The Mac Renaissance
Oh, did you ever modify last week's show notes?
Marco and I had a bet going to see when you would.
Oh, I didn't even look at them.
Oh, you didn't.
What did you have in there?
Nothing.
Nothing, Dad.
Don't look.
Don't look, Dad.
Don't look, Dad.
It's fine, Dad.
I knew about the dollar signs, pre-show, Michael.
Is it the title?
Because it's all like small caps on the website, so I can't tell if that title is messed up.
No, no, no.
Do you still have your dollar signs in your menu bar, Casey, or have you fixed that?
No, I fixed it during recording.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
I'm looking at, you're going to think I'm going to complain about the emoji FOMO thing?
No.
You've already skipped over it then.
I don't know.
What am I looking at?
Tell me.
Sonos and Google sitting in a tree.
Anchor and Amazon.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
You messed it up by putting the word R in there.
R is not in the nursery rhyme.
Oh, that is true.
That's all I complain about.
I have no problem with you doing a cute thing in the show notes.
I have a problem with you not knowing how the K-I-S-S-I-N-G song goes.
Ha ha ha.
It would be Sonos and Google sitting in a tree.
Ellipsis.
Next line would be K-S-S-I-N-G.
You wouldn't say Anchor and Amazon.
You messed it up.
But it was two different topics.
I was trying to wrestle it in.
Well, you blew it.
You blew it.
No.
I'm speaking to you two fine gentlemen tonight from the peaks of... Hi, Sierra.
As am I, actually, but for a bad reason.
Oh, that's surprising.
Yeah, well... Oh, yeah.
Actually, I forgot to put that in.
That should be a topic today.
I just put it in, and I now have moved it up to the top.
But we can't get there yet because we have to do some follow-up.
So since we already are enticing the listeners, let's just dive right in.
John, can you tell me about Sky Platform exclusivity, if you please?
uh speculated on the last show that uh that sky's uh exclusivity to the apple tv would be just like every other exclusive in the gaming world a timed exclusive and that is actually confirmed on that game company's website it says arriving first on iphone ipad and apple tv additional platforms to follow no time window given but we'll see how that goes so i might just be able to hold out until it comes out on you know ps4 or whatever
And tell me about your chair, please.
So I have my chair, my ridiculously expensive Herman Miller chair that I've been sitting on since the last show where we talked about it.
Or maybe two shows ago, I forget.
But I just wanted to give an update on how that's going.
So I did take off both of the arms.
I had to order another Torx wrench because the one that I had couldn't fit in the little space or whatever.
But it's always good to have more...
allen keys and torque wrenches you know in in metric and standard and all sorts of sizes uh although torques it just comes in its own little sizes t3 is what i needed anyway arms are off t30 i forget anyway one of those i don't think it matters
It matters if you want to take the arms off your chair.
I had a set of Torx wrench things, but they didn't fit.
A couple of the screws are hard to get at because the levers that come out that adjust the seat are kind of in the way, but it's not that bad.
So I've been sitting on that chair for a while, and I have just some follow-up impressions of it.
i like it uh you know it's it takes a little bit of getting used to because it doesn't feel like regular chairs but i think i've settled into it pretty well two things about it have annoyed me so far one there is an adjustment on it to make the the seat length like basically from the back to the front of the seat to it to make it longer which is great for people with long legs like me because you're not supposed to have like half your leg hanging off the front of the thing
so you can make the seat longer uh i wish more cars had this some of them do some cars actually have this adjustment to sort of support your legs more uh you know more down towards your knee they say you're supposed to have like you know two inches between the back of your knee or the back of your calf or whatever and then the seat front so uh the herman miller and body has two big handles that you can grab and slide out the front part of the chair
which i do but unless you are in a situation where you're sharing your chair with somebody else and constantly switching back and forth this like many of the adjustments on chairs is something that you'll do once or twice in the beginning when you're getting used to the chair and you'll eventually decide what adjustment setting is right for me there's only a few choices there it's not like infinite adjustability and you find how the seat is comfortable for you and you leave it there
But for the entire time you own this chair, these two Mickey Mouse ears, coffee cup mug handles are going to be sticking out the front of your chair.
And every time I get into and out of my chair, somehow I bump into those things.
They're like ears, like useless ears, fossilized ears poking out of the front of the chair.
And I don't like that.
Second thing is, since I have it extended almost as far as it will go, I think maybe I do have it as far as it will go for my long legs.
there's like a little bit of a creakiness in the front of the chair as that little telescoping thing kind of flexes in its plastic grooves.
Maybe that squeak will go away over time.
Maybe it won't, but it's not a sort of... It's not a sound and a feeling that matches up with the price of this chair.
So I really like that.
And then the final thing, there's a lot of stuff under this chair for all of these spring-loaded mechanisms that handle the thing where you lean back in the chair and...
Some of it probably also handles, like, the back tension, and then there's the gas cylinder thing for the height of the chair.
That giant box of works that's basically under your butt takes up a surprising amount of room.
And you say, who cares about that room?
Nothing's going on under your chair, right?
Well, apparently, I'm someone who occasionally crosses his legs and shoves both his feet underneath the bottom of the seat, resting them on the top of the little leg thingies.
And I didn't know I did this as much as I do until my heels started hitting that giant box that I'm now sitting on.
And I suppose I could get used to it, but I'm still hitting my heels in that box a surprising amount of time.
I'm just like, I kind of wish that wasn't there.
I kind of wish I had that free space to shove my feet into again.
um so that's my update on the embody mostly i like it i think i'm definitely going to keep it um but i i'm sitting right now on the steel case gesture chair which just arrived today this still has arms on it and they're going to be much more difficult to take off i'm already puzzling over how i'm going to manage this but for now the arms are on and i'm sitting on it definitely feels different than the embody
Um, but, and, and it, it has right away.
It's adjustment for the length of the seat is to move the entire seat forward.
So it's all just one unit.
There's no extended bit.
It has less creaky bits on it and there's more room underneath it for me to cross my legs.
But, um,
it definitely feels different than the embody feels more like a normal chair and i'm not sure if i like it as much as the embody but i'm just sitting in it for five minutes here so probably next show i'll have a more longer term update on the comparison of these two chairs and i better hurry up because i got like 30 days for both of them to decide whether i want my bazillion dollars back for these chairs
So last episode, I was lamenting the fact that if you have an issue with your Google Pixel phone, you can get online and you can tell Google, hey, I've got an issue.
And they'll overnight you a box with a replacement pixel.
And then you put your broken pixel into the box and ship it back to them.
And I thought, man, that would be really awesome to be able to do that with Apple.
I wish that was a thing.
And a handful of people wrote in to say it is a thing.
So John Tooker pointed me to AppleCare Plus Express Replacement Service, which is if you have AppleCare Plus, a way that you can basically do the exact same thing.
They ship you a box and then you put your...
thing in the box that the new thing came in etc there's a joke here from saturday night live that i'm trying to avoid anyway uh prem wrote in to say uh i've done this and here's what it looks like and so we'll put a link to that in the show notes and it's exactly what you would expect to see so turns out this is an option i just had no idea which if you live far away from an apple store which most of the country probably does that's pretty awesome
And then additionally via Prem, they pointed me to a KBase article.
Hi, Stephen.
Entitled, How to Use Your Apple Watch Without Your iPhone Nearby.
And it says a handful of things in there.
But one of the things it says is to receive SMS, MMS, or push notifications from third-party apps on your Apple Watch Series 3 GPS and cellular, your paired iPhone must be powered on and connected to Wi-Fi or cellular, but it doesn't need to be nearby.
Okay.
So that kind of hints to me that Apple is proxying push notifications.
I have since heard reports that WhatsApp, I believe that's what the app was.
I know that that is an app.
I just can't remember what people were citing.
But a handful of people cited something, and I think it was WhatsApp, as not having an Apple Watch app at all.
yet people receiving push notifications via cellular.
Additionally, the developers of Do actually wrote us to say, Do uses local notifications.
I think the scheduled notifications were copied from the iPhone to the watch the last time they talked.
And I think one of us had theorized that that may be the case.
But...
It sure sounds like, and I have since gotten tacit confirmation from a couple of little birdies, that Apple is indeed proxying push notifications via, I guess, iCloud or something in order for your watch, your cellular watch, to receive push notifications, even if it's not in range.
I have...
I have had several people explain to me that I'm a moron and that actually Bluetooth works very far.
And I'm a moron that the watch was on Wi-Fi.
But I assure you, I checked to see what the watch says it was on.
And it said it was on cellular at the time.
So, yes, I'm aware that the watch does work on Bluetooth and Bluetooth works further away than one would expect.
I understand it works on Wi-Fi.
I don't know why it wasn't on Wi-Fi in this particular instance.
But...
The watch said it was on cellular and I am inclined to believe the watch.
So in summary, it sure does sound like that Apple is proxying iPhone push notifications, which is pretty cool.
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Moving on to Ask ATP.
Jason Townsend writes in, for those who run Plex on a Mac, how do you run it with no logged in user?
And I can speak for myself and say, I don't.
It is running as part of my user that I'm using right now on this very Mac.
And this user is pretty much always logged in.
and that's okay for me.
It may not be okay for you, listener, but it's okay for me.
I was hoping you had an answer to this.
That's why I put it in there.
I'm like, oh, Casey probably knows how to do this because I do the same thing.
It's running as, actually running as my wife's user, and she's always logged in.
Now, here's the thing.
You don't,
You have to be logged in, but you don't have to be the front most user.
So if one of my kids comes up and is doing their homework on their account on the same computer, as long as my wife is logged in in the background, Plex still works and runs.
So you don't have to leave their account as the front most.
But if there's a way to run it without you being logged in, like Cron it and run it as, you know, some other user with no GUI or whatever.
I have I have honestly I haven't even tried to do it but um I mean maybe have you tried anything Casey or are you just like well I just I'm always logged in so I have no need for this exactly right I have no need for it yeah so I say we're not going to say that it can't be done just that uh neither of us has tried to do it Marco I assume the same
Yeah, I mean, to me, the idea of running it without having a logged in user basically as root never even occurred to me because that's not how I would think to run things that are on a Mac in a server role.
Even though I know there are things that Macs can do as a server with no user, like the built-in Apache server and stuff like that, many of the things that you would run a Mac server for require there to be some kind of application in user space running to serve those tasks.
So the idea of running a Mac in some kind of server role without a logged in user has never even occurred to me to even think about.
Yeah, I know that was not the answer that you were looking for, Jason, and I'm sorry for that.
But that is the answer for us.
And if you happen to know how to do this, I would be curious to hear.
It's not really solving a need that I have, but I'd be curious to hear.
So do write in and let us know.
And Jason as well.
Tom Myers asks, could you guys help explain why a massively multi-core ARM Mac Pro... Oh, never mind.
We don't have to talk about this.
Moving on.
Just kidding.
What do you get for not picking the questions?
I actually meant to earlier today, and I got sidetracked at work and never did.
