Apology Mac Pro
John:
We need more investigative journalism.
John:
With the exception of 9to5Mac and Bloomberg, who's out there digging through dumpsters to find out what the new Mac Pro is going to be?
John:
Let's get some old-fashioned journalism on this.
John:
I think first Apple needs to figure out what the new Mac Pro is supposed to be.
John:
Yeah, well, you know, if you dig through dumpsters and find out like, you know, it's too bad they don't use paper anymore, but like find out they're just now having meetings about what they might do about this.
John:
Like you can get timelines on it.
John:
But anyway, as time passes and we wait for WWC to appear, things could leak.
John:
Let's, you know, let's find stuff out.
John:
Let's get some engineers drunk.
John:
Let's find out some answers.
Casey:
Yeah, because that always works.
Casey:
All that gets you is a pre-release iPhone.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the only thing that works.
Marco:
I mean, I can spoil it for you right now, John.
Marco:
You're not going to know until it launches the two things that you're going to complain about and convince yourself not to buy it about.
Marco:
You're not going to know the price and you're not going to know the GPU choice.
John:
uh the gpu choice could leak like if they're using nvidia i feel like that could leak right and if they are using nvidia they're going to be they're going to be using pascal it might leak that they're using nvidia but it wouldn't it wouldn't leak like which one they're using you know it would leak that they're using pascal architecture it would just be a question of like which part but like even that would be enough like so to you know to be exciting
Marco:
It's been so long since we talked.
Marco:
A lot has happened in the news this week of April 8th or 9th or whatever, right?
Marco:
You know, today, as we talk, has obviously got to be April 12th, 2017.
Marco:
Of course it is.
Marco:
But rather than talk about the exciting news that has happened this week, we thought we'd talk more about what has happened, say, early last week, maybe before April 6th.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Yeah, we thought we'd just do a recap because why wouldn't we?
Casey:
And so here we are.
Casey:
And so that amazing news about Nintendo that happened, you know, just a couple of days ago on the 10th or the 11th, we're going to save that for next week.
Casey:
The good news is we've covered everything that we could possibly cover about the Mac Pro, so we don't have to talk about it until it comes out in 2019.
Casey:
So let's talk about some other things.
Marco:
Wait, do we really have no follow-up trademark about the Mac Pro?
John:
No, let Casey get through his little song and dance.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
Don't you worry.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I can't even take this seriously because I know that I'll be murdered if I don't bring up Mac Pro stuff.
Casey:
So here we go, kids.
Casey:
TechCrunch.
Casey:
The things I do for you, too.
Casey:
I hope you appreciate me.
Marco:
I'm so sorry, Casey.
Marco:
I'm just so sorry for you during this time.
Marco:
I know this is a very difficult time to be on our podcast during Mac Pro Week.
Casey:
Mac Pro Week?
Casey:
Mac Pro Week?
Casey:
Are you shitting me?
Casey:
It's Mac Pro Year.
John:
Yeah, I think we're going to call this the year of Mac Pro, and we're just going to keep calling it the year of Mac Pro until they release one.
John:
Right, which might be a whole other year.
John:
Right.
Casey:
Anyway, all right, let's do a little follow up about the Mac Pro and then hopefully we can move on.
Casey:
TechCrunch, Matt Panzerino and team at TechCrunch have posted the full transcript of their meeting.
Casey:
I guess he recorded it by some mechanism and had hammer one of his people.
Casey:
go ahead and transcribe it all.
Casey:
So we will put that in the show notes.
Casey:
I have yet to have a chance to even look at it.
Casey:
There are definitely parts, as much as I snark, that I think are interesting that I'd like to read a little more about, but I haven't had the chance yet.
Casey:
So you can check that out in the show notes.
Casey:
Is that really the only Mac Pro follow-up?
Casey:
Oh, because one of you made a topic.
Casey:
I see.
John:
Anyway, we'll get to it.
John:
On the transcript, I read the whole transcript and surprise, surprise, the people they had there reporting on it did a good job reporting on it.
John:
There's not any important information in the transcript that you're missing.
John:
You can read it just to get a flavor of what they said and stuff like that, but it was well covered.
John:
It's not as if they left out major sections that were important.
John:
The only fun thing about the transcript is you can see, since it's a fairly faithful transcript, I would imagine, because it's got all people's false starts and weird sentence structures and stuff.
John:
That's just what happens when people speak.
John:
You can see occasionally people getting their reigning in their instincts.
John:
One particular instance is Craig Figuere talking about.
John:
you know the old mac pro and the architecture with the tube and the heating and you know how it was difficult to uh to uh put different components in and everything and so he talks about all of that and then he said uh how they really put a lot of energy behind that design and the next bit is in retrospect that was dot dot dot
John:
And he was about to say, in retrospect, that was a mistake.
John:
That was a bad idea.
John:
That was not the right thing to do.
John:
But he doesn't say that because he is disciplined.
John:
He gets into the sentence, but then he says, abort, abort.
John:
In retrospect, that was new sentence.
John:
While that system is going to be fantastic for a huge number of customers, we want to do more.
John:
There you go.
John:
And Phil smiles next to him and says, good job, Craig.
John:
You almost landed in it there.
John:
But anyway, they're very disciplined with their message.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Craig still manages to be funny and witty within the bounds of being disciplined for PR.
John:
And Phyllis is Phyllis fell.
John:
He's the guy we know and love.
John:
So if if you have seen a lot of presentations with the people who are at this meeting, then you will definitely get the flavor of them just reading the transcript.
John:
And I don't know much about John Ternus.
John:
I'm not sure I've ever seen him on stage, but he's the other guy.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Just like that, we're done with Mac Pro, right, kids?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Okay, so Workflow.
Casey:
So somebody that listens to our show had a conversation with the support team at Workflow, and they received the following email, which was then forwarded on to us.
Casey:
The person at Workflow said, you know, blah, blah, blah, fix for your problem, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But just so you know, we have no further planned updates for Workflow.
Casey:
That being said, we are continuing to support Workflow's current functionality and have no plans to end support, so let me know if you run across any bugs or crashes.
Casey:
Cue the sad trombone here, Marco.
Casey:
Womp, womp.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, to be honest, when Workflow was acquired, and we did mention, they might just let it die or kill it outright and have the staff work on other stuff built into iOS.
Marco:
That was kind of the long-term idea that that was most likely to happen.
Marco:
um i will admit i did not foresee them because of the way it was bought and because of the messaging around the time that it was bought and and what they told the users i did not foresee them totally stopping all updates to the app right now or at least like i think what what what this you know the way this reads it's like they might do bug fix updates but that's it like no new features are coming to workflow uh and
Marco:
That is unfortunate, but I guess not a huge surprise.
Marco:
Because that's what happens.
Marco:
This was clearly an acquihire in the sense that Apple wanted the staff more than the product.
Marco:
And whether that was to make the staff work on...
Marco:
Something boring like mail.app?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
It was probably to have the staff work on workflow-like functionality.
Marco:
Automation technologies for iOS.
Marco:
That's my guess.
Marco:
But the fact is, if you're a workflow user, this doesn't make it any easier to take that basically workflow is...
Marco:
effectively dead in the sense that no one will really be working on it anymore unless they want to fix some bugs for some reason.
Marco:
But that's about it.
Marco:
So that is pretty unfortunate for workflow users.
Marco:
And I hope that in the end this will prove worth it.
Marco:
You know, like in many aqua hires...
Marco:
What happens is the product gets shut down, the team goes to work on something similar within the bigger acquiring company, and sometimes that sees the light of day and sometimes it doesn't.
Marco:
Or sometimes what eventually comes out of that from the bigger company is not nearly as good as the acquired app was.
Marco:
And it's kind of a crapshoot.
Marco:
You don't really know.
Marco:
So I hope that this will lead to better stuff in iOS that will replace the need for workflow for the people who use it today.
Marco:
But honestly, that's not the most likely outcome.
Marco:
The most likely outcome is...
Marco:
iOS still moves forward a little bit.
Marco:
We get some part of this in a future version of iOS.
Marco:
And then maybe the original staff who created it goes to work on other things with an Apple or maybe after a few years they get unhappy and leave and do something else.
Marco:
That kind of thing is more likely to happen than iOS gaining complete functionality like workflow or even something close to it.
John:
I'll tell you, I place much higher odds on workflow being an Apple-branded application for some period of time, you know, like that it would be brought into the fold, workflow by Apple as a downloadable thing on the App Store, possibly bundled with the future OS update while, you know, while they worked on the next integration, you know what I mean?
John:
And just, this is pretty quick.
John:
Like you said, the press releases and then,
Casey:
very shortly after yeah we're not doing that anymore i mean what's it been like 10 days like it has not been very long yeah sad times i i don't know i mean i don't know what to make of all this it's just gonna be interesting watching mike have to become a real true honest to goodness programmer and writing pythonista oh god he's gonna be he's gonna have no other choice so uh mike welcome to our world
John:
Well, no, because Workflow will keep working.
John:
I think they will keep it working.
John:
They'll keep it flowing?
John:
Well, yeah.
John:
Were there major features that people wanted to add to Workflow?
John:
You can add Workflows.
John:
People can continue to do that and share and distribute those.
John:
The Workflow app is just the engine.
John:
So I feel like it should last people until something new comes.
John:
So that's a good outcome.
John:
But if you were really excited about the engine gaining features, then you're sad.
Marco:
Well, so in the past, I remember when extensions came out, and I think even sometime last year for some reason, I've discussed on this show how I think the future of URL scheme usage on iOS is probably limited because now Apple has things like universal links, which replace a lot of the need for URL schemes for average uses.
Marco:
And xCallbackURL and things like that,
Marco:
are used only by a narrow amount of power users for legitimate purposes.
Marco:
And there's lots of abuses that they're used for.
Marco:
And Apple has slowly clamped down on that over time to the degree that they can with various iOS changes, like having to declare your URL schemes that you query for in your info.plist file and stuff like that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It's no real secret that Apple is not a huge fan of URL schemes being used for purposes like this.
Marco:
I would guess Apple probably wants to get rid of them and make them actually impossible for various privacy and security reasons, which is completely reasonable.
Marco:
So it would not surprise me at all if...
Marco:
maybe not iOS 11, but maybe iOS 12, maybe end support for calling other apps via open URL and can open URL.
Marco:
And at that point, there are still other features of workflow as it exists today.
Marco:
It could do other things, but that would lop off such a big portion of what it could do that I think that would effectively kill the app.
Marco:
And hopefully by the time Apple does something like that, if they're going to do something like that, hopefully they would have some kind of replacement in mind like maybe whatever the workflow staff is working on at Apple now.
Marco:
I hope that's how it would go.
Marco:
But the thing is with big companies and with acquisitions, you don't know that it's actually going to go that way.
Marco:
That could be everyone's intention and plan now.
Marco:
But at big companies, things change.
Marco:
In six months, something else might be a bigger priority.
Marco:
They might be reassigned to work on that.
Marco:
And this project just doesn't continue.
Marco:
Or anything like that.
Marco:
I mean, this is kind of just a side effect of the economies going on here.
Marco:
Early on in Instapapers days, I had a couple of early discussions about acquihires.
Marco:
Some of the big tech companies wanting to buy Instapaper for some relatively insignificant amount in order to get me to come work for them.
Marco:
And these conversations always stopped pretty early on because at that time, Instapaper was making very good money because it was selling for like $10 and then later $5 in the App Store, and it was selling pretty well.
Marco:
And so whenever we get to the money part of the early conversations, it would very quickly end the conversations because it was like, well, for me to stop making this money from this app, you're going to have to pay at least X for it.
Marco:
And that was more than they were willing to pay to just get some engineer to come work for them.
Marco:
And the problem is that as the app economy has gotten worse and as the big handful of tech companies have gotten bigger and have had more money and have even tighter competition for engineering talent...
Marco:
The economics of this have shifted so much so that it is very hard for most app developers to turn down a decent acqui-hire deal today because most apps are not making that much money anymore, and these companies can now afford to pay a lot for good engineering talent.
Marco:
And there's so much competition for that.
Marco:
They would rather do that than let these apps continue, I guess.
Marco:
And again, as the developers of these apps, you can't really fault them.
Marco:
Because if someone comes around offering them 10 times what they're making now per year in an upfront sum to buy their app, and then, oh, you'll also have a nice stable job with us instead of having to rely on the ups and downs of your app selling in the app store.
Marco:
I don't blame developers at all for taking those offers.
Marco:
In many ways, you can't really say no to some of these offers because they're so good.
Marco:
And the only way this is ever going to change is if the economics of app development change such that it is more worthwhile for people to keep their apps and not sell them and not take jobs somewhere else than to do that.
Marco:
But I don't see that happening in the near future.
Marco:
If anything, I see things going the other direction.
Marco:
Just assume the workflow of developers have gone to work on the Mac Pro.
Marco:
It's a safe bet, right?
