Any Day Could Be Mac Pro Day
Casey:
I've got a problem.
Casey:
Oh yeah?
Casey:
Having uncomfortable thoughts about Jeep Wranglers.
John:
You just need to come up here where it's cold and it'll convince you not to buy only half a car.
Casey:
It's like 30 degrees here and snowing right now.
Casey:
I don't want to hear your lip about how we don't have winter.
Casey:
I just want to be driving around with no roof and no doors.
Marco:
No roof, no doors, no stability, no quality.
Marco:
No safety.
Marco:
Yeah, definitely no safety.
Casey:
It's got a roll cage, for Christ's sakes.
Casey:
How are you going to tell me no safety?
John:
Yeah, so if you get T-boned in that, I'm sure the roll cage will save you.
John:
No, the doors will.
Marco:
Oh, wait.
Marco:
Yeah, there's a reason they had to add a roll cage, because it rolls over if you breathe on it funny.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
That's what stability control is for.
Casey:
Computers solve us from physics.
Casey:
Anyway, I think I want a Wrangler, and that's probably a problem.
Casey:
It's either that or a Golf R, so save me for myself.
Marco:
Of all the vehicles that you have lusted after for a week here and there...
Marco:
I think a Wrangler is actually one of the less offensive ones.
Marco:
No, it's pretty offensive.
Marco:
It's still not a good vehicle.
Casey:
It's either that or a Golf R. So, John, what would you have me have between a Wrangler and a Golf R?
John:
Easy, Golf R. No contest.
Marco:
Yeah, if those are your choices, I'd go with John on that.
John:
Yeah, if those are the only two choices, it's not a choice at all.
Marco:
I mean, a Wrangler, I think, is a better choice than your weird Cadillac rectangle thing and your SUV dreams, but I don't... I think... I think the Cadillac is better than the Wrangler, too.
John:
Like, I'm trying to think of a worse car, and all I'm coming up with is one of those giant four-door luxury pickup trucks.
Ha ha ha!
Marco:
Yeah, those are, well, but at least those have a little more function than a Wrangler.
Marco:
No, it's about the same.
John:
They're both ridiculous things.
Casey:
Also, that reminds me, DeMuro did a review of, what was it, the G65?
Casey:
An AMG G65?
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
I might have that wrong.
Casey:
So it's a twin-turbo V12 G-Wagon.
Marco:
I believe it's pronounced Gwagon.
Casey:
Gwagon, yeah.
Casey:
I was not prepared for that.
Casey:
So he did a video on the Gwagon, and he—God, it gets better every time I say it.
Casey:
He did a video on the Gwagon, and he hated it.
Casey:
Okay, so fine.
Casey:
All right, so how about this?
Casey:
I don't have the money for a Quadrifoglio, but how about that or Golf R or Wrangler?
Casey:
What would you have, John?
John:
Quadrifoglio or the Golf R, even though it's uglier.
Yeah.
John:
You're so wrong.
John:
I've seen them in real life now.
John:
I saw a white one the other day.
John:
I thought of you.
Casey:
It does not look good in white.
Casey:
Holy shit.
John:
It doesn't look good in any color, but I've seen enough of them now that I know it's not just like, oh, maybe it looks weird in pictures, but it looks good in person.
John:
I don't like it anywhere.
John:
I don't like it in pictures.
John:
I don't like it in a box.
John:
I don't like it with a fox.
Casey:
John, I love you, but you are so wrong about this.
John:
No, I just don't like how that car looks.
John:
But it's a good car for a while it's working.
Casey:
Yeah, for the 10 minutes it's working.
John:
Yeah, and we don't even know.
John:
Maybe the reliability could be fine.
John:
It's too new.
John:
This is the new Alpha, but we'll see.
Marco:
No, it's not.
John:
Look, here's your new rule, Casey.
Marco:
New rule.
Marco:
If you're going to get something fun and fast, unless it is made by a Japanese company, lease it.
Casey:
yeah but what is fun and fast that's made by japanese company that's also at least mildly affordable so like the toyota brew would be it's not fast not fast it's fun it's not fast you know you got a gtr which is too much money and that's it that's all you got maybe the nsx is fun and fast it's unaffordable that wasn't one of your criteria
John:
You're going to lease it.
John:
You're going to lease the NSX.
John:
It'll be fun.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's say, even though this is over my budget, let's say for the sake of discussion, 50 grand.
Casey:
So for 50 grand, what do you get that's Japanese fun and fast?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I rest my case.
Casey:
I'd take a Miata.
Marco:
not fast fun not fast i mean look a wrangler's not fast either but but you you find fun for other reasons to me a miata would would be a better uh version of that plenty of fun yeah that's a good midlife crisis car for you after your second child is uh is in third grade yeah that's fair
Casey:
But no, I'm serious.
Casey:
So, I mean, my options are Civic Type R, which means I would need to install a paper bag in the car to wear over my head every time I drove it.
Casey:
No, they won't let you buy one.
Casey:
You're over 25.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
Fair point.
Casey:
I've heard the Type R is phenomenal to drive, but it is so unabashedly truly hideous to look at.
John:
You can get it in black, maybe try to hide all the wings and ducks and scoops.
Casey:
Maybe that's the answer is just take the wing off, like do a wing delete, if you will.
John:
It's all wing.
John:
You take the wing off, you're just left with the chassis.
John:
That's it.
John:
The entire body of that car is a wing or a scoop.
Marco:
I would imagine there must be some kind of like...
Marco:
marketing differentiation here at work where they have to make the Civic R so hideous that it won't detract from sales of the NSX from older people with taste.
John:
Maybe, but the regular Civic is kind of gross, too.
John:
I think they just had a styling fart on this whole generation.
John:
This is a great generation of Civics.
John:
They're getting great reviews.
John:
People say they're great cars.
John:
So much so that a lot of the best parts of them are showing up in the Accord, but the styling is rough.
John:
Styling is rough.
Casey:
I mean, if you think about it, all kidding aside, I mean, you can get a Wrangler spec to like $40,000 or $45,000 or something like that, which is truly absurd.
John:
No, you can get a Wrangler spec to $40,000.
John:
I would not go near that.
John:
This is getting into the $80,000 pickup truck territory.
John:
$50,000 Jeep Wrangler.
John:
Great.
John:
That makes perfect sense.
John:
Good job, America.
John:
so hold on jeep.com i wonder how see i thought i was trying to move on now i brought myself right somewhere in the town we even pointed out like the wrangler with like leather straps for door handles but but television screens on the backs of the seats like that is a car that has lost its way wait honest question are the back seats in a wrangler like is there actually enough depth there that is where you got to keep your 17 friends when you go surfing wow they go in the back seats quote unquote
John:
Right.
Casey:
They're seats.
Casey:
Even in the coop, they're seats.
John:
The front seats aren't seats.
John:
It's like a bunch of boards with a piece of vinyl stretched across it.
Casey:
When was the last time you were in a Wrangler, John?
Casey:
I'm so over you right now.
Casey:
Is anyone ever really in a Wrangler or are they just on it?
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I hate you, John.
Casey:
Why do you do this to me?
Casey:
Why do you do this?
Casey:
Why are you so mean?
John:
see nobody ever wants to hear me talk about fancy snow tires on my fancy tesla but everybody wants to hear you talk about your terrible car ideas of getting this cheap crappy car have like an intervention of casey casey is like is uh too suggestible when it comes to like his he has like a car shaped hole in his life mostly filled with like bmw repair bills and he's very susceptible to like maybe this will fill it and like and just anything like jeep wrangler like the just something do this for me
John:
anything yeah and so i don't know but just like he runs across the wrong ad or the wrong youtube video and just he's like you know what i should get a winnebago i mean that's his next thing is gonna be like why not the whole family could go on vacation we could live in it because we need to sell our house to afford it my parents briefly had like a little tiny uh um what you call them rv and i am still a little upset that they got rid of it it's
John:
I was joking, but there it is.
John:
Yep.
Marco:
See?
Marco:
That's the seed.
Marco:
And that seed will grow in your mind until maybe three years from now.
Casey:
$41,000.
Casey:
$41,235 for a new Wrangler.
Casey:
Holy shnikes.
Marco:
Just why?
Marco:
At that point, why?
Marco:
There are so many better things in every way.
Marco:
Tell me what.
Marco:
Tell me what.
Marco:
Two Honda Civics.
John:
i would rather drive two honda civics than than a regular one one in a different color like you know just alternate the excitement of having two cars that you rotate it's like it's like raid one for cars if one car has a repair it's so much less annoying if only you could drive both of them to the dealership at the same time actually i don't think i would need to go that quite that bananas i think i can yeah that's the problem you never actually need to go yeah
Casey:
apparently the magic keyboard with numeric keypad is bendy and i guess that's something we're supposed to be upset by because i tell you what when i get a new keyboard the first thing i do is a bend test to make sure it's not bendy no not not bendy you didn't read the link not bendy like if you put it in your pocket and sit on it it'll bend like an iphone 6
John:
But there's two kinds of reports.
John:
One kind is I opened up the box on my brand new Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad, which is a hell of a product name.
John:
I don't know if that's the official name, but you know what I'm talking about.
John:
And I took it out of the box and put it down on the desk in front of me, and it's bent like it's warped.
John:
It wobbles like, you know what I mean?
John:
So that's no good.
John:
That's just like a manufacturing defect or maybe it got bent in transport or something like that.
John:
But the second strain of this kind of story is...
John:
I got a new Magic Keyboard, took it out of the box, it was fine, typed on it for a week, and apparently the force of my typing bent it in the middle.
John:
If you're going to put only little pads or feet on four corners of a very long keyboard, and it's so thin that it bends in the middle from the force of typing, that is a pretty big failure for the functionality of a keyboard.
John:
Now, your beloved Magic Keyboard that you have without a numeric keyboard maybe has a short enough wheelbase, so to speak.
John:
that having the little feats on the corners doesn't make it bend in the middle or maybe you should just not look at your keyboard to see if it's bent in the middle um but anyway we'll link to uh this uh uh mj size web page that has a collection of all of this information
Marco:
i don't you know if it's a manufacturing defect kind of makes me feel better it's like oh they'll fix the manufacturing defect but if it's actually the case that the mere act of typing on the keyboard bends it that's that's pretty bad we are sponsored this week by fracture who prints vivid color photos directly on glass visit fracture.me and save 15 off your first order with code atp17
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Let's do a little bit of Ask ATP.
Casey:
Paige Hilliard writes in, is there any way the three of you could come up with a list of realistic things that you would like to have as holiday gifts, even if some of you already have them?
Casey:
Helpful hints would be greatly appreciated, and potentially opening up your website to sell T-shirts or gear year-round would be even more appreciated.
Casey:
So the bad news is that Paige's spouse or what have you is probably going to be listening to the show.
Casey:
And so, Paige, now you can't use any of these ideas because we're now giving them away.
Marco:
However— You assume we have useful ideas.
Casey:
That's also fair.
Casey:
I was thinking about this on and off most of today.
Casey:
I try to every year and I did not do it this year.
Casey:
I try to every year do a like holiday roundup of here's a bunch of different gifts that I recommend at all sorts of different price points.
Casey:
And so I'll put in the show notes the last couple of years of these posts.
Casey:
And they're just stuff I like.
Casey:
Sometimes it's board games.