And actually, to be honest, I'm curious to hear your answer to this, John.
So let me reread it.
Could you guys help explain why massively multi-core ARM Mac Pro wouldn't be viable?
A 64-core, et cetera, A11X architecture, for example.
So it would be viable, but we've talked about this on the show before.
there's a couple of aspects of this uh you know so we all know that apple makes really fast system on the chips for their phones and then they make even faster ones that they use in their ipads and the number of cores on them has been increasing from one and now they're up to four in the in the phone right is it four i forget it's well with the eight series it's now six six you got the you got the four slow ones and the two fast ones yeah anyway that's a lot of cores it's more than they had before um but as we discussed last time this came up
to make something that doesn't you know that's not like a little system on a chip that takes ipad power but instead takes 150 watts or something like a you know a xeon class uh cpu um that's a very different kind of design you can't say well because we've made a chip for the ipad that's faster than all of our laptops right or all faster than our cheap laptops
we've basically done all the work to make the zeon class thing and you haven't there's a lot more that goes into making a zeon class cpu than just saying oh we have a core and we'll just multiply it out it's like a gpu where you just you know take the execution units and just add more of them and even that gets more complicated there's tons of things having to do with io and pci express lanes and figuring out the whole thunderbolt uh thing and the
Not to mention all the multiple cores and the cache coherency and the ECC RAM and all sorts of other things.
It's not to say they couldn't do it.
I'm sure they would do an excellent job.
It's just to say that by having an iPad and phone chips, they haven't done all the work.
If they wanted to make one, they could, but it's a lot of additional work.
And the question we've always had is, is it worthwhile for Apple to do all that additional work to essentially compete with Xeons for a line of computers that they sell very, very few of compared to anything else?
So...
Maybe that's the answer to the viability question.
Technically viable, sure, but Apple would have to do a ton of work.
Financially viable, can Apple justify that ton of work?
Maybe they will eventually because, I mean, as people have been benchmarking the new iPhone 8 and 8 Plus against Mac laptops, like modern Mac laptops that you can buy right now that are not like last year's models, and seeing how fast the system on a chip is...
The case for ARM-powered Mac laptops is getting stronger and stronger.
But the case for ARM-powered Mac Pros, I mean, if Apple started this project four years ago and has a Xeon-class ARM CPU waiting in the wings for next year's Mac Pro, then fine.
But if they haven't started that project now...
You're not going to see one of these for a long time.
It would cost a lot of money.
It would take a lot of time.
And honestly, I feel like Intel does pretty well in the high end, perhaps better than they do in the low end and the laptop space.
So best case scenario, Apple makes something that is some single to double digit percentage.
faster than intel and you don't really get a lot of extra points for doing it with less power in a zion class thing because you know you're not running them off battery like the whole point of these machines is they're plugged into the wall and it's like a huge amount of power going into them uh for to power everything the ram all you know the gpu the separate gpu the multiple gpus and stuff like that so um i think it's viable but it may not be financially the best thing for apple to do and they have a lot of work to do
I'm still super curious to one day discover if we'll ever see an ARM-based MacBook Pro.
Certainly Marco has thoughts about MacBook Pros these days.
I didn't actually put that in as a topic, but we can talk about that if we want.
But just before we leave this, the...
i would be super excited to see i think everybody would be every computer nerd would be like someone wants to compete uh with high-end cpus with intel that would be great and like i said apple has shown that it's got really good talent to make you know it's just a question of will does apple want to make a chip like this because if they want to i bet they could do a really good job and it would be super cool but it still strikes me as one of those fantasies like you know
the halo car kind of fantasy of like apple's gonna make everything its own and it's gonna make a special computer that's faster than anybody else's because they're gonna make their own cpu and that would be super cool but i just feel like it's still a pipe dream let's baby steps let's get let's get a new mac pro sometime this century and then we'll think about putting a 64 core arm chip in it
Richard Ernie writes in and asks a disturbingly reasonable question.
And that question is, how many iMac Pros do you think Marco will buy before the launch of the Mac Pro?
I have an answer.
I also have an answer.
I feel like the answer should be one, because you will presumably buy the most expensive and most ridiculous iMac Pro you possibly can in the way only Marco can do, and that should be it.
But I fear you will somehow talk yourself into, oh, this one thing I really don't need and or will make it worse.
So like as an example, the dual graphics card MacBook Pros.
I know there won't be a direct equivalent of that in the iMac Pro, but something along those lines.
Well, I understand that the dual graphics card MacBook Pros are hypothetically better, but they're better in ways that don't matter to me.
So I won't get the maxed out top of the line MacBook Pro.
Instead, I'll get a different MacBook Pro.
So that is the one...
I don't know, like wild card.
If you somehow convince yourself that, oh, maybe I don't need the cranked to 11 version of the iMac Pro, then I could see you in for two.
Because the first one will be the, oh, I don't need everything.
And then you'll decide, oh, that was a terrible mistake.
I need everything.
And then you'll get the one you should have gotten in the first place.
John.
So you're overthinking it, but also underthinking it.
My answer to this is... What does that mean?
Well, you'll see in a second.
So he's overthinking it because he's got his answer of one, but then he's hedging, and what about two, blah, blah, blah.
But you're also underthinking it, and you're forgetting a very important factor.
When I read this question, I had an immediate answer, and the answer is he will buy two before the launch of the macro.
Why will he buy two?
Because he'll get one because he's impatient, and he'll buy one for TIFF.
That's the answer.
I did not even think about that.
He's going to buy two iMac Pros before the Mac Pro.
You're right.
That is the answer.
So, Marco, not that it matters because you're going to be wrong, but what do you think the answer is?
I think the answer is most likely to be one, but might be zero.
Oh, I call foul right now.
Somebody mark this date down.
I said most likely one.
All right, go ahead.
Let him explain.
Okay, so in John way, I'll tell you that you're both right and wrong, and John is both wrong and right.
So the generous plan that would have me buying one is I buy one for myself.
When the Mac Pro comes out, I give it to TIFF and I get myself a Mac Pro.
The case for maybe being zero...
It basically leads into the first topic that we have on this list, which is labeled in the chat.
Why is Marco on his MacBook Pro?
And the reason why is because my iMac has some issues that I wanted to get repaired in the eight days left in the warranty.
Screen spiders.
Good call.
One of those is that the screen has image retention.
That is probably the biggest issue.
The issue that...
for long-term value and the ability to sell it for a reasonable price when i'm done with it i want to get that fixed because the screen has a screen only issue i am currently without my main desktop computer for probably a week maybe a little bit less if i'm lucky and that is horrible like it's incredibly disruptive so i have let me show you my desktop setup here i'll paste the link in the chat so the picture i've just shown you is my is what i am podcasting on tonight oh my word
Are you now the mayor of Dongletown as well?
I've got to wait for the picture to come in.
This is tremendous.
Oh, it's like the old times.
You need some soda cans.
Yeah.
I'm currently very much not satisfied with owning an iMac as my primary computer because as much as I miss the crap out of it, I really wish it was separate from the screen because then if something went wrong with the screen, I could just get the screen fixed.
Yeah.
If something went wrong with the Mac Pro, I could plug in a laptop to the screen on my desk and use that as a stand-in desktop while I got the desktop serviced.
But you're not enough of a hardware hoarder to have extra screens around.
So say it was separate and you just had to get the screen repaired.
You'd have a headless computer with no screen and you'd still have to use your laptop because what are you going to hook up the body of your computer to?
well i could get another screen like i i could i could basically overnight another screen i forgot buying solves everything buying solves all problems order a new screen get the other one fixed and that's harder to do when it's an iMac like i'm not gonna buy a whole new iMac to use for a week and then return it or or sell it or anything but no but you'd but you'd buy a new 5k monitor for a thousand bucks no problem maybe
Honestly, I'm losing a week of productivity here using my laptop as my only computer and trying to do iOS development on this.
It's crazy.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
You're not losing a week.
You're not losing a week.
You are perfectly capable of being productive.
You're too fussy to want to do it.
No, I am doing it.
I am powering through and doing it, but it sucks.
And it's at substantial reduction of productivity to lose eight inches of screen space of screen diagonal for a while.
So it's not great.
At times like this, I really make a mental note to say, just buy the desktop next time.
Just buy the Mac Pro next time.
So I really don't like the idea of...
spending a lot of money on an iMac Pro that might potentially still have, you know, that would still have this limitation of like, if anything goes wrong with it, I lose everything for the time it takes to get it serviced.
Also, you know, this iMac is only three years old, minus eight days.
And it already has like a few little annoying things about it.
and I can already see I might not want to use this after the Mac Pro comes out.
And I'm assuming for this discussion that the Mac Pro is probably coming out next summer.
And so if the Mac Pro comes out way later than that, like if it ends up being 2019 or next winter, this might change things.
But I might actually just get zero iMac Pros because the iMac Pro concerns me in the sense that
it's really hard to get an iMac to function well and be useful for 10 years john's mac pro is actually doing that and you're gonna pay the price of john's mac pro for an iMac pro you're gonna pay the the xeon tax you're gonna pay the pro tax you're gonna you were gonna pay like what did they say the base price was five thousand five thousand but you forget how
cheap this was even accounting for inflation 10 years ago this was only like 20 some 22 2300 dollars this was back when the mac pros were incredibly cheap for what you got yeah exactly yeah even with inflation you're coming out i think pretty far ahead with that and so the mac pro to me like you do pay a lot for it but
they last pretty much indefinitely.
They will last as long as you need them to last.
And if something does go wrong with them, you have a much better chance of being able to practically and economically service it yourself down the road when it's out of warranty, etc.
And so the lifespan of a Mac Pro tends to be longer than the lifespan of an iMac.
And I'm not considering the cylinder ones when I'm saying this.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
You're thinking of the old Mac Pros.
That's last decade thinking.
Like, okay, so that was the case.
But the most recent Mac Pro Apple has made, none of those things are true about.
It was unreliable from the start.
It wasn't easy to repair yourself, and people aren't using them well for 10 years.
So I think you kind of have to take a wait and see, and that maybe you won't have a choice of something that is big, reliable, and easy to repair.
Maybe that won't be one of your options.
Your option instead will be,
you know a faster hopefully quieter and more powerful separate screen thing but that is just on as unreliable as you know as any of the more recent apple hardware is and just as weird and flaky and the first generation has strange problems and all that stuff i'm not trying to be pessimistic but like we're all we're all kind of thinking like oh the new mac pros will be like the old ones and the cylinder was an aberration and i think that's still an open question
Yeah, you're totally right.
It is.
And, you know, I think the cylinder has taught them some lessons.
I would not expect a return to a giant tower, but I would hope that it's maybe kind of something in the middle there, like something between a sealed up cylinder that you can do nothing to and some kind of interchangeable parts thing, maybe whether it's a tower or not, you know.
perhaps a magnesium cube yeah right uh and so i i'm not sure i want to commit to an i'm now if the mac pro was totally dead and they said you know okay we're launching the iMac pro the Mac pro is discontinued we're never going to make one again we're just doing the iMac pro then this decision is easy of course i would buy one but because there is a Mac pro allegedly coming uh
I want to wait to see what that is first before I decide.
