowing down the updates again it's hard to know what goes on inside apple but this phenomenon of the mac pro no longer being updated steadily is as marco said not a phenomenon that that goes back to 2013 it goes all the way back to 2010 so it's a long time
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so when, you know, clearly one of the reasons why there was a long delay between the 2010 one and the 2013 redesign, which was really it was announced in mid 2013, but it wasn't really available.
Marco:
It went for sale in late December of 2013 and wasn't actually shipped to anybody until the first couple months of 2014.
Marco:
So it was, you know, a good three and a half years between like July 2010 when that other one came out and this new one.
Marco:
And that was presumably because they were doing this big redesign and everything.
John:
and also by the way they they pre-announced the 2013 mac pro mostly because we felt like or apple felt like like they had to because we were waiting and like what's the deal what's the deal with the mac pro you did this update and it was barely an update it was like you know you call that an update whereas the real new mac pro and we were waiting what it then seemed like such a long time for it they felt like they need to say
John:
at wwdc here's the new mac pro and this amazing thing we're like yay finally and i said oh by the way not really like shipping for a long time but but still they like why didn't they hold it until it was it was somewhat close to shipping because they felt like you know that whatever dissatisfaction there was among that customer base they had to reassure them by saying all right we're going to announce a thing we're going to show you the pictures of it here it is we're going to put it in a little glass tube outside of uh the presidio at moscone and so you can look at it and see that it's a real thing
John:
But you're not getting one for months.
John:
But we all felt better because it's like, well, at least we know now that the Mac Pro isn't dead.
John:
That is not there.
John:
The reason they weren't upgrading the cheese graders could have been because they were working on this.
John:
And this is a fancy new thing and it will be coming soon.
John:
And I think we all basically felt better about that, even though there was a delay.
John:
And this current announcement is like everything that happened before, but stretch all the timelines out even farther.
Marco:
At the time, we thought they don't care about Mac Pro users.
Marco:
They don't care about the Mac Pro.
Marco:
And then they released the 2013 one, and we thought, okay, great.
Marco:
They released a new one, and this is awesome.
Marco:
However, it doesn't meet a lot of people's needs in a bunch of ways that we'll get into in a minute.
Yeah.
Marco:
And so then that was now – it's been now about the same delay between 2010 and that one and between that one and now, about three and a half years or so.
Marco:
The assumption that we've all been making – and I totally own this.
Marco:
I have been number one on the list of complainers on this show at least.
Marco:
The assumption that we've all been making –
Marco:
is that Apple is being run really just by the numbers by Tim Cook, and that this fairly small product line that is something like 1% of Mac sales was just not enough of a blip on the radar for Tim Cook to care about updating ever again.
Marco:
That is how it seemed until this morning to all of us Mac Pro users.
Marco:
And that has manifested itself with a number of side effects, one of which I think might have contributed to Apple finally getting into gear on doing an update here.
Marco:
is that when the MacBook Pro was updated last fall, the 2016 MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar and everything else, it was clearly not as well received as Apple thought it would be.
Marco:
There was quite a lot of outcry.
Marco:
And part of that is because of legitimate downsides of that product.
Marco:
Part of that's temporary, part of it won't be temporary.
Marco:
But I think a big part of the angst over the 2016 MacBook Pro was also that Pros had been neglected on the desktop for so long that not only were they kind of already mad at Apple not serving their needs, but it sure looked like they were going to have to now wedge their needs into these other products that weren't very good at serving them.
Marco:
And so if I had to guess, it was during the 2016 MacBook Pro launch with all this kickback that Apple finally decided to go ahead with the new Mac Pro project.
Marco:
Craig Federighi made some comments during these interviews that it's been longer than six months they've been working on it, but that doesn't mean it had the green light to go ahead as a product for more than six months.
John:
I don't think it was long six months.
John:
They've been working on it was they were trying.
John:
This roundtable was a bunch of journalists.
John:
Right.
John:
So the journalists are asking questions.
John:
And one of the big questions that everyone wants to know is, you know, we we out here in the community who are interested in the Mac Pro have been upset about it for a long, long time.
John:
how how how did it come to pass that so much time you know elapsed between the 2013 mac pro and now and there was nothing literally no updates no price changes no announcement or anything and then just now you call a roundtable
John:
So everyone wanted to know the timeline.
John:
How long ago did you decide that this was a thing you were going to do?
John:
And they did it like, well, it's not like there's any one decision or one meeting.
John:
And each of us went through our own journey of like deciding.
John:
What was it, Craig Fittery?
John:
So we went through like denial and acceptance.
John:
So I can imagine there are people like, well, like the denial thing would be like, well, the new Mac Pro is weird and all.
John:
And people complain.
John:
But I bet if we just leave it out there, people will come to accept it as the new way.
John:
that pro hardware is going to work on the desktop.
John:
And then eventually I have to say, you know, it looks like they're not really accepting it.
John:
And so the six month things seem to me more of a timeline of like, when did you come to this realization?
John:
They never actually answered, how did you go so many years with like basically your heads in the sand, right?
John:
Because that's why, I mean, just two shows ago, I was asking us all if we had consensus that basically...
John:
There's not going to be another new Mac Pro.
John:
There's just going to be an iMac Pro, which, by the way, there will be.
John:
And they talked about it, you know, basically an iMac bent towards pro people.
John:
Because, look, if there was going to be a new Mac Pro, they wouldn't have left this one there for like four years with no updates.
John:
Right.
John:
Like surely they wouldn't do that with no no communication or whatever.
John:
And it's like a certain point they're communicating to you by saying we update the iMac.
John:
You know, we we don't drop dropping the Apple monitors and sort of back channel communicating to some journalist somewhere that, hey, Apple's not doing monitors anymore and offering the LG one.
John:
That's another big sign like the iMac.
John:
It's the future.
John:
Right.
John:
And so we were just all like we were in the acceptance phase, or at least I was like, well, you know, no more Mac Pros.
John:
And we all want to know that because we all kind of want to be vengeful and say, how could you have made this mistake?
John:
Because on the one hand, we're all ecstatic that the announcement they made was not, hey, by the way, we just want to let you know we're not making the Mac Pro anymore.
John:
We want to make it official.
John:
That could have been what they said at this meeting.
John:
This meeting could have also been...
John:
you know, we're just giving up on the Mac.
John:
Like the most pessimistic ideas of what could it mean to go to a Mac roundtable, an ominous sounding Mac roundtable, if you were accepting there was going to be no Mac Pro, it could have been like terrible bad news.
John:
Instead, it was good news, but the good news just immediately makes you ask the question, what?
John:
what took you so long like and that's that's the question that you know when when did you figure it out like what was your plan before six months ago what what were you doing like what's wait another year guys this this current mac pro that we never update will uh will will you know it's gonna set the world on fire just wait yeah right and and so they didn't they're not going to go into like you know their deliberation process and just you know because they don't realize stuff but they did go into a couple of aspects of like
John:
uh why why is the current trash can why didn't you ever update it um and so uh craig federighi uh had said this is a quote from him i think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner uh and there he was talking about the design of the trash can which is a big cylinder and inside the cylinder is kind of like three boards three vertical boards that make a triangle shape if you're looking down on top of it two of them are gpus and one of them is a cpu board
John:
uh he was saying that the uh this is according from uh matt panzerino's article the unique triangular design of the mac pros thermal core that provided proved to be the limiting factor um it wasn't built to have for one of the three sides of the triangle to get super hot so if they if they wanted to have a really hot gpu on one side and then cooler parts it was supposed to be like equal distribution of heat from the two mid-range you know
John:
mid-heat gpus and the cpu on the other side but basically i think the problem is the little cylinder with the one fan on top there was just not enough cooling capacity unless you probably crank that fan up to the point where they didn't like it they but the story they gave was we they couldn't update it like they the faster gpus they could have put in there it couldn't handle a thermal load maybe even also the cpus uh
John:
um and federigi also emphasized uh that this wasn't like someone had an idea to make a trash can shaped computer and then they just put all their marbles in that basket without thinking this and there's another quote from federiga federigi we didn't start with a shape and say well here's the fastest machine we can put in that box we actually started with a target for performance and came up with what we think was a very clever design for that thermal core and thermal architecture
John:
So they had a target of like two GPUs with lots of cores and one CPU.
John:
And then they tried to figure out, which, again, you could say was one of their mistakes.
John:
What is the smallest, quietest thing we can get that?
John:
And they emphasize that in the 2013 Mac Pro launch.
John:
Look how much smaller.
John:
this trash can mac pro is than the giant cheese grater i remember when they put up the image of the two things next to each other look fake it was like it was like what what is that an airport uh hub next to a pro like no that's the new mac pro it seemed impossibly small compared to the size of the cheese grater and they did they made like packaging wise it is super quiet and super small compared to
John:
uh a tower computer and of course you know they sacrificed all the internal storage and all the other stuff but they basically by making that design and all the tooling and all that fancy factory in the u.s that makes all this stuff and you know all the money they put into that the story they gave was that basically they couldn't update it because none of the better stuff that they could fit in there could be cooled inside that case so they had to design a new one but they didn't they just they i don't know what they did they just
John:
sat on their hands for several years mulling over what to do all the while continuing to sell that thing until they finally came to this realization so i don't you know again we have to wait for people to retire and give the tell-all books but something went wrong in sinapolis we're saying something went wrong about with the mac pro because it is not a good look to sell the same computer for the same price for so many years and it's also not a good look to only realize your mistake and
John:
many many many years later way way too late so late in fact that you are forced to do a thing that apple never ever does which is call a bunch of journalists together and tell them about computer you're going to release in the next year like not this calendar year like a let me tell you about something that's not released yet we can't even show you a picture of it and b it's not going to be released this year they also by the way didn't say as far as able to determine that it's going to be released next year
John:
All they said is not this year.
John:
And everybody's like, oh, that totally means next year.
John:
Probably does, but they're covering their bases.
John:
And so that means that says to me that they decided very, very, very recently on the sort of the no-go, no-go on the Mac Pro.
John:
Because if they had come and said, guys, we just want to tell you...
John:
there's not going to be another Mac Pro.
John:
That would make perfect sense because it's like, well, we debated for a long time.
John:
While we debated, we kept selling this thing.
John:
But in the end, we're, you know, it's down the toilet.
John:
Down the toilet with the trash can.
John:
No more Mac Pros.
John:
The iMac is the future.
John:
We just want to let you know and let's talk about it and let's explain to you why we think Pros can use this other stuff or whatever.
John:
Because at least that would make sense for the trajectory.
John:
Instead, they hemmed it hard for four years, realized the error of their ways, which is good, and
John:
but realized it's so late that they have nothing to say to us except we will we will make good and i'm glad they what of course i'm glad that they're they're going to do this because i love the mac pro um i'm glad they went into specifics instead of saying we're going to make new pro hardware they went into specifics by saying this new pro hardware will be modular in their parlance there will be a separate monitor and a separate computer
John:
So it's not going to be like, oh, this is going to be an awesome iMac you like.
John:
No, they said that is a separate thing.
John:
We are going to do a newer iMac with fancier stuff that pros might like.
John:
But also there's this thing, which is modular.
John:
And we're going to make our own displays, which so recently they seem to be moving away from.
John:
And I guess because they want me not to wake in the middle of the night and tremble in fear of having to get a non-Apple monitor, they're going to make an Apple monitor.
John:
And the final point they made is whatever this design is, which they didn't go into details about,
John:
We're going to make sure that with this design, we can upgrade the internals on some kind of schedule other than never, ever upgrading them, right?
John:
So those are the few bits of information they gave about this.
John:
I get the impression that the same brief that they gave these journalists was given to Apple's newly formed team not too long ago to say, we need a new Mac Pro, needs to be modular, we need a new Apple monitor, and we don't want the same thing that happened with the trash can to happen with us.
John:
We need the internals to be upgradable on a reasonable schedule.
John:
all of that is music to my ears because those are all the things i want to hear like the only thing they could have said more was like we're going to have uh multiple internal drives and multiple internal slots they didn't say that and i doubt they will do that but that's the only other thing that i could have even asked for in my wildest dreams so i am very very happy
John:
but also very disappointed in Apple because they... They know what they did.
John:
They done goofed.
John:
They did not do well on this whole Mac Pro thing.
John:
I'm glad that it came... Well, they messed up.
John:
They even said it themselves.
John:
They apologized.
John:
They said, sorry.
John:
When does Apple ever do that?
John:
Because...
John:
it's not a coherent thing like it it would be coherent if they said we slowly phase out the mac pro and it disappeared and let me tell you why we're not going to be in that business anymore but to neglect the mac pro like that and then have a change of heart at the very last minute certainly better from my perspective than not having a change of heart that's not good for the company it's not good for the image it's not good for the pros it's not good for apple that they have to pre-announce this product which is not a comfortable position for apple to be in um
John:
so this was this was kind of a an example of apple being humble and coming hat in hand and saying we're sorry we messed up this mac pro thing let us make it up to you by doing all the good things for you and that's why everybody's happy because uh you know happy and also curious about what we're along but but happy to see that the result we all wanted is the result we're going to get if we just wait a little bit longer
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Casey:
So, here's the thing.
Casey:
Like, on the whole, I agree with you.
Casey:
And even as someone who, sitting here now, doesn't foresee ever buying a Mac Pro, I'm excited about this.
Casey:
I really am.
Casey:
Like, I joked a lot on Twitter about, oh, God, this episode's going to be terrible.
Casey:
But no, I'm actually excited to talk about it.
Casey:
Because...
Casey:
This is good for everyone when Apple commits to the professional market.