Casey:
Sometimes it's stupid.
Casey:
It's like cables or something dumb like that.
Casey:
But this year I didn't do it mostly because I didn't feel like I had that many new and interesting ideas.
Casey:
So I'm missing out on that sweet, sweet affiliate money.
Casey:
But my priority is to do a post that I think is useful before it is make a few bucks on affiliate money.
Casey:
So that's why I didn't write it.
Casey:
The only thing I can come up with that I think is useful is for those of us with new phones, a Qi charger seems like a pretty good answer.
Casey:
Now, you would have to figure out, would your partner want a stand-up Qi charger, say, for at a desk, or would they want a lay-down Qi charger, say, for like a nightstand?
Casey:
But that seems to me to be a pretty good option and a pretty safe option for anyone that has an iPhone 8 or newer.
Marco:
I have a hard time with this because I am very hard to shop for as everyone in my family always complains about right around this time of year.
Marco:
And when I do think of something that I actually want, I just buy it immediately and don't give anyone else a chance to buy it for me.
Marco:
Or sometimes the things that I want are too expensive that I would feel comfortable asking for as a gift.
Marco:
So it's...
Marco:
It's kind of a hard topic, especially because we don't know anything about this person really.
Marco:
So if they like coffee, I can tell you lots of coffee gear that could be useful.
Marco:
I've written it up on my site a few times.
Marco:
So like Casey, I didn't do anything with any kind of gift guide this year.
Marco:
But coffee equipment, kitchen equipment in general, for whatever they like to do, that's always interesting gift ideas.
Marco:
But it's really hard without knowing anything else.
Marco:
I can think of a greatest hits kind of thing.
Marco:
Just stuff that everyone seems to enjoy.
Marco:
And certain kitchen gadgets fit this requirement, I think, pretty well.
Marco:
Certain ones are things like having a really nice pair of gloves for the winter is always good for Christmas.
Marco:
I enjoy having a really nice flashlight.
Marco:
There's a line of flashlights by the brand Phoenix with an F-E-N-I-X that I really enjoy that just use like two AA batteries.
Marco:
And you can get smaller, bigger ones.
Marco:
The two AA ones, I think, are the best size to weight balance.
Marco:
They give super nice LED flashlights.
Marco:
That's just kind of like a pleasant thing to have around.
Marco:
Your mention of the Qi charging mats is really good.
Marco:
The Mophie one that the Apple Store sells is excellent.
Marco:
I've tried a few other ones now.
Marco:
I actually just got in the Grovemade one.
Marco:
Those just came today.
Marco:
I have not yet actually used it beyond just five seconds to test it out because it's
Marco:
It's going to be my nightstand charger, and I haven't gone to bed yet.
Marco:
But it looks really nice, and it's very well built.
Marco:
It's pretty big, but pretty well built, pretty nice.
Marco:
And yeah, just, you know, I mean, there's all sorts of stuff.
Marco:
Like, you know, I like having a really nice backpack.
Marco:
I have a backpack from Briggs & Riley, which is a fancy luggage company.
Marco:
They make fantastic luggage, which is why I got their backpack.
Marco:
And I just love that.
Marco:
It's just – it's so delightful to have that.
Marco:
Any kind of – like certain people, myself included, like having nice leather goods.
Marco:
So like a leather laptop case maybe, something like that.
Marco:
That kind of stuff.
Marco:
But –
Marco:
I mean, this stuff, this is so like kind of general purpose.
Marco:
I like having really good travel mugs.
Marco:
Zojirushi makes a really nice travel mug that I really, really like.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't really know.
Marco:
It's really hard to know like how to be more specific than this.
Marco:
But those are all nice things.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, hearing you talk gave me a couple of other ideas.
Casey:
One of the best investments I've ever, ever, ever made was what I call my GoPack, which is really just a collection of cables and whatnot that are basically duplicates of anything I would need to charge any of my devices and a couple other miscellaneous bits.
Casey:
So, you know, if I ever go...
Casey:
Overnight, anywhere, I just grab this bag that has all of my chargers in it always.
Casey:
They never, ever leave that bag unless they're in a hotel being used or whatever.
Casey:
And I don't have to remove my entire installation from my bedside table or anything like that, pack it up, and then reassemble it when I get back home.
Casey:
It is just everything in duplicate.
Casey:
And I've written a couple of blog posts about that.
Casey:
And so I'll put a link to that in the show notes.
Casey:
It can get pretty spendy depending on what you want.
Casey:
I think I spent like 200 bucks on mine.
Casey:
And I'm not talking about the bag itself.
Casey:
I'm talking about all the bits inside.
Casey:
But I have a couple of fairly expensive things that I find very useful that most normal humans probably wouldn't.
Casey:
And then additionally, hearing you talk about your, did you say Briggs and Riley backpack?
Casey:
I happen to adore anything that Tom Binn makes.
Casey:
That's T-O-M-B-I-H-N.
Casey:
It's maybe a little late to order it for this holiday season unless you are on the West Coast because they're Seattle based.
Casey:
But pretty much anything Tom Binn makes, I adore.
Casey:
And I highly recommend that as much as Marco seems to highly recommend Briggs & Riley as well.
Casey:
So just a couple other quick thoughts that Marco made me think of.
Marco:
Oh, wait.
Marco:
One more thing also.
Marco:
I came up with something more specific in the kitchen category.
Marco:
I have gotten, as gifts for other people in the past, my favorite kitchen thermometer, which is the Thermoworks Thermapen Mark IV.
Marco:
If you have any need for a kitchen thermometer, and if you ever do anything in the kitchen ever, you do.
Marco:
Even if you don't think you need one, you need one.
Marco:
And once you have one, you will use it for lots of things.
Marco:
Every kitchen should have a thermometer and a scale.
Marco:
And the scale, you can get pretty much any cheap garbage.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter.
Marco:
The thermometer, they actually matter quite a bit.
Marco:
There's pretty big variations in quality and accuracy and speed and everything else.
Marco:
What you want is the Thermapen Mark IV from Thermoworks.
Marco:
It runs about $70 usually if you find a good sale.
Marco:
I think it's about $90 if it's not on sale.
Marco:
This is the one that if you see on Top Chef, if you ever see anybody using a kitchen thermometer, it is probably this one.
Marco:
There's a reason for that.
Marco:
It's awesome.
Marco:
This is like the... I was going to say the Cadillac of thermometers, but Cadillacs aren't that great anymore, are they?
Marco:
This is the Tesla of thermometers.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Of course.
Casey:
It's really, really nice.
Casey:
Of course.
Marco:
Yeah, it's great.
Marco:
So generally – and like I mentioned Phoenix earlier with the LED flashlight thing, and those are like $50.
Marco:
So these aren't cheap, but it's really nice when – if you're the kind of person who values quality and nice things, which almost everyone is about something.
Marco:
It might not be about the same things that you or I are, but almost everyone can appreciate quality in something.
Marco:
And it's really nice when you can find something like this in a category where pretty much everything else in the category is kind of mediocre garbage.
Marco:
And if you can figure out what's the one really awesome thing in that category, even if it's a little bit ridiculously priced, that kind of thing makes a good gift.
Marco:
Because it's the kind of thing where people who receive it can probably appreciate something really awesome like that.
Marco:
But because it's expensive and or obscure, they might not ever know about it or they might not feel justified spending the price for it.
Marco:
So that's the perfect kind of thing that makes a great gift is like, I wouldn't have bought this for myself, but I really appreciate having it.
Casey:
Yeah, I do agree that that is one of the best gifts.
Casey:
The, oh man, this is great, but I'm so glad I didn't spend the money on it.
Casey:
That is the sweet spot.
Casey:
John, we've delayed you far too long.
Casey:
What are your thoughts?
John:
I reject the premise of this question, which is that we should list things that we like.
John:
because people who listen to the show like the same things that we like i mean we can try to list things that we like uh even if we already have them like that is one task but the the the second part of this is for those of us who are partnered with atv fans the idea being that if we list things that we like that people who like the show will also like those same things and i don't think that's true like just because we like that means we like them everyone who listens to the show is not like us hopefully so uh so yeah um and also i'm terrible at giving gifts so even if i had a good ideas for gifts that you shouldn't listen to me so
Casey:
That's very helpful.
Casey:
Thank you, John.
John:
And I put this question in there, and I basically put it in just to say, can you come up with a list of blah?
John:
And the answer for me is no, I can't.
John:
I cannot do that because I don't think I should.
John:
I don't think it makes sense.
John:
And even if it was phrased so it does make sense, I'm bad at that.
John:
So I'm glad you two filled in.
John:
page just let you and your partner know that marco and i are your favorites and john is my and it's asked like what do you ask for i'm i'm not as bad as marco and that i don't immediately buy everything that i want but uh when people ask me what they should get me my answer is always nothing which is probably the worst thing you can say to someone who wants to get you a gift so i'm just terrible all around when it comes to gift stuff
Marco:
yeah honestly i i would love to get to the point with the family where like like maybe we just get gifts for the kids right like that's that seems like a better way to do it but which this is i think this is the kind of like many adults want this outcome um but it's very hard to get families to agree to that we're getting close like we should have like a big family map of like how far like we've we've successfully uh spread the only gifts for kids thing we've gotten pretty far there's only a few holdouts left
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Rob Fiorendino writes, how do you feel about your code or your apps after you've written them?
Casey:
Are they more like your children or your tools out in the shed?
Casey:
I will speak for myself and say any code that I've written more than three days ago is always garbage, and any code I've written in the last three days is often garbage.
Casey:
John.
John:
i'm not sure like with the children or tools thing i'm not sure like what uh what rob is getting at there uh you can take it lots of different ways like you know tools in your shed or children like i don't know anyway i'll just tell you how i feel about my code because i don't understand that part of it i think he's just saying you know is it is it disposable and you're like yeah whatever or is it oh this is my creation that i've labored for and it is perfect in every possible way
John:
i mean like you said casey it really depends on the timeline sometimes you write code and as soon as you're done writing it you just hate it but it's like you just got to do what you got to do because it's work right um other times you're you can be mildly satisfied with it but there is i there's really no such thing as far as i'm concerned as code that i write that i can look back on the long term and not see all the terrible problems with like
John:
A couple years down the line, no matter how incredibly happy you are with something, I always do see what's really wrong with it.
John:
If only because if that code lives on, if you're aware of its existence, it probably means that it's still in use, which means that it has to be modified to account for the changes of reality.
John:
Things change and you have to modify and augment your code to do new things.
John:
and inevitably you get to the point where you are modifying your code in ways that you did not anticipate when you wrote it and nothing makes code uglier and makes you more annoyed with it than more than trying to change it in ways that it wasn't meant to be changed like you never thought things would change along this axis so you always thought this bedrock assumption would be true when the entire system was built around it then that bedrock assumption is not true and you're like oh and
John:
God, do I rewrite the whole thing?
John:
How can I change it?
John:
Is it too much?
John:
So you just feel bad about it.
John:
So it's mostly the more time goes on and the more it has to change, the more bad I feel about it.
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
Pretty much all my old code, I look at it as, yeah, this is just garbage and...
Marco:
It's a burden.
Marco:
I love deleting code.
Marco:
I love when a library comes around that removes the need for some code I've written that I can just delete my code and use the library or new APIs from Apple and those come out and stuff like that.