Marco:
No, because apparently the Mac Pro has only started a week ago, and they went there 10 days ago.
Casey:
We're getting to that.
Casey:
We'll get to it.
Casey:
Oh, my word, you guys.
Casey:
I didn't even start my holiday party yet.
Casey:
This is going to be a long show for me.
Marco:
You probably should.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Fracture, printing vivid color photos directly onto glass.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com slash podcast and pick ATP to get 10% off your first order.
Marco:
Fracture lets you bring special memories in your photos to life.
Marco:
They want to rescue your photos from your social media feeds because if you just put your photos out there on Facebook or Instagram or whatever else, you look at them for a day or two maybe and then they're gone.
Marco:
They're just into the digital ether forever.
Marco:
fracture wants you to pull your favorite photos out of the digital ether and get them printed and hang them on your wall or give them as gifts because these these prints look amazing they go edge to edge to edge right on this wonderful piece of glass this thin little piece of glass with this foam core backing behind it so it's very lightweight on the wall you don't have to worry about it like falling off the wall and shattering but it looks amazing because it's glass across the whole front surface
Marco:
So you don't need to frame them or get them custom framed at some expensive place or anything like that.
Marco:
They are their own standalone thing.
Marco:
And your photos look great.
Marco:
These look so good.
Marco:
Every time, you know, we have, I don't know, probably seven or eight of these around my office now and a few more than that around the house.
Marco:
And every time somebody comes here who hasn't been here before, they always compliment these fracture prints and say, hey, what's that?
Marco:
Those look great.
Marco:
uh so you can see this for yourself at fracture me.com slash podcast and if you pick atp out of that list we will get uh credit for you supporting uh you know us and them and then you will get a 10 discount i highly suggest that you check out fracture for all your photo printing needs and they're so inexpensive too you can just get one on a lark to just see how it is there they make great gifts too for all the different various holidays you know mother's day father's day and like you know
Marco:
birthdays, anniversaries.
Marco:
They are such great gifts to give a personal photo to someone who it's meaningful to.
Marco:
Check it out today.
Marco:
FractureMe.com slash podcast and pick ATP to get 10% off.
Marco:
Thank you to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Tell me, John, about a possible explanation for increased free space with APFS on 10.3, if you please.
John:
Continuing the streak of APFS follow-up in, what are we on, like five shows in a row now?
John:
I don't know.
John:
We're keeping the streak alive.
John:
Some show in the past, we talked about people upgrading to iOS 10.3 and saying, hey, I have more free space available on my iOS device now.
John:
and you know that could have been clearing caches or just rebooting or other things related to the upgrade and not related to the file system itself i heard one theory that i thought was worth pondering um it has to do with apfs space sharing uh i doubt you guys remember what that is because i think your eyes glaze over when i talk about apfs but
John:
I do.
John:
It's basically copy on write, right?
John:
No, no.
Marco:
That's one of the features, but the thing they refer to as space sharing is where... Oh, is this a thing where you can have two different partitions that both kind of share some space and so it's kind of like whoever fills it first gets to keep it?
John:
Exactly.
John:
So you've got a one gig disk and you can put two partitions on it.
John:
You can put two one gig partitions on it.
John:
You're like, how can you put two one gig partitions on a one gig disk?
John:
Can't you put two partitions that are like 500 and 500 and 250 or 750?
John:
How can you have two one gig partitions?
John:
That makes no sense.
John:
That's exactly how space sharing works.
John:
I forget what the terms are.
John:
They call it a container or something.
John:
And within the container, you can have separate volumes and they share that space.
John:
And like Marco said, whoever fills it first wins, right?
John:
And that produces weird...
John:
weird results for saying how much free space you have anyway uh so this theory goes that ios has i don't know if this is true maybe marco does uh although i've heard it before that it has two places where it puts stuff one is sort of the os partition and one is the user space partition and they are separate from each other does that sound familiar marco
John:
Honestly, I've never looked that low level at the OS.
John:
That's a question for Steve Trout and Smith, not me.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, the idea is that, yeah, there's that arrangement that has been there for a while.
John:
But with APFS and space sharing, it changes the way free space is reported and that the increase in free space you're seeing is related to that.
John:
Now, I tried to think through this and say, well, how does that work exactly?
John:
What would that do?
John:
And I have in the notes here, experiments required.
John:
Unfortunately, because we just recorded two days ago, I have not done these experiments.
John:
But
John:
uh changing the way space is both shared and reported with the file system could possibly account for uh discrepancies in what is reported in the os you would think that apple would work this out but you know in that example i just gave what is the right thing to do if you have two one gig partitions on a one gig disc
John:
and you ask one of them how much free space it's going to say i have one gig available and you ask the other one it's going to say i have one gig available and that's kind of the truth because there's nothing in the disc they both technically do have one gig available but if they were to both start filling really fast you're not going to fit one gig into each one of those things so now you have like smart ass file systems now like well technically i have one gig available
John:
i didn't lie to you right you could put what you could put one gig in v as long as you put nothing in any of the other partitions that are sharing the same space yeah um anyway i i really you know i wish i had more information to provide but i just wanted to bring up space sharing to remind people that space sharing in apfs is a thing and it's weird and this is one of those things where it's difficult from user interface perspective to determine what is the right thing to do it's not like oh you just need to update your operating system to report
John:
to understand APFS and report the right thing.
John:
People's mental model of how space works on disks does not match how APFS file space sharing works.
John:
So I don't know what they're going to do on macOS.
John:
iOS, this doesn't manifest in any way that you can see except perhaps in this free space thing.
John:
But further news as events warrant, maybe next week I will have some experiments.
John:
And next week is actually two weeks from now.
Casey:
oh goodness all right fair enough uh can we talk about t-shirts because um we've had a little bit of agita with our t-shirt rollout this year so uh you guys have been uh generous enough to spend most of your time doing this i have been completely swamped in all aspects of life this week so take me through the pain and suffering that you've gone through to bring t-shirts to our lovely listeners
John:
I don't want to go through the pain and suffering, but I do want to say that, as usual, every time we do a T-shirt launch, there's something that's weird or wrong and odd about it, and we work it out.
John:
This time, it was mostly about size availability, where, as far as we're able to determine, we had no visibility into what sizes would be available until after we launch it.
John:
And then...
John:
When we launch it, like the you can go to the size pop up menu, like I pick the shirt that I want.
John:
Now I need to pick my size and you will see all the sizes listed, all the sizes that we could see before launch.
John:
We can see this shirt is available from extra small to three XL.
John:
Right.
John:
And then we launch it and you go to the shirt and you see that pop up menu with those sizes in it.
John:
But only two of them would be selectable.
John:
like usually extra small and some other weird size like none of the common sizes would be available to you um and that's bad we want the shirts to be available in all sizes so what we had to do for a lot of the shirts is sort of delete or end the campaigns which by the way some people bought shirts in those campaigns and my understanding is they will get delivered it's just kind of weird that you you were the one of the
John:
two or three lucky people who got that shirt before we frantically deleted it and your shirt might be titled atp shirt delete me in the emails that you get about it if you get an email and it says delete me that's us trying to keep track of which ones are the old bad ones and which ones are the new good ones and anyway and we replaced them with identical looking shirts but with shirts from a different vendor who had stock in all sizes and we've been working on that
John:
um working with teespring to get more sizes available and recreating them and so on and so forth all this is to say that if you tried to buy a shirt because you heard the show last week or whenever and you went there and you couldn't find the shirt in the size you wanted or the shirt wasn't available in any sizes which was true in some cases like the purple one that i really love was literally available in zero sizes like you could no one could order it because you could not select any sizes at all it would let you hit buy now and then i said please pick your size and they were all disabled
John:
so that's fixed you can get your purple shirts now um we added a few shirts to be larger sizes because some of the other shirts only went up to 2xl and now we have 3xl and up i think up to 5xl on the european one um so and also finally teespring has told us that as stock comes in for different sizes and different colors those sizes will become available so uh technically if you just want to you know wait and check back next week or something even if the size isn't available right now maybe
John:
it will become available um so we apologize for this it's difficult um we'll try to do better next year as always every year we have to have something last year it was really expensive shipping outside the u.s this year we do not have super duper expensive shipping outside the u.s which is good but we have some size issues
John:
So thank you to everybody who's bought shirts and good luck out there.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You know, last year we had to apologize for the expensive international shipping.
Marco:
And this year we're having to apologize for some of these operational issues.
Marco:
And we are sorry that we have to deal with this and you have to deal with this.
Marco:
The reality is that printing and shipping shirts all over the world is complicated.
Marco:
And every vendor who does it has different trade-offs.
Marco:
We've now tried two of the major vendors, and each one has strengths and weaknesses.
Marco:
And we've chosen a different set of trade-offs this year, really.
Marco:
But we have not yet found a perfect solution.
Marco:
And we hope in the future that one materializes or that we can tweak things a little bit better.
Marco:
But in the meantime, we're sorry.
Marco:
Please buy our shirts now.
Marco:
Thank you.
John:
All right.
John:
One more thing we are thinking about.
John:
This has not yet happened, but the thing that may happen is that you may get your shirts earlier than you would expect.
John:
We had said all these things to be like a time limited campaign that we're going to end about 20 days from now.
John:
We're still going to end it.
John:
That's still going to happen.
John:
So buy your shirts because we're going to end this thing.
John:
Right.
John:
But during the time that it is running, there is some potential, not a sure thing.
John:
that your shirts could ship like shortly after you order them instead of having everybody wait till the end of the 20 days and then all the shirts go out at once and uh the reason we're thinking about that is it it gives you more time to hopefully get your shirt in time for wwc if you're coming or so you don't have to wait so long or if there are issues with it you know anyway that's why we're thinking about that and that may be a thing so if your shirt suddenly arrives and you didn't expect it for 20 days don't be surprised
Casey:
So Apple's Clips app came out today, and I think we should spend a lot of time talking about that because it's my turn to talk about something that I want to talk about.
John:
Didn't I put that in there way, way down below all this cool new Mac Pro stuff?
Casey:
Well, guess what, buddy?
Casey:
It just got escalated.
Casey:
And actually, I don't have too much to say, if I'm really honest with you.
Casey:
So this is only going to take a moment.
Casey:
But Clips came out today.
Casey:
I played with it very, very, very briefly.
Casey:
And it's pretty cool.
Casey:
I like the... I don't know what the official term for it is.
Casey:
But the transcribe what you're saying as you're saying it feature.
Casey:
So you can turn on a text mode.
Casey:
It's a little speech bubble.
Casey:
And as you record speech will or your speech will appear on screen.
Casey:
So, you know, you can hold to record.
Casey:
And then as you talk, you can make it show the words that you're speaking.
Casey:
I just did that as we were recording as I was saying those words.
Casey:
And it says Honda Accord instead of hold while you record.
Casey:
So this is already going well.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, automated transcription is still a very, very long way away from being good reliably.
Marco:
We can criticize Apple for not being good at some of these things sometimes, but nobody can do this very well yet.
Marco:
Even the fancy Google algorithms that do YouTube transcription and everything, even they are pretty bad at this.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
it's going to be a fun little thing finding like you know funny mistranslations in people's videos sometimes and uh otherwise it's it's a cool idea it's a cool use of technology uh but yeah it's going to be pretty imperfect for possibly ever uh if not a long time it's going to make people enunciate that's what it's going to do i tried that feature as well because i was excited to see if i could do the thing that i talked about when we first talked about clips which is
John:
make the words appear over the video with with a cadence with a purpose like say things in a certain way and emphasize certain things to have the words appear with that rhythm and the lag seemed to be so big I'm not quite sure why whether it's the you know rendering it on top of the video versus understanding the speech or whatever but
John:
The lag was so much worse than, for example, when you talk to Google Now or whatever the hell they call it, where it shows you your words in real time or even Siri these days.
John:
But Google Now was the first one I remember being startled by exactly how fast the words were appearing as I spoke them, that there wasn't a delay, that it wasn't like, let me just think about what you just said and make it appear, that it seemed to follow my cadence.
John:
And clips, clips lags.
John:
I found it difficult even when trying to emphasize in a very exaggerated rhythm to get that rhythm to manifest in the video.
John:
So, oh, well, the people using real video editors can continue to dominate in the perfect timing of their word appearances and transitions.
John:
But in the meantime, yeah, it is a cool app and the effects are really neat.
John:
And it makes it so easy to do something.
John:
You don't need any expertise in any kind of video editing or production.
John:
You just need to be able to tap things on the screen and hold your finger on a giant red button and you will make cool videos.
Casey:
Yeah, like I said, I only played with it briefly, but really, really impressed with what I've seen so far.
Casey:
I also really like, and I think this was covered on Connected recently.
Casey:
I forget where I heard it.
Casey:
But rather than Apple trying to make their own social network or do something ridiculous like that, they're actually just embracing other social networks.