Casey:
It's good for me as, by some definition, a professional because I think they actually cited Xcode as one of the apps they consider to be a professional app and one of the apps they look for in their analytics to see who's a professional and who isn't.
Casey:
But anyway...
Casey:
I definitely unequivocally think that this was way, way, way too late.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
A lot of people on Twitter were jumping straight to like, oh, Apple is just, you know, they weren't doing anything until yesterday.
Casey:
And then they finally decided to do something.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I think it's unfair for us to assume how long it takes to build an entire new computer with an entirely new design from the ground up.
Casey:
Like, I agree that they should have started on this a while ago.
Casey:
I agree that we should never have gotten to this point.
Casey:
But I think it's a bit presumptuous for us to just assume they can go to some parts bin somewhere, throw a few things together and call it good.
Casey:
I think that we're perhaps assuming the worst where it may not be necessary.
Casey:
This should have absolutely happened at least a year ago, if not two.
Casey:
But it doesn't mean that they didn't start work on it a year ago, if not two.
Casey:
What if they just didn't feel compelled to tell us about it until now?
Casey:
Because a bunch of whiners like those guys on ATP, God, what a bunch of whiners, the three of them are.
Casey:
What if a bunch of whiners just got to the point that they felt like they needed to address it once and for all?
John:
yeah i i you know we can go where we think the decision was made to do something different but it's got to be pretty recent i mean just use the lg monitor as an example the monitor for most people is a sideshow here for me it's like the main show because i can tell you that if they if they had said we're going to make a new mac pro but we're still not making apple monitors i would still be like maybe i'll get an imac right that's just me personally right but very recently as recently as when was it like
John:
october i don't know whenever whenever they they came out with the the the new macbook pros with the lg display right and they they talked to the press about it and the press would ask them so you know should we get an apple monitor whatever like no we we this this lg monitor is the one we want it's on our store we're fully behind it so on and so forth and then through back channel communication to someone on twitter to say basically apple's out of standalone display business this is recent stuff if as you suggested casey that perhaps they've been working on this new mac pro for over a year
John:
There's no way they would have told everybody that Apple's out of the standalone display business through whatever back channels they did.
John:
Maybe they still would have said, buy the LG one anyway, because the new Apple monitor isn't coming out for a long time.
John:
But yeah, there are long lead times in these things, but not...
John:
it doesn't take three years to make a monitor right like time was when apple would make new products every year and yeah they have overlapping schedules and stuff like that which by the way is why i think the time that apple needs to start making the next trash can is before the previous one is released like that's usually how these things overlap like the the new iphone is in the works at the time that the current iphone is released that's the only way you can have yearly releases of anything right so it's not as if you can release the trash can right in 20 late 2013 and
John:
and then after the trash cans release start working on the next one you're already late at that point let alone release a trash can wait a year or two and then start working on the successor that's just too long if you're one of the things the commitments of the pro market and it's what they talked about is you have to have some a product that you can update because the whole point of this product is the biggest fastest computer apple sells and
John:
If you don't update it, eventually your phone has faster single-threaded performance than that.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like in the most extreme case.
John:
You have to update it.
John:
It's the role of this computer.
John:
The only reason it exists is to be the biggest, fastest thing.
John:
As soon as it's not biggest, fastest, people are like, well, why am I buying this?
John:
Why don't I buy a 13-inch laptop that has a better CPU speed or a faster SSD or has, you know, Thunderbolt 3 and this top-end thing doesn't?
John:
Like, it loses its purpose without updates.
John:
So...
John:
They were super-duper late, and it seems to me that if they can't even promise a 2018 release of this thing, they started sometime, you know, in the past year.
John:
Oh, easily.
John:
Maybe in the past six months.
John:
Because, again, it's not... Like, the thing we're asking about is, when did they make the call?
John:
When did they make the decision?
John:
Because they seemed to make no decision for a really, really long time, and then they made a decision, and part of that decision was, given that we made this decision...
John:
look at our timelines when will we actually be able to show a product it will hurt us a lot to just do the normal apple thing which is not tell anybody until the product comes out because by then everyone will completely have written off apple as a pro hardware vendor so we need to make the decision and then the even harder decision which is now we have to tell people we have to tell people that we kind of started this new project because if we don't
John:
by the time we release it they'll all be gone they all will have left they'll be like hey guys we have a new mac pro we didn't want to tell you about it for the past year and a half that we've been developing it but we totally have a new one it's like too late we all left you neglected us right so they had to come out and tell us that at some point in the future defined as not this year there will be a new mac pro which was the right thing to do but it is it is a is them coming from a position of weakness and it makes me think that this decision was not made and that the team to make this new mac pro was not tasked with doing so uh
Marco:
anytime longer than maybe like 12 months ago and I would guess maybe six months ago yeah I would say that's because like you know we we know from various like tips and rumblings here and there that like there were occasional efforts in Apple to investigate new Xeons and stuff but that there was never any suggestion by anybody any rumors any tipsters anybody that that was actually becoming a product for you know anywhere close to a product
Marco:
I really do think that this probably became a priority six months ago.
John:
And that's how they determine, by the way, that's how they determine, probably, their thermal limits.
John:
Like, they had this cylinder, and we kept hearing rumors from all sorts of weird sources, like, oh, they're looking at this chip, oh, they're looking at that chip, they're looking at this GPU.
John:
Like, maybe they tried all sorts of, like, component upgrades to the trash can, and every time they tried it, it was either not a big enough win or they couldn't deal with the thermals, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it was just kind of like, well, do we want to bother going through with this?
John:
Should we make it a product?
John:
Maybe wait for next year.
John:
Maybe it'll be better.
John:
We have these problems.
John:
Like, Federighi's explanation is basically like they couldn't put better stuff in that cylinder.
John:
They had designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner.
John:
And...
John:
And the fact that they continued to try to tinker with that every time there was a new CPU or GPU but never actually released anything fits with that idea.
John:
It wasn't like they were opposed to making new Mac Pros.
John:
They couldn't make new Mac Pros without a major investment.
John:
And they come back and say, okay, well, we can't put new stuff in this cylinder.
John:
Sorry about that.
John:
Oops.
John:
Can we make a totally new Mac Pro?
John:
And then it was like, well...
John:
That seems like expensive and not a lot of people buy this and they just kept doing that and doing that.
John:
And, you know, externally we see nothing.
John:
We just, you know, we have the same Mac pro as always.
John:
And just a bunch of, uh, you know, rumors and eventually has to come to a head and say, look, are we in this business or are we not in this business?
John:
And the decision that they made, which I'm very happy with is yes, we're in this business.
John:
We're going to rededicate ourselves.
John:
Um, and we're not going to make the same mistake twice.
John:
Uh, nobody puts a new Mac pro in a corner in a thermal corner.
John:
Um,
John:
Good grief.
Casey:
Reference acknowledged.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Reference acknowledged.
John:
So... Boy, it's... I would not want to have been in these meetings, but I'm so glad.
John:
I'm so glad that they made... I can't even say it's the right decision.
John:
I don't know if it's the right decision for Apple, but it's the decision that I wanted.
John:
Actually, yes, I can.
John:
I think it is the right decision for Apple.
John:
Because if Apple's not going to be in the pro market, then what the hell's the point of Apple?
John:
Like, are they just going to be a phone company?
John:
I think that's not... That's not the Apple we all believe in.
John:
And it's clearly not the Apple that...
John:
All the people who come to these meetings and profess undying love for the Mac believe in either.
Marco:
Well, and I think it's more than that.
Marco:
It's that if Apple decides that iOS is the only OS in their future, then that's one thing.
Marco:
But if the Mac as a platform is going to continue, they need to keep building pro hardware.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, but is the iMac Pro enough?
Casey:
And I think we'll talk about that more later.
Casey:
But the one thing that strikes me about this, I suspect you guys are right in that it was very recent, in the last 12 months or so, that Apple got really serious about replacing the Mac Pro.
Casey:
But it seems a little disingenuous to me for us to say, oh, surely they have macOS running on ARM.
Casey:
You know, surely they're doing that.
Casey:
Why would they not?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, I know hardware is different, but don't you think they would have been doing more than just piddling with a new Mac Pro for all this time?
Casey:
Maybe there were only a handful of people on it.
Casey:
Maybe they weren't taking it too seriously.
Casey:
But I feel like why wouldn't you at least have that in the hopper just in case?
Casey:
To your point, a minute ago, both of you, maybe that didn't start until like two years ago or one year ago or what have you.
John:
Or half a year ago.
John:
It's not going to be two years ago.
John:
They would be done by now if it was two years ago.
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
There's a tension with Apple between make an amazing new thing, which I think a trash can qualifies out.
John:
Like, you haven't seen a PC like this before.
John:
Look at this thing.
John:
Isn't it weird and crazy and awesome?
John:
Like, they want to do that, but then there's schedule pressure.
John:
So, as many people pointed out, they can make a rectangular box with nice finishes on it and shove a bunch of crap in it and be done.
John:
But they don't want to do that.
John:
So, they're going to take longer than it would take to just slap together some, basically, a PC that runs macOS, right?
John:
The question is, how much longer will it take?
John:
And if they had started two years ago, even with the most obsessive, you know, at-ball craftsmanship...
John:
they could have had something to show today, right?
John:
So that makes me think, again, they had to have started this in the last calendar year.
John:
You know, that's the longest I'm going to say this goes back and probably even closer.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so I think it's also worth...
Marco:
Kind of putting the 2013 trash can in context a little bit to figure out, like, why they still care and maybe what they can do to avoid another problem like this.
Marco:
So in addition to the reasons that John always likes to say about, like, you know, the Halo car analogy and everything else, which I agree with –
Marco:
So it actually sells better than I thought.
Marco:
So one of the things that came out in this meeting was they said that desktops are 20% of Mac sales, which that alone is higher than I would have guessed.
Marco:
You know, laptops are most people's computers these days.
Marco:
So the fact that desktops still have 20% is pretty good, I think.
Marco:
They said that the Mac Pro is in the low single-digit percentage of those Mac sales.
Marco:
If that's 1%, which is the lowest that their estimate would really mean, that is about 200,000 Mac Pros a year.
Marco:
Now, that I think is like 1% of Mac sales and 200,000.
Marco:
I think that's actually really good for – because that's not the sales of the Mac Pro in its launch year when it's updated.
Marco:
That's the sales of the Mac Pro now.
Marco:
Like this three-year-old lame duck machine.
Marco:
That's the sales of that now.
Marco:
So I think it's remarkable that it still sells that well.
Marco:
I think that says that the market for these things is probably bigger than a lot of us were estimating.
Marco:
Because if this machine that's three years old and wasn't even that compelling when it was new, for various reasons I'll get into in a second, if that can still sell 200,000 units a year...
Marco:
That's amazing.
Marco:
And so I decided to look up a couple of stats.
Marco:
I did some homework.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
That is roughly equivalent, I translated this into terms you don't understand, Casey, to the sales volume of the BMW X5.
Casey:
Well done.
Marco:
That's roughly what the X5 sells every year worldwide.
Marco:
And that's a fairly popular model in their lineup.
Marco:
So the fact that a car can... Oh, and by the way, it's also double the total sales volume of Tesla.
Marco:
So if it's selling in this kind of volume, if a car company can justify having an entire car model with all the customization that goes into that and support and everything else...
Marco:
Apple can justify having a machine that only sells to this relatively small audience compared to their whole product line.
Casey:
Well, but what's the profit off of each of these devices?
Casey:
The profit off of an X5, one would hope, would be many, many, many thousands of dollars.
Casey:
What's the profit off a trashcan Mac Pro?
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
I mean, no questions.
Marco:
Actually, I wouldn't assume that the profits are that massive on cars.
Marco:
Maybe on luxury cars, especially if you get the floor mats.
Marco:
But I think the costs of developing a new Mac Pro line...
Marco:
especially if it's kind of reasonably done, are probably low enough compared to developing a whole car.
Marco:
I think they're probably okay there.
Marco:
But anyway, I did want to briefly go into exactly what went wrong with the 2013 Mac Pro.
Marco:
So that we, as commentators, and hopefully if anybody at Apple is listening...
Marco:
I assume they're all smart people.
Marco:
They're considering these things too, but I just want to say it just in case because I think there's important lessons to learn here, and I really hope they have learned them.
Marco:
So quick summary.
Marco:
When the 2013 came out, it cost more than the previous model, but it accommodated fewer people's needs.
Marco:
And so even when it was brand new, on day one, once all the configs and pricing were up, a lot of people did not like it very much.
Marco:
And a lot of pros said, ooh, never mind, because it was so much more limited than the previous ones.
Marco:
It gave up all the drive bays, all the slots, a lot of the RAM expansion capabilities, GPU replaceability, GPU options, dual CPU, dual socket options.
Marco:
There was so much stuff that was given up.
Marco:
So it really did a lot less.
Marco:
And it cost more.
Marco:
And so that's like, whatever Apple does next, they have to learn a lesson from that.
Marco:
Whether they choose to follow it or not, that's something to learn.
Marco:
Also, it also suffered from just kind of bad market timing relative to the rest of the industry.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Almost immediately, the 5K screen revolution happened.
Marco:
It was like nine months into the Mac Pro when 5K screens came out in the iMac.
Marco:
And the Mac Pro has no good way to drive a 5K screen.
Marco:
And Apple doesn't sell one still.
Marco:
And when they did finally get around to launching one last fall, it doesn't work with the 2013 Mac Pro.
Marco:
We keep hearing random hacks about how the stores are kind of hacking it to work, but basically it doesn't work.