Because if it's closer to what I want in having things separate and maybe having even crazier CPU options and stuff like that, who knows?
If it's more what I want, I would choose that.
The other thing I'm worried about with the iMac Pro is thermals.
This is a completely new thermal design that basically they are...
wedging much much higher hotter higher wattage hotter running parts inside of an enclosure that they didn't design the size for like they took the size of the other iMac and it seemed like they basically had as a design goal fit these higher end hotter parts inside of this case that we designed for this other computer and
And while they seem to have done a lot of work about the internal design of it and dealing with the internal arrangement of those thermals and everything, the fact that they didn't design the external case for it, that they basically said, wedge this into that, that is probably going to have limitations and side effects that I don't like.
So maybe things are going to overheat and be bad over time.
That's another problem I have with my iMac is that
the GPU fan is now, or the GPU now runs too hot and the fan goes up constantly and it's audible in my recordings, which is one of the reasons I finally got it fixed because I can't have that.
And, you know, maybe that's because these parts in that, in that case, like I got top of the line parts when it was out.
So these are, you know, running pretty hot over three years and eventually that starts to have problems with cooling.
Um,
I fear whether the iMac Pro will have those problems or not because you're taking these hot parts and putting them into a case that is designed to be thin for some reason, even though nobody cares about how thick their desktop display is on the back.
But it's designed to be thin rather than being designed to hold Pro components.
The Mac Pro Towers, on the other hand, with the exception of the Cylinder, of course, although even the Cylinder did have a really clever cooling design that was really good as long as you didn't use the GPUs.
But the Mac Pro Towers were always like, we're going to design a complete enclosure, a complete shape.
around being able to hold and cool the entire range of high-end Pro parts that we're going to sell for this thing.
So I think it was always more likely that there would be fewer problems with thermals and things like that with the Mac Pro towers than with the iMacs.
So again, with the iMac Pro, we still don't know...
how loud is it going to be like are the fans going to spin up constantly and be audible or not because the mac pros are the same noise level regardless of what they're doing pretty much um so like a mac pro you know you don't really hear it an imac you hear it if you push it and that's kind of ungraceful and it kind of suggests thermals don't have a lot of headroom and everything else now there was talk um there was a weird geekbench result um that may or may not be real we don't really know people are believing that it might be real and
that might be the new iMac Pro CPUs.
And they were reporting that they were basically an alternate version of the workstation class.
So Xeons, typically the highest performance Xeons for desktops, they end in W for workstation at the end of their model number.
And this usually means...
the absolute highest clock speed for that core count that is available, because it's going to burn lots of power, so it's not quite great for big server racks, but it's going to burn lots of power, but it's going to be really, really fast for a desktop, and it's going to need a huge fan.
So those parts usually end in W. The ones in Geekbench ended in WB, or just B, I think, anyway, and they seem to be running at lower clock speeds than what we'd expect.
Still good, still really fast, but...
it looks like they might be having to use lower wattage chips in these iMacs than what a full Zeon workstation chip would be in like a tower.
And that's most likely for thermal reasons.
Those are 140 watt chips, 150 watt chips usually.
And an iMac chassis is usually designed to hold like, I think like a 60 or 80 watt chip.
And yeah, again, they have redesigned the internals of this to be, to offer more cooling, to fit higher wattage parts, but they also need to leave room for the GPU.
And so like there's...
Basically, we still don't know what the trade-offs are to get workstation-grade components into an iMac Pro, into the same case size.
And I'm guessing the trade-offs are going to be related to fan noise under load and a possible heat sealing that might limit the range of performance they can get out of those processors.
Whereas the full-blown Mac Pro that I hope will come out sometime next year...
That shouldn't have those limitations.
That should be able to use full wattage parts.
That should have a cooling system that has lots of headroom and that can cool quietly under load.
I don't know if it will, but it should.
And because the previous ones did, all of them, even the 2013 had that.
So I hope the Mac Pro offers those things.
And if it does, that's the computer I want to buy, not the iMac Pro.
But because neither of these computers are out yet, there's probably going to be other factors that go into it.
So if possible, I hope,
that my iMac coming back from repair can last me until the Mac Pro comes out.
So I can then decide then.
There's no way you will see that hot looking new iMac Pro and say, no, thank you.
I'll wait.
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So speaking of industrial design and cooling, in one of the many interviews and books that never seems to happen, if I could get like Johnny Ive and all of like John Rubenstein and all the people together and ask them about like past Apple designs, I would love to know.
What changed between nowadays and back when Apple made the cheese grater?
Because if you think about the cheese grater, and this is what I always hope that the new Mac Pro design will be, but who knows what it'll actually be.
The cheese grater, as you noted, and as Johnny Ive in his white world said, I think, in the introduction for the original cheese grater, the Power Mac G5, the design of it was not so much like all the modern Johnny Ive, or not just Johnny Ive, but the modern Apple designs by Johnny Ive's design team, where it's like, we wanted to boil it down to its essence.
Yeah.
and find, you know, uncomplicated, simple, direct, blah, blah, blah, all the things they do for things that are like phones or portable things where they don't want a lot of gigas hanging off it.
Whereas the cheese grater was, we wanted to be honest about the fact that the main job of this thing is to be a heat exchanger.
Like, it was modeled off of heat exchangers or air exchangers like...
that are up in rooms that suck in air in one temperature on one side and eject it out the other side at a different temperature.
I think somebody said, like, the actual cheese grater was modeled off a heat exchanger, right?
And so it wasn't designed to be the most sort of... Well, you know, it was designed to be...
True to its purpose, but its purpose wasn't to be a beautiful object.
Right.
Its purpose wasn't to be portable and uncomplicated and, you know, simple and obvious.
Its purpose was to exchange heat like that was the purpose.
And so.
it was designed with that as a goal and it seems like so many things that apple makes nowadays are designed with a with a simplicity of form as a goal which is a fine goal especially for portable things but as you said nobody really cares that much about the simplicity of form like if a more honest iMac pro
on the back of it would have looked like the back of a transformer.
Like it would have looked like a giant heat sink.
It would have had bulges and flares and fins, or it would have looked like the underside of like a Ferrari, like all sorts of ground effects and like a diffuser.
Like it would say the back of this computer is all about ejecting heat because honestly speaking, what is the purpose of this computer?
It's the iMac Pro.
It's not the iMac that's simple and elegant and just looks like a screen and you say, where's the computer?
No, this is the iMac Pro.
Its job is to be the fastest possible all-in-one computer that human beings can make.
And the main problem of a fast all-in-one computer is getting rid of the damn heat.
So the back of it looks crazy and just as big and chunky and has...
heat you know coming out the wazoo and that's what the cheese grater is it is a big giant thing cold air in front hot air out back gigantic fans nine fans steve jobs was raving or however many the original one had look at all these fans they're all computer controlled to be just the right amount of cooling at the right so they're not all running full blast all the time you know there is an elegance to it but it is so purpose-built to like you house all that hot stuff and get it cooled so i hope the mac pro is not like the trash camera it's like
what is the essence, what a form of the Mac Pro?
Like, I want it to be functional, and the function is heat exchange.
And things whose function is heat exchange don't look like lozenges, bars of soap, or simple, elegant designs.
I mean, in many respects, the chimney Mac Pro, the trash can Mac Pro,
does have a purity of purpose, cold air and bottom hot air out top, just like the G4 Cube, right?
But it was not designed to be like, how much heat can we get rid of?
Because they just had, you know, the two GPUs in there and the CPU, and they couldn't even cool them well enough.
Like, so it was a clever design for its size, but it was very, very small.
If you want to build something with a massive heat exchanging capacity, you make it bigger.
You want to have excess capacity, not be right on the borderline.
So...
Anyway, getting back to what I said, I would ask them, like, it's like the same people who were there.
Johnny, I've made the cheese grater, but now he's making all these beautiful featureless things with no ports on them.
What changed?
Surely it wasn't Steve Jobs saying, please make me something that looks like the underside of a Ferrari, right?
So someone there was like, okay...
was like in the design brief the main job of the thing that you are making is to be an efficient heat exchanger do that in the most elegant way that you can and i don't imagine steve jobs was forcing johnny out to do that steve jobs probably wanted it to be like the trash can like he doesn't like all the big you know fins and and you know holes all over the front and back and giant fans and stuff he just accepts that as a cost of doing business but they did the best job they could with it but it's like the same people are there
But their philosophy has changed, and Apple has stopped making computers like that, whose purpose is not to be simple, obvious, white Apple pencil with no things on it and just this beautiful, perfect form.
So anyway, when Johnny comes on the show, I'll ask him about it and see, like, has he changed his mind?
Has his philosophy evolved?
Was there someone forcing him to make those older computers the way they were?
Was someone forcing him to put all those ports on the side of his laptops?
Like, I don't know.
So many questions.
Johnny, come on the show.
We'll talk.
Yeah, that's going to happen.
No, I mean, I totally agree.
And I wish Apple, you know, like, you know, Apple is, you know, famously talked about courage to remove the headphone jack.
And, you know, and Apple is considered a very bold company for the courageous designs they make.
What they lack, it seems like, in the hardware designs of their computers, is not courage, but confidence.
They need the confidence to know that they can make something that sacrifices visual symmetry for functionality.
That doesn't take courage.
It takes confidence.
Because you have to be able to know in your head that even if the press says, oh, you know, it got thicker...
Or, wow, that iMac, it looks pretty thick from the back or whatever.
Apple has to be confident enough to be able to say, we believe in our design because it is better that way.
Even though you're saying it doesn't look as good or whatever, we know that it works better.
And it seems like they don't have that confidence anymore or it's not being properly enforced somewhere along the way or something because...
A great computer, nothing about its physical form, should unnecessarily detract from how great of a computer it can be.
And there are certain models in the lineup where you'd make a different choice.
So things like the 12-inch MacBook, where the whole role of this computer is what is the absolute smallest, thinnest, lightest computer we can make and have it still be remotely usable.
So then you make different trade-offs.
But as you go up the line, as you get more and more to the larger and higher-end and pro machines, and especially when you get into things like desktops, which are kind of pro by nature and have very different physical demands around them and very different usage around them, the decision always has to be made the other way of, yeah, you know what?
You can make it beautiful.
Have the confidence to know that you can make a beautiful design while still letting it function well as the computer that it has to be.
And it seems like Apple doesn't have that confidence anymore or at least or they don't have that ability anymore, which is even more concerning.
I understand your point.
I deeply disagree.
And I think they're showing external confidence by doing things like going all in on USB-C, right?
Because USB-C was not it did not have a terribly great story when the MacBook and the MacBook Pros went all in on USB-C.
And it's gotten better.
But as you recently wrote about... I was going to say, the story isn't that great now.
No, no, no.
And that's exactly what I was going to say.
It's gotten better.