Marco:
I code to accomplish something else.
Marco:
I code to build a product.
Marco:
The actual code, I take very little joy in, like, is it beautiful or elegant or interesting or clever?
Marco:
Like, I don't... I take no joy in any of that.
Marco:
So I write code, and immediately, even as I'm writing it, I'm like, oh, God, I don't want to have to maintain this.
Marco:
I don't want to have to do this crazy thing.
Marco:
But it's all to accomplish the end.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Basically, immediately after my code is written, I don't like it.
Marco:
And I just try to move on if I can.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I gave a slightly snarky answer in saying everything I've written I hate.
Casey:
And that is only slightly snarky.
Casey:
I mean, I really do feel that most of the time.
Casey:
But all kidding aside, in my entire career, and I've been doing this for, oh, geez, like 13 years now, I think there have been maybe...
Casey:
Probably five or less like blocks of code.
Casey:
I don't mean that as like five lines.
Casey:
I mean like projects maybe is a better way of phrasing it.
Casey:
There have been like five or less projects wherein I've written some code and thought to myself, you know what?
Casey:
That was really solid and I did something really good and or clever there.
Casey:
And usually clever is bad when it comes to code, but occasionally it can be good.
Casey:
And so I think, all kidding aside, probably five times or less in my career, I've looked back and said that was good work.
Casey:
Everything else is either, well, it didn't immediately turn into a fireball, so I consider that job well done.
Yeah.
John:
Marco has the advantage that no one else is telling him to change, to, you know, change his product in ways that he didn't anticipate it changing because he's the one who decides how it's going to change.
John:
And if anyone has any kind of idea how it might change in the future, it's him because he's going to be, and it's not like he's saying he predicts everything, but you never have, he never has someone coming and saying, you should add this feature that is, that flies in the face of your entire internal design of your application and,
John:
uh, even if he has the notion to do that, he's not forced to do it on an abbreviated timeline or like all sorts of like the, the pressures of a real job that forces you to do things.
Marco:
Except when the iPhone 10 is coming out and you got to make the release.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Right.
John:
But, but that's, that's, that's like, uh, that's more like just that's, that's what the, your entire job is, is, is using someone else's APIs.
John:
You know, you don't write UI kit, you rolling with the punches of Apple's platform.
John:
You're writing on top of a platform.
John:
Everyone has that same thing.
John:
If you're writing, you know, whatever you're writing on top of a framework, uh,
John:
And that framework changes.
John:
You got to, you know, roll with those punches too.
John:
But I'm saying for like the things that your actual product does.
John:
So I think it makes you feel worse when you have to change your thing in a way that it was never meant to be changed.
John:
And you have to do it ASAP.
John:
And, you know, whether you think it's a good idea or not, it has to happen.
John:
That does like the worst damage to even code that you feel like, you know, was arranged in a reasonable way.
John:
And designed in a reasonable way, you have to go in there and basically like injure it and scar it and make it uglier and just makes you want to just never look at it again and tear it all down and start over.
Casey:
I know those feels all too well.
Casey:
Now, one of my favorite pastimes on the show is to bag on Marco for not having a job.
Casey:
However, in Marco's defense, I have to stand up for Marco on this one.
Casey:
I feel like just in the last few days, Marco, and I don't know how much of this you want to talk about on the show, so I'm going to be a little cagey about it, but just in the last few days, you had maybe not an emergency, but a oh crap moment where some external force forced you to do a whole bunch of things and write a whole bunch of code that it seemed like you...
Casey:
If you were planning on doing it at all, it was going to be long in the future.
Casey:
And so I do think, John, you're usually right, but it just so happens that it seems like, Marco, you've just gone through this recently.
Casey:
So how do you feel about that code, whether or not you want to discuss the motivations behind it?
Marco:
I'm happy to talk about it.
Marco:
So the code you're referring to is Overcast handling permanent feed redirects or feed changes for podcasts.
Marco:
Basically, the way I built the Overcast crawling infrastructure and database is
Marco:
is that feeds are keyed uniquely on URLs, so that feeds map one-to-one to URLs.
Marco:
And those URLs really can't and shouldn't change in the feed.
Marco:
If you have a new URL, it gets a new feed entry.
Marco:
And then episodes are represented as feed items.
Marco:
And feed items are keyed based on their feed ID plus then a bunch of random numbers based on hashing their contents and then their GUID and stuff.
Marco:
And so once you have feeds and feed items matched to a certain feed URL, it's not trivial to then...
Marco:
move those subscribers to a different feed URL because all the item IDs for everything they have subscribed to will be different.
Marco:
And I can't easily change.
Marco:
I can't just like modify the ones that are on the old feed to point to the new feed without having lots of other problems and everything else.
Um,
Marco:
And also worth noting is that the feed items table is 170 gigs now.
Marco:
The table that maps users to feed items is also about 170 gigs.
Marco:
These are the two biggest and highest traffic tables in Overcast.
Marco:
It is very hard to modify these tables at all, to modify the schema, to add indexes, or to change the schema, to run alter tables on it.
Marco:
It pretty much can't be completed in any kind of real-time fashion.
Marco:
The only way to really change that would be to set up a whole new database as a replica, modify it, and then make it the new master.
Marco:
And that's just a lot of administration work, and it's risky.
Marco:
It involves downtime, and I hate doing it.
Marco:
For Overcast to modify what URL a feed entry points to is a big deal.
Marco:
And so since the beginning of Overcast, the way it handled redirects was in...
Marco:
HTTP terms, it treated them all as 302s, temporary redirects.
Marco:
So if it encountered a redirect, it would follow it when crawling the feed, but it would never update the source URL to point to a new one if it encountered a 301 code, which is the permanent redirect code.
Marco:
This works on the web because on the web...
Marco:
It's pretty common practice that if you host a website at a certain domain name or a certain path and you change your URL scheme or you move hosts, it's kind of known on the web that you're supposed to set up a redirect pretty much indefinitely.
Marco:
That it is a bad idea to ever change your URL without having a redirect in place because then you're losing all your search engine ranking and your inbound links from other places and everything else.
Marco:
It's kind of understood as a best practice on the web that you don't break redirects ever.
Marco:
So on the web, a permanent redirect is much less important to be treated as such because you can just always crawl one of the URLs that something used to be at.
Marco:
And if it's been properly maintained, it will get you to where the feed is, like where the new one is.
Marco:
Podcasting doesn't work that way in practice.
Marco:
So all this time when I've been doing basically treating this like the web where I just kind of assume that if I follow a redirect, it'll always be there.
Marco:
In podcasts, a lot of podcasters, first of all, aren't web programmers.
Marco:
A lot of podcast producers, they come from the media world.
Marco:
There's also all sorts of podcast hosting and analytics and advertising platforms out there that all want to host your feed for you at their domain and are all selling their services quite successfully to big podcasters.
Marco:
And the big podcasters, to them, their entire world is iTunes.
Marco:
And with iTunes, you don't have to maintain permanent redirects forever if you change your feed.
Marco:
You can just tell iTunes what your new feed URL is, and it will move for you for itself and for Apple podcast subscribers.
Marco:
And then you don't have to think about it anymore.
Marco:
So the concept of having permanent redirect setup is in practice, not known and not practiced by most podcasters.
Marco:
They are happy to move their feeds to anyone else's service, anyone else's domain, whatever new ad tracking insertion platform they're using this six-month period.
Marco:
They'll move it all the time.
Marco:
And they don't consider what web programmers would consider is necessary for that.
Marco:
So I could sit here as much as I want and try to blame them and say, well, you know, this is your problem, not mine.
Marco:
But the reality is it becomes my problem.
Marco:
It is definitely my problem.
Marco:
And I'm the one who needs to fix it and find a solution because what happens is when a big podcast moves, like about a year ago, This American Life moved their feed and they broke the old redirect.
Marco:
And I suddenly had like 80,000 people
Marco:
telling me that their number one podcast was broken in Overcast.
Marco:
And this was bad.
Marco:
So it became my problem, very much so.
Marco:
At the time, I didn't have any kind of infrastructure in place to move subscribers between feeds in a way that wouldn't just break everything.
Marco:
And This American Life has another problem where they don't keep their back feed going.
Marco:
They only keep the most recent handful of episodes in the feed.
Marco:
once something is older than a few weeks old you can't download it anymore you have to i think i think they sell them or you can get them in their app or something but um you can't download them out of the regular feed anymore so if i move people over to a new entry that doesn't have all those back catalog episodes for this american life that's a pretty big problem especially for that show because it's so popular and a lot of times people will save up save episodes for like months at a time like they'll save up a big back catalog so they can either go back and re-listen or they'll save it up for like long car trips whatever else
Marco:
So there's all these very, very fragile conditions in which I have to be very careful what I do to handle redirects, if anything.
Marco:
And my original plan up until now of just not handling them was breaking down pretty badly.
Marco:
The driving factor this past week was that, which is what Casey was alluding to, the New York Times podcast The Daily is very, very popular.
Marco:
The Daily moved their feed.
Marco:
Overcast didn't take the redirect.
Marco:
And the old feed wasn't redirecting to the new one.
Marco:
I was hearing about it from a lot of people.
Marco:
And eventually we worked it out, and they arranged to put that redirect in place.
Marco:
So that was a temporary patch.
Marco:
But ultimately, this was kind of like one of the many wake-up calls.
Marco:
If I finally had it, it was like, okay, I need to handle redirects.
Marco:
Also, SoundCloud is falling apart, and it seems like they're probably not long for this world.
Marco:
And a lot of podcasts are hosted there, so there's going to be a lot of feed moves there.
Marco:
And there's so many popular shows that are moving to different ad insertion platforms now and changing their feed address again.
Marco:
It's a big enough problem now that any podcast crawling setup like this, it has to have a way to have permanent redirects.
Marco:
That's just the environment now.
Marco:
Too many popular shows move too often.
Marco:
You have to do it.
Marco:
So what I've been working on for the last week or so is that.
Marco:
Permanent redirects and making it work.
Marco:
It's really not good.
Marco:
The way I do it is really not good, but
Marco:
the only way I can do it without totally modifying my database schema and going through like sysadmin hell for weeks as I do that.
Marco:
As I mentioned, lots of costs associated with that and possible bug potential.
Marco:
So I really don't want to do that.
Marco:
So what I do now basically is...
Marco:
I have a separate process from the crawlers, because speaking of your old code, my crawlers are the only thing I have written in Go.
Marco:
And I haven't written really any Go since, so my Go skills are very rusty.
Marco:
And I look at the crawler code now, and it's so complex, because it was... Not only is it written in this language that I've used for nothing else, so my skills are dull, but also...
Marco:
it's like the first go program i ever wrote so it's not particularly great go code like it's like me learning the language and so like everything's in one big file and it's kind of all over the place and for me to track redirects there i would have to modify the go code and i've been i was trying to do that at first to solve a few other problems i'm just like looking at this like i just want to set this on fire like i have no idea what any of this does i'm so scared to touch because like it mostly has worked for a long time and i don't want to touch it but
Marco:
So instead, I made a separate process in PHP, my comfort language.
Marco:
I know it's bad.
Marco:
It's like comfort food.
Marco:
It's not good for you.
Marco:
But anyway, so I made a PHP separate queue that just once a day checks feeds for redirects.