Marco:
it missed the 5k revolution by a very short time and a lot of pros like myself prioritized having that retina screen over having those additional cores and everything also right after that model came out the next generation of processors that apple of course didn't use increased single threaded performance noticeably and so what happened was within a very short time of the mac pro being released within about a year
Marco:
It was unable to drive the best screens that the highest-end buyers wanted, and it was defeated in a lot of single-threaded performance tasks and a lot of benchmarks.
Marco:
It was either beaten completely, or in the case of the 6-core, it could barely edge out in multi-threaded, but that wasn't all work.
Marco:
So it was badly timed in the market.
John:
and then don't forget about usbc one more revolution that happened across the product line usbc also came along and guess who didn't get that the mac pro like terrible timing in terms of peripheral like it wouldn't have been terrible timing if it was on a yearly update schedule be like oh next year the mac pro will get updated it will get the new chips it will get usbc it will get thunderbolt 3 it will be able to drive a 5k display that but but again the thermal corner uh apparently they just plain couldn't do that
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And then also, by limiting it to a single CPU and dual GPU configuration, they were making a big bet that this is going to be the future of pro-computing.
Marco:
Unfortunately, it wasn't the present of pro-computing at the time, and the future took a different direction.
Marco:
And they were betting that just having this one set of trade-offs, this one CPU, two workstation GPUs,
Marco:
that was going to solve all Pro needs or all needs of the Mac Pro customers at least.
Marco:
That was wrong even in 2013, and it never became correct.
Marco:
They were betting big on OpenCL, and that really didn't pan out beyond a very small number of specialized uses.
Marco:
And they never really supported it very well in Mac OS either.
Marco:
And so I think another lesson to learn here is that whatever direction the Mac Pro takes...
Marco:
it can't rely on highly specialized OS features very much because chances are it's never going to have the priority within Apple and the engineering priority to devote a lot of engineering time to optimizing the OS for this machine that sells to 1% of the user base.
Marco:
They're never going to do that.
Marco:
So it can't depend on weird, like, you know, edge case technologies like OpenCL has turned out to be.
Marco:
You know, if it can handle it well, that's one thing.
Marco:
But that can't be the main focus of the machine.
John:
They did do a lot of OS changes to support the dual GPUs.
John:
Because remember, one of them was like, oh, you could address them individually and use one for compute and one for graphics.
John:
And they had that whole demo of the 3D application that Pixar was using.
John:
So they actually added OS APIs.
John:
to make it so that people could write programs to take advantage of this machine.
John:
But the only way anybody, uh, like any pro app vendor is going to change their program to take advantage of this new fancy hardware is if doing so gives them some kind of advantage, like, okay, well, this is weird hardware.
John:
And, uh,
John:
You know, but Apple gives us APIs and we can address these two GPUs and control them and do interesting things.
John:
If we do this, if we make this big investment and rejigger our application and use these new APIs, what is the payoff?
John:
And if the payoff is performance that still doesn't match a plain old Windows PC with a big stonking single GPU in it.
John:
Well, why would we do that?
John:
Why would we spend all this time rewriting our thing to get worse performance than we can get if we just leave our application exactly the way it is and get, you know, a GeForce 1080, whatever the top of the line thing was at the time?
John:
Why would we bother doing that?
John:
So people didn't rewrite their programs, even though there were APIs.
John:
And those APIs themselves didn't get expanded and supported and everything because there was no one writing for them.
John:
So it was an ecosystem that never materialized for hardware that was never good enough to justify the investment and very quickly became embarrassingly not good enough, as you mentioned.
John:
Every other standard and peripheral and capability just passed it by, even on Apple's own infrequently updated machines.
Marco:
right and then and they also had execution flaws even with this one model like the gp like you know they they're talking now about how the thermals prevented them from updating it very very well the thermals were a problem then too it this machine anybody who's ever owned one of these or especially anybody who's had to manage more than one of them like certain you know developer studios or or visual effects places that have had multiple 2013 mac pros the gpus die all the time the
Marco:
Apple's doing tons of warranty replacements on those.
Marco:
The only reason it hasn't become like a big known scandal or thing is because this is a relatively unpopular product.
Marco:
So not a lot of people have them.
Marco:
But anyone who does have it knows that there's tons of GPU overheating problems and they die all the time.
Marco:
And on top of that, to make a GPU-focused machine that takes this huge bet on GPUs being the future and then not updating it for three years, like, GPUs change, like, every nine months.
Marco:
Like, it's a pretty fast-moving part of hardware development.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It was a huge design flaw even then to design something that could barely cool the GPUs it had, and then with not only apparently no headroom to cool future ones, but also to not update this machine at all for three and a half years at least, and what's probably going to end up being four and a half to five.
Marco:
That's a massive error in just how... It was an execution flaw, simple as that.
Marco:
I will say, though, as much as I bagged this machine...
Marco:
And redesigning the tower, like the cheese grater, typical PC tower.
Marco:
I mean, it was more than typical.
Marco:
It was a really good one.
Marco:
But redesigning the tower in 2013 was a good idea.
Marco:
And it remains a good idea today.
Marco:
They should not just...
Marco:
put new components in the old cheese grater and ship that as the new thing because there's lots of like old baggage that is no longer necessary in the pc tower so doing a design doing a redesign is the right move it they just did the they just didn't do the right one like they chose a bad redesign they went the wrong direction
John:
and they admitted that yeah that was like my blog post back in before the new mac pro in 2013 begging for them to make a new mac pro uh the case for a new true mac pro successor like everything you said about the the trash can i agree with and you know it was kind of uh you know you could have predicted these mistakes at the time because it didn't suit our needs but like well maybe there's other audiences for them it could have worked out but either way to where they worked out it didn't they made mistakes they were there were bad timing with 5k displays and usbc and thunderbolt 3
John:
You can't say, you know, we make fun of the can't innovate anymore, my ass, the Phil Schuller thing, but that was mostly because they failed to update it.
John:
This was an innovative machine.
John:
They tried something new and bold and daring, and they were trying to make...
John:
the best Mac that there could be.
John:
It was so different from any other Mac that there ever had been before.
John:
And there have been since so different in so many ways that I give them full marks for doing what I asked them to do, which is try to do your best.
John:
Turns out this wasn't a good idea, but you can't say they didn't try.
John:
You can't say like, and again, I would have, you know, been more disappointed to say, oh, here's another cheese grater, right?
John:
Like, cause that's not, that's not really trying.
John:
That's just kind of a business as usual status quo, which is better than nothing that,
John:
But I do give them full marks for introducing it, which is why even though I didn't buy one, I was very happy that it existed.
John:
I was pinning my hopes on, okay, they're either going to keep updating this and I'll buy the one that can drive the retina display.
John:
Remember those days when I was talking about that?
John:
And same thing for this new one.
John:
In the same way, it's like, well, they could make some kind of rectangular box and sell it and they could get that out sooner.
Yeah.
John:
I'm willing to wait for them to try something innovative.
John:
They just need to make a different set of trade-offs with this design, building on what they've learned.
John:
But I totally like the idea of them because if they're just going to make a box, I know people want them to do that.
John:
Just make me like a rectangular PC that I can run Mac OS on, which I'm sure some people would like.
John:
But I want more than that from Apple.
John:
I mean, even the cheese grater is, like you said, Mark, it's not just a tower case.
John:
It is a really cool, really good, really interesting tower case that has many innovations inside and out and turned out to be a good design that they kept for a long time.
John:
Just do that again, Apple.
John:
Is that so hard?
John:
Just be successful all the time.
What's the deal?
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, and I think looking back, as you said, they did something – as Federighi said in this interview, he said we wanted to do something bold and different with the 2013 one.
Marco:
And he said it's good for some, but it does not address the full range of Mac Pro customers.
Marco:
And I think this is the nut right here.
Marco:
Apple is really good at being bold and different.
Marco:
And they pride themselves on that.
Marco:
They really try to do that with much of what they do.
Marco:
The problem is that if you only make bold and different product line choices, then the overall product line will suffer because you need...
Marco:
general purpose products to fill the gaps and satisfy the most needs and the mac pro the whole the purpose of this machine is to serve a bunch of those edge cases and you can't just make one super focused design like this you know one cpu two pro gpus no slots nothing else like you can't do that kind of like bold and different design for this particular product line because all of the different edge cases that the mac pro needs to satisfy are all different from each other
Marco:
So no single narrow design like this can satisfy them.
Marco:
The old Mac Pro cheese grater could be configured in completely different ways for depending on what the customer needed.
Marco:
And there was a huge range of what that could do.
Marco:
And that's the kind of flexibility this product line needs.
Marco:
Mac Pro buyers, they don't need cool and bold and different.
Marco:
They need versatile, powerful, and kept up to date.
John:
and it can be innovative too like like the uh the yosemite case before yosemite was the name of an operating system it was a code name for a tower case designed by apple that was like oh tower it's like a vertical rectangular solid like but apple did its thing hey ours has handles on all four corners and ours has a side panel that that folds down and the motherboard was on the side panel at that point look how easy it is to open this thing up and here's the ram and here's the gpu and you can change your hard drives and
John:
And they used that design for two generations, the G3 and the G4, and, well, more if you count, like, mirror drive door and the wind tunnels and all that other stuff.
John:
And then came the cheese grater with the Power Mac G5.
John:
Still four handles, but a different design, aluminum, and look how easy it is to slide the hard drives in and out.
John:
And there's a little panel that comes off the side, and look how much room we have for fans and the computer-controlled fans and all this other stuff.
John:
Like...
John:
Both of those designs were innovative and interesting, but like Marco was saying, they were modular.
John:
They could be configured to different needs.
John:
You could choose what you wanted to put in them and make the computer that you needed.
John:
If instead they had made an innovative, like the G4 Cube is a good example.
John:
The G4 Cube is basically a trash can before it's time.
John:
Here's one computer with one specific set of trade-offs, and you can't change those trade-offs at all.
John:
And if it doesn't suit your needs, you're out of luck.
John:
uh the g4 cube did not do well in the market despite being a cool cute little computer to you know to address the pro market you either need to have a bunch of different models each of which satisfies a need or some kind of system that you can configure to serve different people's needs either they can configure themselves with third-party things or they can configure on your store by picking from pop-up menus how much storage how many drives how many gpus what kind of gpus how much memory uh all those things
Marco:
And I think, too, it's important to recognize when they were designing the trash can in 2013, I don't think they necessarily forgot what pros need.
Marco:
I think they were swayed by both a bit of hubris and also the times.
Marco:
Back then, the reason why Phil Schiller said, can't innovate anymore, my ass...
Marco:
And the reason that got a huge applause, besides the fact that it's hilarious hearing that from him, is that at the time, there was a huge, overwhelming press and analyst narrative of Apple not being able to innovate anymore.
Marco:
And that Samsung was doing all the innovation.
Marco:
This was a huge thing in 2013.
Marco:
That Samsung was taking the innovation crown.
Marco:
And of course, we were all trying to figure out, what do they mean by innovation exactly?
Marco:
But that was a massive thing that
Marco:
Everybody was saying about Apple, the press, the stock people, everyone was saying, Apple can't innovate anymore.
Marco:
Samsung's innovating.
Marco:
And it turned out that all that was was big phones because Apple didn't have the big phones yet.
Marco:
Turns out all Apple needed to do to out-innovate Samsung was to make the same size phones that Samsung makes.
Marco:
That pretty much solved that problem for them.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I feel like that narrative really got to them and that helped sway their decision into taking a much bigger risk with this product than they should have.
Marco:
I think Apple, and maybe this has changed now, I'm not sure it has, Apple needs to be confident enough in itself to release boring products sometimes when that's actually what certain types of customers need.
Marco:
And the Mac Pro is the biggest example of that.
Marco:
Like, they can totally do, not only can they, they should probably do a relatively boring line of Mac Pros.
Marco:
Because that's, like, what comes along with boringness is what pros need.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm struggling because it's so clear to me how right you are in retrospect.
Casey:
But if you're Apple and you're looking at what's coming in 2013, which here again, 2013 feels like forever ago.
Casey:
And that's when this thing was released.
Casey:
Oh, my God, this is so bad.
Casey:
But anyway, when you're looking at the future in 2013 and you're looking at like OpenCL and all these different options...
Casey:
It makes sense to me to bet, maybe not bet the house, that's probably a little aggressive, but bet big on OpenCL and say, you know what, this is probably the future and we're going to give you the best possible machine that will be as fast as it possibly can for that future that is so obviously coming.
Casey:
Unfortunately, that future never came, but sitting where Apple presumably was sitting in 2013, I
Casey:
I I think it does make sense to do what they did.
Casey:
But unequivocally looking at it in hindsight, you are absolutely correct that the boring machine was the writer machine.
Casey:
And maybe the cleverness is what John was talking about and having the motherboard on the door or whatever or what have you or making it easily upgradable or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
But I don't think we could necessarily fault Apple for the way they were thinking in 2013, given the facts they had in front of them.
John:
Well, I think you can fault them by saying, like, if they thought OpenCL was the future, wouldn't they have to release a machine that the next year they could make it run OpenCL faster?
John:
And then the year after that, they can make it run OpenCL faster?
John:
That's fair.
John:
Even if they had kind of an idea of what the GPU compute future was going to be like, they didn't have... It doesn't seem like they had a roadmap of, like...