But without question, there is a long way to go.
And I thought your post touched on that really well.
Or I shouldn't say touched on it.
It handled it really well.
So I think they're showing external confidence.
But...
With a few tweaks, I think what I would say is it's the internal confidence that they lack.
It's the internal confidence for some designer or whomever to go to Johnny and say, you know what?
Maybe we should make this a little thicker.
Or you know what?
Maybe more than one port on the MacBook Adorable would be useful.
Or you know what?
Yeah.
Maybe MagSafe wasn't so bad.
And I think the problem is internal courage to stand up to whoever's calling the shots on why it is these things are, as it appears to us, very crippled.
Like, they're great machines.
I love my MacBook Adorable.
I really do.
But damned if it wouldn't be great if I had one more port on it, you know, or damned if it wouldn't be great if I had MagSafe on it.
Because just yesterday, I think it was, I ripped it off my nightstand.
It was charging on my nightstand.
I caught the cable with my foot and it came flying off my nightstand.
It's fine, thankfully, but... Did it land in a pool of water?
No, it did not land in a pool of water, thank goodness.
The waterbeds are not trendy, so we were safe there.
God, can you imagine me with a waterbed?
That'd be terrible.
They still have their fans.
Well, in any case, the point I'm driving at is I think it's the internal confidence that's the problem, that nobody's standing up to Johnny or the mythical version of Johnny.
Who even knows if it's really Johnny anymore?
But the mythical Johnny who is saying, no, this MacBook Adorable will have only one port.
No, these butterfly switches are the only way to go.
You know, whoever is making those decisions, be that an individual or a committee, I think it's the lack of internal confidence to say to them, no, this isn't right.
This isn't good enough.
We do need one more port on the adorable.
We do need better keyboard switches or whatever the case may be.
You know, I think that's where it's lacking.
Like I said, it's like, what is the design brief?
What is the goal here?
And I think the design philosophy and the goal for a lot of portal devices is very often don't have so much crap on it.
Don't have a million buttons.
Don't have a million ports.
It's easier to waterproof.
It's simpler.
It should look simple and obvious.
Having the front be all screen is a natural evolution of...
Not having a hardware keyboard.
Why not just have a screen and a single button on the front?
Like that kind of elemental simplicity is very appropriate for a certain class of devices that Apple happens to sell a lot of.
Because you don't want a phone with a million things sticking out of it for most consumers.
It's supposed to be a thing that fits in your pocket.
And even laptops, you can see an argument for there.
Laptops are simpler when there's less stuff, when there's fewer moving parts, fewer seams.
Like, you know, just compare the original aluminum, you know, PowerBook G4 to a current unibody one.
The design...
and evolution of that of trying to say simplify, simplify, simplify has made a better portable computer because it flexes less because it's, you know, it has fewer seams.
It has fewer things to go wrong on it.
Even the hinge is more robust and everything about it is simpler.
And then that extending just start taking ports off and then you start to get into, you know, I'm not quite sure about that, but you can see kind of an argument for the simplicity.
But where this goes awry is on things like the iMac Pro and certainly the Mac Pro,
The story has to be different.
Your goal has to be different.
You can't take that same design philosophy that works for phones and tablets and possibly also laptops, especially the small ones, and say, this same design philosophy should apply to our professional modular computer.
because that's not what it's supposed to do as marco said professionals don't care what the hell the back of their desk under desk mounted computer does like it is supposed to fulfill a job and its job is to be really fast and capable and being really fast and capable means ejecting heat and having a lot of room inside and being reliable and stuff and if that's your goal like
these are the most important things it's got to be super reliable and just chunky and very powerful and like the maximum amount of power and flexibility you design a different thing i i start thinking of things like power tools or off-road vehicles not like cars that you buy but like actual like you know getting around on the farm or going through the jungle or whatever those things
They can be elegant and have nice designs, but they have a job to do, and their design is entirely focused around that job.
No one is trying to say, can we get huge ground clearance on this off-road vehicle, but not have a big gap between the wheels and the wheel well?
Yeah.
Like, could we cover that over with something?
Like, could we make it so that, like, that we have, like, a skirt that when the wheels compress, the skirt moves up so it looks more elegant?
It's like, what are you even doing?
Are you trying to make this car look like a low-slung, you know, Tesla?
Like, the whole point is it's supposed to go off-road.
It's like, yeah, but it's so ugly when you can see all the suspension bits and you can see all this air under the car.
That's a skirt idea.
We can make the skirt work.
It's like, no, don't try to make the skirt work.
Like, just...
What huge amounts of travel and big exposed springs and shocks.
And don't worry about the skirt.
Don't worry about the big gap.
That's what it's supposed to do.
Just make the best off-road vehicle you can make.
That's what I want them to do with the Mac Pro.
And the iMac, it's like...
It has to be just as slim as the regular iMac.
Why?
Why would you make it just as slim as the regular iMac?
Yeah, maybe you can.
We're all so smart with our cooling.
Like, you already have the iMac.
The iMac is, oh, I don't even know where the computer is.
It's so skinny.
And we got rid of the optical drive, so we can make it even thinner on the edge.
It looks beautiful and elegant.
And it does.
And I think an all-in-one computer that is very thin and elegant and has a beautiful screen is a product they should make.
And they do.
It's the 5K iMac.
It's great.
When they go to make the iMac Pro, why is it like, design brief hasn't changed?
yeah it's supposed to be like the fastest computer you could buy especially remember as i pointed out before they weren't going to make the mac pro the imac pro was going to be their top of the line and still they said it's got to fit in the same case and that that's what's wrong like they they have the wrong goal even before they begin executing and i don't i don't know where that comes from i don't know why that philosophy is extended maybe it's they just think all technology should be like that but they didn't always think like this and the cheese grater mac pro is the the perfect proof johnny ive
made that computer and talked about it his team made that thing and it is perhaps the most brutally utilitarian thing that apple has ever made it's a big silver heat exchanger with freaking handles on it with a huge amount of space in it that's what i want i want i want i mean not that exact design but i want that philosophy executed well
Yeah, and the thing is, like, that giant metal tower full of fans and everything and ports in the back and huge air holes in the front and back, that thing is beautiful.
That is the nicest PC tower I've ever seen, bar none.
It's not even close.
And for people who love computers and who need high-end pro computers, that is beautiful.
Yeah.
You don't have to make it ugly.
People who look at that and say, that's ugly, are people who hate computers.
It seems like the people who were responsible for designing computers at Apple hate computers.
And I don't say this lightly.
What I mean to say here is literally that it seems like the computers at Apple are designed with the goal of hiding and getting rid of as much of the computer as possible.
And there is a place for that.
Again, there's a place for that in the ultra-thin and light, the MacBook 12-inch and everything, and even maybe the Airs, although we're going backwards in that direction as well in the Air range.
But at the high end, you are selling to people who need computers and, in many cases, who love computers.
And those people don't want you to hide everything away, especially when it comes at the cost of practicality and functionality.
Those people are happy to see the computer.
We are happy to have ports and air holes and a little bit more thickness in order to get, like, a better keyboard or better battery life or something else.
Like...
that market isn't trying to get rid of the computer.
They're buying a computer.
They like computers.
And the pros want to see, like, the pros want a pro piece of gear.
The people who buy the giant off-road vehicles are not looking at them and saying, man, this thing's so ugly, it's a shame no one can make these things prettier.
No, they love the way they look.
They buy them because of the way they look, partially, and their functionality as well, some people just for the looks, but, you know, like...
So to make a honking Mac Pro tower that's full of high-powered, the best components they can make, you know, cooled with giant, slow fans so they can be really efficient and really quiet, even under a load, that is beautiful.
And that is good design for a high-end Pro computer.
What they seem to be doing now instead is applying the wrong design principles to, like, you know, what John said, like,
What these tools are here to do, they're applying the same principles as they're applying to the ultra-thin 12-inch ultra-portable.
That's not good design.
Design is how it works.
A famous guy said that once.
Design is taking the requirements that the people have who are going to use this thing and making something that...
works well with those requirements, and also hopefully looks decent in the process.
But design is about those requirements and how you literally design the work to accommodate those.
So what they're doing when they make a pro computer that has massive practical problems when used professionally or when used by anybody, that's actually bad design, no matter how it looks.
And so they really need, I think, to shift this thinking, and I hope they have with the Mac Pro.
They really need to shift this thinking back into, it is okay to make a computer that looks like a computer.
There is nothing wrong with having a high-end Pro desktop that's probably going to cost like $8,000.
To have that be a little bit bulky and to have that go under your desk and to have that look like a square with ports in the back and fans in the back, that's fine.
That's actually what people want.
And to those people, if that is designed well, it will be beautiful no matter how it looks.
They could have a design like a Star Trek spaceship.
Like it can be cool, but it has to be fulfilling its job.
And its job is to eject heat and hold lots of things and be super fast.
And it's just you end up with a different shape.
You end up with a different everything about it.
There's lots of options available, lots of things I'm imagining where it gets fuzzier, I think.
And I was thinking about this when I was sitting looking at the bunch of laptops around the table at work.
A lot of people at work now have the same thing I have, the 2017 MacBook Pro with its four little USB-C slash Thunderbolt 3 ports all around the sides of it.
But then other people still have the 2015 ones like an earlier, right?
And honestly, when they're all sitting around the table like that, other than the fact that the new ones are space gray for the most part,
they don't look that different like the you can tell that the new ones are thinner and the screens are nicer right but the other ones don't look that bad but i look at the sides of the other ones and like they don't look that much thicker but then i see sd card uh hdmi port magsafe uh usba and
And I think, again, we talked about this when they did the Mac roundtable, and I was like, but they said, didn't they say something about maybe they'll be reconsidering their choices with the MacBook Pros and coming out with new ones that appeal to people more?
And I kept thinking, like, that maybe in the future they would reconsider their decisions and, like, put an SD card slot on it or, like, just make different decisions about ports and stuff like that.
Sort of backpedal on the...
uh you know relentless simplification on their biggest laptop and i'm not expecting them to make a keyboard that's not the same size as the small ones you know i'm not going crazy here but i'm just saying like the the utility of like i think a lot of people are jealous at work of the people who come in with the old laptops and just plug their thing right into the projector with no dongles right um or that uh you know the
you know mag safe of ripping the thing in and out and then get up from their desk and stuff and maybe they're also jealous of me with my single wire connecting with all the other stuff so there's advantages thunderbolt as well but like i think of it this way if they came out with the new macbook pro that had an sd card and hdmi on it a lot of people
would love it and i'm trying to think who would hate it the people like i don't want that additional complexity i never use hdmi would they hate it would they just be like oh whatever i don't care i don't use those ports like who would really hate it other than saying you've just mucked up my perfect clean symmetrical design but i don't think people who buy them
care that much about it and the people who would love it boy would they love it so in this new mac renaissance of where we all believe apple's turned a corner on the mac and is paying more attention to it and is going to make a mac pro and they're making the imac pro and they're doing all these things i'm waiting to see how how far does the mac renaissance go we know it goes far enough that there are they revived a line of computers that they weren't going to do so that's great i love it like and that gives me hope for everything else but a real test may be what happens to the 15 inch
do they go more utilitarian in any way on it do any ports come back is there any recognition that some decisions made with the current line of computers may not be exact even if it's the keyboard which is a topic of conversation this week which may or may not to get to in the show do they
change their thinking on the keyboard and say, we need to take another run at this in a big way.