Marco:
And if a feed is redirecting to the same place that is also an iTunes registered feed for more than, I think, two days as a threshold at...
Marco:
then it will take all the subscribers and basically create new entries for them in the new feed that match their entries in the old feed and then delete the old feed description.
Marco:
So to the user, the only thing that appears to happen is...
Marco:
All of a sudden, the episodes for one of those shows that got moved, they all just re-download for some reason.
Marco:
Everything else is preserved.
Marco:
Played, unplayed states, whether it's starred or not, progress if you're partially listening, that's all preserved because that just gets re-inserted with the new IDs.
Marco:
But you do have to re-download because the client sees them as new entries.
Marco:
Basically, that's now in place.
Marco:
There's now this queue that runs those things.
Marco:
It's going through the backlog.
Marco:
It took way too long for me to do this.
Marco:
I'm glad I finally did it.
Marco:
I wish I had a slightly more elegant solution that wouldn't require redownloading, but that would just be a lot more overhead.
Marco:
So I'm not going to do that yet, maybe down the road if it becomes a big problem.
Marco:
And man, once I found... Once I had something actually checking for 301 redirects and for the iTunes new feed URL tag, which is inserted, it's like...
Marco:
people who aren't familiar with podcasts who just know web programming, this would make you cry.
Marco:
The way that you can redirect a feed for podcasts is you leave the old feed still there returning a 200 response code, but you put an XML tag in the RSS feed that's iTunes colon new feed URL and just leave that there for a few days and iTunes picks it up and moves your feed for you.
Yeah.
Marco:
And then the old feed just can sit there not getting new episodes added to it or can just get deleted and stop working.
Marco:
Like, that's how... Like, I'm telling you, this is what I have to deal with.
Marco:
So it's like, again, like, the web programmer, I mean, when I started this whole thing, I was like, I don't need to do that.
Marco:
That's terrible.
Marco:
No one's going to really do that.
Marco:
But no, people really do it at increasing frequency.
Marco:
And so anyway, once I had this redirect checking working, I was able to see...
Marco:
quite how many very popular shows have had redirects uh since 2014 when i started crawling them and it's a lot some of them are simple like moving from http to https like that that's a very common one like all the relay shows did that um lots of lots of popular shows have done that but a lot of them are just moving to different ad platforms and tracking platforms and insertion platforms and publishing platforms and
Marco:
No one hosts their own feed in podcasting.
Marco:
It's yeah.
Marco:
So it's a mess out there.
Marco:
And so I had to deal with it, even though I really didn't want to.
Marco:
And I was so opinionated about like, I don't need to do this.
Marco:
Like that's they should have redirects in place forever.
Marco:
But that's not the reality.
Marco:
And I had I had to adopt to that because that's the industry I'm in.
John:
so yeah so occasionally you have to do things and do them on the double because other people uh weren't thinking about you but it's not his boss tell him to do it though he's his boss he's the one he he got to the point is he got to delay doing it for a really long time because he didn't want to not with the daily though right and not with the not when very popular feeds redirect there but it was like no one no one is forcing you to add an about screen that includes a car racing game to your to your thing and you
John:
you really don't have your display system no one's making you support video podcasts if you don't want to no one's deciding you have to have a recipe manager and a to-do list inside it that's the type of thing
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Show the world who you are and what you're passionate about without tying it to a particular publishing platform or big email platform that happens to be popular this year or this five years because that changes over time.
Marco:
And my first email address was at Juno.com.
Marco:
And when I bought Marker.org in 2000, that was the last time I had to change my email address and tell anybody, oh, please update your address book.
Marco:
Nobody ever likes that.
Marco:
I also have hosted my own website at my own domain name since that time because web hosts change, platforms change, social networks change.
Marco:
And it's always nice to have a domain for your home base, for what you tell people, to represent you online, for your email address, for your website.
Marco:
Have your own domain name.
Marco:
And if you're going to do that, you've got to register it somewhere.
Marco:
And Hover is my favorite registrar.
Marco:
They have over 400 domain extensions from the classics like .com, .net, .org, to all the new fun ones like .diamonds, .plumbing.
Marco:
There's no tricks or shady upsells or scammy add-ons or anything like that.
Marco:
And they respect your privacy by giving you free Whois privacy.
Marco:
They have great features to save you time like Hover Connect for fast setup.
Marco:
Or if you want fully advanced DNS control, they have that too.
Marco:
If you need any help at all, their customer support is top-notch.
Marco:
It's just a great place to register domains.
Marco:
I have almost all of mine there now and I keep moving more there as time goes on because it's just pleasant.
Marco:
It's there when I need it and it's out of the way when I don't.
Marco:
It's just what you want out of a domain registrar.
Marco:
So check it out yourself.
Marco:
Go to hover.com slash ATP to learn more and get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
That's hover.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Hover, get a domain name for your passion.
Casey:
So back to AskATV.
Casey:
Thankfully, we have a quick one to round us out.
Casey:
Stefan Kozlowski writes, do you guys pronounce the command S-U-D-O as sudo or sudo?
Casey:
And I will start by saying I have always pronounced it sudo.
Casey:
And I understand that it stands for super user do.
Casey:
So sudo is probably the more academically correct answer, but I've always pronounced it sudo.
John:
I had to think about this question because I think I do both, both out loud and both in my head, depending on context.
John:
That's the conclusion I came to by like tracing through the times that I've said it or thinking about it.
John:
I think I, I think I do both.
John:
I don't know.
John:
That's not a satisfying answer, but I think that's the reality.
Marco:
I pronounce it wrong and I don't care.
Marco:
I'm proud of it.
Marco:
I say pseudo and I know it's super user do.
Marco:
I'm very aware of this.
Marco:
However, I don't care.
Marco:
To me, pseudo is its own word.
Marco:
And so it gets its own pronunciation.
John:
Yeah, I don't think that's wrong.
John:
That's just one of two very common pronunciations.
John:
Like who's to say which I don't even know if that is the less common one.
John:
And maybe for all I know, it's the more common one.
Marco:
It's a Linux thing.
Marco:
It's definitely wrong.
Marco:
There's always, whatever everyone does with Linux, a lot of people will say it's wrong.
John:
Well, I don't know.
John:
I think that it's in the running to being the more popular one.
John:
Because, like you said, it is a word, P-S-E-U-D-O.
John:
The fact that people just substitute a word, they don't know how to say it.
Marco:
Oh, that was what I was talking about.
Marco:
I was just saying, like, you know, basically, like, conceptually in my head, I read that as pseudo.
Marco:
Like, I read it as a word, and I know what it means.
Marco:
It's like being fluent in a language.
Marco:
Like, I'm not thinking about, like, its component parts.
Marco:
I'm thinking, like, oh, I need to pseudo to do this command.
Marco:
Like, that is its own word in my head...
Marco:
i don't think like oh i need to super user do like when i make a directory i think oh make dir like i or mcder like i think that in my head like as like its component parts so i don't like think about that as in i don't say like you know make dire it's dir for directories so but pseudo to me like that has become its own word in my head so that's why i pronounce it the way i do i don't i don't care about the the component parts of it and how they're pronounced
Casey:
All right, John, tell me about your black screen of death.
John:
This could have been follow-up, but I'm trying to, you know, I think it has wandered out of follow-up, and now it's just like practically a weekly segment where I complain about my laptop in some way.
Marco:
You know, people gave me so much crap when I was complaining about my laptops.
Yeah.
John:
These are not systemic complaints.
John:
These are specific complaints for the most part.
John:
Sometimes it's not complaints.
John:
Sometimes it's just updates on my life with the MacBook.
John:
The Touch Bar thing was not really a complaint about the Touch Bar, just telling you I tried to use it and it wasn't for me.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So that's different.
John:
But anyway, this might not be a laptop bug, but it's a situation I find myself in frequently.
John:
And one of those things where I don't know where to blame it, but it makes my overall experience with this thing worse.
John:
I think I mentioned it before.
John:
So I've got this docking station.
John:
And it's great when everything works well, but sometimes it gets cranky when I undock it.
John:
So I'll undock with it in clamshell mode, and I'll go off to a meeting or something, and then I'll arrive at the meeting, open up my laptop, and everything about it will work perfectly except for the screen is 100% black.
John:
And I used to know that everything was working perfectly back when the touch bar was not in the, you know, the mode that I changed it to where it just shows the function keys all the time because I would unlock with touch ID or unlock by typing my password into the totally black screen.
John:
And then I could command tab and I could see the touch bar changing as I command tab among the applications that, you know.
John:
Everything's working.
John:
I'm command tabbing.
John:
I'm presuming the trackpad is working.
John:
If I could see the mouse cursor, it would be moving.
John:
I could type keyboard commands that I know worked in the front most application.
John:
If I could use it without seeing the screen, it was all working, but the screen was 100% black, and nothing I would do to that computer sitting there would make that screen not be black.
John:
Put it to sleep, wake it up again, close the lid, open it.
John:
The only way I found to bring it back is a hardware way where I would use my little...
John:
they have some little dongle thingy that goes in the side that gives you like a usb port and hdmi and a bunch of other crap plug that in the side and then plug the the room's monitor into the hdmi port and that would wake up it would first of all it would start my machine would start projecting on the on the external screen but also would wake up the internal display
John:
right so that's i've had this book really long time and it's annoying sometimes i've had to leave the meeting room go back to my desk get my dongle come back to the room plug it in plug in the hdmi monitor and then my thing is awake anyway i ran into this problem and i'm calling this the black screen of death even though it's not death it's like in limbo it's alive but blind um this happened to me where i unplugged my thing because i was in a hurry to get home unplugged it and i needed to use my laptop at home and i got home and opened it up and sure enough black screen
John:
and i didn't have my little dongle because it was back at work so i couldn't do the one magic hardware thing that makes my screen back to life and i tried so many other things i tried sshing into it from another machine i tried plugging in other things i tried getting out my very own apple branded hdmi dongle and plugging it into my gaming monitor which is hdmi and turning everything on and that didn't wake up the screen
John:
in the end i had to hard reset the thing which really annoyed me that's why i spent like 20 minutes trying to bring this thing back because i was in the middle of a lot of stuff you might not you might be surprised to hear that i had a lot of windows open you i had a lot of things going on i you know i just i had a lot of terminals a lot of shelves and no i don't use any one of the million things that can let me resume my shelf and exactly where i left off yes i'm sorry i'm
John:
disappointing all the people who love tmux and screen and and all the other things that do that that's right i also use none of those things i always have tons of terminal tabs and windows open and it's fine right anyway i was annoyed that i lost everything that i was working on uh and had to hard reset my computer who wants to reset it and the worst part is i'm not hard resetting it because it crashed i'm not hard resetting it because it's frozen it's not like everything was fine except the screen was 100 black so
John:
this is really putting a damper, this bug, and the possibility that this bug can be there in my annoyance when it happens.
John:
It's kind of like the month 13 is out of bounds thing, where it's like everything is mostly working, but there's some part of it that's not working that you feel like someone should notice.
John:
So I would like... I think...
John:
Something in the operating system should be aware after a certain period of time that there is A, no monitor attached, and B, the screen is entirely black.
John:
And I don't think that's a sustainable state and the lid is open.
John:
I think that set of things, there should be some assertion in the operating system that says if no monitor is attached and the lid is open and you're awake...
John:
But the screen is 100% black?