Casey:
So this is an app to pipe your video into other places, which I think is really smart.
John:
Did you just say you heard that on Connected?
Casey:
Did we talk about it?
John:
It's fine.
John:
It's fine.
John:
It's all a mess.
John:
It's like you're on the show with me when I said that same thing, but it's fine.
John:
You can cite Connected.
Casey:
It's all a blur, man.
John:
Did Connected invent follow-up, Casey?
Casey:
Yeah, you know, they did.
Casey:
It's weird.
Casey:
We appropriated it, but it was all them.
John:
I actually heard that from somebody.
John:
I wasn't connected.
John:
What was it?
John:
Bonanza that did the thing with the echo and reverb?
John:
Good God.
John:
No, that was either the prompt or connected.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, anyway, someone wrote me to say I totally thought they invented it because they had a cool sound effect.
John:
Follow-up.
John:
Anyway, they've been set straight.
John:
Wonderful.
Marco:
Oh, good.
Casey:
So anyhow, my very brief playing with this app, I definitely like it, although it confirmed to some degree that I'm an old man because it took me a minute to realize how to share a video that I created because...
Casey:
It wasn't obvious to me that in the creation screen is where you're doing all your modifications and edits and whatnot.
Casey:
And from what I can tell, you have to back out to your library screen in order to actually share something, which I thought was a little peculiar, but whatever.
Casey:
But either way, in my very brief playing with it, I really, really like it.
Casey:
And I don't know that I'll use it that much, but it was really cool.
Casey:
The only complaint I have about it, which actually is probably for the best, is that I kind of wish it wasn't just square.
Casey:
So as an example, I had recorded a video of myself and Declan very quickly.
Casey:
And I wanted to share it as an Instagram story.
Casey:
And when I sucked it into Instagram, it looked awful.
Casey:
And it was like only the center of the video.
Casey:
And it took me a second to realize, oh, it's scaling it because the video is square, but Instagram stories annoyingly are portrait only.
Casey:
And so it's just doing the best it can, but that ruined my video.
Casey:
And so that was a little frustrating.
Casey:
But to be honest, it's probably for the best that that that that it is square because it's kind of generic.
Casey:
I also didn't see a way to share to Twitter, but that, again, could be user error.
Casey:
And I only looked for a moment.
Casey:
But all in all, I definitely like it and I think it's pretty good.
John:
They've got to fix that, the Instagram story thing.
John:
That's not a minor issue.
John:
Because, like I said, the whole point of this is to share in other networks.
John:
And, yeah, Instagram stories does the particular format.
John:
The app needs to support that in some way.
John:
You can leave the defaults as whatever they are.
John:
But someone who...
John:
wants to use this app primarily as a way to do instagram stories they're just not going to do it if they you know it just won't feel it won't feel right to not be able to shoot it in the same aspect ratio so get on that clips team all right uh let's see what else has happened recently no that was your one you get your one
John:
that oh geez dad wow that's how it is all right fine let me go pass out all right kids have fun i'll see them i'll see you next week make a drink i can't it's all the way downstairs there's non mac pro stuff we'll clear the mac pro eventually and come out the other side in 2019 into the sunlight where we'll discuss patents and uh nvidia drivers and all sorts of other things so i think we'll make it
Casey:
Okay, I'll see you guys next week.
John:
So this is more Mac Pro!
John:
The show notes say.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure I didn't do that.
John:
You know I didn't do it.
John:
I think I put the word more in there.
John:
The first bit is a rumor that I don't know how much, you know...
John:
worth to attach to but it is a rumor and it has been reblogged as we used to say all over the place which does not make it any more true um but anyway it's from os news osnews.com and it is a rumor cited to people and sources who know their stuff so there's that instills confidence that definitely means it's true
John:
That's the way rumors should be cited because that, again, matches the reliability.
John:
This says the Mac Pro was in limbo in size Apple.
John:
The decision to go ahead and develop a modular Mac Pro replacement seems to have been made only in recent months.
John:
with development starting only a few weeks ago so we were last year we're talking about oh this you know seems like it must have happened at the earliest during the last 12 months probably during the last six months this one says in recent months the decision was made and development started only a few weeks ago so that is the tightest timeline i have seen even suggested
John:
And then it goes on to say, why did Apple do this?
John:
Why did Apple make a 180 on the Mac Pro?
John:
And the reason cited is a more specific version of a thing we've talked about a lot, that Apple was surprised by the reaction of the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, which you've heard from many different places in a vague sort of Apple thought that everyone was going to love their product and...
John:
The negative reaction in the press, if not in the sales numbers, caught them by surprise.
John:
And so this adds some more detail to that with some more vaguely sourced rumors.
John:
It says, after announcement of the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, orders for refurbished old MacBook Pros supposedly went through the roof.
John:
And after the initial batch of reviews came out, they shot up even higher.
John:
So that would be...
John:
a signal that i think apple would pay attention to hey we've got the new macbook pro with touch bar and the refurbished version of the old one goes up really high now to believe this you have to a believe this is founded on anything and b you have to believe that this is not something that always happens every time a new model is introduced which i'm not entirely sure because maybe every time you introduce a new model that's different from the old one people buy the refurbished runs really quickly because they want to get their last chance to get the model they know and love but anyway that is a suggestion
John:
uh how that would reflect on the mac pro which it would be just basically like we thought we knew what pros wanted uh but we seem to be wrong and they say similar combined with the problems of the lg display uh and stuff like that um and then finally to add more exciting unsourced rumors that will make marco uh happy if he can bring himself to believe them briefly so far i can't go ahead yeah
John:
Apple is said to be exploring additional Retina MacBook Pro models without the touch bar.
John:
Oh, wouldn't you love that?
John:
Oh, God.
John:
So there's something for everybody in this vaguely sourced rumor.
John:
But again, you know, since people are talking about it, like...
John:
I do believe that the new Mac Pro decision and project were very recent.
John:
I'm not sure if I believe a few weeks ago, but very recent.
John:
And I do believe that Apple was surprised by the press reaction to the MacBook Pro with touch bars.
John:
As Apple emphasizes every time you talk to them about it, including in the transcript that we cited before, the new MacBook Pro with touch bar is incredibly popular and has the most orders ever of any laptop ever has ever produced.
John:
And people love it and it's awesome and all the numbers are great for it.
John:
But like so many other things Apple said in that transcript and about the Mac Pro and everything, they may be true, but if you don't update a model for a really long time,
John:
some of these results fall out of it you know like we're not really selling a lot of mac pros people buy them well you haven't updated it in years so that's a self-fulfilling prophecy prophecy as we've discussed before and the macbook pro touch bar is the best selling model ever well again the macbook pro was a little bit overdue for an update so there's pent-up demand for it um and the you know then you have to map into like the curve like is our mac sales increasing overall um
John:
I think the MacBook Pro is a successful product for them.
John:
But again, I do believe that Apple was surprised by the negative reaction of some of the press about it.
John:
They even emphasized in the transcript, by the way, went back to the well on the battery life of like their metrics say that the battery life for the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is better than the outgoing ones.
John:
I believe that too.
John:
You know why?
John:
Because the outgoing ones are old and the new models are brand new.
John:
And I'm sure that...
John:
i'm sure they factor that in and i'm sure they can tell the age and normalize for it or whatever but it's difficult to to hang your hat on a lot of the stats because every stat they say i'm like i 100 believe that but i also don't have enough information to to really tell whether it shows the thing you're saying that it shows what they're trying to say it shows to say the new macbook pro with touch bar has better battery life than our outgoing model and
John:
But you haven't given me enough information to believe that.
John:
All you've said is the stats say people are getting better battery life out of it than the old one.
John:
You don't tell me whether you've controlled for the age of the machines.
John:
And, you know, you don't tell me if it's an average or a usage or what the percentiles are, what the histogram looks like and all sorts of other stuff.
John:
As Marcos pointed out many other times, you can get fantastic battery life out of these new models until you do something intensive and then they tank.
John:
And I bet most people don't do intensive things.
John:
People aren't playing games with their laptop unplugged.
John:
Because if they did, their game would be over in two and a half hours, if they're lucky.
John:
And that would really bring the numbers down.
John:
But most people just don't play and don't do that.
John:
So that doesn't show up in the stats.
John:
Anyway, I don't want to go off on that tangent.
John:
But that's where my mind went when reading this weird rumor.
John:
Believe it if you want to feel good for a little while.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this is not an incredibly reliable source.
Marco:
This is not like somebody with a great track record.
Marco:
I don't lend a lot of credibility to this, basically.
Marco:
It lines up with some of the other things that we've heard here and there, but not very strongly.
Marco:
And honestly, for the most part, it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
I think what matters is Apple is at least, you know, if we believe what they said, and I don't think we have any reason not to,
Marco:
They were on a bad path before.
Marco:
They have finally recognized that.
Marco:
And yes, they did recognize it pretty late down that path.
Marco:
They did not recognize they were on a bad path in 2013.
Marco:
It took a lot longer than that.
Marco:
I would guess they recognized it in 2016 sometime, possibly even 2017.
Marco:
But the fact is they are on the path to fixing it.
Marco:
something has clearly switched in Apple.
Marco:
Something has clearly flipped over or changed to make them make this decision because before this, it was very clear that
Marco:
they were doing things their way, what they thought was right, which involved a lot of things that did not serve pro users.
Marco:
Basically, it involved saying no a lot and taking a long time to do pretty much everything and ignoring a lot of product lines and
Marco:
And to some degree, this is still what they're doing.
Marco:
Not a lot has changed in their actual actions here.
Marco:
I think it probably will over the next two years or so as some of this stuff shakes out because clearly something has changed to make them do this 180 on the Mac Pro because...
Marco:
Again, they didn't decide three years ago that this design needed to be replaced and it took them three years plus whatever it's going to be now to do it.
Marco:
No, they decided three years ago to stop developing the Mac Pro.
Marco:
And they have been effectively...
Marco:
thinking for whatever time span between then and within the last few months, they have thought, we don't need to develop Mac Pro anymore.
Marco:
This is a dead product line.
Marco:
It is no longer necessary for us to do.
John:
We won't do it.
John:
Well, it's not like they weren't developing it, because that's another thing that came out in the transcript, that they further emphasize in the details that they did.
John:
think about upgrading this component or that component i mean they didn't say that they actually tried it out but how else would they have known that they couldn't support it like someone one of the the people present or one of the the press people present asked them specifically oh so you i think maybe it was panzerino saying so you were thinking like oh we could increase the the the gpu frequency by 300 megastars because that doesn't quite seem worth it so we won't bother updating it and one of the apple people said yeah that's exactly yeah that what you said is what happened like so
John:
they stopped developing it in terms of ever releasing products but it seemed like at least in the beginning they would love to have done a spec bump or component bump but uh they just couldn't do it because the design they had didn't support it what they had decided is basically we're not going to invest in entirely new models so if you can't update this one and the engineers say we can't because they either tested it or ran the numbers or whatever uh we'll look into it again when the next round of gpus and cpus comes out but in the meantime no you can't have the budget to make a new one
John:
so semantics say does that mean stopping support or whatever but it does mean that they they they would have liked to have been able to offer speed bumps in this one because it is embarrassing to offer the same high-end computer for multiple years without without making it any faster well i i i would nitpick a little about that i'm not going to go too far into it now for casey's sake but um
Marco:
thanks buddy but yeah i i think they could have done more in the meantime like they could have updated the cpu was thermally fine it was only the gpu thermal balance that was the issue with that design the they could have updated the cpu to the same model like the equivalent models in the new families and then they could have updated the gpus to more
Marco:
mid-range mid-temperature models over the years like they didn't have to keep selling three and a half year old parts like they could have updated it by using similar class parts there that they already used in that design it just wouldn't have been as competitive but it is even less competitive with three-year-old parts
John:
But they were saying they didn't think that trade-off was worth it.
John:
Like, yeah, the parts that would fit in there weren't better enough to warrant it.
John:
Now, arguably, after three years, if you had merely done that thing that you never thought was worth it a couple of times, then you would be farther from where you were, or even if you waited until the end and done it.
John:
That's definitely arguable, but...
John:
uh you know at some point i think it really was you know so far on the back burner that they weren't even entertaining updates to it but what they said in this thing was you know even though we could have made incremental improvements the incremental improvements didn't seem worthwhile i guess they couldn't justify whatever it would take to you know basically the overhead of ever doing a spec bump and making new models and doing all the stuff or whatever um this is taking everything they said at face value who knows what actually what's actually going on and how far along they got with any kind of
John:
upgrades this thing and at what point they were nixed, whether in the idea phase or after it had been almost ready for sale.
John:
You can never tell because all we see is what they actually release.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But anyway, so the point I was trying to make is obviously something has changed with Apple's
Marco:
philosophy or the whatever they're using to make these decisions of whether to invest in certain product lines whether to update them or not because they were clearly going in one direction for some time and they are still going in that direction for most of the product lines i mean you know nothing has changed in in the releases yet um but it's pretty clear if you look at the release schedules since about 2012 and
Marco:
Everything slowed down.