Even if the new keyboard is just as thin as the old one, to just have a different philosophy of saying, like, you know, we need to rethink this.
Like, how much are they willing to reconsider...
on the models that are, you know, are not the... I was going to say they're not the very, very top-end, but the 15-inch is their top-end laptop, right?
How much are they willing to reconsider?
And I'm still maintaining fantasies that they're going to be willing to reconsider a lot, that the new Mac Pro will be the giant purpose-built heat exchanger that I was describing, that...
You know, the iMac Pro really will be amazingly fast and competent, even if it isn't the same case.
And that the new line of laptops, like, they will see that they're learning from their mistakes and they make different decisions about it.
And they can make a big deal out of it.
Like, we heard you.
We know you don't want as many dongles.
So now there's HDMI and an SD card or whatever they decide.
Like...
That would be a huge applause line.
Tons of people would love it.
It would make the computers more popular.
Some people would be disappointed that it's not as simple, but how many?
How many who don't work in the sealed-off, frosted glass area with Johnny Ive would actually be disappointed by those computers?
Yeah.
So, Johnny Ive, come on the show.
We're waiting for you.
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By the way, there was one thing about that picture I posted about my setup that you appear not to have noticed.
Your glass of water?
John, how many dongles do I have?
I don't know.
Some of them are black and some of them are white, so I can't really tell.
I got to zoom in.
Am I at 100% on this?
Let's see.
Zoom in.
I see... John, what shape are my arrow keys?
oh they're not full size is that the yeah the screen's different i could tell from the screen board is that's 2015 yes it is oh god but you do you still have a dongle what is that ethernet yeah ethernet dongle yeah thunderbolt ethernet and then you've got the mag safe what is the black thing coming out
optical audio optical audio which doesn't exist in the new ones but does exist on my iMac the trackpad is smaller and the little cutout where you're the finger thing where you reach in to get the lip to open it up is actually not as wide as well i believe anyway yeah now you do you have uh 20 i can't keep track of what laptops you have do you still have a 2016 or 17 i do but not for long i'm going to sell it all right and where did this 15 come is this just one of your old ones or did you buy another one ebay
ebay can't you just buy these directly from apple now you can they still sell them yeah they still sell them brand new um this one was this is the base cpu the 2.2 with the 512 ssd which i i basically i required a bigger ssd the last when i actually had one of these you know in 2015 um it was only the 256 ssd and it killed me i i like one of the reasons i had to upgrade was just because i i just kept slamming into that because like
you know when you're once you're doing ios development you need a ton of disk space uh to keep up with all the you know betas and everything else so anyway uh so 512 ssd everything else is base on it uh and it has apple care uh because it was bought in september of 2016 like a month before the new ones came out it has apple care until 2019 the battery only had 50 cycles on it and it was 1600 bucks
to get the same thing new from Apple with AppleCare would be $2,800.
So I decided to go used on it.
And it's totally great.
Basically what happened here is my plan of getting the 2017 15-inch and using it all summer at the beach and then bringing it home and bringing the LG 5K home and using that as my desktop until the Mac Pro comes out
That plan ended up being just not working for me because it ends up the 15-inch is not a great desktop.
It can serve as one with the LG display.
It can be a desktop, but it's not a very good desktop.
I would rather use my three-year-old iMac that is purpose-built for that than use the weird clamshell and everything else.
Um, so I'm just going to try to keep using my, using my Mac.
And, you know, I gave these butterfly keyboards a year.
I first had a 2016 touch bar, 15 inch, sold it, switched to the MacBook escape, sold that to my curly and switched back to this, this summer when I, when I just went, when I had this harebrained desktop idea, I gave this keyboard a year.
I've had the 2016 version and the 2017 version, um,
they're all just incredibly incompatible with me.
I thought I'd get used to it.
I didn't.
I hated every single minute of typing on it.
Every single time I would think to use that computer, it would turn me off from wanting to use my laptop to have that keyboard there because every single time I typed on that keyboard, I hated it.
And every time I said, you know, maybe everyone's right and I'll get used to it.
And I gave it a year, people, and I didn't get used to it.
And every time I would see someone else's, like, John, what you were just saying about the conference room, every time I would see someone else's 2015-era 13 or 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro,
I would be like, oh, man, I wish I never sold mine.
I like that so much better.
And I started browsing eBay.
I'm like, you know what?
These are not that expensive.
To get one that's very lightly used, these are really pretty inexpensive.
And I can sell the one I have for probably like $2,800.
And so I waffled about it for a while and I was worried.
I'm like, is it going to feel really old?
Am I going to regret losing USB-C?
Am I going to regret that it's bigger and heavier?
Is everything going to feel and look old and I'm going to feel like I'm stepping back into the past?
My impression of this has quite surprised me, actually.
Nothing about it feels bigger or heavier.
It is, but it's such a small difference that honestly, when you go the other direction, you don't really notice it.
Like it's, it's, it's a half pound heavier and it's, you know, a couple of millimeters wider in each dimension or something like that.
Like it's not, it's not that much different.
Like you didn't like for all the crazy things we gave up to go to the super thin, you know, USB-C models.
It didn't actually get that much thinner or that much lighter.
Yeah.
Oh, and the battery life is better on 2015, by the way.
On this used 2015 model, the battery life is better than my almost new 2017 model.
And not by a small amount either.
Because, surprise, the battery is actually 33% bigger.
So that actually matters, even with an older processor.
So anyway, you don't notice the size difference when you go the other direction.
I did not notice the loss of the trackpad size.
You just immediately adjust.
In fact, it's actually easier because now there's no more accidental trackpad input when you brush against it.
I did not notice the loss of the touch bar because I always hated it and never really got into using it.
I occasionally miss Touch ID, but not much.
I love having the arrow keys back to the way they were because I can feel them.
Because you need arrow keys that have a different shape than the rest of the keys because they are far away from the home row.
So when you reach over to them, you are not as precise as you would be with keys near the home row because you're moving your hand a little bit.
So you need there to be some kind of tactile feedback so you can feel where the right keys are in order to hit the right one.
that's why the new generation arrow keys that have no metal gap in them and that are all the same height are so easy to hit the wrong one on because your hand is moving over there and has nothing to anchor itself based on feel so the arrow keys in this are perfect they feel wonderful the rest of the keyboard is perfect and feels wonderful for about a second it felt mushy and then it felt great so that took no adjustment time the ports are luxurious
I got to remove, oh, geez, I mean, a whole bag full of stuff from my travel bag.
Like, I got to remove so much crap, so many dongles.
My entire dongle bag is now just in storage until I have to switch back to a USB-C sometime in the future.
So that's, like, my travel bag is so simple.
It's just the laptop and a power adapter and a couple of the USB cables that I was already bringing before because nothing else in the world is USB-C.
So I was already traveling with USB to lightning cables so I could plug them into hotel lamp tables and stuff.
So I'm just using those now to travel with.
And the computer and the power cable.
That's it.
I don't need an SD card reader.
I don't need any dongles.
I don't need any hubs and HDMI adapters and everything.
It just works.
And it's all built in.
And it looks great.
And it feels great.
And it feels like a computer that was designed for use.
Not a computer that I have to adapt myself to it.
This computer was designed for me to use it.
And I am just so much happier.
The only thing I miss about the new one... I don't miss the thinness.
I don't miss the lightness.
I don't miss the space gray.
By the way, the space gray, that's a very fragile coating.
And that'll chip pretty easily if you even nick it a little bit.
The only thing I miss, surprisingly...
is I actually kind of miss having USB-C for power.
Even though I don't miss the USB-C brick that doesn't have the little cable management wings, it is nice to be able to use other third-party chargers.
For example, the Anker 60-watt thing that I have.
It's nice to use that.
It would be nice to be able to use USB-C batteries if I needed to on the plane.
But ultimately, that isn't that much of a problem because...
This thing has a 99.5 watt hour battery in it.
It's a pretty big battery.
The battery life is pretty good.
I probably won't need a battery in practice.
It's just great.
It doesn't feel noticeably slow.
There's no other downsides to it.
And in fact, when you buy an old one off of eBay, not only do you save a ton of money, all the accessories cost way less than they did when they were new.
So like I long ago, I got rid of my Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter because I thought I would never use it again.
So I had to buy a new one to use Ethernet here at home for this because that's how to run my computers.
And, you know, I think when it was new, it was like 30 or 40 or 50 bucks.
I got one on eBay new for like, I think, $19 or
I have another power adapter, an extra power adapter coming tomorrow.
Also new.
That was $30.
It's just great.
I think there's a reason they still sell this.
Because it's a fantastic computer that I bet a lot of people are still buying.
It's just great.
I'm so happy with it.
And I hope that I can use it until they make a computer that actually is better for me.
I have thoughts.
So first of all, this is the epitome of different strokes for different folks, right?
Because I have basically this machine as a work machine, and we are still buying or really leasing this machine brand new for incoming employees, incoming engineers.
Right.
We do not have a Touch Bar Mac that is being issued by my company yet.
I forget the reasoning behind it, but it basically boils down to it provides little to no benefit, so why bother?
Every time I'm away from my desk and away from my wireless Magic Keyboard and have to type on my work laptop's keyboard, I hate it.
God, do I hate it.
It's mushy.
It's sloppy.
And it just feels friggin gross.
And it's funny to me because you have the exact same opinion, but the other direction in that we are like polar opposites on this.
And you know what?
That's that's fine.
You know, everyone has an opinion.
That's OK.
What works for you is great.
What works for me is great.
And that's fine.
But it's funny to me that you prefer this so heavily, particularly the keyboard.
Like, the rest of it, yeah, that makes sense.
But particularly the keyboard, I'm surprised you prefer it that much.
My question for you, though, is what's your long game on this?
Like, are you just going to pull a Syracuse and run this until you can't get whatever ridiculous California code name is, like, three or four versions from now?
Like, what...
What is the long game?
Because eventually I reckon you're either.
So there's only a couple of ways to go.
Right.
You use this until you can't anymore.
And then you're going to have to figure out a new plan.
You wait for Apple to have an oops.
We're sorry.
Which, to be fair, is certainly possible, but not exactly their style.
I would say unlikely.
yeah and unlikely and i feel like i had a third but i lost it but you see what i'm saying like you just go to i guess you buy a lenovo like you know what is what is the long play for you then i mean i could hackintosh it with someone else's laptop but no i mean the long-term play here is i hope this lasts me long enough that i either stop caring about having a good laptop uh stop needing a good laptop or apple starts making better ones and as simple as that i mean
I hope it lasts that long.