John:
Fix that.
John:
Like, make it not be like that.
John:
I'm hoping that's a thing that it can detect.
John:
And I don't know who to blame.
John:
Maybe I blame the docking station.
John:
Maybe it's an OS bug.
John:
Who knows?
John:
But anyway, I don't like laptops.
John:
are you on high sierra on this yes oh no no i'm not i'm on regular sierra sorry okay so it probably isn't like a well i guess it isn't a new os bug at least but it's not like sierra was bug free either i don't i don't know what it is it's just uh my latest uh in a long line of infuriating sort of bugs on my laptop
Casey:
So I can assure you that this is not only not a bug that has been fixed in High Sierra, but it is not unique to your laptop because my Marco Book Pro that I use at work, that exhibits this same behavior.
Casey:
Now, I wouldn't say that it happens all the time.
Casey:
I wouldn't even say that it happens terribly often.
Casey:
But the only solution I had come up with for it was occasionally I can sleep it and then reopen it, you know, close the lid and reopen it.
Casey:
And then sometimes it'll come back.
Casey:
Or like you said, you know, disconnect external monitors, reconnect external monitors.
Casey:
But just like you said, additionally, there are times I just have to just kill the machine and bring it back.
Casey:
So this is a clamshell problem.
Casey:
This is a software problem.
Casey:
This is not a new MacBook Pro problem.
Casey:
And that is very sad.
John:
I mean, it seems like there must be some hardware aspect to it because I don't think merely closing the lid and opening it.
John:
I think it's the fact that you're attaching an external monitor.
John:
And something about the, I've attached a monitor, please detect that it's there and start sending your video signal to it.
John:
Oh, you just yanked it out.
John:
I have to handle that.
John:
It's related to...
John:
the fact that the hardware configuration of the machine is changing like i've never seen it you know once the computer is working in isolation i'm not plugging anything into it i've never seen it happen there where i close the lid and open and the screen doesn't turn on so i don't know um but yeah like these type of problems uh very often waking from sleep problems and stuff like that but i feel like waking from sleep is almost more explicable it's like well the computer's not even awake
John:
And so like, obviously it's not working.
John:
This is the worst because it's, it's so clearly so clear, especially with the touch bar that everything is working just fine that the computer is running.
John:
It just refuses to display anything on the screen.
John:
And I find that infuriating.
Casey:
I should also add, since this is apparently the airing of grievances, it is the holiday season after all.
Casey:
I should add that my MarkoBook Pro is now going to have to go in for service when I'm out over the holidays because it turns out if you plug in and remove... What is the port on the side?
Casey:
What is the Thunderbolt?
Casey:
But it's also known as... Mini DisplayPort.
Casey:
Mini DisplayPort.
Casey:
Yeah, thank you.
Casey:
If you plug and unplug Mini DisplayPort cables every single day, all day, every day, turns out they start to fail over time.
Casey:
So Monday...
Casey:
When I got to the office, I tried to plug in my two LG 4K monitors, and one of them in particular wouldn't plug in for the longest time.
Casey:
I would switch around cables.
Casey:
I switched around where I was plugging them in.
Casey:
It was nothing I could do to get it to work.
Casey:
And then finally, I had actually my head IT guy come over and look at it, and he plugged in his Marco Book Pro, and it worked no problem immediately.
Casey:
Unplugged it, plugged it back in, worked no problem.
Casey:
So it appears that either the graphics card is dying or the connectors are getting screwed up in some way, shape, or form.
Casey:
So I hope, Marco, that in your beloved MarcoBook Pro that you are not often using the Thunderbolt ports because over time, after a year or two, after a couple of years, you might find them failing.
Casey:
So good luck.
Marco:
Yeah, this is one of the things that the move to USB-C made a lot better, that USB-C, as far as I can tell so far, the connection does wear out over time, just like many of them do.
Marco:
However, it seems like the parts that wear out are mostly in the cable end and not in the port end.
Marco:
So it is kind of annoying that your cable loosens up over time, especially when it's your power cable to your new MacBook Pro.
Marco:
But it does seem like that's probably an easier fix long term that you can probably just replace the cable in those conditions for USB-C.
Marco:
But the mini DisplayPort connector that then became the Thunderbolt connector, that's never been a good connector.
Marco:
One of the big problems with it is that the cables are kind of loose in there.
Marco:
There's nothing like holding them in really.
Marco:
So they can just very easily slide out or get a little bit dislodged or a little bit jostled.
Marco:
I will defend a lot of great things about the 2015-era Retina MacBook Pro.
Marco:
However, the design of the Thunderbolt port is not one.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So I kind of wish I had a Thunderbolt one, or a Thunderbolt one, I'm sorry, a Touch Bar one, but that ain't never going to happen.
Casey:
My IT guy refuses to buy any Touch Bar MacBook Pros, and maybe it's because he's smarter than me.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Well, I mean, think about it from the point of view of an IT manager at a company.
Marco:
Like, a computer that seems to have a pretty high keyboard failure rate compared to most computers.
Marco:
And again, people who defend this keyboard, even if that rate is 20%,
Marco:
That's still really high for a computer that has only existed for a year.
Marco:
If that's the kind of failure rate you see on a pool of these new computers, and if buying them would make you have to rebuy a whole bunch of dongles or display things or projecting things or things like that for the whole office...
Marco:
you can totally understand why an IT manager would be like, yeah, that's not worth it.
Marco:
We can't afford the downtime for the keyboards.
Marco:
That's a lot of work for the IT people to have to pull those out of service from the company when the keyboards break, get them repaired, put them back into service, figure out things in the meantime.
Marco:
That's a huge burden on an IT staff.
Marco:
Even before you consider all the dongle stuff.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
That makes total sense.
Marco:
Like, I totally get it.
Marco:
And honestly, that's probably why Apple still sells the 2015 model new in the Apple Store today.
Marco:
They probably sell a ton of them to big corporate purchasers who just want what they've been buying for years because they know it's fine, they're already equipped for it, and it's pretty reliable.
Marco:
Except when you have to replace your Thunderbolt port.
Marco:
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Casey:
We have somehow accidentally procrastinated for an hour and 20 minutes by my clock, but we should probably talk about the iMac Pro.
Casey:
And unfortunately for me, I started to have a holiday party and made it through about a half a drink because I was very busy tonight.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
i'm sad to report ladies and gentlemen that this is not a holiday party for me and i'm going to have to endure this sober and i'm doing it for you the listener so all right guys tell me about what's going on why do you have to endure this aren't you sitting in front of a 5k iMac right now i'm mostly giving you a hard time i am sitting in front of a 5k iMac so you're an iMac buyer this is this is a computer that could potentially be for you you like this kind of computer
Casey:
i do i do i'm mostly giving you two a hard time don't you do a lot of video transcoding and buy all the apple stuff in space gray you know the the i don't the sick thing about the imac pro is the thing that i think appeals most to me about it is the fact that it's space gray because i think that is so hot and it's so ridiculous and i'll be the first to tell you that is utterly truly ridiculous that the thing i'm most excited about is the color but oh my god it looks so good and those accessories look so good um
Casey:
No, I snark.
Casey:
And if you're not a longtime ATP listener, I don't remember which episode it was.
Casey:
And I probably won't remember to put in the show notes.
Casey:
But it was early on in our run.
Casey:
Yeah, well, it was all of them.
Casey:
But no, early on in our run, it just so happened that I knew we were going to be talking about the Mac Pro.
Casey:
And I don't remember why, because there was no news about it.
Casey:
But we were going to be talking about the Mac Pro.
Casey:
And I made the mistake of bringing my drink upstairs with me into the office while I recorded.
Casey:
No, I didn't spill it on anything.
Casey:
But that part wasn't the mistake.
Casey:
The mistake was that I also brought the bottle with me.
Casey:
And by the end of that episode, I had had quite the holiday party all by myself.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So anyway, it's very embarrassing and I won't actually I probably won't link it because I am embarrassed by it and I shouldn't have done it.
Casey:
But, you know, it is what it is and you only live once.
Casey:
Anyway, the iMac Pro does appeal to me.
Casey:
We should we should do a kind of an overview in just a moment.
Casey:
It does appeal to me.
Casey:
I don't think.
Casey:
I find it worth all of that money.
Casey:
I'm not saying that it's an unreasonable price.
Casey:
I'm not saying that it should be lower.
Casey:
I'm just saying I have a really nice iMac in front of me.
Casey:
And yes, I do transcode things a lot.
Casey:
Yes, I am getting into video now.
Casey:
But sitting here now, I don't feel like I need a new computer, which is usually stage one in case you're buying a new computer.
Casey:
So anyway, Marco, tell me about what this iMac Pro is all about.
Marco:
We actually, there's still a lot of big unknowns about it because as we record this, it is, well, actually, are they going to launch it at three in the morning tonight?
Casey:
Oh, I think you're right.
Casey:
Are we just going to, maybe I should start my holiday party after all.
John:
Just keep podcasting until the configurator goes live and then we can answer more questions.
Casey:
I really don't want to do that, but there's something to be said for how funny that would be.
Casey:
And I will go downstairs and get myself more water and my bottle and we can do a holiday party if that's what it takes.
Yeah.
Marco:
no i i'm not staying up till three in the morning i'm just me and the listeners yeah i'm gonna make it because like the thing is like for me like the christmas season is way too busy for me to buy a new desktop and set it up and move my stuff over and everything like i'm way way too busy for a while so if i just wait until the morning to order mine if i order one i mean i'm still telling myself if but
Casey:
You said that, and I took pause, but I didn't want to ruin your flow, so I just bit my tongue.
Casey:
But you're going to order one.
Casey:
Now, it may not be tomorrow.
Casey:
I believe that it may not be tomorrow, but you're going to order one.
Marco:
I mean, it's probably going to be at least 8 in the morning.
Marco:
Like, I'm not going to wake up at 3.
Marco:
I might wait until 8.
Marco:
So anyway, all this is to say, at the moment that we're recording, we don't know any of the pricing and the configuration options really.
Marco:
We know what options will be available roughly, but we don't know if there are certain combinations that they will require.
Marco:
We don't know some of the finer details of some of the options.
Marco:
So the core counts are going to be 8, 10, 14, and 18.
Marco:
But the 14 and 18 aren't available until, quote, early next year.
Marco:
We don't know what that means, really.
Marco:
That could mean in two weeks or that could mean in three months.
Marco:
So there's a whole lot of unknowns.
Marco:
And the biggest thing is that we only know the base price at this moment.
Marco:
We only know that it starts at $5,000, and that is 8 core, 1 terabyte, and I think 32 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
Which is a great, like, that's an awesome config.
Marco:
Like, that is my iMac, but with twice the cores.
Marco:
Like, my iMac is 30 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
You know, it was the top CPU at the time I bought it, which was in 2014.
Marco:
And that was $4,300 or something like that at the time.
Marco:
I think the top iMac is slightly cheaper now, but when you spec up an iMac to be one terabyte of SSD and 32 gigs of RAM, you're already getting about $4,000.
Marco:
You're near that point.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
For this to be eight cores starting at $5,000 and for it to be the Xeon line with ECC RAM, workstation GPU... And way better GPU.
Marco:
Yeah, way better GPU, faster SSD, and a whole lot of extra stuff.
Marco:
Am I reading correctly from the reviews that it comes with all three peripherals?