Marco:
And it seemed like they went from releasing as much as they could in most of the product lines to releasing as little as they could get away with.
Marco:
And that is worrisome.
Marco:
And that's what we've been complaining about for years.
Marco:
And so it seems like whatever was causing that to be the result, maybe a change has happened there in their thinking or their decision-making or whatever else.
Marco:
Something has changed to make Apple...
Marco:
flip around on the Mac Pro and on displays and have this meeting and tell us what they were thinking.
Marco:
I hope that doesn't just apply to placating the media enough for the Mac Pro thing to say, okay, well, now Apple cares about us again in the end.
Marco:
I hope that applies to their entire thinking about all their products.
Marco:
I'm tired of Apple seemingly thinking, you know what?
Marco:
If we can't do something incredibly innovative and awesome, we're better off just doing nothing.
Marco:
you know i think that's the wrong approach i think they should they should be saying yes to things that are simple updates to their products like it's one thing to spread yourself too thin with new stuff you know new initiatives new you know new entire product lines things like that that you could make an argument and we have that they should you know be really careful with that because it's hard you know it's it's a huge risk of spreading themselves too thin
Marco:
But it is not hard.
Marco:
It shouldn't.
Marco:
If it's hard for them to update the Mac Mini with the same processor line but the new version of it, if that's hard, they've set that up wrong.
Marco:
They are a huge company with tons and tons of money and tons of engineering resources.
Marco:
They should be able to do what I described last week as boring updates.
Marco:
If there's a new processor, put it in and start selling it to all the products that could use it.
Marco:
There is no reason why they need to do things like what the Mac Mini is right now, which is sitting around with ancient parts being neglected.
Marco:
The last update even made it worse than it was before.
Marco:
There's nothing stopping them from doing a new Mac Mini except...
Marco:
High up somewhere, they have decided that that is not worth investing any resources into at all.
Marco:
And I think that's a mistake.
Marco:
And maybe we'll see something of that turn around.
Marco:
Again, probably not, especially like the Mac Mini has always been a very neglected product.
Marco:
But I don't think that's not a good excuse.
Marco:
If Apple really wants to fulfill what they say they are and make the best products for people that they can and only make great stuff, that's what they say they do.
Marco:
That isn't always true, but that is what they say they do, and I believe that's what they want to do, and that is what they want to be.
Marco:
then they have to set up their product line in a way that allows them and, and their management structure and their priorities.
Marco:
They have to set this up in a way that allows them to not leave things in complete neglect for years because they aren't the most profitable product lines in the world.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
They sell a lot of all these things, all these products.
Marco:
We mentioned last week the 1% or whatever of max sales is still $200,000 a year and it's as many as the BMW X5.
Marco:
It is worth them, if they're going to have a product line at all,
Marco:
I think it's worth them keeping it minimally updated.
Marco:
And what that means is not every four years you make it worse.
Marco:
What that means is you keep it updated every time you can.
Marco:
And you don't have to do a whole new case design.
Marco:
I feel like last week we were discussing about how Apple needs...
Marco:
the audacity and confidence to release boring products sometimes it seems like it seems like they would rather you know it seems they would rather do nothing and neglect something for years than release something that isn't that exciting and i i just think that's the wrong decision i think that they need to start thinking the other way of like that might be true for certain products i don't know certain like you know mass consumer fashion type of products maybe the iphone although that's kind of its own schedule anyway you know
John:
It's not true of the watch.
John:
They just gave that a speed bump.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
John:
What's the same on the outside, better stuff on the inside.
John:
It's actually thicker.
Marco:
But yeah, I feel like they need to bring that same philosophy to all their products.
Marco:
It's just like, you know what?
Marco:
If the Mac Mini can't be updated at least every two years, because the stuff that goes into it is updated every year,
Marco:
If the Mac Mini can't be updated at least every two years to whatever's current for its form factor, then it was badly designed, and it should be redesigned.
Marco:
Maybe that's the problem with the Mac Pro, too.
Marco:
If the Mac Pro can't be updated easily, then they did a horrible job designing it.
Marco:
Any of their products that you can say that about...
Marco:
I feel like they need to, and maybe this is what it took, they need to get some humility in the sense that their designs need to be a little more humble and they have to be okay releasing a slightly more utilitarian version of some of these products.
Marco:
Not all of them, but some of them.
Marco:
And then they also then have to have the confidence, as I said last week, they have to have the confidence that, you know what, it's okay to release a boring Mac Pro update and a boring Mac Mini update.
Marco:
That's okay.
Marco:
No one's going to say Apple can't innovate anymore, anybody's ass, because the Mac Mini got updated again.
John:
like that's i don't think that's true at all it's totally true because because the thing he's talking about speed bumps we have a name for them because they were so common so so common for a long time for years and years and years this was just a thing that happened just like model years of cars they would introduce a model and then there would be speed bumps and
John:
And that eventually there would be a new model that's fancier in some way.
John:
That's how Apple products work for a long time.
John:
And during that time, every time there was a speed bump, nobody says, oh, no, Apple can't innovate anymore.
John:
Because we understood what speed bumps were.
John:
The fancy new one isn't here.
John:
It's just a speed bump to the other one.
John:
And people go, oh, this is a boring announcement.
John:
It's just a speed bump.
John:
But we had a word for it because it was a thing that happened routinely.
John:
Little did we know that you may like, oh, I don't want speed bumps.
John:
I want a fancy new one every time.
John:
You know what's worse than speed bumps?
John:
No speed bumps.
John:
yeah exactly just nothing new at all so i think uh there is no pr damage of speed bumps it's just that at some point apple decided that speed bumps weren't a thing they wanted to do and i have my own completely unverified anonymous sources who are not the atp tipster or they could be for all we know because it's just email man i don't know where the heck this stuff comes from
John:
who conveyed this, again, completely unsourced information, that the high-end iMac was a thing that Apple has been playing for a while, so there are hopes for that to have good internals.
John:
We'll talk a bit more about that with more unsourced rumors later.
John:
This is the Unsourced Rumor Show.
John:
But the decision about the new Mac Pro and the display were made fairly recently.
John:
And the summary is, neither of these products, meaning the high-end iMac and the new Mac Pro, are a good financial ROI.
John:
But there is now a recognition of the senior VP and CEO level that's important for the company to make them.
John:
And that's what it boils down to, like that.
John:
I can totally imagine all these products not being a good return on investment.
John:
It doesn't mean that they make losses, but, you know, good ROI means I put X amount in and I want to get X times some large number amount out.
John:
And a bad ROI, I mean, you're like, it doesn't seem like we make enough money on speed bump Mac mini to even bother doing that at all.
John:
What if we just don't do it?
John:
How do the sales look?
John:
It's like sales are flat.
John:
It's like, great, we just saved some money.
John:
I just increased the ROI on the Mac mini by not speed bumping it.
John:
And they did.
John:
They did increase the ROI on the Mac mini.
John:
And I think they can kind of get away with that on the Mac mini.
John:
with a reasonable amount but like on mac pros what if we just don't ever update the mac pro because engineering says it would cost a lot of money and require redesign what do the sales look like yeah they go down a little bit but they're about the same great we just increased the roi on the mac pro and you know the what this completely unsourced rumor now conveys is that even though it's not a good roi which is the
John:
It's important for the company to make these products anyway.
John:
And Apple is totally on that page now.
John:
And again, another thing you can pick up from the transcript is everything Marco said about frequent updates.
John:
That was in all the summary articles, like that Apple says they want to make a new Mac Pro that can have frequent updates.
John:
It is further emphasized in the transcript, like further in detail emphasized that like they want to make a Mac Pro that they can make the parts inside of it better on a regular basis.
John:
They don't commit to doing it on any particular schedule, but they emphasize that
John:
this is a thing we did wrong and we're going to fix it by doing it right we want a machine that without redesigning the machine we can regularly and steadily and easily and cheaply do those things that we used to think are boring which are called speed bumps and so you know that that's why we're also happy about this is because they didn't just say we're going to make a new new mac pro and trust us you really like it just wait they said specific things about it and the specific things they said and emphasized are exactly what we want so yay apple let's now fast forward for two years
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Squarespace.
Marco:
Go to squarespace.com and enter offer code ATP at checkout ticket 10% off.
Marco:
Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace.
Marco:
Now look, almost everything you do these days needs a website.
Marco:
Whether it's a new project, a new business, a new hobby, you probably want a website for it.
Marco:
And you can waste tons of time installing your own CMS and customizing your own server and getting your own custom design done or doing it yourself.
Marco:
Or you can take almost no time and do it in like an hour and be done with it with Squarespace.
Marco:
Because Squarespace sites are so easy to make no matter what your skill level.
Marco:
You can make a website with Squarespace in almost no time at all.
Marco:
You can customize it in just a few minutes.
Marco:
They start with these beautiful professional designs.
Marco:
And you don't even have to customize.
Marco:
You can just use the stock design and be done.
Marco:
Or you can tweak a few little things like a couple of colors here and there or a logo here and there.
Marco:
Or you can go full-blown and customize all sorts of stuff about it.
Marco:
You can drag stuff around.
Marco:
Everything is visual.
Marco:
What you see is what you get with a live preview of everything you're doing.
Marco:
It's incredibly easy and incredibly powerful.
Marco:
And Squarespace has tons of built-in capabilities.
Marco:
Not only the basics like news feeds and calendars and blogs, but even full-blown storefronts.
Marco:
If you want to sell digital or physical goods, Squarespace has entire store functionality built in along with all the wonderful content management stuff.
Marco:
So check it out today.
Marco:
Whether you're making a site for yourself or even if you're making a site for somebody else, if someone else has asked you, if you're like the nerd in the community and someone has asked you to make a site for them, we've all been there, make it on Squarespace and then just hand it to them and say, here, I did it and you can do it from now on.
Marco:
Here it is and they will support it so you don't have to, which is really nice.
Marco:
So check it out today at squarespace.com.
Marco:
Start a free trial, no credit card required.
Marco:
You can just build a site and see how it works without paying anything.
Marco:
Once you decide to sign up, please use offer code ATP at checkout, and that will get you 10% off, and it will tell them that you came from here.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Squarespace, make your next move up.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
Do you have any other thoughts about this particular rumor?
Marco:
I wouldn't put too much into it.
Marco:
And the other parts about how Apple is said to be making a non-touch bar 15-inch MacBook Pro option.
Marco:
Yeah, that's just trolling, Marco.
Marco:
I honestly, first of all, I want to be clear.
Marco:
I don't hate the touch bar that much.
Marco:
I would just, given the choice to get it or not get it, right now I chose not get it.
Marco:
And as I said, that's due to other factors also.
Marco:
I wanted something smaller and the 13-inch that comes in both touch bar and non-touch bar, the non-touch bar gets better battery life by a lot.
Marco:
And battery life is very important to me right now.
Marco:
So, like, you know, it's obviously, like, you know, other factors go into this decision for everybody.
Marco:
You know, there's cost considerations for a lot of people.
Marco:
So, like, I don't think there's actually that much demand to make 15-inch MacBook Pros without the touch bar.
Marco:
And I also would be incredibly surprised if Apple did that for user satisfaction reasons.
Marco:
Now, what they might do...
Marco:
There's also a lot of complaints about the pricing of the new MacBook Pros because it is higher.
Marco:
So I could see them maybe offering in the next update to the MacBook Pro generation, whenever that comes.
Marco:
I don't know when the chips are coming out, maybe this fall or next spring, who knows.
Marco:
But whenever that happens, it would not surprise me if they made an entry-level 15-inch model that was maybe $19.99, and that one had no discrete GPU and no touch bar to hit that price point.
Marco:
the 15 inch escape yeah basically you know like because in the past they've you know they've done that with the gpu selection which i've talked about before whereas like in the past like the retina generation and everything the and even the one right before that um they had like the base model which was about two thousand bucks had only the intel integrated gpu and you had to spend a few hundred more to get one with a little bit more stuff in it and the discrete gpu and
Marco:
And it would not surprise me at all to see them do the same thing here, to just give it another one that is $19.99, so people will stop complaining about the price, and has a few things cut out of it.
Marco:
And one of them would probably be the discrete GPU, and one of them might be the touch bar.
Marco:
And that would be totally fine.
Marco:
But that wouldn't be because, quote, everyone hates the touch bar.
Marco:
It would be because they want to hit a price point.
John:
Yeah, they did also mention the transcripts.
John:
People asked some questions about ports.
John:
They didn't say they were going to even entertain this idea, but...
John:
It was mentioned as an idea that exists, just like the Mac Mini is a product that exists in the lineup of having a MacBook Pro with legacy ports, like that the only things on the side of it wouldn't be the Thunderbolt 3 USB-C things.