If not, I'm going to have to figure something else out.
It could be next summer they might release a new one that I like and that I switch to that.
I have no idea.
But honestly, I think that would be too soon.
That would seem very unlikely to me.
My long-term plan here is when the scroll direction changed in macOS.
Which moment was that?
Like Lion or something?
It was a while ago now.
Yeah, maybe even earlier than that.
yeah so when the scroll direction changed i i thought you know they have an option to keep it the other direction but we know how apple is there's only there's only going to be a limited time that that option is going to be there so i might as well get used to the new one now and switch so i switched immediately hated it gave it like a few days still hated it and i switched back you know i thought you know what
There might come a time where I don't have this choice anymore, but that time hasn't come yet.
So let me just enjoy the way I like it while I still have the choice.
And then when the time comes that forces me to make a choice I want to make, I'll deal with it then.
So that's kind of my philosophy with this.
Like...
This is not a sustainable plan to just keep using the 2015 MacBook Pro forever.
Obviously, that's not a sustainable plan.
But I don't need to give it up right now.
I am way happier with this laptop right now than I am with the 2017 model.
And so I can use this for probably a while.
I'm probably going to want to move to something else before I'm forced to move to something else.
And so I might as well enjoy this while I can, while it is still great, while it is still competitive and useful and works great.
When the time comes, for whatever reason, that stops being the case, then I'll figure it out then.
Real-time follow-up, it was Lion, by the way, where they added the feature.
And I still have that in the non-default setting as well.
Wait, wait.
The two of you are saying that you are not on natural scrolling?
You're on the scrolling from the 80s?
Old school, yeah.
Yes.
oh my word you're so old the two of you i'm so disappointed in you you're so old there's no there's no reason there's no reason to change it like i mean i'm i'm i didn't even try to get used to the new way because they they gave you an option from day one to not do that i'm like oh well it's not like it's not even a penis hack it's a gooey option uncheck never think about it again and they've sustained that like it's it's still there
still you can do the opposite way, and so that's the way I like it.
I also remap Command-N to the new folder because I've been doing that since I was 10 years old, and there's a feature in the operating system that lets you assign keyboard shortcuts to any menu in any application, and it's a supported thing, so of course I'd do it.
Like, I don't see why I wouldn't.
Like, that's part of a computer being a computer, right?
That's what separates us from the multi-pad mongrels, right?
Like, we can do, you know, you don't like the...
you don't like the keyboard shark guess what i can reassign it and not by hacking something it's a feature of the operating system there's a workflow it's system preferences you just go there and type like it's a real thing uh anyway yeah um and i kind of feel the same way about scroll direction like if forced i'm you know they take it away and there's no p-list hack or whatever i probably won't go to heroic links to get it back but i might grumble but uh you might grumble
I think Marco's plan is mostly sustainable because, again, I still keep thinking, perhaps wrongly, that we are in the beginnings of a Mac renaissance and that...
It's going to take a while because computers take a long time, like the pipeline is long, but then Apple is indeed reconsidering some of its broad decisions about how it makes Macs.
And so the new keyboard that has more travel and is more reliable and is more pleasing to people who don't like the new one.
and is only on the 15-inch model or whatever, that's not coming, like, anytime soon.
But if they start on it now, in three years, it will be here.
And that's, you know, like, they're reconsidering how they build their computers and what people want out of them.
Like, satisfying Mac users.
Again, that Mac roundtable.
Everything they said in that Mac roundtable was essentially...
We hear you, we've realized we've been doing things in the wrong way, and we're going to change course and try to do them in the right way, like the way that will make everybody happy.
Starting with, hey, the Mac Pro, we were going to get rid of it, we didn't think it was necessary, but actually it is.
How far that goes, I don't know, but...
If you're a little patient, I think you have to give it time because the pipeline takes a while to flush all this bad stuff out of the system before you see the new ones.
And it's just a question of how far they'll go.
The Mac Pro is going to be a great test.
If the Mac Pro comes out and it's another cylinder type thing,
exercise that does not bode well for marco's ebay computer because he's going to be hanging on to that for a while while he waits for the you know all like one approach they could take is we know a lot of people love the new keyboard and i kind of like it too by the way like i almost never use it so i think my laptop at work is actually a great test case because if my laptop keyboard at work dies that's a bad sign because i type on it so little like i type on my other keyboard all the time and she's a desktop but um
It could be that a lot of people like that.
And one way they could go is, we'll just make that reliable.
Find a way to make that keyboard that feels like that, that Casey really likes and that a lot of other people really like, and that I kind of like too, other than the arrow keys and all the other laptop keyboard crap that I hate just because of key layout.
Just make that reliable.
If that's what they do in three years, again, bad sign for Marco.
So we have many things to be watching, but I'm still entertaining fantasies that they are really turning the ship here
And they're going to let the Mac be the Mac in hardware and in software and make all of us old school Mac users happy.
Because honestly, who are you trying to make happy with the Macs?
Who's super happy with these new computers?
Many people might like them.
And I know a lot of people do like the new keyboard.
But...
I don't think anybody's head over heels for the new laptops.
And nobody was really head over heels for the new Mac Pro either.
So there's some work to be done there.
And Apple says they're going to do it.
And I feel like I want to give them a chance to bowl me over.
Before we leave this topic, we should also mention the amazing article by Casey Johnson at The Outline about the keyboards that came out yesterday.
That, like, you know, basically going through her process of, like, having to get keys repaired multiple times at Genius Bar, the crazy things they tell her, the, you know, the...
the like feigned surprise oh it must be a speck of dust it's like come on this is a widespread issue like they should know about this by now um it's a great article that i think everybody should read uh it spawned a lot of discussion around uh the other blogs as well pretty much everyone linked to it and said yeah me too you know and you know so it's it's pretty great um and you know just to add to this
there are a lot of people when when stuff like this comes out like when when we complain about the keyboard here or when other people complain about it or even when people report problems with it there's a lot of people who are like well i love it it's my favorite keyboard ever and the old ones all feel like crap to me now but not that different from case's opinion of it and i want to just state two separate things here you know number one you can love it you can love the way the new keyboard feels but
that is a separate thing from, is it reliable or not?
Like, if the new keyboard has as many problems as it appears to have anecdotally, from almost everyone I know who has one, and almost everyone who I've asked on Twitter...
problems are widespread with keys getting stuck or breaking widespread it certainly seems like this is a pretty big problem and it's also important to point out these laptops aren't very old and they're having these problems already you know in many cases they had these problems within a few months of ownership um so it's you know there there are problems with this keyboard you can like it you can like the way it feels but if it has problems with reliability it's
It's a bad keyboard, regardless of what you think of yours personally.
My second thing to point out is that these aren't the only two choices we have.
You have the 2015 and earlier keyboard, and you have the MacBook hard as a rock keyboard that breaks constantly.
There are other options for keyboards that Apple can use.
And in fact, they already have one.
And Casey already loves it.
It's called the Magic Keyboard 2.
The Magic Keyboard 2 is very, very thin.
It has Johnny's dumb layout where there's no space between any of the keys, and the arrow keys are all the same.
They're all square and have no gap, so you can't feel where they are.
So it satisfies Apple's needs to be thin and be symmetric at the cost of feeling good.
It has pretty shallow travel, feels very precise, has a much more precise click and less wobbliness than the old 2015 laptop keyboards.
Best thing is, that uses scissor switches.
The old, reliable scissor switches that didn't die when one speck of dust got in one key.
Apple already has the solution to this problem.
They can have a modern, clickier feel with lower travel.
They can have the stupid layout that they want of the keys with no space and bad arrow keys.
And it can be super thin.
But it can also have reliable key switches that also do provide...
a little more travel than the MacBook keyboard, and a little less travel than the 2015 keyboard.
So it's kind of this nice happy medium there, and it should be way more reliable.
So all they have to do is take that keyboard that they already make and find a way to put that into laptops.
And if you go to a store and you look at a Magic Keyboard, they're pretty damn thin.
I have a feeling that Apple can figure out how to do that.
So being the optimist again, I think that, you know, again, it takes a while for these decisions to make it from, like, we've decided to do a thing to do manifesting a product, so it still could be years.
But their recent changes in the iOS device line give me some optimism here.
One of the best examples is both the iPhone 7 and the iPhone X, and I guess the 8s as well.
Like, the iPhone 7...
prioritizing battery life and going with the same form factor for the third year in a row and getting so much better battery life than the six and also the 10 the 10 not being you know even thinner than the seven like saying we're going to you know either make it thicker or keep it the same thickness and we're going to spend that on battery the two extra hours of battery life shows a change in philosophy from every single year we're going to keep making it thinner and thinner and just try to maintain
past two iterations have been we're not going to try to make it thinner at all costs and just maintain we want to increase battery life seven was better than the six and this 10 is way better than the seven two hours they advertise and that's what exactly what we've asked them to do you're making the wrong choices you're making it too thin go in the other direction and it took many many years for that to happen but they did it so
I am optimistic that even if it's not the exact magic keyboard, that three years from now, the new professional laptop will have a keyboard that is reliable and maybe that also has more key travel.
Maybe not, because I don't know what the percentages are for people who like the new one and people who don't.
And like I said, I kind of like it.
But certainly the reliability, whatever they have to do there.
And by the way, on the reliability front, someone who's been using Scissor Switch keys for a long time and who's had them on laptops for a long time, they are way more reliable, obviously, than the butterfly ones have proven to be.
But they're also less reliable than their predecessors.
I have broken...
keyboards with these scissor switches multiple times i've worn through at least one possibly two because one of my keys is sometimes wonky at work aluminum apple extended keyboards i have broken keys on powerbook g4 era computers which also had scissor switches under their very different looking key caps right um
I have never broken a key switch on an Apple Extended 2, which I used for years and years and years since like 1989 or whenever the SE30 came out.
I have never broken a key switch on any keys before that.
So if you want to compare reliability for the little plastic scissor switch things compared to the quote-unquote mechanical keys and other keyboards, another term that drives me nuts as if scissor switches are not mechanical.
Yeah.
It is a downgrade in reliability for size.
It's just a question of, is it an acceptable downgrade?
Me using an Apple aluminum extended keyboard for seven years and then I break a key, I'm like, all right, I've been pounding on this keyboard eight hours a day at work for seven years.
I accept that I have now broken one of the very commonly used keys.
And I can kind of get it to fix because I'm pretty good at like prying off these keycaps and putting it back on.
But it's always a little bit wonky.
And you know what?
Seven years.
Good job, keyboard.
You're filthy anyway because I haven't been cleaning you well enough.
Buy another keyboard for 50 bucks and you're fine.
that we're willing i think we're all willing to trade that even though apple extended to you could uh you know defend yourself from a mugger with and it will still work fine like it's just there is no you know what i mean like literally never broke i i remember i i uh dropped a pocket knife off a high shelf and it landed on the keyboard with like the blade out because i don't know i had my knife with my blade out and it like cut off like the corner of one of the keys
The thing was still fine.