Marco:
It comes with a trackpad, keyboard, and mouse?
John:
It's so hard to tell from these early reviews because, like you said about the pricing, Apple just gives you a bunch of stuff as they hear you go.
John:
They don't say...
John:
Would it even be possible to order it this way?
John:
Or would you have to say, yeah, you can buy all these input devices, but you only get to pick one to come for free with your iMac Pro?
Marco:
This is why you're going to win the bet.
Marco:
You're going to make me buy a whole second iMac Pro just so I can get all the input devices.
Marco:
Just so I can get a black trackpad and a black mouse.
John:
That's the real black tax.
John:
Wow, that's true.
John:
You have to buy a whole second machine.
John:
Yeah, no more like $300 extra.
Casey:
Yeah, I lamented the $150 or whatever it was for the black book, and this is a whole new world.
Marco:
Anyway, so all this is to say, pricing is still a big unknown for us for all the details.
Marco:
The configuration that the reviewers all had was 10 core, so it's one step up in the processor line from 8 to 10 core, and I believe it was, was it 64 gigs of RAM?
Marco:
128 gigs of RAM.
John:
Okay, yeah, so that's probably going to be a $7,000 configuration.
John:
Yeah.
John:
and the big the big sort of non-linear price increases are always going to be 128 gigs of ram and four terabyte ssd those are going to like cost as much as a car like i don't know what it's never like it's double the price of the of the size that's half as much nope it is not it is more no it's not yeah it's going to be like you know one terabyte comes with it two terabytes might be like you know plus 400 and then four terabytes might be like plus 1200 it's going to be like that kind of jump like
John:
you know it might even be more than that because these are pretty and the interesting thing about these these computers and we knew this already but i think people are relearning it for the second time because again we saw these machines at wwc like actually physically saw them and in my case touched them even though you weren't supposed to um yelled at by the apple person
John:
um uh but there there's no uh upgradability in this this is a question we asked the the person who was there like you know is the ram soldered to the borders and slots he said it's in slots but you can't get at them like there's no little door for you to upgrade the ram there's like you you configure this machine from apple and you buy it and that's it
John:
now in theory you could like iFixit could probably find a way to open this thing up and take out the ram and upgrade it like there's nothing really stopping you from doing it it's not like it's locked with the key or whatever except for perhaps a secure boot thing which we'll get to in a minute but who knows how well how they're you know integrating that with their ram but essentially there are no upgradable parts uh inside this thing
John:
uh that you are allowed to change or that you can bring to an apple store and say i'd like to buy more ram can you put more ram on this for me the apple's gonna say no it the ram that you got is what you kind of same thing with upgrading the cpu or any sort of other stuff like that which if you're gonna have a machine that's totally sealed up this is the one to do it on because the iMac the whole point of it is it's all in one right and you know the mac pro is coming and that that that really highlights what we think will be a very important difference between the iMac pro and the mac pro
John:
the iMac Pro has the freedom now to say 100% sealed box, configure it the way you want it, and that's it.
John:
You know, no doors, no flaps, no upgrading after the fact.
John:
It's just the machine you get is the machine you get paving the way for the Mac Pro to take the opposite choice.
John:
So some people are kind of annoyed at that, but I feel like
John:
It is a reasonably smart differentiation between these two machines.
John:
So it's clear to you, why would I buy this one machine over the other?
John:
It's like what you want.
John:
If you want everything in one and beautiful and elegant and simple and clean and sealed up and done and done, it's the iMac.
John:
And if you want the other thing, it's the Mac Pro.
John:
Well, I mean, to be fair, we don't actually know yet whether the Mac Pro will be upgradable.
Marco:
We don't, but we're hoping.
Marco:
I mean, the tube was slightly upgradable.
John:
You could change the RAM.
Marco:
You could add RAM.
Marco:
That's it.
John:
you could swap out the ssd too i don't think anybody ever ever sold the ssds separately yeah it wasn't it wasn't like i think it was like the m.2 whatever thing it wasn't entirely you know you could you could buy stuff the whole point is it was you could open the case and pull things out of it whereas this for all we know there's like it's glued together like i don't even know how easy it is to even get inside this thing
Marco:
I mean, it's probably like every other iMac.
Marco:
Like, you know, all the components appear to face the back, but you can't open it from the back, probably.
Marco:
So you probably have to, like, remove the screen and, you know, basically go in... Which may be glued on.
Marco:
Right, right.
Marco:
And so it's probably like magnets like the other one.
Marco:
But anyway, it's probably very similar to the construction of the 27-inch iMac today.
Marco:
So you probably can get into it, but...
Marco:
You don't want to because it involves so much like surgery on the screen that lay people really shouldn't do it because you will risk damaging things or getting dust in there or whatever else.
Marco:
So it's something that like, yeah, like Apple can do it like their technicians can do it, but you shouldn't.
John:
and it looks pretty clean inside from the pictures they have on apple's website if you look inside there if if the back came off in a reasonable way it's pretty nicely laid out the ram is really easy to get to it's sitting right there in little dim slots you could pull it right out like it's got a nice little heat pipe arrangement with the central heat sink and the two fans and like it looks nice in there it looks like they you know sweated the details and made it look nice on the inside even though nobody's ever going to see that except for an apple technician when you know some part of it breaks or something
Marco:
Yeah, but ultimately, I am very excited about this machine.
Marco:
I was a little excited about it when it was announced this past summer.
Marco:
But I'm even more excited now that we're getting performance numbers and that we're getting the first reviews that have been out.
Marco:
The best review that I've seen so far is the MKBHD review.
Marco:
He's had it for about a week.
Marco:
And he's a hard user.
Marco:
He creates and produces very high-end video content.
Marco:
So he's editing high-bandwidth, high-resolution video on this thing.
Marco:
And that really pushes it.
Marco:
One of the major concerns I had with the iMac Pro when we first heard about it was, I believe we talked about it in our live show at WWDC this past summer, which my main concern was, how does it handle being under load?
Marco:
Because my regular 5K iMac, it's a very graceful machine until you really ask it to do something hard.
Marco:
And then you hear annoying fan noise, and the fan really spins up, and it's loud, and it's just kind of ungraceful.
Marco:
And a Mac Pro, historically, has not done that.
Marco:
You know, Mac Pro's...
Marco:
usually are able to take pretty much any workload and still be dead silent or close enough to sound that you won't hear it in an average room um and so i really miss that like going back to a consumer level product like the regular iMac or a laptop like when it's when when you put under load and you hear the fan spinning i always kind of feel like yeah this really isn't made to do this very much um and
Marco:
So anyway, heat and how it deals with heat is a big question mark for me.
Marco:
Upgradability is kind of a known thing at this point.
Marco:
The laptops haven't been meaningfully upgradable since 2012.
Marco:
The desktops... The only thing that's been upgradable about the desktops anytime recently has been RAM.
Marco:
And even that is slowly fading away in the rest of the lineup.
Marco:
So really, to me, the upgradability thing is...
Marco:
It's certainly something.
Marco:
It's significant.
Marco:
It matters, I think, more for long-term servicing costs than necessarily getting a good deal up front.
Marco:
In the olden days, you'd be able to buy a MacBook...
Marco:
or whatever or a power book and go get third-party ram from crucial or owc or something like that and save a bunch of money on a high-end configuration by buying the parts yourself and putting them in from third parties those days are long gone for the entire lineup desktop to laptop like the only thing you can still do that for is casey's imac and you shouldn't because look what happened to casey's imac
Casey:
I was waiting for somebody to make that joke and prepared to make it myself.
John:
Not the reason you shouldn't.
John:
But I think the second use case is just longevity.
John:
Because if you buy it and you're happy, like you buy a 32 gig arrangement and you're happy.
John:
And it turns out that this thing is so reliable and the screen just looks gorgeous year after year that the thing is five years old.
John:
And you're like, you know what?
John:
This thing still does everything I need it to do.
John:
But I could use a little bit more RAM because I thought 32 would be enough for me to do what I need to do forever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But the latest version of Adobe's whatever suite is just a RAM monster, and I would really like to have 64.
John:
And that's where you want the ability to say, yeah, I used it for five years for 32, and it was great.
John:
To extend the life of this machine, let me upgrade it to 64.
John:
And you totally could on this machine if you could get inside it in a reasonable way, but you can't.
John:
So if there was a little RAM door, you would yank out the RAM five years later and put in some new RAM.
John:
And same caveats about third-party RAM, yada, yada.
John:
There's the whole reason Apple doesn't want you doing that.
John:
It makes sense.
John:
But it really does extend the life of the machines if you can...
John:
add an ssd to a thing that had a spinning disc or add a faster ssd or expand the ram and that's basically all you've been able to do with any mac for the longest time if you've been able to do anything at all but it does extend the life of your machines i mean just my mac pro is the obvious example where so much of the insides have been swapped and rotated and just gotten better and better over time that it's extended the life of the machine if it was still the way i bought it when it was new it would be completely unusable right now
Marco:
oh yeah but like you know but that was also in many ways a product of the times that it went through like the ssd transition is you know that's not going to happen again right or unless maybe we move to like those ram computers yeah but even just the video card i've gone to like three or four video cards in this thing each one faster than the next that's really extended the the you know the gaming life of the machine
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
But anyway, I feel like most of those days are over.
Marco:
There was a good section on Connected this week where Stephen talked about the video card upgradability of previous Mac Pros.
Marco:
And usually, people who want upgradable Mac Pros, they usually think of it, if they haven't done it before, they think of it from a PC builder perspective.
Marco:
Where if you're in the PC world, building Windows PCs,
Marco:
You can swap out video cards with all sorts of different great options all the time.
Marco:
Everything costs very little money, relatively speaking, and you have tons of great options.
Marco:
In the Mac world, you've only ever been limited to the handful of cards that actually supported the Mac.
Marco:
This has been true of many peripherals, even when the Mac Pros were the tower style, like what you have and what I used to have.
Marco:
You couldn't just put in any PCI Express card in there and have it work.
Marco:
Like, many of them would, but most of them wouldn't.
Marco:
Or they would work partially.
John:
It was more than you'd think.
John:
More than you'd think if you had the Flash now, because it's basically just based on the architecture.
John:
Like, Apple makes drivers usually for the architecture, not just for a very specific card.
John:
So a lot more cards than it would work, can you think?
John:
But even if it was just a handful of cards, it's not... Yeah, you don't have the selection of a PC builder, but...
John:
To have the option to put a faster card in there, even if you only have literally one choice, there's only one choice that you can buy that is faster than your current one, it's way better than zero choices.
John:
And one of the things I put in the notes here, this is a tweet from Barefeet, the website that does lots of this kind of testing, emphasizes this fact that they have benchmarks.
John:
These are OpenCL benchmarks, so they're things that run on the GPU.