John:
that was that was brought up as a question and apple didn't immediately shut the door and say we are never doing that and that's you know in the apple world it's like wow they're entertaining the idea of possibly having a macbook pro with different ports on the side of it maybe an sd card slot i don't know wouldn't hold your breath for it but you know that's what apple does like they said we make a product we do the best we can see what people think of it what their behavior indicates and then for the next one you know they said for the next one we're going to do better
John:
uh and we'll take what we've learned and you know and marco's suggestion sounds totally plausible both because it makes sense from a business perspective and also because if that's what people are telling them based on like you know this rumor of buying refurbished ones or people buying the escape or whatever uh they'll do that to fill a market need and the same by the same token like uh this is something that didn't get too much discussion in the articles those mentioned a few times
John:
apple said and we've been hearing about for a while that they went they have been going out to pro users reaching out to just regular people like hey you use our products in a pro capacity tell us about it for a long time now leading up to this mac pro announcement and they do this stuff like that all the time so just just knowing that it's like that's they're gonna make a new mac they do that all the time like they say even when you just go to the apple store or buy a new mac or get a new iphone sometimes they send you a random survey about it or whatever but they were going to people and saying
John:
tell us how you use our pro hardware what do you like about it what do you not like about it what things are important to you what things are not important to you to try to gauge you know whether they should make a new mac pro and the decision they came to is yes they should and probably like what do you think about the new macbook pros and what you know if we made a new one what would you want to see in it and stuff like that so they're they're doing their job they're doing what they're supposed to be doing and hopefully we'll see um this feedback loop closed with the next round of macbook pros and uh i mean
John:
I don't want to call, like, if the next round of MacBook Pros has the 15-inch escape and has an SD card slot and has better batteries that they supposedly couldn't fit in this one for some reason.
John:
I forget if this is the model or it was another one that rumor was about.
John:
Anyway, if they come out with that, it doesn't mean that they made a terrible mistake and have fixed it.
John:
It just means they're making their products better over time.
John:
That's what they always do.
John:
But for the Mac Pro, I was thinking that this Mac Pro that comes out that, in theory, I will buy...
John:
yeah right yeah is elevated is worthy of being elevated to the holder of the the coveted title of apology mac pro right alongside the apology mouse people don't remember the apology mouse is the mouse apple release was much fanfare after subjecting the world to the completely circular puck based mouse on the original imac
John:
and they apologized for that by making a mouse that was not completely circular and therefore easier to align and it was under everybody's seat at a macworld expo keynote and i got one because i was there and uh the mouse wasn't under your seat it was like a little card and you go to the back of the room and give someone a card and they give you an apology mouse and i still have it and it's awesome and i would love an apology mac pro and it looks like i'm gonna get one
John:
well you're going to have one released are you going to buy one yeah yeah colloquially get one i'm not gonna it's not gonna be a card under my seat at wwc that says i get a free one but yeah oh and i'm on the topic of by the way i'm skipping a bunch of the mac pro uh
John:
more mac pro topic for you casey but one thing i mean oh that's too bad yeah one thing i want to talk about this is from we want to hit every single person who was in that meeting because there's always like five journalists this is from uh lance olanoff at mashable he i quoted this because i didn't have the transcript at the time but let's give him credit he reported and i pulled it out
John:
when i asked if apple might consider a touchscreen mac schiller shook his head and said no he told me it's simply not a big request for mac pro customers we're talking to them and the things they're most interested in this doesn't even register he added you can see the full quotes in the transcript if you're interested but it was basically he just like cut them off and like said no no touchscreen mac this is not something customers interested and how they know what customers are interested in it's because they're talking to them right this is a great example of
John:
i feel like if i was in that meeting i mean i don't know it's hard to say what you would do when you're in these meetings but uh in a relaxed environment where i didn't feel pressure to be well behaved i would say but come on guys you know you can't just ask customers what they want like yeah you have to do that but customers don't always know what they want until you show them no one would no customer would have ever requested the iphone but guess what when you made it they're like yes that if you asked them what they wanted they would have been like a fancier version of whatever nokia smartphone they had right now right
John:
I think Mac Pro customers aren't requesting a touchscreen Mac.
John:
But if it turns out that the Surface Studio is a good idea that has legs, by the time your customers are requesting it, it's way too late because of the things you would have to do to your OS or to your app store economy, depending on whether you're trying to make a Mac into that or make an iOS device into that, will take you a long time.
John:
So Apple should not be asking its customers...
John:
like you know not be deciding just because its customers don't want one now that it's not a good idea clearly apple thinks it's still not a good idea and i'm sure they've experimented with it i'm sure they've used the server studio probably even they even uh dumped on the server studios like a drawing experience like they basically said the ipad pro has a better drawing experience i'm assuming they need more responsive and less parallax because you know this you know like which is true right it's totally true but uh
John:
They may be right that the Surface Studio idea doesn't have legs in the design community, but the reason I would cite for that is not that the first iteration of this has flaws versus some existing tech, because that's just like a PR whatever.
John:
The first version of everything is wonky, right?
John:
The first Mac was Ramstar.
John:
The first iPhone didn't even shoot video, right?
John:
so you can't cite that right that doesn't mean and you also can't cite oh our customers aren't asking this of course they're not asking for they're never going to ask for the visionary next big thing because they don't know they want it yet but if the server studio starts getting penetration and starts being used by more people eventually they will be saying hey apple why don't you have something like this and maybe apple will say take this humongous ipad pro and try to find pro apps for it or something so anyway that bothered me a little bit because i don't like
John:
to say no and then you're not thinking about it is fine but to cite those reasons like those are those are not those are not reasons that should be convincing to you internally if there are reasons you want to power it back to the press to give explanations that's fine but i really hope internally like there there's that fear i get especially when i hear people who are good at talking to the press at apple the fear i get um
John:
that they believe their own hype that the reasons they give externally for things are also the reasons they use internally to justify their decisions which i sincerely hope is not the case because so many of the reasons are are bad reasons you know like they're they're they're like they're they're absolutely
John:
Apple 101 bad reasons.
John:
Like the whole history of Apple shows that this is not how you should be making decisions because every success you had, you know, defied these or even just like plain old, you know, Ed Catmull creativity and success hides problem reasons or whatever.
John:
It's like, it's fine to tell them to other people, but I really hope you don't believe like because this first server studio has technical flaws that that's why it's a terrible idea.
John:
If you're going to say we've tried the idea internally and we found out that it's terrible, which they have said in the past, that at least I give more credence to because it shows you are seriously pursuing the idea.
John:
but anyway that bothered me i still think the server studio is an idea that has some potential some artists also agree um i just hope apple doesn't get caught flat-footed on this one because again it's not like oh well so what if it becomes successful apple can make one they have a serious software and platform thing to resolve to ever ship anything like that they have to decide whether it's a mac or an ipad and either decision they make there are a bunch of other software and ecosystem things they have to do to make that work
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, like, everyone I've known who has bought a server studio or used one, and granted, this is not a large group of people, but, you know, it's like people on Twitter and stuff.
Marco:
The responses are pretty consistent, which is, this is really cool.
Marco:
There's really something to this, but Windows sucks.
Marco:
We all know that already.
Marco:
This is no surprise to anybody listening to this show in all likelihood.
Marco:
But it's clearly like, you know, there's something here.
Marco:
And I think if Apple chose to do something with that, they might be able to do a really good job with it.
Marco:
I mean, there would be certain limitations.
Marco:
Every computer input method has weird limitations to it.
Marco:
The iPad has problems with text entry unless you do keyboards, but that's a weird hack.
Marco:
The computers have problems with direct interaction and manipulation.
Marco:
Everything you do is going to be imperfect, but I think the model for modern computing and devices in the last decade has really just been like, well, you know what?
Marco:
We're going to embrace that we can't get this perfect anymore.
Marco:
And we're going to make things anyway the best we can that take advantage of what they are and leave what they aren't to other devices.
Marco:
Because if you weren't willing to do things that way, tablets wouldn't exist.
Marco:
Because tablets are this kind of weird hybrid that is good at certain things computers are good at, terrible at other things computers are good at, but they can do things that computers can't.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
when apple says like oh this this we've tried this and it doesn't work it can't be done there's lots of problems or whatever you could have said the same thing about tablets in 2009 but they made the ipad anyway they found a way they found like uh like a slot for it to fit in in the way people use things they there there were things that it was really good at and that made it worth doing despite all the you
Marco:
And those downsides are still there today, but it doesn't matter because the things that it's good at, it's really good at for certain people.
Marco:
And so any kind of like touch or pen Mac hybrid might be the same thing.
Marco:
It might be like, you know, this is kind of weird for these reasons over here, but it's really good at these things.
Marco:
And I think the Surface Studios, you know, slight success among some artists and stuff is
Marco:
shows that to be the case that like you know the drawing on windows is weird you know using a pen and touched on this giant you know like drafting table form factor pc running a pc os is weird and does have downsides but it also has really cool upsides so there i think there might be something there and and i think
Marco:
It would be unfortunate if there was something there and Apple wasn't able to or wasn't willing to find it and deliver it because they either are making bad assumptions or that they aren't willing to tackle the software integration cost that would result in doing this kind of Mac work.
Marco:
ios touch kind of hybrid os and because those aren't small problems you know those are those are big problems but but i do think it would be kind of a shame if there was really a product here to be had that could be really useful to some people and that we weren't ever going to get it because of these other issues you know that being said one of the other things i'm concerned about is it does kind of seem like at an increasing pace that
Marco:
apple is being surprised by customer reactions to what they do and that's a little concerning like we keep like you know first like when you know with with the uh the 2016 macbook pros those came out and were you know really met with a lot of ambivalence from people and a lot of criticism and a lot of anger that they weren't certain other things and
Marco:
And Apple was, allegedly, they were shocked by this.
Marco:
They were like, we thought this was... And same thing with the touch bar.
Marco:
Wow, we thought this was amazing.
Marco:
It seems like it's actually not being well received.
Marco:
How did this possibly happen?
Marco:
Why is this so different from what we expected?
Marco:
And similar with the Mac Pro.
Marco:
It turns out that if you kill your Pro hardware line slowly over years with...
Marco:
you know, neglect after releasing an already polarizing product, then it turns out people get mad who liked the old thing or wanted the current thing to stay current.
Marco:
And they seem greatly surprised by that as well.
John:
Oh, that reminds me of something else that I forgot to address there on that exact topic of, hey, you know, what happens if you don't update your Mac Pro for real time?
John:
One of the things they cited in this very strange lead up that I think a few of the journalists who were there noted, this very strange lead up to this announcement at this meeting was,
John:
Let me tell you how few people use the Mac Pro, and let me tell you how many pros use other products, how many pros use MacBook Pros.
John:
I think I flubbed that.
John:
Let me tell you how many people do not use the Mac Pro and instead use iMacs or MacBook Pros, right?
John:
That was their whole intro.
John:
If you read the transcript, it was all about that, right?
John:
It's like, and this is a thing where they're going to announce, guess what?
John:
We're making a new Mac Pro, right?
John:
If you had just heard the intro, it's like this is leading up to them telling us why they don't need to have a Mac Pro anymore, because they're saying, look at all these pros.
John:
And we're defining pros as someone who uses a pro app at least once a week or someone who uses it every few weeks.
John:
And they just all, you know, the number one piece of hardware used by our pros is, guess what?
John:
The MacBook Pro.
John:
The number two piece of hardware used by our pro is, guess what?
John:
The iMac, right?
John:
And a distant third is this Mac Pro.
John:
Such a small percentage.
John:
All that I 100% believe.
John:
But if you don't update the Mac Pro for three years, of course they're going to flee elsewhere.
John:
Of course they're going to start buying iMacs and Mac Pro.
John:
What choice do they have?
John:
What choice?
John:
And again, I totally understand from a PR perspective.
John:
This is the line.
John:
This is the move.
John:
I just sincerely hope that internally that they are clearer-eyed about all this.
John:
And you can't tell.
John:
They're not going to tell you what they talk about in their boardrooms.
John:
What do they put up on their slides?
John:
And I really believe they are clearer-eyed.
John:
Remember they had a leak of the slideshow?
John:
uh many years ago like the samsung thing about it like like we don't have bigger phones and customers want them yeah right we we do not have what customers want we need to make a bigger phone yeah yeah that's that's how you talk to yourself internally in a healthy way and i'm sure they do but like it's when you only get the external like the you know the party line of like here's what we have to tell you
John:
uh it makes me worry sometimes because it's just so hard like they'll they'll never they'll never tell you what they tell themselves internally and you just worry that they they're believing their own hype because they are so consistent and disciplined with their message to the outside world and because they choose to offer up these things like this that are just like instantly refutable like oh people who are moving to imax and macbook pros like
John:
Well, duh.
John:
Why even tell us that?
John:
Aren't we all smart here?
John:
Of course they're moving.