Like, enough force to actually cut the plastic of the keycap of the key switch was fine.
So the thing was like a tank.
But, you know, so there's leeway for Apple to be thinner, be more elegant, be lighter weight.
reduced reliability just don't reduce it quite that much and it feels like they've gone too far with this one so i i have some hope that they are going to turn the ship on this one and it frustrates me that none of us know how widespread this problem really is we just you know it's all anecdotes and like oh yeah of course you know everyone who's going to respond to casey's article not this casey the other one is going to be like people who have keyboard problems and
And the same thing with like when Marco was complaining about the keyboard, you know, a year ago.
Of course, we heard from all the other people who hate the keyboard and other people have reliability problems.
Right.
But we can't tell percentage wise.
It's not it's not a it's not a representative sample.
It's just the people who are at the extremes and probably mostly people that agree with us.
But Apple knows, and I think Apple geniuses probably kind of know, because they're just there taking all the repairs and stuff.
So I wish we knew exactly how much we're overreacting to this and not, but anecdotally, it just seems so...
clear that like marco said these are new computers the keyboards are already failing casey johnson's article like it is the the it is of a type is of you know a very typical article where if you are in if you are in the industry of like writing about these type of products and you personally have to bring your brand new computer back three times because the keyboard won't work and
that's like that's you know i'm writing an article about this because this is way outside the realm of expectation three times like fine some you get it it doesn't work once you get it repaired like now that it's repaired it'll be fine especially if it's like you bring it in oh well this is the new 2017 keyboard with the rubber bubble now it's repaired it's fine but if you bring in and they they replace a huge piece of the computer at great expense
And it's just all you've done is start the timer again and go to six weeks have passed.
Now bring it back in again.
That'll be another three to seven hundred dollars and new one.
And just like that's just a bad design.
Like if there is no hope, if you feel like bringing it in and getting huge parts of your computer replaced because it's all one giant thing.
It doesn't make you feel like now this problem is fixed.
All it makes you feel like is you just started a timer on the next failure again.
That's just a bad design.
I really hope that we're capturing these devices and we're looking at the issue and we're taking stock and it's actually not that big a percentage and blah, blah, blah.
I don't know what to believe, but I do know
the hopelessness of that feeling i kind of felt it with my thunderbolt display when i would bring it in and get it quote-unquote repaired with huge amounts of the guts uh replaced but then i would get it back in the same problem would be there and i had to bring that in three times as well but luckily the third time was the charm and you know that did it
But these keyboards, I have very little faith that your third repair is going to be any more successful than your first or second repair, especially if you've got the quote-unquote new keyboard on the second repair and the third repair.
So this is all the type of thing that makes me believe that Apple will...
change its mind on this design a new keyboard or adapt the the the magic one that the other case is so confusing that casey list loves and in two to three years we will see a new 15 inch with these new keys and apple will talk about it in a subtle but not particularly self-deprecating way and we will all cheer and it'll be safe for marco to buy one unless it still has no ports in which case he'll still be angry
Well, just for the record, I have not used a Touch Bar MacBook Pro for more than about 45 seconds in an Apple store.
So that could be the utter filth and dumpster fire that everyone says it is.
I don't know.
But...
I do freaking love my MacBook Adorable.
Are there things I would change for?
I would love to have one more port.
I would love to have MagSafe.
But in the grand scheme of things, I freaking love this computer.
It's all of the good parts of the iPad except without that iOS thing that holds you back.
And so I love this computer.
I am looking forward to one day in like two years or something like that eventually getting a Touch Bar MacBook Pro at work and seeing what that's like.
I love my iMac.
Don't look forward to this.
You know what I mean?
I love my iMac.
I am I am hopeful, however, that especially this keyboard that I think Marco, you know, you made a really great point earlier.
You are really me.
I do like it.
I absolutely like it.
But I also concur that it is not as reliable as it should be.
And I had to buy, and we talked about it on the show, I had to buy a can of compressed air, which was the first time I bought one in probably a decade, because I needed to blow out this microscopic piece of dust from under the keyboard such that it would operate properly again.
And it turns out I just moved it to a different key.
And the second time I blew it out, and I think that actually did it.
But that's not an acceptable answer, right?
I've never had to blow out an Apple keyboard before.
And I just hope that Apple is willing, and I think they are, is willing to revisit this in the future.
But I love this iMac and I love this MacBook Adorable.
And we'll see what happens with my next computer whenever I buy it.
The other thing I wish this MacBook Adorable had, though, was Touch ID or Face ID?
That would be cool.
Do we think that's coming?
Yeah, before we turn to the Mac show, which happens occasionally.
Sorry, people.
We're Mac users.
I mean, have they seen the show art?
It shouldn't be that much of a surprise.
Yeah, so Face ID's Mac has been in here for a while, and I just want to touch on this, especially in light of Marco talking about iMac Pro versus Mac Pro.
I forget how we know that the iMac Pro is going to have a secure enclave.
Did Apple just announce that?
Or did people just ask the person who was in front of the computer at WWDC?
I don't remember.
I think it was in some firmware reference, some EFI reference somewhere.
Anyway, one of the potential advantages of an all-in-one computer, kind of like the advantage that Apple leveraged to bring the 5K iMac at first, is that you can do a lot of stuff when everything is inside the same case.
So...
a weird display controller with like you know the timing controller and the dual internal cable you can do all that and it's like it's all in one box you don't have to worry about that they can give you a 5k screen in the iMac before they can give it to you on the Mac Pro or some other computer with an external thing because they don't want to have two wires connecting it and it's inelegant and blah blah blah
Well, one of the other things that you can do is stuff like Face ID, where you've got the Sierra Enclave and you're guaranteed to have a camera and you know where the camera is and you know what the quality of it is.
And you've got it pointed at the person's face and you've got all the sensors and the IR dot thing and so on and so forth.
So Face ID starts to take off and works well.
I really do want to see it on Macs.
And...
the all-in-one computers, both laptops and the iMac, are the perfect place for it to appear.
We were talking about Touch ID and the Touch Bar on Macs, like on a separate keyboard, but that poses a lot of problems.
Can the Touch Bar work over Bluetooth if the secure enclave is inside the keyboard?
How does that communicate?
And similarly with Face ID and the IR sensor and the camera and everything, if Apple makes an external display, which they are, they're making an external display, but they want to put Face ID in it,
They could do it.
But how does that communicate back to those computer?
I guess the answer is like, oh, it'll just be Thunderbolt three and it'll be no problem.
But that's an additional complexity that makes that monitor even more complex and more fraught and more like potentially flaky than if everything is in the same box.
So I don't know if the iMac pros will have face ID.
It kind of seems like they wouldn't just because I feel like the timing of their production and the timing of the iPhone X production don't match up in a way that I would expect the first iteration of the iMac Pro to have them.
But I fully expect, and I think Apple should...
integrate face id into all of their macs eventually if it works well much more so than touch id which has been integrated into the laptops but hasn't made it to the desktops and having you have you know a laptop with touch id now and it's not the best implementation it's a little bit slow uh but
I would love it if I just opened the lid on my laptop and it unlocked by seeing my face because it's the perfect scenario.
When you lift the lid on your laptop, chances are even better than when you use a phone that you will be facing it.
Like that's how you open the lid on your laptop when it's facing you, right?
It's like, here I am.
You open it up and your face comes right into view.
Whereas your phone, you could like pull it out of your pocket or whatever.
Might be facing a weird direction.
Much more challenging there.
And similarly on iMac, you sit down in front of your computer.
Boy, it's got a great view of your face.
It can spray those IR dots all over.
Like, it's just it's right there.
Everything's built into one thing.
And so I really hope they do bring that to Max.
I really hope they kind of like skip Touch ID and say, well, we brought Touch ID to our laptops and it's OK.
But you know what?
Let's just skip right to Face ID because even more so than Casey's beloved watch unlock, Face ID is the ultimate.
I was going to say, because it's super quick now.
Super quick.
Between the new watch and the new OS, it is super fast.
But you don't have to have your watch on, and you can just sit down, and different people can sit down and can recognize who they are and switch to their account.
Like, if they can do that well and fast, that is a better future for authentication on the Mac than Touch ID ever could be.
And it solves so many problems.
The only...
downside is it's more difficult to do on the mac pro supposedly their top end computer now you have to figure out a way to you know get those cameras and maybe maybe i'm overblowing maybe thunderbolt really does support solve this problem entirely for them maybe they have plenty of bandwidth and side channels for all these weird sensors and everything and there's no problem with the drivers i just i just worry it will be less reliable than it is in the iMac where they've got everything inside the same case
The other problem is with laptops is that you have a pretty severe thickness limitation on the screen lid.
The screen lid is extremely thin.
They can't even fit a decent front-facing camera in the laptops.
You can get a $3,000 MacBook Pro that's brand new, and the FaceTime camera on it is worse than the iPhone 5S's FaceTime camera.
It's really...
really bad front cameras on the Macs possibly for cost reasons because they just don't care but most likely also because of thickness reasons that those screen lids are super thin and I don't know if they can fit good enough sensors into those screen lids on the laptops to actually achieve face ID anytime soon.
I think the camera is probably good enough already.
It's just I don't know how thick the IR spray or dip thing is.
As soon as we get the iFixit teardown of the phone, are they using all that thickness for the additional sensors?
Or are actually those sensors super thin and it's no problem?
I feel like it can fit.
There's not as much room as there is on a phone, but...
You know, like you can always make it a millimeter or two thicker.
I wouldn't say that they should go with the bulge, but maybe not the first generation.
But down the line, those sensors, there's nothing inherent about the sensors, like optically speaking, that makes me think they can't have it.
And I think the camera is plenty good enough already.
It's just the auxiliary sensors, the multiple cameras or the IR thing that I don't know how thick they are.
But anyway, no problem on the iMac.
Plenty of room there.
And so that should be the first...
The first place it appears is on their big desktops because you've got more room, more power, and that's what they should do.
Yeah, I have this slight fantasy that maybe the iMac Pro does have Face ID, and that's why it's not out yet.
They were holding it back until the iPhone unveiled with its Face ID.
But I think in reality, that's very unlikely.
The timing just doesn't seem to work out because you know everything having to do with Face ID is coming first on the 10, and that is everything that the company is focused on.
iMac Pro was started so long ago.
It just seems like their flagship phone is going to blaze the path for this, and then it just doesn't work out timing-wise.
I feel like even the second-generation iMac Pro,
that they may be in the planning stages even that one might not have face id incorporated but you know i would love to be surprised too i mean it's not like any of us scrutinize the forehead of the of the imac pro model and that thing to look for a tiny little impossible to see slightly differently colored black areas in the forehead to see if we could see an ir sensor yeah i think it's it's way more likely that face id does come to the mac but that's you know in like three years you know not probably not soon
I don't want to wait that long.
Next year, I want to see it in an iMac.
Maybe that can be in the Pro display.