John:
of of the imac pro and then they pitted it against a 2010 mac pro and the 2010 mac pro was faster why because the 2010 mac pro has a replaceable video card and like margo said there's not a lot of choices for what you can put in the 2010 mac pro
John:
uh but there are a couple of them and one of them they were able to put in there was one that is that uses the same architecture as the gpu and the imax pro so it's an amd vega or however you pronounce it uh 64 so they put that card in and because it's the same architecture and because
John:
mac os has drivers for it because of the imac pro it's able to use that card and just so happens to the card they could fit in that gigantic 2010 mac pro tower that has tons of room for cooling and everything that card is just faster than the one that's in the imac because the imac is a slower card it's probably clock slower because it's a more thermally compromised environment and so if what you care about is performance gpu performance in your 3d program or in your open cl whatever program
John:
uh 2010 mac pro is faster than an iMac pro and i think this also highlights the role that the mac pro might play uh will the mac pro have an upgradable gpu maybe maybe not but i think the most important thing for these type of computers for the mac pro or even for the iMac pro is
John:
to be super fast when you release which i think this this qualifies like it's got lots of cores in the cpus and if you have an application and use them it will really make a difference in your life uh the storage on this mac pro is really really fast and the iMac pro is really fast it's faster than the laptops right and so that makes it the fastest uh mac apple has because the old mac pro is so old um and it's got a you know the gpu is plenty fast right but to fulfill its role as the iMac pro i feel like
John:
next year there needs to be a much faster gpu in the iMac pro or you know like they need to they need to update the internals of this iMac pro on a reasonable basis fine they're not upgradable fine but apple itself has to upgrade them and revise them
John:
Because otherwise, it will just get more and more embarrassing that your 2010 Mac Pro, every year you can buy a new GPU to get you a 2x speed boost in whatever it is that you're doing.
John:
And the iMac Pro, year after year, the internals don't get upgraded.
John:
And if the Mac Pro is or isn't upgradable, same story.
John:
Technology marches on.
John:
And at the very, very top end...
John:
Apple has to be committed to releasing computers that are competitive with the top end and then revising their computers to continue to be competitive.
John:
And if they don't want to revise them, then merely make certain components upgradable and people will buy a PC Vega card that is faster than the one that they had before and flash it and throw it in there and it will work because the drivers work with every card in that architecture and everyone will be happy.
Marco:
My biggest concern here is the thermals.
Marco:
And I believe them when they say they've gotten the iMac enclosure to cool the up to 500-watt load that they are putting in here or that it's designed for.
Marco:
But it seems like there's not a lot of headroom.
Marco:
And this was exactly the problem they had with the 2013 cylinder Mac Pro.
Marco:
Craig Federighi famously said that they designed themselves into a thermal corner.
Marco:
It seems like the 2013 Mac Pro was designed with just barely enough cooling power.
Marco:
And even then, it wasn't really quite enough because of the way the dual GPUs got so hot.
Marco:
With this, it seems like they went into it, like, you know, John, you mentioned last time we talked about this, that, like, they went into the design brief of this seemingly with, like, FitPro workstation-grade components into the iMac enclosure.
Marco:
Well, why?
Marco:
Like, why couldn't it be a little bit differently shaped?
Marco:
Why couldn't it be designed in an enclosure that supports programming components, like the reverse?
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so, because of that, because they went in with the apparent goal or requirement of
Marco:
fit this into the iMac case that was never designed for this amount of thermal load.
Marco:
I mean, this case was designed in 2012, or was launched in 2012, and it was launched with the second generation 27-inch iMac.
Marco:
Even the Retina one was not designed for this.
Marco:
This was before the 5K.
Marco:
We have shoved so much stuff into the exact same size enclosure that in 2012 they probably were not thinking of when they designed the shape and
Marco:
ventilation and size and everything else with that in mind with the thermals as a severely limiting factor probably here i worry that on two fronts number one i worry like how much did they have to clock down the gpu and the cpus to fit here and
John:
And that gets to what you were saying of like if they're on the ragged edge of their thing, if they've had to downclock things, there are basically that they couldn't support the cooling.
John:
And the only way they could get things to fit is they had to say, well, let's just slightly downclock everything.
John:
And I don't know if that's true.
John:
That's just been a rumor for a while that like basically all the components are running it.
John:
you know slower speeds from the gpus and the cpus and the ram and every part of the system not a lot down clock but just a little bit and the only reason you do that is because you couldn't you couldn't cool them running at their their full speed and that i mean maybe that that's a compromise for like hey this is a slim computer it's all in one you don't have a big box you don't have a big thing or whatever
John:
I don't think it's unreasonable, but it does, you know, optimistically say this now further emphasizes why you might want the upcoming Mac Pro, because presumably that one will not have to downclock its components.
John:
And so it will therefore be faster and have more headroom and everything.
John:
And that gets to your point, Marco, about if they had to downclock things that you're concerned about.
John:
like uh about all the same things about the 2012 about reliability and about noise and so it could be argued that the 2013 mac pro the trash can privileged noise above reliability like it was very quiet all the time but maybe it should have been a little bit more noisy because there was lots of overheating problems with the gpus right so maybe they made a different choice here um that's one thing that i found lacking in all the reviews is
John:
A rigorous testing of the noise.
John:
I mean, people gave their subjective reviews or whatever, but I'm looking for someone who's a fanatic than I am about fan noise.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I wonder, too, the reliability, that's not a small point.
Marco:
Because nothing in here is really serviceable, because even Apple getting to it is challenging, taking off the screen probably and everything, and because these are all expensive custom components, like...
Marco:
This is not a machine that I would want to own out of warranty very long.
Marco:
And I certainly would never buy one out of warranty.
Marco:
And I would probably try to not sell it out of warranty.
Marco:
Because I worry that if it's operating...
Marco:
so close to the thermal limits of this enclosure because this enclosure was never designed for this it's similar to a laptop where like laptops often run like pretty warm if you push them like all the time and laptops tend not to last as long they tend to have reliability problems or components break or you have like heat fatigue and your gpu falls off or things like that like there's all sorts of problems with laptops with just things that run too hot because they're they have such constrained enclosures and
Marco:
This is basically a giant workstation laptop in a big screen in the way that it is clearly very thermally constrained.
Marco:
The old Mac Pro towers and even the trash can Mac Pro, those had a lot of headroom for most configurations.
Marco:
The main problem the trash can had was if you actually stressed the GPUs,
Marco:
That would cause a problem.
Marco:
If you just stress the CPU, it was fine because it was designed with the kind of asymmetric triangle of heatsink in the middle there.
Marco:
It was designed to have one very hot side, which was the CPU, and two kind of hot sides, which were the GPUs.
Marco:
And as long as the kind of hot sides didn't get super hot,
Marco:
It was fine.
Marco:
But unfortunately, that's not how people work anymore.
Marco:
And they sold it as a GPU workstation, which is kind of a problem.
Marco:
But I think it could have been done as it was, as quietly as it was, if they just made it a little bit bigger.
Marco:
The main problem with the Trash Jam Mac Pro, I think, is probably just they wanted to make it small.
Marco:
And they succeeded.
Marco:
It was very impressively small.
Marco:
But that's something that nobody was really asking for.
Marco:
And instead, they've made it unreliable, if you stress the GPUs.
Marco:
Anyway, with this, I feel like they've done the same thing.
Marco:
They've kept it super thin on the edges, just like the current one.
Marco:
And the back of it's pretty small, too.
Marco:
And they've kept the same enclosure.
Marco:
But...
John:
why nobody was asking for that and it has severely constrained them they didn't even put that many more vents like the vents are bigger but like the back of this is not covered with vents in places where the regular ones aren't they hid the vents behind the leg just like they always do so it looks clean from the back and that is like not only are they keeping the case the same which you know presumably has big advantages in terms of tooling you don't have to come up with a whole new case design you don't have to come up with a whole new set of
John:
machines to carve out your case like it's just a different some different slotting in the thing and you know whatever i don't know if that's actually as big a savings that as it might seem to be but uh there's something to be said for uh for you know keeping some things the same but they they could have made the entire back of this thing like a giant cheese grater and that would certainly allow more airflow into and out of this thing and would have allowed you to have bigger lazier slower spinning fans instead of two
John:
relatively fast ones pushing all the air out of the central thing and pulling all the air in through these little slits right so it's all very elegant looking and everything um i mean and we don't you know we don't know we're we're we're worrying more than anything else we're not saying this there's going to be thermal problems uh even the downclocking thing is just something i've read as a rumor i haven't actually seen anyone pull out the the speeds for all the components and say here are the speeds for the components and if you put these things in a pc you would never collect them down like this if you had adequate cooling like so we don't know but
John:
um but that gets to the heart of what you're talking about before like the reason you pay for all these expensive components xeons and ecc ram and all that other stuff is for the reliability factor and if the reliability factor is undercut by the uh by the thermals and the form factor then that makes this a less compelling purchase
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I don't want my professional workstation $5,000 and up dollar computer to be operating very close to its thermal limits from day one, especially since I can't service anything.
Marco:
Because what that tells me is I don't think this is going to last as long as a tower.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And my current iMac, I think, has similar issues.
Marco:
I think that's just inherent in the iMac design that, like, when you constrain things with thermals, things don't last reliably as long.
Marco:
Simple as that.
Marco:
That's been the case for all computer hardware forever.
Marco:
When you can give them more thermal headroom, they last longer, and they run more reliably, and they run more gracefully under load.
Marco:
And it's important to say what you just said, because, like, we still don't know.
Marco:
We haven't used this yet.
Marco:
None of us have one.
Marco:
We haven't used it, and the reviews have not been very...
Marco:
clear about you know load and thermals and noise and everything else but that is a that is a major concern for me at least that they crammed all this stuff into a case that was never designed to handle it and even though they did a lot of work on the cooling system and redesigning the internals and everything it was still a case that was not designed for 500 watt workstation grade components inside so that's my main concern is like is this really going to last and as i mentioned a few months ago i think
Marco:
I'm not sure I want to spend $6,000 on a great computer that is going to be really flaky in three years.
John:
You'll just sell it before then anyway.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
But I don't sell desktops that often.
Marco:
I mean, look, I'm still using my 2014 iMac now.
Marco:
And so I really... Seeing the reviews of this, I really want one.
Marco:
I really, really do.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
I really want a speed upgrade.
Marco:
I do so much parallel work that would benefit from those new cores.
Marco:
So, so much.
Marco:
I really want the black trackpad.
John:
Your compiling would probably benefit from both the faster disks and the... Well, I don't know if the disks are faster in RandomSeek because I haven't seen that.
John:
But I like the... The disk subsystem, I think, is getting short shrift here because, first of all, the disk subsystem in the, I think, the 2016, 2017s,
John:
was much faster than us before people don't you know for for large data transfers like if you know for if you're doing like video or something like that and again i don't know how it is for random access with a bunch of small files and stuff but i love seeing stuff like that because people don't think oh it's got an ssd and they think ssd equals ssd equals ssd but ssds get faster and part of the advantages of buying expensive pro hardware is it should have the fastest ssd on the fastest interface and so the numbers coming out of this is like three gigs per second read and write sustained uh through the internal storage and
John:
And that's great.
John:
That is better than that's better than Casey's little MacBook adorable.
John:
Right.
John:
A lot better.
John:
And that's exactly they both have SSDs.
John:
Are they the same speed?
John:
They are not.
John:
Right.
John:
That's what I want out of a pro machine.
John:
And that's, you know, this machine for like processing 8K video and stuff like that.
John:
That's a lot of data to move on and off the disk and into and out of RAM.
John:
And so all thumbs up on that.
John:
And that's one of the things that's attracting me to the machine.
John:
The reason I think that for so many applications, like the very fastest Mac that Apple sells, maybe it won't make everything that you do faster, especially if you don't take advantage of the multiple cores.