John:
when this future arrives we should be poised to make the the fastest thing that you can run opencl on year after year they weren't even poised to do that even if it had materialized they were not like because the benefit like by the time this machine slipped like i said you can get a single gpu pc that that beat it right in in the things that people cared about right and people didn't have to rewrite their applications and they seem to have no plan i mean it's a surprise to me because this type of chimney design where you pull in cool air from the bottom and exhaust the hot air out the top
John:
with it with a really big fan that goes slowly i would think that would have more thermal capacity than it apparently has so we're taking what they said in face value that like they had they had the you know thermal problems with it and they couldn't get new stuff in it that's that's pretty darn bad um and i have a hard time envisioning any good plan for the mac pro that does not include the ability to make it faster next year and faster the year after that and faster the year after that in
John:
in an incremental way because again the whole point of this product is to be the fastest thing out there and i know what marco's saying with with the boring updates i wouldn't use that word to characterize it because as far as i'm concerned having the best performance in the product line is not boring even if it's not in a in a spiral shaped underwater case right you know or whatever you want to say is like oh we can put it in a sphere and it rolls around your desk like whatever
John:
If every year it gets faster and faster, speed is not boring.
John:
Capability is not boring.
John:
Like, you know, my renders or compiles takes X amount of time.
John:
If I buy a new one in a year or two years, they should take X divided by some number amount of time.
John:
Some number greater than one.
John:
I want to see things happen faster.
John:
And that's not boring.
John:
The boring is be innovative, but don't try to change things for the sake of changing them.
John:
And I think what they tried to do is kind of what they tried to do with Final Cut Pro X, which is
John:
Let's not be constrained by what defines pro computers today.
John:
It could be that we are holding on to baggage that is not actually necessary anymore.
John:
If we start basically from a clean slate and say, what do our pro users really need?
John:
What can we eliminate?
John:
What is just there?
John:
Because like, oh, everyone expects to have floppy drives and parallel ports and whatever.
John:
Like what if we drop things and just leave the essence?
John:
Can we get it a simplification?
John:
And they dropped too many things on the wrong things, right?
John:
If they had found the correct essence and dropped some things but left others, they could have come up with a better balance, and it still could have been a cylinder case for all we know, and it still could have had no internal story.
John:
Some of the bets, I think, were reasonable.
John:
no 3.5 inch internal bays no optical drive obviously like all those things all those things that they removed from the mac pro as compared to the cheese grater those were correct things to drop it's like you don't have to keep having three and a quarter inch drive bays you don't have to have any kind of drive bays you can you know we see the future as being pci express ssds or you know optane whatever things from intel
John:
that is an example of a simplification that isn't possible if you say super boring which is basically like well pro computers got to have a bunch of pci slots and a bunch of 3.5 inch bays and a bunch of five and a quarter you'll never you'll never make anything interesting there it's just that they dropped other things as well and it didn't work out and i think to to try to make different trade-offs we can start talking about what we think
Marco:
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Marco:
The iMac.
Marco:
they seem to have apparently canceled the iMac revision that's been mostly done, and the USB-C Kaby Lake revision.
Marco:
It seems like they're now just going to hold that, maybe until the fall, because what they said was that there's going to be new, more pro configurations of the iMac this year.
Marco:
So I'm guessing that maybe gets announced at WDC, but probably the fall.
Marco:
And that probably, you know, whatever iMacs were going to come out this past, you know, winter or spring have probably been delayed to just make one big update then.
Marco:
Which I'm not sure that's necessarily the right move, but I see, you know, that is typical of Apple, so that's plausible, right?
Marco:
But anyway, I wanted to kind of get an idea of...
Marco:
If they're going to do pro configurations of the iMac and also do a modular Mac Pro, and we'll talk about what that might mean also, what would the iMac configurations actually be like?
Marco:
So I was thinking they could put Xeons in there to get higher core counts and more PCI lanes and everything, but
Marco:
I figured that might become like a Mac pro only thing.
Marco:
So maybe the Intel extreme series, like we, like we kept, we keep getting told about like the X99 boards and the extreme edition processors that have like six to 10 cores, um, that are basically Xeons, but you know, not in, not an official name.
Marco:
And so they don't have ECC Ram support.
Marco:
Um, they don't have quite as high of cores as Xeons do, and they don't usually max out at quite as high of clock speeds.
Marco:
Uh, but yeah,
Marco:
That would be one way, like, if they want to keep these two different things, this, you know, they have the regular iMac, which the regular iMac already has usually the fastest, like, typical desktop processors that Intel sells.
Marco:
GPUs, they have more headroom.
Marco:
GPUs, they usually use, like, a low-powered desktop GPU, because the big honking, like, you know, like, the 1080 kind of equivalents, like, the big, like...
Marco:
things with the big green plastic fans from the overclockers, those GPUs don't fit in the iMac enclosure space or heat-wise.
Marco:
So if they make the enclosure thicker and have bigger heat capacity, maybe larger, slower fans with massive heat sinks somehow, if they do that kind of thing, then they could increase the capacity enough to maybe have at least mid-range desktop-class GPUs.
Marco:
And that could also add more.
Marco:
But again, how high would that actually be able to go before it questions the need for the Mac Pro tower?
Marco:
So I'm guessing it would probably be obviously limited to just one GPU, but maybe again limited to the PC mid-range.
Marco:
The kind of PC GPUs that you can usually get for $200.
Marco:
That kind of class.
Marco:
And maybe it might have...
Marco:
a higher RAM ceiling, you know, because right now the iMac is 32.
Marco:
Maybe the iMac Pro, in finger quotes, goes to 64, and the Mac Pro goes to 128, you know, stuff like that.
Marco:
The iMac Pro probably wouldn't have all of the Thunderbolt bandwidth, and, like, you know, the Mac Pro has, like, three Thunderbolt buses.
Marco:
You know, the new one would probably have a different arrangement, but suffice to say that they would max out however many PCI Express lanes and Thunderbolt, however much Thunderbolt bandwidth they could get.
Marco:
the Mac Pro would have the most, and the iMac Pro would probably have closer to a consumer level of them.
Marco:
And maybe the iMac Pro would retain older ports for longer.
Marco:
Maybe if they drop Ethernet, say, or the SD card, or whatever.
Marco:
I think Ethernet's a better example.
Marco:
If they drop Ethernet off the iMac in the consumer line, maybe they keep it in the iMac Pro line.
Marco:
Or if they drop upgradable RAM out of the consumer line, maybe that gets kept in the Pro line.
Marco:
So I think there are...
Marco:
ways they can do the iMac Pro that doesn't interfere with the Mac Pro.
Marco:
But not only am I very surprised that they're doing too, but I'm very excited to see what the iMac Pro is because that might end up being the computer that's right for me.
Marco:
Because I actually don't need a lot of what the Mac Pro offers.
Marco:
I really just need the massive CPU power.
Marco:
That being said, as I stare at my 5K iMac with the horrible image retention, I'm starting to wonder maybe that would still go that way anyway.
John:
The big question with the iMac Pro for me is, was this product planned before or after they decided they were doing the new Mac Pro?
John:
Because that really dictates the design.
John:
Because if I think about it in the new world where they're saying, hey, we're going to have a new modular Mac Pro, I think, oh, well then this iMac with stuff for Pro, people are just going to be like...
John:
a little bit faster internal ssd uh you know thunderbolt 3 a little bit faster gpu a little bit faster cpu all the same classes just like better components all around a new high end what we used to call a plain old speed bump right but if this new iMac was planned and you know because this new iMac is coming this year right so this is not like a distant thing it's coming this year um if this new iMac had been planned and
John:
At a time when Apple was like, we're not doing the Mac Pro anymore.
John:
And this was going to be their replacement to satisfy everybody.
John:
Then I start thinking, well, maybe they could put a Xeon in it.
John:
You know, maybe they could put a actual slightly higher end GPU.
John:
All the things that you said, like use the X99 series and use a desktop class GPU.
John:
Like...
John:
that's the only reason i think we would get that and that machine i think makes less sense for apple to invest in in in in a situation where they really are making a new mac pro because who in the world would buy that when they have the option to buy a new modular mac pro like if you need that stuff if you feel like you need tons of cores and you need a faster gpu and stuff like why wouldn't you go with the modular one it's so much better you know because then if your monitor does have image retention you can just
John:
you know ship the monitor back or get a different monitor instead of chucking the whole machine like all in one is not pro friendly in terms of how to configure a system to your specific needs right um so really this machine depending on when it was when it was created and what apple's planned for it was
John:
It could end up being this weird one-off where somehow, by some miracle, we get an iMac with a Xeon in it, but then that goes away as soon as the new Mac Pro comes, because what the hell's the point of an iMac with a Xeon in it when you've got the Mac Pro?
John:
But for the most part, I'm thinking that this new iMac will basically be...
John:
like the current top of the line 5k iMac, but every component of it just be a little bit better and also have Thunderbolt 3.
John:
And I think they could sell that as saying, this is an iMac that has more appeal to pro users than the previous one.
John:
But to me, it would just be a speed bump in the old style where we just took it for granted that every year...
John:
the computers that apple sells at the very least would have all their components upgraded to be slightly better and every couple of years they would get a new generation kind of like cars although they don't tend to get horsepower bumps but you know there's a generation of car and they improve it year after year after year and then there's a new generation that used to happen with max too every year they would get a little bit faster we used to be disappointed in speed bumps remember that it was like oh they just did a speed bump but now we would kill for speed bumps please just make every component make every component a little bit faster
John:
make you know the the just just make everything a little bit better and that will hold us over until next year instead they just don't update stuff at all anymore so yeah my for the iMac I'm interested in what it will be as well but the promise of a real new Mac Pro is probably going to keep me away from an iMac no matter what a new real new Mac Pro with an Apple monitor the only way I'll end up with that iMac is if my computer dies I will get it I will get an iMac and then I will get the new Mac Pro after that but
John:
If my little 2008 Mac Pro can hold out, as I've joked about in many past shows, if we can go for the full decade, 2008 to 2018, 10-year surface life of a computer, if I can make it, I will.
John:
And if not, I'll get an iMac.
Casey:
Yeah, I think you guys are right that an iMac Pro would just be more of whatever the top-of-the-line 5K iMac is.
Casey:
It would potentially have more ports.
Casey:
I think, Marco, your example of Ethernet is a phenomenal one because I think Apple's itching to get rid of that for the most part.
Casey:
But a pro user is the kind of person that would want to move humongous bits of data around.
John:
Didn't they already get rid of it?
John:
I don't think my 5K iMac is either.
John:
No, although the iMacs still have it.
Casey:
Yeah, the iMac side.
John:
I think the Mini still does too, but who cares about the Mini?
John:
I got to go look.
John:
I don't think mine does.
John:
Continue talking.
John:
I'll be back in a second.
Casey:
John, I have the most modern 5K iMac, I believe, and it absolutely has an Ethernet port.
Marco:
It definitely still has it.
Marco:
You don't have to check.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I think it would have more ports, like Marco said, potentially more RAM.
Casey:
The other thing I wanted to bring up, though, is...
Casey:
And I don't know anything about this, so maybe this is completely bananas, but what about VR?
Casey:
So I know that VR is super intensive and it requires just tremendous GPU power, but is it feasible to have a 5K iMac Pro that maybe does VR?
Casey:
Because VR is kind of that in-between, right?
Casey:
Where you need tremendous hardware power.
Casey:
But you don't necessarily need to go all the way to a Mac Pro for that sort of thing, do you?
Casey:
So maybe that's the target is you could use an Oculus with an iMac 5K or something.
Casey:
I understand that last I heard Oculus isn't supporting Mac OS, but just for the sake of conversation.
John:
That's because Apple doesn't make any hardware this fast enough.
John:
And like I said, I don't think you can fit a VR-capable with current VR standards, VR-capable GPU inside the iMac.
John:
Unless, again, unless the iMac we're talking about was the one that was designed and planned and executed for an age without the Mac Pro.
John:
Because there's plenty of room back there to add stuff to the back of that monitor.
John:
They could put much more capable cooling.
John:
They have a lot of area, especially between the 5K one.
John:
There's a lot of area behind that monitor to put stuff.
John:
You can spread it out far away from each other.
John:
You can get lots of air flowing over things.
John:
And you have tons of options.
John:
But the only way such a thing would exist is if it was...
John:
if it was something that was supposed to be at a lineup that doesn't include the Mac Pro, and in which case I think it would be a one-off.
Casey:
So you think Apple's official message is, if you ever wanted to do VR, we have an answer for you, and it's a $5,000 Mac Pro.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I mean, it depends.
Marco:
Like, I think VR is, you know, right now, even in the PC world, VR requires, like, the highest-end hardware because it's really new and it's incredibly taxing on GPUs.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Everything that comes out that's a new type of thing you can do with GPUs requires the best GPUs.
Marco:
If you look at gaming, which is what VR is obviously involved with, typically what happens is in a few years...
Marco:
more pedestrian gpus will be able to handle vr in the same way that today you can run a 3d game on a macbook pro but you maybe just can't turn all the settings up so you can't have like all the super high resolution super high detail levels things like that so vr is going to be the same way like
Marco:
Right now, it requires these massive things, but in two years... And Apple's patient.
Marco:
They're not going to design a whole new product line with this iMac Pro that would only be able to do VR with this massive thing on the back of it, but then in two years, that wouldn't be necessary anymore.
Marco:
Basically, I think that by the time the new Mac Pro comes out...
Marco:
and we see the kind of stuff, whatever the new Mac Pro balance with the Pro iMac and the regular iMac is, I think by the time that all gets settled out, VR will run fine on mid-range hardware.
Marco:
And so that question will be kind of moot.
Marco:
Now, if you want a really good VR setup, you're probably going to want a high-end gaming PC or the equivalent hardware on a Mac Pro.
Marco:
But that's a different story.
John:
We're still early in VR because there is so much headroom just in resolution.