John:
What else are they going to do?
John:
I guess they could go to Windows as the other choice, which is also happening, by the way, and you're not going to tell us about that.
John:
Anyway, sorry to derail there.
Marco:
Anyway, so all that is to say that it certainly has seemed in recent times that Apple seems to be increasingly surprised that people don't universally love what they put out there.
Marco:
And that concerns me, and I hope in whatever has kind of flipped around or changed that has caused them to decide to do the Mac Pro again and to start really serving pros well, hopefully, again, whatever has changed to cause that, I hope it has also fixed whatever was causing them to put out products with a very different approach
Marco:
internal impression of what was going to happen or how they were going to be received than what the public actually delivered.
Marco:
Because that is worrisome.
Marco:
Apple should not be that caught off guard by their reactions to their products.
Marco:
You know, Apple is...
Marco:
really good most of the time at product design they have a huge history doing it very well the track record is very very good they have incredible talent within the company you know and like you know if they're going to do something like the apple tv remote that is incredibly bad just terrible good thing they update the apple tv every year so we won't have to deal with that bad remote for a long time right yeah like to get something like that out into the world
Marco:
There are people inside of the company who are smart enough and clear-headed enough to look at that and say, you know what, this is kind of a bad idea and here's why.
Marco:
But for some reason, they weren't listened to.
Marco:
So I hope whatever has changed that caused this Mac Pro thing is also going to let them be a little bit more honest about their own product reactions internally before they decide to release things or go ahead with things.
John:
So that they are less surprised when the public doesn't love every weird, beautiful, useless thing they release.
John:
it's another one of those facts that could be 100 true but it doesn't tell you what the initial value was so if the if the trash can mac pro was only appealing to a certain very small subset of people and those people were trapped into repeatedly buying it year after year even though it didn't get updated that would result in flat sales and because it's such a small percentage it would result in look how many people who we classify as pros according to this weird metric buy our much more popular machines well of course they do those are your most popular machines and you know like anyway
John:
Stats that are true, but do not necessarily prove the thing you're saying that they prove.
John:
It's frustration.
Casey:
Anyway, go ahead, Casey.
Casey:
It's curious to try to reason through what Apple is thinking with regard to their products and how they're received.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Because, you know, anyone I've ever spoken to who has spent any amount of time as an Apple employee has always vehemently said that their biggest critics are themselves.
Casey:
And I completely agree with you guys that from the outside, it seems clear that they offered up this, you know, Touch Bar MacBook Pro on a platter and said, look at this magnificent piece of electronics.
Casey:
You should be blessed enough to be able to give us a whole pile of money for one of these.
Casey:
And then it did seem from the outside like they were surprised that people were like, yeah, we're good.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
On the inside, it's a bold claim for any of us to make if we think that on the inside they were really taken aback by it.
Casey:
Because as you said, John, the messaging to the outside will always be, oh, no, this is exactly what we planned.
Casey:
but the inside i bet that they're being pretty darn honest with themselves and maybe the expectation was different but i don't think it took them very long to realize that oh this didn't go the way we thought it did and now they're turning around now i will concede that it certainly seems like the mac pro something just went totally wrong there
Casey:
Because I concede and agree that it took way too long, way, way, way too long for them to make any statement about what's coming.
Casey:
And the consistent reports, you know, be that rumors that it's been in the last six weeks to six months that they've really gotten in on a new Mac Pro.
Casey:
Like, that's kind of alarming.
Casey:
But at least they're turning the ship around.
Casey:
It seems weird to me for us to assume that there aren't some very vocal critics of Apple.
John:
There totally are.
John:
Even Marco was saying that there are.
John:
It's just a question of they don't win the argument because we can tell who wins by what they actually ship.
John:
And like I said, I think that the presentation about the iPhone before they had a big iPhone with that slide I was trying to quote was like, you know,
John:
uh customers want what we don't have or something a similar phrasing like they were just totally brutal about we don't have big phones customers want them we should make one and they did and guess what it sold really really well so like i believe internally that everything we're saying has been said internally by multiple people and it's just a question of
John:
who wins the argument and my my general frustration is because they have executives who are so good at talking to the public so good at talking to the public in terms of they'll never get off message and also like they're willing to throw out things that don't actually support what they're saying but sound like they do at first at first glance and i find it frustrating to never be able to get to the no seriously just talk to me like a human being like
John:
I guess that would have to be off the record.
John:
On the record, they're never going to do that.
John:
Because in the end, it doesn't matter.
John:
Who cares about the internal politics?
John:
The products are what they are.
John:
When you ask me questions about it, I'm not going to trash my own products, and I'm not going to tell you about future ones.
John:
They could be working on a Surface Studio-style computer.
John:
They could have had it in the works for three years now, and they're just trying to get it right.
John:
They're never going to tell you that.
John:
they're you know they're just going to say right up to the point when they release it steve jobs style that's not a good idea we don't think it's a good idea until they come out and say we finally cracked it here it is and now it's a great idea because we did it right that's just the way they work and it can just be frustrating from the outside but uh but yeah when when the when the stuff that's coming out that tells you that tells you who won arguments and what decisions were made and that we can judge them based on um and so
John:
It's also hard, too.
Marco:
If you are an engineer working on Photos.app or something like that, are you really going to be willing to take the political hit internally to criticize a remote that was designed by Johnny Ive or Richard Howarth?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Is that really going to be a wise career move?
Marco:
The company is set up in a way... It's a big company.
Marco:
There's rank.
Marco:
There's politics internally.
Marco:
Every big company has this stuff.
Marco:
So not everybody can get their voice heard if they have a criticism about a product that is being considered or being designed.
Marco:
There have to be people who... It has to be set up in a way that high-up people can criticize.
Marco:
And the people who are at the high-up levels need to criticize when necessary.
Marco:
We've talked before about this is one of Steve Jobs' greatest strengths.
Marco:
And one of the reasons why he had such a great relationship with Johnny Ive and with the engineering is there was a great balance of...
Marco:
editing and criticism and honesty internally that resulted in mostly only great stuff coming out.
Marco:
The hit rate was pretty good there.
Marco:
And when things did come out, there weren't a lot of controversial or polarizing attributes of new products as there are now.
Marco:
Now it seems like almost everything that comes out, there's great advances in some areas, but almost all those advances come at some kind of massively polarizing cost.
Marco:
And I feel like that's happening more recently than it used to.
Marco:
And maybe that's because the collaboration or the editing up top is not happening with the same health and same balance that it used to.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Audible, with an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original audio shows, news, comedy, and more.
Marco:
Get a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash ATP.
Marco:
If you want to listen to it, Audible has it, with audiobooks from virtually every genre.
Marco:
You can listen anytime, anywhere, on phones, tablets, computers, and more.
Marco:
audio books are great for long flights road trips or even your daily commute because you know you might think you don't have time to read books but if you add up all those times that you could be listening to audio books you'd be surprised how much you could hear each year even if it's just to and from work every day audio books bring books to life many of them are read by the authors themselves
Marco:
And you can take risks and try new authors and genres without regret because Audible offers a great listen guarantee.
Marco:
And what this means is if you start an audiobook and you don't like it, you can trade it for another one for free.
Marco:
So see all this yourself.
Marco:
When you begin your free 30-day trial, you get your first audiobook for free, and there's no obligation and no stress because you can cancel your membership at any time.
Marco:
With audiobooks and spoken word audio product, you will find what you're looking for with Audible.
Marco:
Get a free 30-day trial by signing up at audible.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's audible.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you to Audible for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
You know, I wanted to go back just briefly.
Casey:
I thought that the statistic that John had talked about earlier very quickly was just fascinating, and this is quoting from Gruber.
Casey:
Apple's research shows that 15% of all Mac users use at least one Pro app frequently.
Casey:
These are apps for things like music creation, video editing, graphic design, and software development.
Casey:
Basically, apps that are performance intensive.
Casey:
An additional 15% of all Mac users use Pro apps less frequently, but at least a few times per month.
Casey:
That 30% of the overall Mac user base is what Apple considers the Pro market.
Casey:
I don't really have a lot to extrapolate from this, but I just thought it was very, very interesting.
Casey:
that according to apple 15 of users uses them uses a pro app frequently whatever that definition is be that daily or multiple times a week or what have you uh and then another 15 that uses them at least a few times a month and i i just thought that was a really fascinating statistic that i never expected to to come out of that meeting
Marco:
Yeah, that's that's a lot higher than I would have guessed for, you know, especially like the 30 percent total.
Marco:
That's kind of amazing.
John:
Well, they didn't clearly communicate that because if you read the transcript and there was much debate about this, many people interpreting.
John:
But now having read the transcript, it is no more clear to me.
John:
The question is, the first one is clear.
John:
15 percent use use what they classify as a pro app at least once a week.
John:
Totally clear.
John:
The second one is the problem because they say this group of users uses a pro app like once every few weeks or whatever, some longer period.
John:
And the question is, does that second group of users include the first Gruber clearly thinks it does.
John:
Because what Apple said was 30% use it, you know, in the longer period and 15% in the shorter.
John:
But I can't tell if the 15% is part of the 30%.
John:
Like, are they exclusive groups or are they inclusive?
John:
And so you can't tell if the total is 30% or 45%.
John:
Apple could have communicated that better, like perhaps in text or in some other fashion, or it could have been clarified.
John:
So depending on how you interpret what they said in the transcript...
John:
And I think it's a big difference.
John:
Are 45% of Mac users classified as occasional or frequent pro users?
John:
Or is it 30% and 15 of them are once a week?
John:
Either way, these are very nice high numbers, higher than I would have guessed.
John:
But Apple picks what it means to be a pro user.
John:
They use a pro app, which they don't tell us what it is.
John:
They just say, oh, you know, like one of those apps you use to make things, right?
Marco:
Well, I think it's pretty clear that what they mean by pro app is anything Apple makes ends in pro.
Marco:
So Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro.
Marco:
Also, probably like I would say Adobe Creative Suite apps would make sense there.
Marco:
And I think it was also very clear they meant Xcode.
John:
and that includes a lot of people yep i would agree with all of those but there how many other things are in that categories they didn't give us an exhaustive like you're just going by their metrics and i bet they're picking something pretty broad um for example there could be just one application that is frequently used that they happen to classify as pro that pulls up the average for everything else these are you know we have no visibility to these apple has all the information so um
John:
I'm not surprised by that number.
John:
It sounds about what I would think they would because of their very broad definition of pro.
John:
Everything you defined, I don't think that's broad, but I'm just trying to think of one other application that they could throw in there that would be like, oh, if you ever launch Terminal, you count as a pro app.
John:
Yeah, you could argue for that, but there's millions of people who are launching Terminal just so they can use their Mac to SSH into something to do something, and they're not using their Mac in a pro capacity.
John:
It's, you know...
John:
it's a glass tty as we used to say back in the day and that is not a pro use because you can do that from a macbook adorable and it works fine but if you classify terminal as a pro app something that brings up your numbers play pro is a state of mind oh my goodness all right what else do we have to talk about with regard to the mac pro
John:
well we can move on to the imac pro because there was another completely unsourced rumor and this is the place where we're dumping them all on this show right um this is from all of them on this episode yep all of them john this one also got reblogged everywhere i'm surprised like people reblogging i thought that the mac uh blogosphere had gotten over that like that there'll be one completely unsourced rumor on some random thing and it
John:
everybody else will grab it and you'll see it appear on every site and sometimes you'll have to like pour over the site to try to figure out are they just citing that one thing i read on that totally unsourced blog and sometimes they don't link to it and sometimes they don't source it until the very end and you're trying to figure out and you see it in so many places like well it must be true i've seen every mac site i've seen has been telling me about this these the specs of this new iMac pro
John:
it's like you trace it all back and it's just this one completely unsourced thing anyway this completely unsourced thing is giving us supposed specs for the iMac pro and this one says it will have a intel e3 1285 v6 i have no idea what the hell that is um it's nothing yeah
John:
16 gigs of ram upgradeable to 32 or 64 ecc memory faster ssds uh and uh up to two terabytes for the ssd size and amd graphics with support for vr and pro apps whatever the hell that means thunderbolt 3 usbc gen 2 with ta-da a brand new keyboard for casey
Casey:
All right.
Marco:
Something for everybody.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So basically, just to summarize quickly here, Xeon E3, it might as well not be a Xeon.
Marco:
The Xeon E3 is only barely different from the consumer chips the iMac already uses.
Marco:
The only thing it would get you is support for ECC RAM.
Marco:
That's pretty good, though.
Marco:
That is something.
Marco:
I feel like if the iMac Pro... Just assume whenever we say iMac Pro, it's in finger quotes.
Marco:
If the iMac Pro is something to handle heavy horsepower, then that's not going to do it.
Marco:
That's what the old iMac already has had.
Marco:
If it's something to add check marks to make pros stop complaining about certain things, it helps a little bit in that area in the sense that it enables ECC RAM.