We have speculated on the show, they mentioned in the Mac Pro briefing last spring that they're working on a Mac Pro and also a new Pro display.
We know nothing about that display except that they said it's going to exist.
So we don't know what size it is.
It could be 8K.
We don't know.
We have no idea what size it is, what resolution it is, what features will it have, when will it come out, what will it cost.
We have no idea.
One of the obvious questions is, what would make someone buy the Apple Pro display instead of the LG mediocrity box?
And Face ID could be a great answer because you know it's going to cost more because it's going to be an Apple display.
So if LG is still selling theirs, let's assume this thing comes out next summer.
Let's say the LG 5K display next summer is $1,000.
I think at best it's going to be maybe $900, but it's probably going to be about $1,000 next summer.
Apple comes out, let's say their display is 5K, it's probably going to be at least $1,500.
So what can they do to help justify that cost?
If LG's is going to be $1,000, now Apple's is not going to be $1,000.
So one of the things they can do that no one else can do is Face ID.
They can build that in.
That would be an incredible selling point that would make pretty much everyone at the high end choose that display over some other thing from somebody else.
So that's something they can do.
We don't know.
Until we get actual information and hopefully actual product releases from the Mac Pro and this Pro display, there are so many unanswered questions that make it very hard to contextualize the iMac Pro and to decide whether to buy the iMac Pro or the other things.
So you said you'll be buying 13 iMac Pros.
Well, thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Hover, and Away.
And we will see you next week.
I'm pressing the spacebar.
I'm pressing the spacebar.
I am pressing the spacebar.
I'm pressing the spacebar.
And nothing is happening.
This computer is about a year old and it was very expensive.
I had been waiting to upgrade for a long time.
And now you're telling me that it would need extensive surgery for a speck of dust lodged beneath the butterfly.
I found your instructions.
They were not helpful.
I bought this can of air.
I feel like an idiot.
Cause I'm pressing the space bar.
I'm pressing the space bar.
I am pressing the space bar.
I'm pressing the space bar.
And nothing is happening.
Oh, nothing is happening.
Get me out of here.
So tell us what your little experiment was last week with the show.
Not with your computer, but with the show.
Yeah, this didn't go so well.
So long-time listeners will remember that I had a bee in my bonnet, as Casey would probably say, about I was upset that Apple's MP3 decoding library did not properly seek VBR MP3s.
And that podcasts could be way better if they could be VBR MP3s because variable bitrate means that you can, for instance, the silences between all of our words, uh, that overcast is hopefully shortening for you for, you know, 70% of you.
Um,
The silences between all of our words can use very few bits because there isn't much information there.
The words can use a decent amount of bits, but not a massive amount because they don't need that much.
And then the theme song that plays between the after show and the regular show can use music bitrates.
And all of that could be done at a total file size of not that much compared to a constant bitrate mediocre quality file.
Just because different parts of the file need different things and some of them need more and some need less.
So it makes sense to encode with variable bitrate.
But...
The problem is if things that don't properly support variable bitrate, they basically read the file as if it's either the average bitrate of the file size divided by the duration, or they read the very first MP3 frame, which is the first few milliseconds of the file, and they assume that the whole file is whatever bitrate that first frame is.
And so this causes a couple of problems.
Oh, and also the way, the way some of them would calculate duration is they would read that first frame, see what the bit rate is, look at the file size and just divide it and say, all right, well, if the first frame is, you know, 32 kilobits and this is a hundred meg file, and this is going to be like, what would that be like a five hour long file or something like that?
Um,
The MP3 standard is very old.
It doesn't provide a lot of niceties in this regard.
So, you know, there's been some bad implementations over the years.
However, VBR encoding has been around since literally the late 90s.
So this is not a new thing to do.
And it's extremely common for music files to be VBR encoded because it's a way to achieve very good quality without obscene file sizes.
So...
This has been around for literally 20 years.
Not everything supports it properly.
The main problem that you see when it's not supported properly is either the duration is misreported, because of what I said earlier, or seeking doesn't work properly.
In the sense that you seek to a timestamp, and as far as the player is concerned, it is playing at that timestamp, but the content that you are hearing...
is not the content that's actually at the time.
You're hearing the wrong thing for the time if you seek.
Because the dumb way to seek is if you know the file size and the duration, you can say, all right, well, if the user seek to the 50% point in time in the duration, seek to the 50% byte in the file and then just start playing from there.
With a VBR file, though, you don't actually know that the 50% of the bytes through matches up to 50% of the time through.
Because the distribution of different bit rates could be different at different parts of the podcast.
So when something doesn't support VBR properly, you have that issue where seeking to a timestamp does not actually play the correct timestamp.
Well, we started getting a lot of reports from people on Android, mostly, this past week when I released the show, saying, hey, your chapter markers are all messed up and seek to the wrong timestamps in, you know, insert name of Android podcast player.
It wasn't too long before somebody, I think John probably, asked...
Did you, by any chance, encode the show in VBR this week?
And the answer was yes.
I did.
So Apple added VBR seeking support, finally, in iOS 11 and in High Sierra.
And now that iOS 11 has over 50% market share and nobody listens to podcasts on the Mac.
Sorry, Casey.
So I figured this would be a safe time for me to try VBR, to just see, like...
How many problems, you know, are we going to hear from anybody who has problems or is no one going to really notice or care?
Because most of our listeners are on iOS, but a vast majority of them upgrade to the new OS fairly soon.
And since the global share of iOS 11 was over 50%, I figured, you know, that's pretty good.
And I knew it worked fine on Overcast and on any other iOS app that used the built-in iOS libraries.
I figured Android is nerdy.
Surely they've figured out a 20-year-old MP3 standard by now.
Turns out that was wrong.
It turns out that I don't know the great details on how MP3 decoding is done on Android, how many different libraries there are to do it, what versions are out there, because I don't know anything about Android.
But suffice to say, most of Android or all of Android in practice does not support VBR seeking of MP3s.
And therefore, or at least the libraries that podcast makers use, I honestly, again, I don't know the details of all this.
Short version is, they're not supported.
So all of our Android listeners started bothering us and the app makers who make Android podcast apps.
Some of which are very mad at me right now.
It was causing enough problems that I was convinced to put a CBR file back up, a constant bitrate file back up, and that this was not a good test after all.
The failure rate was simply too high.
So about a day after release, I switched the file out for a regular bitrate,
lower quality, larger file.
It turns out this was a failed experiment for VBR last week.
I don't know when I will try it again.
I think what this has shown me is that basically Android's not ready.
iOS just got ready.
Android is not ready.
And because of the nature of Android, it's probably going to be a long time before podcast makers can safely ship VBR files without causing problems for people.
So I'm guessing...
I'm probably not going to do VBR again for a very long time, possibly if ever.
Because the other thing is, if I can, for instance, serve different files to different clients, like right now there's not a lot of infrastructure in place for that, things like our hosting and our website and things like that.
But if I were to go through the complexity rabbit hole of adding something like that where I could serve different files to different clients –
then I probably should stop using MP3 altogether for the good one, and I should start making an Opus file.
Because Opus is a way better codec than MP3.
And I could get awesome quality with VBR, naturally, in something like a third of the file size.
So...
I don't know if I'm ever going to actually be able to practically use VBR MP3s as a podcast again.
But at least now that Apple supports it in their libraries, which means now that every iOS app will now support it, at least there's a chance.
And I hope I can do it in the future, but it's probably going to be a long way off if ever.
You should just serve up the show as a HEVC video, but with no video.
It has all the features that you want from its audio stream, its variable bitrate and chapter markers and all that stuff.
And it may turn out to be playable on more platforms sooner than variable bitrate MP3 because it's not like...
vbr mp3 is a new standard waiting for people to catch up as you noted is 20 years old so if they haven't done it now what's their motivation whereas all of the hevc and all those new containers is a new format and i think most platforms will adopt it so people can watch 4k video or whatever on it although there's what is the competing one what is the google one that they like is it vp9 yeah one of the vps yeah well anyway you still probably serve two different things anyway next time just you know do the experiment in top four is all i'm saying
i can't hear about pumpkin spice food i'm so angry they'll get over it they'll be fine wow it's escalated quickly it's not as important as hearing us complain for the umpteenth time about the macbook pro keyboard and the mac pro i mean that's a good priority straight here although i have to say seeing the picture of all that food that you bought like i try not to do the math
Like, I feel like you're running the show at a loss based on how many hundreds of dollars worth of crap food you buy for each episode and then, you know, give away or throw away.
It's just doesn't seem to make economic sense.
And he's giving you tummy aches.
Yeah, fortunately, pumpkin spice garbage food from discount retail stores is not very expensive.
But yeah, that definitely was probably... That was a lot of food.
Yeah.
A lot of food.
Well, it's big boxes.
I mean, you know, it's like, it's crap food.
There's not a lot in there.
Did you try at all other than the ones that you were too afraid to?
Like, did you actually open every box and consider?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, there were a few that we cut from this show.
There was a bag of popcorn.
There were a few that we cut just because it wasn't interesting.
We recorded something like an hour and 45 minutes worth of tasting.
It was two sessions, right?
Yeah.
Because of upset tummies.
And we ran out of time.
The first session we had to fit in the school day because we were doing it during the day.
And it was time to go pick up Adam at the bus.
We had to stop.
like it was like it we had way too much food so yeah that was that was uh there was a lot of editing there we'll put a link in the show notes this is one of marco's other podcasts and uh it's very different from atp and it's a lot of fun and uh if you're interested in it you'll be able to link to it this is in this episode they tasted a bunch of pumpkin spice food
I don't know why, is what they do.
And then the premise of the show is that they rank them, but it's a farce.
So anyway, check out the show.
Can I have this to be tied for my number two?
I have 45 honorable mentions.
Right, yeah.
i give them the honorable mentions just once they get into the four that they can't actually pick for marco marco had a new twist this time because it was like this would be my number two except it's not my number two because i'm weird about things so but he had an alternate number two and three after he'd gotten up to his number one and he'd done the other ones and he's saying this would actually be my number two but and there was some kind of explanation that made sense in his mind but it didn't actually make any sense about as to why his number two was not even in the top four
yeah that's truly mind-boggling it made sense in my head he'd already had lots of pumpkin beer at that point so we didn't really know not no i not honestly i had like three sips of pumpkin beer because one of them i didn't like very much and the other one i didn't have time to drink so i it was i was i was high on pumpkin spice donuts and cream cheese and all sorts of weird stuff i like how the the pumpkin spice donut holes that barely had any flavor it's like you were munching on those anyway because like you know what donuts yeah they're good like
They're not pumpkin spicy.
They don't even make honorable mentions, but donuts.
You can have donut holes in pretty much any flavor, and they're going to be amazing, and you're going to want more of them.
They're so small.
Yes.
They barely count.
They feel free.
That's what we're missing on this show.
How come we don't get snacks?
What the hell?
I know, right?
You got toasters for a while.
Yeah, but I had to supply my own food, and it was like toast.
I didn't have any pumpkin butter.