John:
Like it's so grainy.
John:
It's like not going back to Doom where the pixels are the size of boulders.
John:
But like you need a high end rig just to get the current best VR, you know, goggle setups to show you something that looks incredibly grainy from the perspective of what you would expect from like.
John:
a modern 2d regular pc game so there is a huge amount of capacity for new gpu power that will purely be absorbed by making things less ridiculously dotty and it doesn't mean like you can be able to do vr as it exists today on a mid-range system so at least it will be possible right so you're right about that like suddenly it's possible on mid-range systems but the appetite for high-end will will not go away for a long time just because
John:
At the very least, you're doing twice the work for VR because you have to have two different images or two different eyes, and it just goes up from there in terms of sensor fusion and response times for getting things to your eyeballs as fast as possible in a very demanding environment where every millisecond counts.
John:
So that's why I feel like you always need a high-end rig to ring the best out of this, either a high-end rig or something like PSVR where it is a purpose-built system that is not a general-purpose computer but that is designed specifically to do VR
John:
And it has strict constraints on latency and frame rates and all that stuff.
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Marco:
So let's talk about the whole idea of what is this modular design?
Marco:
So they mentioned, you know, they were very clear on a number of times during this briefing that the new Mac Pro that's coming out sometime after this year is going to have a, quote, modular design.
Marco:
What does that mean?
Marco:
One of the things that people online have been thinking about and asking about and suggesting and even predicting for the future for years now is a kind of set of stacked components that would look kind of like Mac minis that you would stack up and one would be your CPU module and one would be your GPU module and stuff like that, right?
Marco:
Here's a storage one.
Marco:
You kind of like...
Marco:
build your own assembled stack of parts, each one of which is its own independent box that you could buy and upgrade and customize as needed.
Marco:
The more I thought about this kind of thing, the more I think that this is not only not what Apple probably has in mind, but that it actually might be terrible and impractical in reality.
John:
I can't believe you were entertaining it enough to discuss it as a show topic because you're right that people have been talking about this for a year because it sounds like a cool sci-fi thing kind of in the modern incarnation of this that people may be more familiar with is like the project era whatever it was those phones like we're going to make a cell phone by having a bunch of modules that we snap together and you can pick your camera and you pick your CPU and your GPU and how much storage and how much battery and you'll just be able to build your phone from a bunch of these little modular capsules that snap together to build a phone it's like
John:
No.
John:
It's an interesting idea, but the tech for that simply does not exist.
John:
And so with the advent of Thunderbolt 3, everyone says, well, the tech for that does exist.
John:
Everything you just described, I can get a bunch of Mac Mini-type things, and they snap together with the cool Thunderbolt 3 thing, and I have my GPU and my CPU and my storage, and it just snaps together.
John:
But it's like, what is that buying you versus just having...
John:
a regular computer that you can pull things in and out of like what what do you get by putting them in separate little modules what does apple get what do you get that like it's it has always been a pipe dream and as the technology comes closer and it goes from pipe dream to potential reality then you have to say if we could feasibly do it what what is that what do i get out of it and
John:
Other than it being really cool and futurey, I think we don't get enough out of it with today's technology for it to be worthwhile for Apple to even consider this approach.
Marco:
Well, and if you even think about, like, what it would actually be, like, if you think through, like, okay, what would these things actually require?
Marco:
How would this be sold?
Marco:
How would it be supported?
Marco:
So one of the number, you know, number one, obviously, is, like, how do they connect to each other?
Marco:
Like, over what kind of...
Marco:
do they talk to each other that is actually fast enough to do this stuff?
Marco:
And if you're putting a disk on there, Thunderbolt's fast enough.
Marco:
But if you're putting a GPU or a CPU or things that need lots and lots of bandwidth, then you're going to need... Either you're going to have to deal with the limitations of Thunderbolt, because Thunderbolt is PCI Express over a cable, but...
Marco:
it is not nearly as much bandwidth as the internal slots for a GPU and a desktop have.
Marco:
And furthermore, the standards for PCI Express itself and the Thunderbolt standards, those change every few years.
Marco:
So you'd have the set of pods, I guess that's the word I'll use, you'll have the set of component pods where there'll all be different speeds if you mix and match over the years.
Marco:
And if you're not going to mix and match over the years, there's no point in doing this.
Marco:
Not to mention, every one of those pods would need its own power and cooling.
Marco:
So maybe you could have some interface where the big honking one on the bottom has a giant power supply and powers all the other ones.
Marco:
you still need to put fans in all of them.
Marco:
So that's going to be more noise, more size.
Marco:
They're all going to have their own metal casing and whatever hardware is involved with the interconnection between them and keeping them securely mounted so your GPU doesn't pop out of the socket in the middle of using it if you nudge the desk or your cat walks over or whatever.
Marco:
It is so challenging to build a system like that that works at all.
Marco:
And it would end up, these pod things would end up being so cumbersome
Marco:
and expensive and loud and it would and then not to mention like imagine the support nightmare of like you know you think it's bad now when we have to know like well if you have a 13-inch macbook pro the two thunderbolt ports on the right side are a little bit less bandwidth than the two thunderbolt ports on the left side you think that's bad
Marco:
imagine a system where, like, well, you can stack, like, three GPU modules, but only if you have this one high-powered CPU module, and only from this year forward, and not if you have a disk module between any of the two GPU modules.
Marco:
Like, it would be crazy to support, and it would be crazy as a user to figure out what would work with what else, and whether you could do things, and it would just be a nightmare, and there would be weird limits of, like, how many of something you could have...
Marco:
what order they'd have to be stacked in, what the certain main module would have to be to support the other ones.
Marco:
It would be a mess.
Marco:
So that entire idea of stacking these external boxes that you could just combine into whatever you want, I don't think that's ever going to happen.
Marco:
In practice, it just doesn't work.
Casey:
I completely agree with you.
Casey:
And I think that that reading of modular is grossly overcomplicating what Apple's probably talking about.
Casey:
Yeah, they just mean a separate monitor.
Casey:
That's all I mean.
Casey:
Yeah, that's it.
Casey:
Just separate monitor.
Marco:
Well, and I think what they mean, you know, it turns out if you if you can describe the configurability of a PC tower that we've had for decades, like that is modular.
Marco:
I think what they mean... That's exactly what I was going to say.
Casey:
Yeah, I think it just means user-replaceable RAM, maybe user-replaceable CPU, maybe.
Casey:
User-replaceable graphics card.
Casey:
It's basically a cheese grater Mac Pro, but presumably done in a much more modern fashion, but with the same amount of upgradability.
Marco:
And I would say it doesn't even necessarily need to be user-replaceable on all these parts.
Marco:
I think what Apple means by modular is...
Marco:
they can configure the same general case in different ways to suit different types of needs at purchase.
Marco:
So the old Mac Pro Tower could be configured with one or two CPUs, three or six RAM slots, any number up to five, I think, of PCI Express cards, two of which have GPU, or three of which could have GPU bandwidth, I think, four disks, two opticals.
Marco:
There were all these different configurations, and this one product...
Marco:
That Apple, you know, this one case with this one power supply, with this one set of supporting components, could be configured by Apple in a modular fashion to solve a bunch of people's needs differently in one product.
Marco:
That's what the PC Tower gave Apple.
Marco:
That's what the Mac Pro had until 2013.
Marco:
And so when they say modular, I'm pretty sure that's the kind of thing they're describing, as opposed to the 2013, which is, with this model, you get one CPU and two mid-range GPUs, and that's it.
Marco:
It was one configuration you could make with that one.
Marco:
So that is what I would expect by the word modular.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I wouldn't get your hopes up, anybody out there, about the stacked components idea or even, as you were saying, even user-replaceable stuff.
Marco:
I'm sure the RAM probably will be.
Marco:
Storage, maybe.
Marco:
Processors, probably not.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
CPU upgrades haven't really been a practical thing for quite some time because basically sockets that the CPUs plug into and the motherboard chipsets and everything, those change so frequently that you can't really upgrade to a processor that is newer than the one you have.
Marco:
You can move laterally within the same family.
Marco:
If you bought the low-end one in the family, and then two years later you can find the high-end one for sale somewhere, you could put that in, but the gain usually isn't that big.
Marco:
The difference between the low and the high-end within a single family in a single year isn't that big.
Marco:
It's like 5% most of the time.
Marco:
You could get more cores with the Mac Pro, but again, it's not as big of a gain as just buying a new one would get you.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Doing a CPU upgrade on a modern computer, especially a Mac Pro with these giant Xeons in it, involves so much, like, messing with delicate and very important thermal management things, giant heat sinks, moving the fans around, dealing with these little fragile sockets and the thousand pins in the bottom of them, like...
Marco:
It would be such a crazy ordeal to put most people through.
Marco:
I would not expect anybody today to consider the CPU in an average person's computer to be user replaceable.
Marco:
So I definitely would not expect that to ever happen again with Apple.
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me if the CPU was soldered to the board.
Marco:
Probably not for component management reasons, but it wouldn't surprise me.
John:
So I don't want to poo-poo the external stuff too much because you're just like, oh, nothing's ever going to be external.
John:
It's probably the right choice for the Mac Pro, but...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
does not have enough bandwidth to fully satisfy the very very very top end cards in a specific application where they need all the pci express lanes that they could have internally because the external does not have as many lanes as internal and maybe you could gang cables together or something like that but um they could do that but as you said another external power supply cooling like it's awkward the the role of that is to make a laptop have a
John:
if apple was ever going to do something like that they would do it for a laptop because you can't put it inside the case wouldn't it be cool if you could put your laptop down and then connect it with thunderbolt 3 to gpu that is not the highest of the high end but is so much faster than the gpu that's inside your case that it's a win so my hope my first hope with the modular thing which i interpreted this is the same as casey which is basically i'm just saying it has a separate monitor
John:
I'm not even talking about the internals.
John:
I'm just saying there's a box that doesn't have a monitor, and there's a monitor connected to it.
John:
That's my interpretation of modular at this point.
Casey:
That's not modular.
Casey:
That's no different than the current Mac Pro.
John:
Right, but it's not the iMac.
John:
That's what it's saying.
John:
We're going to make a new Mac Pro, and that's their way of saying, and it's not going to be an iMac Pro.
John:
That's how I read...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Their statement on the broadest level, right?
John:
So what I hope... My first hope is that they do not have an external GPU connected with Thunderbolt on the new Mac Pro.
John:
Because, again, the whole point of this computer is to be the absolute fastest thing that money can buy.
John:
And if you connect a GPU with a Thunderbolt 3 cable, you are already down behind all the people who have internal stuff.
John:
Forget about having a CPU connected separately from this and that.
John:
Like, just plain old taking the GPU outside the box...
John:
It's a bad idea from packaging, and it's a bad idea from performance perspective.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I think to me, as we think through what the new Mac Pro should be and what it's likely to be, the question of whether the GPU is internal or external, I think, decides a lot of it for us.
Marco:
And I'm with you, John.
Marco:
I think once you think it through and think through the realities, like...
Marco:
No question that Thunderbolt is great, and you can do external GPUs over Thunderbolt now.
Marco:
And they actually, if you look up, like I know barefeets.com did a bunch of tests a few months back, and it turned out that external GPUs for a lot of applications that didn't involve tons of transfer to and from main memory, they actually did pretty well in the external boxes.
John:
yeah they can be just as fast if you're not constrained by bandwidth they're exactly as fast as if they were internal but again the whole point of this computer is to be the absolute fastest at everything and say you're doing some workload that does take advantage of all those lanes now you're down some number of pci express lanes now you're down bandwidth why why take that hit for what advantage it's like oh well if it's external we can upgrade it easily well guess what if it's internal you can upgrade it easily through this amazing technology we call cards like
John:
Well, we'll get to that.
John:
Not that Apple's going to get into the upgrade business, but like you both said, Apple can upgrade it.
John:
Maybe they'll never let you upgrade it, but next year they can swap out one of the GPUs and put in a new one and say, here's the speed bump to Mac Pro.
John:
We're now with new GPU options because we built them with enough cooling capacity.
John:
That's what we're talking about here.
John:
Not even like, oh, you'll be able to take your GPU out and put in a new one yourself, which you probably will be able to do by taking PC GPUs and flashing them and all the other stuff.
John:
But in terms of Apple-supported stuff,
John:
that in internal versus external does not give apple any more flexibility in terms of modularity right and i also like i like kind of like product wise i cannot see apple shipping a portion of a computer that does not contain a gpu like it would contain the internal one and they would do switching
Marco:
A computer these days needs a GPU to do anything.
Marco:
You're not going to use a computer without a GPU.
Marco:
Sorry Linux people or embedded routers, but I'm not talking about that.
Marco:
And so they're not going to sell you the base Mac Pro box that doesn't have a GPU.
Marco:
They're going to put one in there.
Marco:
That's not the way Apple would do things without that.
Marco:
If you're going to have a GPU that comes with the computer, it might as well be internal.
Marco:
It would make no sense to put it external.
Marco:
I think once you have realized there's going to be an internal GPU...
Marco:
And they've already talked about modularity, and they've talked about upgrades easily in the future, you know, for them, updates, I should say, updates easily in the future.
Marco:
They're basically going towards a PC tower, right?
Marco:
So what other parts of a PC tower are still needed today?
Marco:
You know, we mentioned earlier, there's lots of things like, you know, optical drive bays that you don't really need anymore, right?
Yeah.