Marco:
But that's about it.
Marco:
And Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C, I'm assuming it has a lot of PCI Express lanes.
Marco:
Does it have more?
Marco:
No, I don't think it has any more.
Marco:
You have to go to the E5 series.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure it has the same PCI Express configuration as the regular i7 high-end chips.
Marco:
Because it really is just an i7 with ECC compatibility, basically.
Marco:
There's...
Marco:
There's really nothing else to it.
Marco:
That's literally all it is.
Marco:
The E3 line mostly exists to make cheap server options because servers almost always want ECC and server needs almost always use that like in data centers and stuff.
Marco:
And it's a way to basically bring the wonderful economy and power of the consumer i7 line into cheap 1U rack mount servers.
Marco:
So there's not really a huge benefit.
Marco:
And that's why, remember about two years ago, they started selling, not Apple, but the PC industry started selling Xeon laptops.
Marco:
And that was the same kind of thing.
Marco:
It was using this E3 line where it's like, yeah, that's not really anything more than what we had before.
Marco:
It's not really anything more than the consumer line.
Marco:
So that's the same thing here.
Marco:
It would enable ECC, but that would be the only advantage that it would have over what we already have in the iMac.
Marco:
That being said,
Marco:
It would also not require any additional thermal headroom because it isn't a bigger chip.
Marco:
It doesn't have more cores.
Marco:
It doesn't have a higher TDP.
Marco:
It would be very easy for Apple to configure an iMac with an E3.
Marco:
So if the idea of the iMac Pro is to do as little work as possible and check off a few more boxes for pros while changing almost nothing about the iMac...
John:
then okay maybe but that's probably not like that wouldn't be a very compelling product for almost anybody so i hope that isn't what they're doing i hope they're doing more than that well if it's the only one that comes with thunderbolt 3 and usbc then suddenly that becomes a lot more attractive because it's not just people who are looking for pro or buying it it's like anybody who wants basically a modern modern 5k iMac would buy it's like well if that's the only one that has all the new ports on it i'll get it and if they want that fancy new keyboard right
John:
Other ancillary rumors attached to this, and I keep seeing this.
John:
I haven't traced this back to the origin, to the fantastical origin, but the 8K display.
John:
Apple's working on an 8K display for the next generation of Mac Pros.
John:
8K display has been floating around for a long time.
John:
Is that a thing?
John:
Is that a thing that anyone is asking for?
Marco:
Well, Dell just shipped one.
Marco:
You see, Dell just shipped one for five grand.
John:
I know, I know.
John:
All right.
John:
So, yeah, right.
Marco:
My question is, does the size math work out to be something reasonable?
Marco:
Yeah, like how big would it have to be to keep the current DPI?
Marco:
Yeah, I think it would have to be like 40 inches.
Marco:
It would have to be pretty big.
Marco:
I think we learned from past monitor things and some current-day ones where you have that one LG super-wide 35-inch or whatever it is, right?
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
So we've seen a rough idea of what monitor sizes are and what works and what doesn't.
Marco:
We can probably agree – actually, I'm curious, John, because you're probably the contrarian here –
Marco:
What do you think is the largest inch diagonal measurement that a single monitor could reasonably be for practical desktop computer use, where you wouldn't have to sit so far back from it that the resolution would be wasted?
Marco:
So my answer to that question would probably be maybe like 32 inches, maybe at most 35.
Marco:
What do you think?
John:
I would go up to 42 because I know people who use televisions as their monitors.
John:
Obviously, the resolution is horrendous, right?
John:
But they're using, like, actual televisions as their monitors because they can get them in really big sizes.
John:
And why?
John:
Because if you have any kind of vision impairment, you can't buy a computer monitor that makes things as big as you want that doesn't make it look like you're looking through a tiny little porthole.
John:
So they will get a 42-inch television and put it at, like...
John:
a resolution that we would run a 23 inch display at and keep it like normal computer distance from them and just lets them see things better so i think it's actually surprising surprisingly big but but that wouldn't be a use case for 8k though 8k is talking about like right no no but you just asked about the inch sizes right now 8k specifically the reason the reason i'm skeptical of the 8k thing is not because i think 8k is not a thing right but just when i envision apple making a monitor for its mac pro
John:
i envisioned 8k as a thing that only people who are working like at ilm get so they can look at their 8k video you know composites or whatever like that you know people who are working with source material shot in 8k but traditionally apple has left that market to like the super duper high-end color calibrated weird monitors with hoods over them and like
John:
that type of thing apple has never sold one of those they've always sold a really good monitor for regular people it has great color calibration but always during the entire history of apple if you go into a very fancy place that even just does stuff with photoshop or with special effects or whatever you will see one of those really weird i don't think any scene makes a bunch of them or you know one of those really weird monitors just for this specific
John:
industry and right now i feel like 8k is in that category the only people who need 8k are people who are shooting 8k footage who want to see it displayed in 8k so you want 8k monitor but like i'm not i'm not gonna be sad if apple makes one i think it'll be awesome but that seems such like such a narrow thing that apple's gonna go from we're not making a monitor at all to guess what we're making an 8k one and to get back to what you were saying marco if they do make an 8k one i hope it's not the only one because
John:
i really don't i personally don't actually want a 40 inch monitor and i think 8k at 27 or 30 inches is overkill for my needs so if they only make an 8k monitor it's going to be super expensive and b oh god i'd probably actually buy it too wouldn't i well
John:
like oh you would it's not it's not what i want out of a monitor i'm thinking they're going to make a 5k display because i think 5k is in the spot where apple usually makes monitors and that leave 8k to dell and nec and view sonic and whoever else is making these monitors for for professional things that you can already buy today um but we'll see the 8k rumor won't die
Casey:
Anything else on the Mac Pro, kids?
Marco:
Why do you even keep asking that?
Marco:
If you just stopped asking that and just moved on, you would catch us off guard.
Marco:
No, because there's more, unfortunately.
John:
Unfortunately for Casey.
John:
Two related stories that were in the notes last week, or at least one of them was, and we didn't get to it, that may or may not be related.
John:
The more recent one is NVIDIA's announcement that their new graphics cards have Mac support, and you're like, what?
What?
John:
what do you mean by that there are no macs with card slots what are you talking about how can you have mac support right it's like oh yeah all those cheese graters yeah you can put these things in there um so nvidia is offering drivers for its pascal based gpus that's their latest architecture of gpus and this is the the titan nvidia titan xp is their product they're launching but uh the drivers they're making will work with any pascal based gpu apparently on the mac
John:
and why would they do that i mean people with cheese graters can buy them and you know or people with hackintoshes right who want to run mac os and do all this stuff and apple didn't ship drivers for this because they don't ship any machines with pascal gpus in them as far as i'm aware like it didn't
John:
Or do they have a Pascal-based one in one of the portables?
John:
I forget.
John:
Maybe the chat won't be able to tell me.
John:
But anyway.
Marco:
I don't think Apple ships NVIDIA anything right now.
Marco:
Apple and NVIDIA seem to have some kind of major fallout.
Marco:
And I think they ship ATI stuff or AMD stuff now everywhere.
Marco:
which is kind of a problem like you know we we keep hearing i don't want to steal what you're going to say if you're going to say this but we keep hearing from people who know this stuff that like really nvidia has has kicked amd's butt so hard and gpus and and things like gpus like those like parallel computing cards recently uh that
Marco:
Apple really, really apparently, if they want to be competitive in these high-end GPU areas, they should really consider going back to NVIDIA.
Marco:
And it seems like for whatever reason, possibly some kind of weird business disagreement or history, they have been unwilling to do that so far, but maybe they should reconsider now that they're trying to address pros better.
John:
so that balance of power between amd and nvidia it has swung around it's not like intel and amd where intel just dominated has come back from the the the bruising of the athlon age as we discussed in a past show and it's just dominated for a really long time and like ryzen is just like the the turnaround possibly now but amd nvidia have traded the lead many times and
John:
specifically for apple's purposes not talking about the highest at the high end which apple's been ignoring anyway very often the ati or amd part actually is the right choice for specific things but if your concern is i want the best performance in a given uh thermal envelope or whatever and that thermal envelope isn't really really low nvidia is currently uh the leader uh
John:
that could change with the next generation of gpus but either way apple has nothing in any of its products and hasn't for many many years that could be considered a high-end gpu none just they don't they don't sell them they didn't even when the 2013 trash can mac pro was brand new
Marco:
the day it was released the day it was announced for that matter you could buy faster cards and put them in pcs single cards double cards everything i'm pretty sure like the last time they had competitive gpus was when you and at the time i bought the 2008 mac pro and you could for 200 get an nvidia 8800 gt and at the time that was like an upper mid-range card and we were like oh that's that's a nice option thanks yeah it was it was a decent card a long time ago
John:
Yeah, and always there have been third-party people like buying PC cards and flashing the firmware and stuff.
John:
And it was just a matter of like, does Apple support this GPU architecture?
John:
Because if they supported it, sometimes the drivers would work with the higher-end cards that were just overclocked or just had more VRAM and stuff like that.
John:
And so this announcement by NVIDIA has a lot of people thinking, oh, maybe the new Mac Pro that Apple just admitted they were creating like three days ago, maybe it's going to use Pascal-based GPUs.
John:
And you know what?
John:
That would be awesome.
John:
and i hope it does because they're really good right but i can't draw any kind of sane connecting line between nvidia supporting max with its current crop of lines and anything that apple's going to do by its as yet unknown to anybody outside apple uh mac pro project so i can't connect those lines but i really sincerely do hope that
John:
An option on the new Mac Pro is the highest of high-end video cards from NVIDIA, because that would be awesome.
John:
And they kept talking about how people want a single really fast GPU, and this is a single really fast GPU.
John:
For all we know, Apple could have made a deal with NVIDIA for them to develop these drivers, because that's the only line I could draw.
John:
I was like, why the heck is NVIDIA doing this?
John:
are they so desperate for money that they want the seven people who have hackandoshers to buy this card and put it in right like what why because making drivers for making mac drivers for a video card is non-trivial um it's a difficult thing to do working with apple's you know driver stack so different from windows uh and for what benefit so
John:
Maybe there was some kind of agreement or money-changing hands to have NVIDIA do this sometime in the past, and they're just like, well, while we wait to be in the new Mac Pro, we'll sell this to people or whatever.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, I'm excited about this.
John:
People who have cheese graters that are more modern than mine that can actually run this.
John:
I believe I can't run this in mine because I think it requires...
John:
uh more pci express you know yeah i can't even yeah anyway um this seems like an exciting announcement for a very small group of mac nerds i'm excited by the prospect of a very super high-end gpu and a future mac pro uh but for now i can't i can't connect the dots on this to say that this means anything about what uh what gpu the next mac pro is going to have
John:
And related to this is the older story, which is about Apple moving away from imagination, the PowerVR GPUs that it uses in all of its iOS products.
John:
For many, many years, speaking of GPUs, Apple's GPUs and its iOS devices have been awesome.
John:
they have been amazingly good they always show that graph that shows look how crappy our gpus were in the beginning of the of the ios devices before we even called it ios and look at this curve every time we come out with a new product the gpu is like super duper faster it's like it's not linear it's like going up like a hockey stick and we are kicking butt on gpus and look what we can do with these games and all you know and it's true they've been doing a really good job with the gpus and
John:
and for i think for the entire life of of ios devices they have been using power vr based gpus with intellectual property licensed from imagination technology and imagination technology put out this press release this very sad angry press release that's like apple tells us they're not going to be using our intellectual property anymore and apple by the way is like more than 50 of our revenue and
John:
But we think basically it's impossible to make a modern GPU without infringing our intellectual property, which, by the way, is another reason the patent system is ridiculous.
John:
Like little does Apple know it is literally impossible to make a modern GPU without our intellectual property.
John:
Right.
John:
So we own these ideas forevermore or like whatever the ridiculous term limit is on patents.
Marco:
But John, patents are to foster innovation.
Marco:
Without patents, nobody would innovate.
John:
no one would ever be able to make a gpu without these ideas that are now obvious to everybody uh who is what is it uh obvious to people versed well versed in the art anyway i hate patents uh but but apple says they're they are not licensing this technology anymore which means that apple is going to make gpus for its ios devices presumably or you know whatever they're either not going to make gpus or they're going to make gpus licensed from somebody else or they're going to make their own and
John:
Apple has, as Phil Schiller points out, or one of the people points out, one of the best chip design groups in the world, arguably the best, going based on how good their system-minded chips are for their devices.
Marco:
Have you seen the benchmarks of the new Samsung S8 or whatever?
Marco:
It matches the performance of the iPhone 6S.