Marco:
upgradeable ram is an easy one that's going to be in there but we already have that you don't need to make a tower to have you know you have that in the iMac you had it in laptops until very recently so we already have upgradeable ram you know you can just have a little tiny door somewhere and have that be it so you don't need a tower for that you don't need optical bays you john you said earlier that you don't need three and a half inch bays
Marco:
I think you're probably right, but I'm not 100% confident in that because here's the thing.
Marco:
When I was first trying to think about this, I was thinking, you know, you don't really need 3.5-inch driveways anymore because today you can get a 4-terabyte SSD.
Marco:
And it isn't even that ridiculously expensive.
Marco:
And the 2-terabyte ones, which is about as much space as most people need on their desktops most of the time, 2-terabyte SSDs are actually...
Marco:
inexpensive now they're actually like only a few hundred dollars and by the time this thing comes out in you know 2018 or beyond that'll be even cheaper and so at first I was like well you don't really need three and a half inch base because if SSDs can be that cheap they can put a couple of like the stick kind and I'm not even saying like you know if you're a building computer to have a bunch of SSDs in it you might use 2.5 inch drive base which are like the little ones that SSDs and laptop power drives use
Marco:
that that's storage skeuomorphism right there 2.5 inch ssds come on right like you don't even need that anymore because not only are the ssds a lot smaller but also like the interface standards like the the sata standards you're the pci express you're not going through sata that's not a spinning disc exactly so like you're gonna have some kind of directly connected pci express ssds and whether they're on little slots like a little those little like m2 stick things or whatever they are
Marco:
they're probably going to be on slots, right?
Marco:
At least for Apple to service and replace them when they die.
Marco:
So, and it would be nice to have more than one of those.
Marco:
It'd be great to have two SSD slots maybe so you can configure it at purchase time probably with more storage.
Marco:
That'd be awesome.
Marco:
But I wouldn't expect more than that for SSDs.
Marco:
However, you can kind of make an argument that, you know, if they would just put like one or two three and a half inch bays in there, you know, a 10 terabyte hard disk is just 400 bucks right now.
Marco:
but it's just too slow it is really slow to be your to be your boot drive right but like but pro users so many pro users need to work with very large files that they almost all of them use these these you know incredibly expensive complicated loud giant external raid boxes and stuff if you would put two three and a half inch bays inside this machine so
Marco:
that could accommodate lots of that in a really nice way.
Marco:
Now, I'm not saying necessarily that this is definitely what Apple should do, and I'm almost certainly not saying that this is what they will do.
Marco:
I really don't think there's any chance that they would do this.
Marco:
But a three-and-a-half-inch bay inside something that's big enough to have a GPU on a slot is nothing.
Marco:
Three-and-a-half-inch bays aren't that big.
Marco:
And so it wouldn't take a lot
Marco:
for Apple to fit this into whatever shape this is going to take.
Marco:
That being said, though, again, I don't think they will.
Marco:
I don't think that's very realistic.
John:
I would go the reverse of what you said.
John:
I would say that I don't think they should do it, but I can actually envision them doing it because they really are having this self-reflective moment about the Mac Pro and atoning for mistakes.
John:
I think they would actually entertain the idea, which is inconceivable from the perspective of the trash can that they would entertain this idea.
John:
But I think they should not do it like my my vision of what if I had to advise them both what they should make and what I want, which coincidentally are very close to the same thing is I think all they need to do to atone is all the things they already said they're going to do, which is make it so that you can change the parts year over year to make them faster.
John:
which necessitates a certain amount of cooling and power structure.
John:
And honestly, for the past... Since the Power Mac G5, the Pro Apple desktop line has... Johnny, I've even said in his little intro video for the Power Mac G5, has been basically...
John:
making a box to extract heat from components like that it was modeled after a heat exchanger like that's why the cheese gritter looks the way it does he actually talked about heat exchangers like you know up in up in a room or whatever take air one temperature in and extract heat from it and you know like that's what these boxes are all about the the cheese gritter is about that the the the trash can is about that it's a chimney right so
John:
make a box or it doesn't have to be a box make make a case that can support the thermal load of all the parts that you could possibly put in it that means you have to support two really hot cpus maybe also two really hot gpus or some combination thereof so you can upgrade them year over year you have to have excess capacity and one great thing about the cheese grater is it has excess cooling capacity like it was made for chips on such an old process that were so incredibly hot
John:
like i mean they made a water cooled one at one point you know there was room for that in there there's so much you know you can cool almost anything in this box it is huge it has direct airflow from back to front it you know works great you have plenty of room for different arrangement of fans not that i'm saying they're gonna make something that big but so make a box with adequate cooling
John:
um and you know upgradable and the next thing i think that we need to do is gets what you were getting at is like what things can we remove obviously you need to have tons of ports all thunderbolt 3 and all that other stuff you know high speed ethernet put 10 gig ethernet on put two separate ethernet buses like do everything you can use all those pci express lanes on the back of the thing and then for storage i think it would be the right thing to do
John:
to have more than one internal storage thingy, more than one internal SSD.
John:
Because they are so small, to be able to support not a 3.5-inch drive for bulk storage, which, again, I think they might consider, especially if they have a lot of room in the case, for all the reasons you said.
John:
But I think they should not do it.
John:
Instead, they should let me have three or four internal SSDs, which they will charge an arm and a leg for.
John:
But that, I think, gives all the advantage you're looking for, which is like, you know, what if I don't want to have a giant RAID array?
John:
I just want to have adequate internal storage.
John:
And SSDs, you know, you can only get them so big.
John:
But if I could have four 2GB internal SSDs that are super fast because they're internal, right?
John:
Like, that's what you want out of it.
John:
I think there's plenty of room for...
John:
one to two gpus one to two cpus and one to three or four very fast pci express ssd things and that to me looks like in whatever shape they put it a modern mac pro especially if you're saying those ssds eventually will be replaced with the optane you know 3d cross point whatever thing intel's coming up with it's even faster still is that how you say that i don't know x point i don't know you know
John:
Anyway, like that's the point of this machine.
John:
Very, very fast storage.
John:
And yeah, external storage is great for bulk storage and everything, but it'll never be as fast as internal storage.
John:
And I don't want to just have, oh, my boot drive is internal and everything else that I work with is outside.
John:
mistakes of the past don't make it so darn small that you only have room for one tiny little ssd because the things are like the size of a thumb drive practically inside there they're so small you have plenty of room to put four of those inside there no five and a quarter bays no three and a quarter bays no 2.5 inch bays but you have room for that and if they made that machine with that combination of things
John:
that would be upgradable by Apple and upgradable by industrious hackers, and having more than one internal storage thingy, all of which are super-duper fast and that third parties could sell into, I think that would cover all their needs and all the sins of the past while not looking backwards and while foregoing the 3.5-inch trade, even though, like, you're saying, like, this could keep people from having to go for the big array even longer.
John:
Because I just think...
John:
Any spinning thing inside this case is a non-starter and is not forward-looking.
John:
So I would not save space for it, and I would use the space that I get from that to put that other stuff in.
Marco:
That's a reasonable argument.
Marco:
The only thing I will say, though, is that all of these super awesome PCI Express SSD systems need a good amount of PCI Express lanes to make them fast.
Marco:
And one of the issues with the current Mac Pro is that there actually aren't enough PCI Express lanes to really add anything more to it than what it has now.
Marco:
And so if you have the slots inside, you know, if you have like, you know, four, you know, M2 or whatever they are, SSD slots, then you have to have allocated the PCI Express lanes to assume that those are going to be in use.
Marco:
And then maybe you don't have enough to also have two high-powered GPUs and the Ethernet port and stuff like that.
John:
That's what makes it a configurable system.
John:
You could say, hey, if you want to have four really fast internal SSDs, you've got to give up something.
John:
You can't have two GPUs.
John:
In other words, be able to configure the machine.
John:
Or Apple, just let Apple configure it.
John:
Not you, like it's a built order where you get to pick and choose everything.
John:
But Apple can make different configurations.
John:
Here's the one for people who need...
John:
a single modest cpu one really fast gpu and tons of fast storage and here's the people who need two of the fastest gpus but storage is less of a concern and a moderate cpu like you're right that the lanes have limit but again the whole point of this machine is they will they will choose the chips and chip sets from intel they give the maximum number of pci express lanes that money can buy and then it's up to apple to allocate those in arrangements that serve all the different needs
John:
That's fair.
John:
I'm just saying one of those needs may be the one that says, hey, I want to have more than one internal storage thingy.
John:
Because if you don't, then it's going to be like a SAN over 10 gig Ethernet.
John:
Data's got to get into the system somehow anyway.
John:
It's just going to go through a bridge chip and get into the whole... It all ends up in the same place.
John:
It all needs to get into the computer somehow.
John:
So it's not as if by not having internal storage, you suddenly get more bandwidth for storage.
John:
You don't.
John:
It just sips through a smaller hose outside the computer.
Marco:
and then i'm curious to know your thoughts about whether we think they would actually use like standard pc slot gpu sized things or whether the gpus would take would be like a custom smaller apple slot because to me that there's there's clear advantages to both i mean you know number one like if it's
Marco:
If it's a PC standard one, like the old Mac Pro use, the GPUs in the cheese grater were really just PC GPUs with Apple firmware and custom Apple driver support, but they weren't that different.
Marco:
If you go that way, then it's easier for Apple to keep updated.
Marco:
And I really do think they said, a number of the Apple executives in that meeting said,
Marco:
seem to say this over and over again, which is they want the new Mac Pro to be something they can keep updated frequently.
Marco:
And so if the GPUs are not something crazy custom that's just for Apple, but if they're just regular slot GPUs, then that could probably help them achieve that goal a lot.
Marco:
On the other side of it, though, if they do the slot GPUs, then, assuming that they're at all user-replaceable, then they're not going to be integrated with the system's cooling thing.
Marco:
So they're going to have to have 16 different fans in there, because the GPU's going to have its own fan.
Marco:
By the way, GPU fans die constantly.
Marco:
So the GPU's going to have its own little stupid fan that's going to be loud and filled with dust and die all the time.
Marco:
And then the rest of the system's going to have all these different heatsinks all over the place like the old one did.
Marco:
If they do something custom...
Marco:
it would be harder to keep updated.
Marco:
It would be more work.
Marco:
They'd be more likely to neglect it, like the current one.
Marco:
But also like the current one, they could integrate the GPU's cooling needs into some kind of larger combined cooling system.
Marco:
And that would therefore probably be a nicer product because it would be quieter and it would be easier and more reliable to cool if they gave it enough capacity, unlike the current one.
Marco:
So I can kind of see...
Marco:
Both sides of this, if you make it the custom Apple thing, you have, I think, more flexibility to design a really cool new product, which, as we mentioned, we're not actually sure that that's what they should do.
Marco:
But if you do it the PC way...
Marco:
the more you think about like what's going to be in this new Mac pro, the more it seems to me that it's basically just going to be like the bottom half of the cheese grater.
Marco:
Like, and maybe, you know, they can tweak certain things a little bit within that design, but if it has to accommodate regular PC graphics card slots, uh, and especially presumably it would accommodate more than one.
Marco:
Uh, and even if it maxed out at two, unlike the old, you know, the old one, I think you could put four low power ones in, but even if it maxed out at two, uh,
Marco:
big honking GPUs just to design something that could accommodate that even if they didn't even even if they didn't offer dual CPU options which I hope they do but I wouldn't bet on that that it very quickly becomes a PC tower you know and whether it's just like really short and doesn't have any drive base or not is a question but it doesn't really matter if it has to accommodate those standard GPU sizes and more than one of them it's going to basically look like a small PC tower right
John:
The question is, what is the barrier to them updating the GPU?
John:
If they went with a custom thing, it would be harder for them to upgrade the GPU.
John:
I'm not entirely sure that's the case because...
John:
updating the gpu like they can get the chip and the like the the chip set and the reference board that goes with it the packaging of what you're talking about is like pcs like they have all this cooling and then there's this other fan that's facing a totally different direction like 90 degrees to the whole rest of the airflow that's cooling the cart
John:
because they're sold modular and usually it has its own slot on the back because it has the you know the double width slot cover thing to blow the air out the back and fill with dust it is its own it is its own little cooling universe because it's modular right but i think apple can can actually use like the work of the pc industry hey we have a new chip a new chip set a new reference design a new card a new like the whole nine yards and
John:
but not take their cooling solutions it would still be in some kind of slot but that apple would have their own cooling solutions because again i don't think apple cares that you can upgrade it after the fact they're not going to sell new cards for it if you want to do some weird third party thing and hack a thing in like apple's not supporting you that's not a thing that they've done in years and years um so i i have to think that no matter what even if they make a rectangle
John:
that they are going to do their own cooling solution because i think i think they're off the train of doing like a card with its own like you said terrible you can tell or what we used to call them uh video coolers or what they had a weird name that people used to call them for the those horrible fans that would be attached to your gpu that would always be the first thing to die in your system i think those days are gone for apple
John:
Even if they use an actual card, you know, a full length or half length card, like in a slot that looks like a plain old, I think they will still do custom cooling.
John:
Because I think to design a good case with thermal capacity, Apple's recent designs, and even on the Mac Pros to some degree, like they're all working towards...
John:
Let's design the airflow as one system for maximum capacity.
John:
And taking this other little island of cooling and chucking it in the middle, I've got my own fan.
John:
I'll put my intake here.
John:
First of all, they pull their intake from inside the case.
John:
And then they do exhaust to the outside through their back little slot thing, right?
John:
But that is so...
John:
So not how to efficiently design, you know, a system like an Apple-style system for cooling, which is why, you know, the trash can Mac Pro wasn't like that.
John:
And why in from the G5 until today, it has always been so incongruous to open up these machines and see the carefully planned air flows and channels and then see the cooler, the video cooler, sitting on its thing, doing its thing off in the side of the world.
John:
So it really depends, I think, on, like...
John:
Does Apple think that doing that, doing custom cooling or even a custom form factor for the card, is that too onerous that will actually stop them from updating the GPU?
John:
Like, oh, we would love to upgrade the GPU, but we can't just take a new thing and slap it in there.
John:
Or will they say, well, you know, we just need to have enough cooling capacity and a way to design a cooling solution.
John:
And we will take your board and your chip and plug it into a standard slot and then slapped onto it, alien facehugger style.
John:
will be our cooling solution that integrates with the whole rest of our cooling flow inside the case so if i had if i had to bet i would say they are going to go with custom cooling even if the cards themselves are standard now on the trash can the cards themselves are not standard they're not in standard slots they're you know they're they're on the outside of a weird triangle thing which is no arrangement than any pc motherboard they like that is custom head to toe and that didn't work out so i don't think they need to go that extreme i totally think they can have cards but
John:
I'm thinking the best bet is to go with custom cooling, which means you will not be able to yank that thing out, go buy an Nvidia card off the shelf, and shove it in without doing some pretty fancy hardware hacking to get their giant cooler in there.
John:
Because I just have trouble envisioning a box that would accommodate that that isn't literally the size of the cheese grater, maybe with some parts of it lopped off the top and bottom.
John:
Because those cards are huge.
John:
The coolers they come with are huge.
John:
They're noisy.
John:
It's just gross.
Marco:
So basically, we've basically redesigned the Mac Pro for Apple in two hours.
Marco:
Yeah, that was so easy.
Marco:
What's taking them so long?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I think to close out, I think, for now, what I think they're going to do with this or what I think they should do with this.
Marco:
As you work through what this machine should be, I think it's a lot more like the cheese grater than like the trash can.
Marco:
And even though the cheese grater was definitely outdated and should have significant editing done to it and significant changes done to it.
Marco:
I think what we've ended up with is to make a good Mac Pro, you need to go more towards that style, whether it's just the bottom half of it lopped off or whether it's more designed.
Marco:
And this is not going to be...
Marco:
a sexy, high PR product for Johnny Ive to feel really good about.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
It's because it's going to be some form of PC tower of some, you know, it's going to be utilitarian more than it's going to be a fashion object.
Marco:
But this, if Apple has to do that, this is the one Mac in the entire Mac lineup that must sacrifice appearance for functionality if that choice is necessary to make.
Marco:
If they come to a point where they have to decide whether to make this thing cooler and prettier or whether to make it more utilitarian, every other Mac, you could make a case, maybe they should go the other direction, not the Mac Pro.
Marco:
It has to always go to functionality first.
Marco:
Because it has to satisfy the widest range of pro needs possible that are not satisfied by the iMac.
Marco:
The iMac already has the high-end, nicely designed computer covered.
Marco:
The iMac is that.
Marco:
It is great at that.
Marco:
The Mac Pro must be utilitarian, even if it comes at the expense of the coolest, tiniest, smallest, thinnest thing they could make.
Marco:
The more tower-like that it gets, the more the design they choose for it resembles a tower, the more it offers above the iMac, and the easier and cheaper it is for Apple to keep it updated.
John:
I just don't agree with the way you're characterizing that because I think the G3, G4, and Power Mac G5 cases were awesome looking.
John:
They were fantastic.
John:
They were the best looking things Apple had made.
John:
I don't think they sacrificed the beauty and design of those cases at all.
John:
And they also delivered amazing utility.
John:
Right.
John:
So I get what you're saying.
John:
Like, I think the way to phrase it would be more like what Federighi said, where we came up what we wanted, which was like two GPUs and a CPU.
John:
And then they they pulled in like they basically said, how small and quiet and elegant a case can we get this exact amount of power?
John:
Like they pulled in the edges as far as they could go, like they shrink wrapped it down.
John:
That's the wrong approach.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
Instead of saying, here's what we want to build.
John:
Now let's put it in a beautiful case that has like 10 times that cooling capacity, right?
John:
So that we have so much headroom that no matter what comes down the line, we have places to put all that stuff.
John:
And I think there is tremendous freedom to make.
John:
It should be the sexiest looking computer that makes because it can be fantastically weird.
John:
Like no other computer.
John:
You just have to make sure you don't, like you said, make those trade-offs where you're like, oh, I have a great idea.
John:
Let's make it shaped like a corkscrew.
John:
and we could fit the pieces in the corkscrew and they could go in a little so it's like no wait a second you know you may think corkscrews are cool or maybe we could fit these parts exactly in a corkscrew but that corkscrew has no headroom that corkscrew is the wrong choice for this you know so don't or whatever making it super duper flat like here's a mac pro that's like it's like an iMac with no monitor it's so incredibly flat and thin right it just lays i don't know underneath your feet and you put your feet on it keeps them warm like stuff like that is where you're where i get what you're saying like don't make that trade-off right
John:
but i disagree that this shouldn't be sexy i think it should be the sexiest computer that apple makes and i think there you have the flexibility to make it sexy because it doesn't have to have a monitor in it it can be insanely expensive and you have don't have the size limits of portability
John:
So by all means, make this thing awesome looking.
John:
Make it look like, I don't know, you can make it look like a Death Star as long as the sphere is big enough to support a tremendous amount of cooling.
John:
Like, go nuts.
John:
It can be black and shiny and chrome and, you know, whatever you want to do to it.
John:
I picture in my head something that even just a rectangular solid with the right surface finishes, right?
John:
would would be really cool like a couple of well-placed uh white leds you know not saying has to be have ground effects on it and have water bubbling through it or whatever although they did that with the g5 um or was it the g5 that the water cooled when i forget anyway yeah i am i want this to be exciting and sexy just you know and again i i point to the the whole uh yosemite el capitan uh line of cases that all sorts of weird surface finishes and
John:
within the same basic but also very weird and cool shape hiding the fact that guess what inside it was a gigantic rectangle with with reasonably good cooling and the g5 the same thing i think it looks pretty cool by now we're bored with it because it's ancient right but it it did its job and it did it with style and pizzazz and elegance uh and it was and is cool and
John:
But it was also a workhorse.
John:
And so I want it all.
John:
I want sexiness and utilitarian-ness.
John:
And I think it's possible.
John:
I think Apple has proved it's possible.
Marco:
Yeah, I agree.
Marco:
I mean, you know, the other funny thing is like by going from the big utilitarian silver rectangle that weighed 50 pounds and sat on the floor...
Marco:
to the little black cylinder, it had to come off the floor.
Marco:
It had to sit on your desk.
Marco:
Yeah, that's a question.
Marco:
Do you want this on the desk or the floor, the new one?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And honestly, I really greatly prefer it on the floor because it allows for neater, cleaner cable routing.
Marco:
If there's any noise produced by it, it's further from your ear and your podcasting microphone.
Marco:
And it just, to me, it gets everything out of the way.
Marco:
And the only thing is, though, to be on the floor, it does have to be huge and fairly heavy to be stable there.
Marco:
There was nothing saying that you weren't allowed to put the trash can on the floor.
Marco:
It was just unwise.
John:
You'd just kick it over all the time.
Marco:
Right, yeah, exactly.
Marco:
You just shouldn't put it on the floor.
Marco:
It deserves to be up on the desk.
John:
That's an interesting thing, socially speaking.
John:
I had my G3 and G4s on my desk because I thought they deserved to be up there because they were beautiful.
John:
But the G5 I also had on my desk, but it was just too damn big.
John:
Yeah, how big is your desk?
John:
It was on the desk.
John:
It was going to fall on me and crush me to death, right?
John:
And so I had it on my desk for a long time, and I said, you know what?
John:
This is inappropriate.
John:
And it went to the floor.
John:
And my G5 and my Mac Pro have been on the floor ever since.
John:
So I'm not opposed to putting something that other people would put on the floor that could be put on the floor on the desk just because I think it's really cool and looking at it makes me happy.
John:
But at a certain point, it becomes ridiculous.
John:
So I'm thinking this one...
John:
should be and will be small enough that you could put it on the desk but i think a goal should be also it works underneath the desk so that gives the people the choice of where they want to put it which means like you said it can't be so small that it like it tips over from a stiff thunderbolt cable in the back or whatever
Marco:
yeah exactly but I'm just guessing just by the way things are like the direction technology is going you know if you actually do take that choose greater case and subtract all the stuff you don't really need anymore I think it actually might be too small to go on the floor I put lead weights in the bottom like high end audio equipment there you go so Casey what what do you want them to make
Marco:
Anything.
Marco:
Or you want them to make nothing, right?
Marco:
So we'd stop talking about it?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Or do we talk about it more when they make nothing?
Casey:
A, you talk about it more when they make nothing.
Casey:
And B, I want them to make something.
Casey:
I said that at the opening of the show.
Casey:
I want them to make something.
Casey:
I want it to be here because I don't want to do 50-some weeks of us pontificating about what it will be.
Casey:
Could be more than that.
John:
They only said not this year.
John:
That leaves the whole rest of the future.
Casey:
On an infinite timescale, kids, they will release a new Mac Pro.
Casey:
There we go.
Marco:
Overall, if I could summarize how I feel about this one more time.
Marco:
To kind of close out my thinking on it so far, which of course I'm sure we will follow up next week with all the stuff we forgot about.
Marco:
But I'm incredibly happy to see this because it really does show for the first time in a long time.
Marco:
that Apple is really taking pros' needs very seriously.
Marco:
And they might have done that for a lot of time in the middle here.
Marco:
But we weren't seeing a lot of signs of that from the outside.
Marco:
It was always questionable from the outside...
Marco:
whether they really cared about addressing pro needs or whether pro needs were kind of like this nuisance they had to deal with.
Marco:
And they were kind of reluctantly supporting very minimally until the pros just all went away.
Marco:
And none of us wanted that as pros or as fans of Apple trying to be the best that it can be.
Marco:
None of us wanted that.
Marco:
And for a while, it really did seem like that's what we had.
Marco:
And whether that was true or not, this shows us that they are taking a serious effort now and really putting themselves out there publicly to show that that's not the case.
Marco:
And whether that was the case two years ago and they had a change of heart in the last six months, I don't know.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
Honestly, right now it doesn't matter.
Marco:
What matters is that they are getting back on the right track.
Marco:
And maybe this new iMac will get halfway there, and that's only a few months away.
Marco:
And then maybe the new Mac Pro is only a year away.
Marco:
A year's not that long.
Marco:
And it's going to feel like an eternity, but it isn't that long.
Marco:
Especially for some of us.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And so I'm, I'm very, I kind of, I kind of just feel relieved today thinking that like, you know, reading all this stuff, seeing like all the things that, that the Apple executives said, I feel relieved that they clearly care as much about this as I do right now, possibly even more so, which I kind of hope because it's their job too.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that's really a very nice feeling.
Marco:
And I feel very good about that right now.
Marco:
And actions do speak louder than words.
Marco:
You know, Gruber ended his piece of some of these lines of, he did a better version of what I'm about to say.
Marco:
You know, actions do speak louder than words.
Marco:
And these aren't necessarily actions in the sense that we don't have any new shipping products today.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The fact that they put themselves out there so publicly, talking about future products, which Apple almost never does, they really did commit to doing this.
Marco:
And they could decide in a few months, oh, you know what, never mind, we're not going to do that, but that would be really bad PR.
Marco:
It's unlikely, right?
Marco:
the fact that they made such a deal out of this and gave so much info about why they can't update or won't update the 2013 Mac Pro, kind of why it's been so long, although that's, you know, okay, that wasn't, they weren't doing everything they could have done in the meantime, but that's behind us now.
Marco:
Now, you know, they're doing it now, right?
Marco:
That's what matters.
Marco:
So we now know that they care.
Marco:
They're being honest with us about what has gone wrong, about how long it might take, and that they're actually planning on apparently one and a half to two pro desktop lines, depending on what the iMac Pro ends up being.
Marco:
That, to me, is awesome.
Marco:
And I am just incredibly happy and relieved as a user of this platform and as a fan of this company and its products and everything.
Marco:
So much of my life is in the Apple universe, and most of it is in the Mac universe specifically.
Marco:
To know that Apple is that committed to it...
Marco:
it really means a lot.
Marco:
And it's something that we've been lacking for some time in at least being shown to the public.
Marco:
And so I'm very happy.
John:
Here's my hope for this new...
John:
Mac Pro, because as we've discussed in many shows in the past, despite this recommitment, people are understandably wary because even when they come out with the new Mac Pro, people are going to say, well, that's great and all, but you did this once in 2013.
John:
Fool me once, right?
John:
Why would I buy this machine if I have no faith that you're going to update it?
John:
But if everybody takes that attitude when the new Mac Pro comes out, Apple's going to be like, well, maybe we misjudged this because we come up with this new Mac Pro and people aren't excited about it and not a lot of people are buying it despite the fact that there's got to be pent-up demand.
John:
So I think it's important for when the new Mac Pro comes out for it to be successful in the market.
John:
And my hope for the way that it could accomplish that is...
John:
The old fashioned way, because then you can't you can't prove that you're going to we promise we'll update this next year and the year after the year after you can say that all you want.
John:
But people people aren't going to trust you at this point.
John:
Right.
John:
You have you have a trust issue.
John:
The way you can get people to buy this thing and get them to be excited about it is the way Apple used to get people to buy and be excited about almost all of its computers, but certainly its top end ones.
John:
Show me that this new thing you're going to sell for thousands of dollars is the fastest thing money can buy.