John:
they're like two generations behind and yeah they're apple is doing amazing like they're making these chips themselves yes it's arm it's arm based technology and they have that license from arm to use the instruction set and all that other stuff or whatever and yes they're licensing gpu stuff from power br whatever but apple make no mistake apple is designing these things ever since the the uh the confusingly named swift cpu i think was the first one that they really like did themselves from scratch yeah it was the f1 5 right
John:
yeah they're they're doing amazing so i have zero doubt that if apple wanted to they have the in-house expertise to make an amazing gpu for the next iphone whether or not infringes on patents who the hell knows let the lawyers fight it out i think apple's going to win that one because they have more money and that's how our legal system works they're like you know what f you imagination we're going to buy your company done and done we win um and that's and that's their worst case scenario so apple will not lose this um
John:
or they could be licensing someone else's thing but combining the new mac pro rumor which now affects everything that that is discussed surrounding the mac it's like does this mean apple is going to make their own gpus for the new mac pro and while i think that would be amazing and fantastical i'm gonna say no on that one yeah that makes no sense because
John:
Because Apple already doesn't like the ROI on the Mac Pro, reportedly.
John:
And in fact, they seem to not like it so much that they didn't even make one.
John:
They just barely decided to make one.
John:
if apple is making a gpu architecture they're making it for ios devices and i have a hard time believing that that the gpu design could even be adapted from ios devices to something like the new mac pro so i'm thinking the new mac pro will not have a gpu of apple's own design i'm hoping it will have a super high-end nvidia gpu or at least the the best whatever the best architecture is that amd has i forget what theirs is called
John:
Is it Maxwell?
John:
I don't remember.
John:
Maybe that's another Nvidia one.
John:
And I don't think the imagination rumor is connected to the Mac Pro either.
John:
It does make me kind of excited about what the next iPhone and the GPUs are going to look like there because presumably Apple is ditching imagination for some benefit.
John:
And I don't think the benefit is the relatively piddling amount of money they pay.
John:
It's like only $75 million a year, which is a lot of money to imagination technologies.
John:
Apparently it's like Apple is their biggest customer.
John:
It's like more than half of their revenue.
John:
but Apple sneezes and $75 million comes out and falls on the carpet.
John:
Like that's how much they, that's how much they, they spend for snacks at the, uh, the defunct, uh, Apple car project.
John:
Right.
John:
Um,
John:
Yeah, so I think they want to do it for the same reason they do everything.
John:
They want to own and control the blah, blah, blah technology, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And I bet they have some good ideas about, you know, that chip team is like, we have some good ideas about how to do a GPU in ways that are our own, our own ideas.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Why do we need this imagination technology stuff anymore?
John:
We have all the expertise in-house to make an amazing GPU ourselves.
John:
We don't need them anymore.
John:
It will free us up to do what we want.
John:
Now, there's a couple of good articles about this saying, all right, so Apple could do this, but there is an entire software ecosystem built up around the PowerVR architecture that...
John:
Take advantage of features of the PowerVR architecture that are tuned to work well on that architecture in terms of, you know, for games, you can get really low level type of stuff like things that perform particularly well on a particular chip with a particular set of execution units in a particular arrangement with particular latencies.
John:
That's how game development works a lot of the time, especially as you get up towards the high end.
John:
if apple makes a new gpu that has very different characteristics or that doesn't support any of these weird power vr specific extensions that are there are things that game developers can use or could have used in the past that may be a problem for ios game compatibility stuff like metal may help with this because presumably metal provides
John:
I mean, it's less of an abstraction layer than OpenGL, but it's more than, like, writing against the, you know, the bare metal of the GPU.
John:
So there could be troubled waters ahead for iOS game performance, but I have faith that Apple knows about all these issues and will have software-based solutions.
John:
And because their new GPU will be so much faster than the old ones, games tuned for PowerVR performance specifics, they'll get by on the new one just because it's so much faster.
John:
So...
John:
this this development this sort of corporate divorce divorce makes me excited to see what what the next uh gpu will be like and i assume it's like the not this year's one but next year's like i guess we'll find out as soon as the iphone 8 or whatever they're going to call it comes out and someone checks it out and see sees if it has a power vr based gpu in there but um i'm kind of excited about that but i don't think it's related to the mac pro
Marco:
Yeah, I agree completely.
Marco:
There's no way that is connected to the Mac Pro.
Marco:
The timing is a coincidence.
Marco:
Yeah, there's no way.
Marco:
I also think with the idea of changing it and being a problem for games, I don't think it's that big of a deal because...
Marco:
There aren't that many people writing high-performance, low-level game engines at that level for iOS or for anything, really.
Marco:
There's not a lot of original, low-level game engines being written at any given time.
Marco:
Most games that come out are using someone else's engine.
Marco:
So it's a relatively small number of engine providers and authors that will need to adapt to any changes like this anyway.
Marco:
And the fact is, enough iPhones are sold that if the new iPhones from this point forward have this architecture, every mobile game developer is going to demand support for that.
Marco:
And so the engine makers are going to do it.
Marco:
So it's really not an issue.
Marco:
That's not going to be a problem at all.
John:
Yeah, it's still better.
John:
It's the same thing on game consoles these days, where game consoles will feel free to rev their hardware and then...
John:
console game developers just deal with it like when the ps ps4 pro comes out or the scorpio like it's like well the hardware changed in a way that we have never optimized for but then again also the hardware is faster as this new gpu will faster as well and they figure it out because that's how you make that's how you make the money that's how you sell the games
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Audible, and Fracture.
Marco:
We will see you next week.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
So once I went back and listened to the tape last time, it certainly does appear that I'm going to win the bet in all likelihood because I never bet on it being unmodified.
Marco:
Like I said, if the 2013 Mac Pro is still for sale on January 1st.
John:
that's kind of vague someone did provide a link that i actually removed from follow-up that was like see look they didn't change the name of it and they gave me a link to the page that talks about the 2013 but i couldn't find anything on the page that said that it wasn't just like a page that hadn't yet been updated like nothing about it indicated that that page was aware that they did the reconfiguration thing but anyway i everything that i've seen indicates to me that this is just a price drop and a model elimination and everything about them will be exactly the same
John:
including the name and the model number and so even on the strictest possible definition they could still be for sale yeah so i won't declare victory until january 1st but i am confident that i'm most likely to win this you should just start scrounging for money in your couch casey each day if you find any change there put in a little jar and by the end of the year you'll have five dollars no remember i found five dollars at the end of last week's story so we're good
Marco:
At some point, don't worry.
Marco:
At some point, we're going to talk about something else.
Marco:
Just that time is not today.
Casey:
I'm skeptical.
Casey:
It's probably not until 2018.
Casey:
Actually, no.
Casey:
And then in 2018...
Casey:
It'll be, oh, where's the Mac Pro?
Casey:
Where's the Mac Pro?
Casey:
Where's the Mac Pro?
Casey:
It's not here.
Casey:
Where's the Mac Pro?
Casey:
It's not here.
Casey:
Why isn't it here?
Casey:
Apple is doomed.
Casey:
Where's the Mac Pro?
Casey:
It's not here.
John:
They already said.
John:
They didn't even say it was going to come in 2018.
John:
So we're already saying it might not be here until 2019.
John:
So our expectations are appropriately set.
Casey:
We will be hopeful.
John:
That's going to stop you, too.
John:
Seriously, though, this announcement that they're doing this thing...
John:
gets rid of a lot of anxiety it's like it's just a matter of what we used to before say it's just a matter of when but we didn't know now we know they put a stake in the ground they said words they made promises they're gonna keep them like it's gonna happen it's gonna happen for us i know it then we can complain about what they release that's where the good stuff is
Marco:
after they release something or announce it everything in between too like if they preview it at you know a fall event or wbdc or whatever else then we can nitpick the preview to death that that's at least two episodes yep then we can say like they said they were gonna make the parts upgradable but everything is soldered to this motherboard what were they thinking did they just mean that they're gonna upgrade maybe they won't even upgrade it if everything is soldered on
John:
Yeah, we'll have fun there.
John:
But they said so many of the right things.
John:
This is going to be a long honeymoon period for me to just imagine how awesome this thing is going to be.
Casey:
And then a three-year-long just tirade about how it doesn't meet your every expectation.
John:
I'm still even considering buying the iMac Pro.
John:
Like, in addition to the Mac, it has been so long since I bought a Mac, I should do a Marco thing where I'm going to buy the iMac Pro, keep it for a little while, sell it, buy the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Yeah, because I had the Mac Pro for only about 9 or 10 months before the 5K came out, and I didn't lose that much money on it.
Marco:
Like, I lost, I think, like 15% or something over, like, you know, almost a year.
Marco:
I consider that pretty good.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Do you think a MacBook Adorable update is eminent?
Casey:
Because I'm really itching to buy one.
John:
You mean a speed bump?
John:
Sorry, Apple doesn't do those anymore.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
It really, it honestly is a very good question, like, where the heck that is, because it sure seems like, you know, that probably should have come out this spring.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure the chip was available, but, you know, there could be, see, now, like, now we don't know.
Marco:
Before, we could just say, ah, it's just Tim Cook being, you know, Tim Cook.
Marco:
Now, we can say, maybe they're rethinking things.
Marco:
Maybe, like, now we can be a little more optimistic and be like, well, maybe, maybe they're doing something else.
John:
Well, I,
John:
like i said when you talked about the mac mini just because they've realized that if you want a high-end computer you have to update it like they've clearly made that realization that a they do want to have a computer and b you can't have a computer that you don't update it right that doesn't mean they made that same realization about anything else in the product line because they could be saying as you go down the line it's like you can have a macbook adorable that we never update it's not a high-end product nobody cares about performance it's fine
John:
why why waste time updating it every year with speed bumps you know and like that that's one of those things like so many things that apple reconsiders like why does a computer have to have an optical drive why why do batteries have to be removable on laptops right all these things that other companies won't consider one of one of the recent ones that apple has adopted is do you have to speed bump computers every year just because new components are available
John:
And Apple's answer was, no, no, you don't.
John:
Like our sales don't seem to suffer from it.
John:
In fact, maybe they do better because we built up all this demand among the people who know that our computers are old and crappy, that we have these big spikes when we release new things.
John:
So maybe you don't have to do that.
John:
Now on the high end, they've changed their mind.
John:
But the whole rest of the line, I will need to be convinced that they've realized that speed bumps are a thing that they should go back to doing.
John:
And honestly, I don't know if they should, quote unquote, should for the business.
John:
We all want them.
John:
Tech nerds get upset that like speed bumps don't happen.
John:
But maybe they're right for non high end products that the customers for those products.
John:
don't care and we'll just keep buying the macbook adorable and update it every two years or every three years or whatever and it will be fine and and honestly i can kind of get on the same page with them if they have the numbers to back that up because the role of those products is not to be the very fastest thing you can get uh and when you do comparisons against competitive products it's like well but we got mac os you can't it's not an apples to apples comparison haha because who cares if you can buy a dell laptop for way cheaper that has updated components no mac os um so
John:
that could be what they're saying now i hope they go back to speed bumps because i think it's just a healthier thing to do overall and the lack of speed bumps makes technical people angry at apple which spills over into our attitudes about everything else that they do but who knows but anyway they made the right decision on the mac pro again i'm still basking in that so honeymoon period
John:
you know if you look at the uh if you look at the mac rumors buyer's guide macbook don't buy macbook air don't buy macbook pro iMac don't buy mac mini don't buy mac pro buy now yeah i can't i can't believe they did that like it's like a bug in their systems like yeah i know they quote unquote updated it by changing prices but like you got to turn that back to don't buy like don't don't buy that
Marco:
Yeah, there's no way that is earned.
Marco:
There's no way.
Marco:
That's a bug.
Marco:
That is earned even less than the new badge was when we started this show for the 2012 Mac Pro.
John:
Is that still that way?
John:
Because I saw those same screenshots when people screenshot, ha, look at this, isn't this funny?
John:
Their buggy software put it as a buy.
John:
But if it's still there, maybe it means someone at Mac Rumors actually thinks... No, I looked a minute ago.
John:
they need to change that still there it's right there right on top buy now it says buy now price drop so it at least clarifies that it's not an update but but don't but don't buy now no one should buy those unless you have unless you have to unless you know you have to because like whatever reason that casey's co-worker but regular people don't buy those it did not improve
Marco:
no and the price drop if if they had dropped the price at 50 bucks yeah definitely buy right but they didn't it's still it's still pretty darn expensive you should not buy it yeah now to get a good configuration instead of spending seven thousand dollars you'll spend five thousand dollars still probably not worth spending for an almost four-year-old computer for a computer that your phone beats in certain benchmarks well it's not that bad but it's it's not great
Casey:
There's a refurb MacBook Adorables.
Casey:
My brain is telling me no, but my heart is saying yes.
Marco:
Don't.
Marco:
Just don't.
Casey:
I want one, though.
Casey:
I'm sick of having an iPad that doesn't let me get anything done on it.
Casey:
Imagine if iPads actually worked for getting things done.
Casey:
That'd be amazing.
Marco:
Oh, my God.