John:
Show me that it can do things that not only no Mac could do, but like that for a brief moment, probably really, really brief.
John:
It is like the fastest thing in the world at a bunch of tasks.
John:
Show me that it runs Final Cut Pro faster than any other computer has ever run it.
John:
Show me that it runs 3D stuff faster.
John:
Like, whatever pick.
John:
VR.
John:
Like, I don't care what it is specifically.
John:
But you have to show me to get me excited about this computer that is not just finally a Mac that I can use to do my job.
John:
Get me excited enough that I forget about the fact that...
John:
You introduced a fancy new computer and didn't update it for four years.
John:
Right.
John:
Make me just say, I just got to have that because it's so darn cool or fast or has some capability, even if I'm never going to do that.
John:
They used to do that with their laptops are crying out loud.
John:
They'd be like, buy this laptop.
John:
It's the world's fastest laptop or it has the best screen or, you know, it's got to be the best or look at the throughput on the the storage, whatever it is.
John:
That is a thing.
John:
It's not appropriate for you to do on the iMac or the MacBook.
John:
And even on the phone, they show those little graphs to show how much faster it is and stuff like that.
John:
But this is the Mac Pro.
John:
Get us excited about it.
John:
Do not release it and say...
John:
Yay.
John:
Aren't you excited that we are now remotely competitive?
John:
No, I want you to crush everything.
John:
It's going to cost thousands of dollars.
John:
I know it's the next week.
John:
It's not going to be the best thing.
John:
And I know the benchmarks will be contrived and probably isn't really the fastest and you can still build a PC for less and yada, yada, yada.
John:
But you just, if you're going to go through all this trouble.
John:
and make this product and you want to convince enough of us to buy it despite our better instincts about the fact that it won't be supported going forward make it awesome in at least a couple of ways so that we come out of the presentation drooling they say i don't even think i need this thing but i want it because it's awesome
John:
that is the feeling that i want i think we even had that feeling for the uh for the trash can because it's like who knows what this thing can do two workstation gpus what does that even mean what the hell is the d500 that's not a part number that i write i mean we we learned it wasn't as cool as you thought it was or anything but uh but yeah that's that's my hope for this product and i think that would be a good strategy to get people off their butts and into the apple stores plunking down their thousands of dollars for this stuff
John:
And after that, all you got to do is execute.
John:
Next year, update it.
John:
Next year, update it.
John:
Next year, update it.
John:
And everything will work out.
Marco:
Yeah, this I feel like is the first step in what is going to have to be a multi-year series of actions by Apple.
Marco:
to regain that trust and to show all of us, pro buyers and just Mac fans in general, to show us that they are committed to this after all.
Marco:
And it's going to take not only the release of this product, but then also an update or two to show like, yeah, we really are going to keep this updated this time.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment, and Indochino.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
We'll be right back.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
John:
so did i win the bet or rather i guess i didn't win it yet did i lose the bet uh it's it's iffy i think you put a lot of qualifiers on like if these exact models are on sale come january and technically these exact models won't be on sale even though they just shifted configurations and prices that's not the exact models with the exact spec so i think we have to go back to the tape and see exactly how you phrased that
Marco:
that yeah because i think i said like is the 2013 mac pro still for sale at the end of this year and that is almost certainly going to be yes but then i think i might have said unmodified and that is the question do you think on january 1st 2018 the 2013 mac pro will still be for sale
Casey:
No, absolutely not.
John:
I vote yes.
John:
If I had to pick, I would vote no, but it's not as sure of a thing as I would hope it would be as I think about it.
John:
You want to bet five bucks?
Marco:
I'm not betting you any money.
Marco:
I'm guessing January 1st, 2018, it's still for sale.
Casey:
I'll take your $5 bet.
Marco:
Yeah, all right.
Marco:
It's a deal.
Marco:
If I said unmodified, it's arguable whether it has been modified or not.
Marco:
Because here's the deal.
Marco:
What they did today was they used to have four and six core SKUs, and then you could custom build them up to 8 and 12.
Marco:
They eliminated, and also the D300, 500, and 700 GPUs.
Marco:
what they've done is they've eliminated the 4-core and the D300.
Marco:
So they got rid of the lowest-end parts, and they basically moved everything down a notch.
Marco:
So now the low-end SKU gets the 6-core and the D500, and the high-end SKU gets the 8-core and the D700.
Marco:
Now, these are all parts that were available since 2013.
Marco:
These are all the same parts.
Marco:
Nothing else has changed except for the options that come pre-configured.
Marco:
with the two SKUs in the store.
Marco:
So does that count as whether the computer has been still available at the end of this year unmodified or not?
Casey:
So I think there's some ambiguity here, and I think the one clear resolution to this problem...
Casey:
is when you or someone else i'm assuming you because this is your mo buy a a mac pro in a week or two uh what does the mac pro say is it mac pro comma early 2017 then it's a new computer but if it still says mac pro comma prehistoric i mean uh 2013 then it is the same computer commas parentheses right
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Comma parentheses.
Casey:
You know what I'm saying.
Marco:
That is probably right.
Marco:
I would consider that the authoritative source as well.
Marco:
And I can almost certainly guarantee that it's not going to get a new model identifier.
Marco:
I cannot see that happening.
Casey:
Wait, I'm sorry.
Casey:
So you're saying it would still read 2013?
Marco:
Yeah, because I'm guessing that whatever they have changed, it does not get a new model ID, and it does not get a new name in Apple support system.
Marco:
Like, you know, Mac Pro, late 2013.
Marco:
Like, I'm guessing there isn't.
Marco:
That's what you're saying, right?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
I don't think they've ever changed the support-facing English language name without also changing the internal identifier.
John:
So if they, you know, whatever the model is, you know, Mac Pro 6,1 or whatever the hell the trash can is, I can't imagine them changing the external name to say Mac Pro 2016 without also changing the internal one.
John:
But there's no way they're changing the internal one because the hardware is literally the same.
John:
Exactly.
John:
So I think they're not going to change it, the internal or external name, because they come in a pair.
Yeah.
Casey:
So then you win, right?
Marco:
I would win if it's still for sale on January 1st.
Casey:
Oh, that part I'm pretty confident in.
Casey:
And we didn't talk about this in the main part of the show, but there is the slim chance that they are deeply...
Casey:
under promising with the hope slash intention of over delivering so you never know what will happen but if if we take apple at their word then you will not see a a new new mac pro until at least 2018 which means if it still reads mac pro comma paren late 2013 or whatever it was then i owe you five dollars okay no comma
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I think now that they've announced pre announced the upcoming one, I think they are free now to stop selling the trash can as soon as they think not enough people are buying it anymore, because presumably sales will tail off even more now.
John:
I know there's always people who just need to replace it because they're, you know, they just need more of them, period.
John:
Right.
John:
But come January, they could say, all right, well, we've drained all our existing inventory and sales have slowed to a trickle.
John:
And we know, although we're not going to tell you yet, that the new one is coming in X months.
John:
And so we're discontinuing the Mac Pro.
John:
And they discontinue it.
John:
No one's going to be upset because they're like, you already told us the replacement's coming.
John:
What I'm saying is they are now free to stop selling the trash can anytime they think it is a reasonable thing to do.
John:
And so we have to wait until January before any money changes hands because it is not inconceivable.
John:
They could just plain stop selling it because we all know a new one's coming.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I'm definitely not going to declare victory or loss until January 1st.
Marco:
But it's on my calendar.
Marco:
We will see.
John:
Do we want to mention T-shirts?
Marco:
oh yeah we launched t-shirts that's a thing that's a thing go to our site atp.fm slash shirt uh or just go to the shirts item in the nav bar on our site and we'll put a link in the show notes as well and probably have some kind of promotional artwork and link at a chapter marker at this point in the podcast as well because we are really good at self-promotion that's how we do things
Marco:
So we had a couple of minor glitches.
Marco:
If you saw it, when we first launched it, there were a couple of issues with certain sizes being sold out, which we didn't even know was a thing on Teespring, but apparently it is.
Marco:
So we fixed that now.
Marco:
Thank you, John, for fixing that very quickly before the show.
John:
Or at least we think we fixed that.
John:
I'm pretty sure I fixed that.
John:
If you don't see a size option listed, just send us an email and we'll do something.
Yeah.
John:
We're trying to get you the shirts in the sizes that you want.
John:
The website is fighting us on that.
Marco:
Yeah, and the shirt design, it's an interesting story.
Marco:
So it was actually about a week ago that I had the initial concept, and then John did a lot of work on it and came up with something way better.
Marco:
But the initial concept that led to this shirt was...
Marco:
basically um mac pros and it was like it was like the first mac pro the trash can and then like a dotted box with a question mark and like what comes next where's the new mac pro and that kind of evolved over over a week of design and into what we have now which is more of a a celebration of the of the pro mac desktops over time uh right from the very first one all painstakingly illustrated by the artist on the show john syracusa and there's no art involved i just trace things
John:
For God's sake, take the credit.
John:
It was art.
John:
Yeah, seriously.
John:
Well, I take more credit for the design concept because in the channel, it was like, hey, Mac Pro, Mac Pro, question mark.
John:
And I thought the question mark was a little bit too snarky to be like, hey, where's the new Mac Pro?
John:
Like, I didn't want the shirt to be...
John:
accusatory uh because people want to you know wear it and feel good about it not like here's this angry protest shirt that i'm wearing and one of the in-between designs was like well what about this what about the evolution of the mac pro like doing like the whole evolution from like you know monkey to to homo sapien you know you've seen that thing they always show in like textbooks of like starts off all hunched and gets upright and at the end there's like the human being holding the spear or whatever you know that that was the idea and
John:
Trying to pull that off with computers because they're not tall and slender like humans are doesn't really work that well.
John:
We tried a whole bunch of different iterations on it, but we couldn't quite get it.
John:
We'd already eliminated the question mark.
John:
There are a couple of designs I still think had some legs in them, but someone who's a better designer than I am could maybe make it work.
John:
But then, you know, we abandoned that and said, well, look, let's just make it, no question mark, let's just make it about Pro Max.
John:
And me being the old person that I am,
John:
i have the long view of pro max it's not cheese grater trash can question mark there have been many we didn't include them all but there have been many many pro mac designs in the beginning every mac was the top of the line mac because first there was only one and when there was two the new one was faster than the old one and when there was three the third one was faster than the first and the second and like so early in the pc industry and especially in the history of the mac
John:
every mac was better than all the previous ones in like every possible way like one of them came out with color and it was like the other ones are black and white this one color it wins right so what we put on the shirt is the classic mac and there are many of these obviously the first one was the fastest but then the se was faster and then you know or the plus was faster and then the se and se 30 and so on and so forth and then then the color macs the mac 2 2x 2fx
John:
And then I skipped a whole bunch of weird looking towers that don't look good in profile because there's only so much room in the shirt.
John:
And then I skipped to the G3 and G4 design, which I think is fantastic.
John:
And then the G5 cheese grater, which lasted a really long time.
John:
And then finally the trash can.
John:
So we have a nice progression of Pro Macs and not pictured is every other Mac that was not a Pro Mac.
John:
all the laptops aren't there because f them uh all the all of the boring towers that were like mid-range the lc is not there the you know the what other weird like the tooth is not there the emac is not on the list none of the imacs are shown in this silhouette uh this show uh this shirt and so many episodes of the show are all about pro desktop max max was there like the least popular
John:
most uninteresting to most people uh maxed in the lineup and yet we spend as much to casey's uh regret so much time in the show talking about it it is the logo of our show as discussed was originally the cheese grater with the snarky new badge on it and then the later logo of our show that you may be looking at right now assuming you're not driving a tesla and seeing some crazy artwork that is unrelated uh is a depiction of the front of the
John:
current trash can macro so this show is all about the mac pro and the shirt is all about the mac pro um so buy one they'll be on sale for the next well 21 days from the time we're recording this and by the time you hear it less than 20 days uh and thus far we have never repeated the design so don't think well i don't want to buy the shirt now i'll buy it next year you probably won't uh if you want a shirt buy it now
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
And shipping.
John:
Last year, we had a lot of complaints about it was super expensive to ship these outside the U.S.
John:
We've gone with a different vendor this time that has fulfillment from the EU.
John:
So hopefully the shipping will be cheaper for people who are not inside the U.S.
John:
And we have many, many, many choices of colors.
John:
It's not even obvious sometimes from the store pages how many choices.
John:
If you want to see what kind of color choices you have, almost all the shirts have only one color choice except for the shirt with white ink that has like seven color choices.
John:
And a couple of other ones have like two choices where you can get a black or a white shirt.
John:
So...
John:
If you look at the shirts and they all look boring to you, or you just see two blue ones, you're like, well, I don't want black or gray or blue.
John:
I'm not going to get a shirt.
John:
Click through to the ones that have white ink on them, and they will have... How many choices do we have?
John:
One, two, three, four, five, six.
John:
They'll have up to seven color choices of the shirts.
John:
And unfortunately, the color choices are not the same in the U.S.
John:
and Europe, and they're not the same on men's and women's, because they're just not.
John:
We tried to make them as consistent as possible, but we are limited by the offerings through the t-shirt vendor.
John:
So...
John:
Take some time.
John:
Click through the things.
John:
Try to find the best shirt for you.
John:
We apologize for inconsistencies.
John:
We apologize for regional and gender inconsistencies.
John:
So we did the best we could.
Marco:
Indeed.
Marco:
And special thanks to John for doing the vast majority of the work this year.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
That was extremely awesome.
Casey:
And I'm glad we have you on the show, John, for many reasons.
Casey:
But that's the primary one right this very moment.