John:
But if you do stuff that it uses lots of disk bandwidth,
John:
even if you don't care about the cpu cores or the gpu this is the best disk machine if you just do stuff with gpus this is far and away going to be the fastest gpu even if you don't care about the cores and you don't care about the disk like there's a lot to like even if you're not going to use every aspect of this computer and yeah
John:
you have to pay for the other aspects too which is the reason people get cranky like i just want the good gpu i don't need zeons i don't need all this stuff well you get it all right it's expensive it's just the way it is but having to pay for it all to get like a good gpu is way better than literally having no option except to buy a 2010 mac pro and a third-party gpu and shove it in there yeah and the final thing that i worry about here before we before anybody has one is
Marco:
Is having this much heat going to be a problem for the screen?
Marco:
You know, this iMac was designed in 2012 when the components behind it were, you know, 85 watt to 100 watt load probably.
Marco:
Now it can be up to 500 watt load.
Marco:
Is having that amount of heat right up against the back of the LCD panel...
Marco:
going to be a problem for the longevity and quality of the LCD panel?
Marco:
Are you going to develop a splotch in the right quadrant near the middle where the processor is on the back?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
How do LCDs handle very high heat
Marco:
being you know generated on a component that is stuck to the back of them for three years these are the kind of things i'm worried about like as it's like i'm so excited about this machine and i'm probably going to buy at least one but i i don't know like these these are problems that i wouldn't worry about if it was a tower
Marco:
And I intend to buy the tower when that comes out too.
Marco:
Like the only reason I'm even talking about this now is because Tiff wants me to buy this.
Marco:
So that way I can give it to her when I get the tower.
Marco:
So that's probably what I'm going to do.
Marco:
But it's hard not to think about those concerns when I, when like I've been a little bit burned by IMAX in the past and I've had such great experiences with the towers.
Yeah.
Casey:
You know, I'm surprised that you're harping on the thermal stuff so much because it seems to me like Apple has got to know what the thermal requirements for this thing are.
Casey:
And with the trash can, yes, they designed themselves into a corner in that they didn't have a lot of headroom, which is what you said before.
Casey:
But it's not like it was broken the moment it shipped.
Casey:
And so I don't think this is going to be any different.
Casey:
I really don't.
Casey:
And having seen it very briefly...
Casey:
I saw it when we were at WWDC, as did John, and my recollection of that brief window of time I spent with it was that I could hear the fans, even despite the fact that it was in a very loud demo room.
Casey:
And they said that the fans were screaming deliberately because it was a very early pre-release model, and they just wanted to crank the fans up to 11 to make sure that whatever they were demoing on screen, which I don't even remember anymore, didn't cause any problems.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Those fans, I'm sorry to report, gentlemen, my recollection were they were loud.
Casey:
Now, that doesn't mean they were going to be loud always.
Casey:
It doesn't mean they're going to be loud every time you hit, you know, Command R and Xcode.
Casey:
But it certainly seemed like it was capable of moving a whole lot of air.
Casey:
And you very well could be right.
Casey:
I mean, obviously, all three of us are just pontificating at the moment.
Casey:
But I would be really surprised if we see widespread thermal issues with this thing.
Casey:
I mean, it has been extensively redesigned on the inside specifically to avoid that very problem.
John:
but so but like so is the trash can like and that's exactly what it had was maybe not from day one but it had gpu failures due to heat right and so like that was that is that was the the major and i think the only sort of systemic hardware problem with the trash cans and marco is sitting there right now in front of a computer that he says uh runs the gpu too hot and his isn't even a pro so there's some reason to believe that
John:
Apple doesn't have the cooling stuff licked for stuff stuck to the back of a monitor, even if it is not really hot stuff like this.
John:
So I think it is reasonable to be concerned, given the recent history about this.
John:
And, you know, just worry.
John:
Like, we don't know.
John:
We'll find out, right?
John:
But the problem with this is...
John:
The only real way to find out is to be like me and be like, I'm not going to buy one of these for the first two years just to find out what the deal is.
John:
But you can't, you know, you can't do that.
John:
If you want one on day one, you kind of have to pull the trigger and say whether like, are you going to buy it or are you not going to buy it?
John:
And that's where the worry comes in because you won't have time if you're going to buy it.
John:
when it comes out within the first month or two you won't have time to see in six months does everyone try all their gpus or not so you just kind of gotta cross your fingers or uh you know be prepared to sell it to somebody else or you know do what marco's gonna do which may end up working out which is marco gets the computer he stresses all the cpu cores uh encoding mp3s and compiling stuff and then he passes off to tiff and she stresses the gpu but leaves the cpu alone because she's just playing games on it and doing photoshop stuff which is also all gpu stuff
John:
Yeah.
John:
So you'll spread the heat.
John:
So you get a splotch on one side of the screen and then a splotch on the other.
John:
It'll even out over time.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I really hope that it's good because all the reviews are very, very positive.
Marco:
And these are still, you know, these are very early reviews.
Marco:
But
Marco:
They're very promising in quite how universally positive they are.
Marco:
And man, Skylake Xeons are awesome according to these reviews.
Marco:
This is a big deal on the processor front because the 10-core version that they've seen to the reviewers seems to have 10 cores without a significant single-core performance penalty.
Marco:
Like in the previous generation... There was a little penalty.
Marco:
It was a little bit slower than...
Marco:
It's slightly slower single core than the newest iMac at the top spec, but barely.
Marco:
And it's obviously way faster and multithreaded.
John:
The real promise is supposedly that the 18 also doesn't take a smoke.
John:
Because it used to be like, yeah, you take a little hit, but then you go up to whatever the maximum core count is, you take a pretty significant hit in a single core.
John:
And so the theory with these is that...
John:
The 10 core takes a little hit.
John:
The 18 core will be similar performance to the 10 core in single threaded.
John:
So it's like you're not, you don't have to make this horrible choice between, well, if I want awesome performance in my parallel tasks, I have to give up single.
John:
You just give up a tiny bit and it doesn't get worse as you go up in core.
John:
We'll see if that's true, but that's, that's the, that's the pitch.
Marco:
The main concerns for most people here when they see this are price and lack of upgradability.
Marco:
And those are very valid concerns.
Marco:
But it's a very, very good value for what you get for workstation parts.
Marco:
A lot of people look at the Pro line, as John said earlier, because they want a really good GPU for gaming, say.
Marco:
But that's never what the Mac Pro has been very good at.
Marco:
You could do that with it, but it was a pretty inefficient way to do that price-wise and sometimes even performance-wise.
Marco:
You can get GPUs that are pretty decent for gaming, but that's not why they're selling them here, and they don't expect people to buy it for that reason.
Marco:
And when you compare it to the price of just building a gaming PC, which John should have done years ago, it's not even close.
Marco:
And PC people and Mac people who just want to play games look at this and say, look, I could build a gaming PC for way less money.
Marco:
And that's true, but you wouldn't put a Xeon in it.
Marco:
And you wouldn't have a wonderful Apple 5K display in front of it.
Marco:
And you wouldn't have ECC RAM and Workstation Class other stuff.
Marco:
Like the Workstation Class SSD.
Marco:
You wouldn't have all that stuff.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
When you actually go to like Dell or HP or somebody and spec out workstation grade components in a workstation that match the components in this that are actually like a Xeon with the same core count and a workstation GPU and workstation grade SSD that's super fast if you can even get them to give you one.
Marco:
It's actually pretty competitively priced.
Marco:
From what we know so far, again, we don't know the pricing of the upgrades yet, but the base price and what you get in the base model, it's actually pretty reasonably priced, it seems.
Marco:
And if you spec up an iMac, as I said, if you spec up a regular iMac into this territory of performance and capacity and everything, you're already getting to about $4,000.
Marco:
So to get double the cores for $5,000 is not unreasonable, I don't think, in addition to all the other upgrades.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So value, I think, from what we know so far, it's probably fine.
Marco:
Lack of upgradability is a big thing, but I think this is just the era in which we live now.
Marco:
I think the reality, our laptops, again, haven't been upgradable for years, for five years for most people.
Marco:
They haven't been upgradable meaningfully, if at all.
Marco:
And this is just the world we live in now.
Marco:
The reality is upgrades have been getting fewer and fewer.
Marco:
They've been getting increasingly problematic like Casey has with his RAM because as things get super advanced, they also tend to get more picky and more specialized and it's harder to find and make third-party stuff that actually works.
Marco:
Look how long it takes people to make third-party things for like the custom Apple SSD modules and a lot of laptops and many of the recent desktops.
Marco:
So like...
Marco:
It's just things are getting more advanced, more specialized, more integrated.
Marco:
So I think the era of upgradability is really pretty much over for most computer things.
Marco:
And I say this not happily because I always did that.
Marco:
I participated very heavily in that.
Marco:
I would always buy my laptops with base configuration and then spec them up with third-party parts to save money and to get bigger capacities and stuff and upgrade down the road with an SSD to make it faster and everything.
Marco:
And that was a great time for a long time.
Marco:
But I think the time is over.
Marco:
The technology has moved on.
Marco:
The market has moved on.
Marco:
And I think very few people really even would do that anymore, even if they could.
Marco:
And additionally, now you can't.
Marco:
So it kind of closes the door on that.
Marco:
And I think rather than hoping to go back to the time where you could buy John's Mac Pro in 2008 and keep it running all this time with just occasional upgrades of relatively inexpensive parts,
Marco:
we're not going back to that time like we can't like the parts now are too specialized too good even john's computer you could never upgrade the processors you could never upgrade the motherboard make it you know faster bust or anything you just can't do that can't you can't you do the cpus of mine i think well you can but only within a range of like the three that were available at that time like you can't put in a new xeon into your motherboard until it changes the socket like every two years
John:
yeah there was there was a long stretch though where they kept the socket the same it's not my model year i think well maybe actually it was a 2009 someone recently posted a youtube video i think they were doing a 2009 and they just upgraded the heck out of it to basically the fastest cpus that still fit in the socket and all the other stuff fast and you know it wasn't super impressive but it was pretty neat it was mostly interesting just to watch exactly what it takes to do that if i can find the link i'll i'll throw it in the notes but but yeah you're right like eventually they change the socket and then you're out of that business
Marco:
Or even just, like, you know, the new ones require a certain type of bus speed or RAM type or North Bridge that yours doesn't have.
Marco:
Like, stuff like that.
Marco:
Like, there's always, like, the requirements change.
Marco:
Even if the socket doesn't change, usually you can't meaningfully upgrade your processor after it's being sold, you know?
Marco:
And so, like, the era of upgradability has been fading for a long time.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I think it's very well over now.
Marco:
It's very, very clearly over.
Marco:
And so rather than hoping to go back to a time that we're never going to go back to, a more productive approach now would just be like, figure out how to operate in this new environment.
Marco:
And base your purchases accordingly.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So, you know, if you're concerned about running the same computer for 10 years, well, you're going to take a big risk on that.
Marco:
You know, it might break after year five and require a repair that is going to be more than it's worth or it won't even be available anymore.
Marco:
So, like, my approach to this is I have just gotten accustomed to selling computers after three years of using them or sometimes less.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I buy AppleCare if I'm concerned about service costs.
Marco:
I don't buy it on phones, as I mentioned, because that's not for me.
Marco:
But for Macs, I sometimes do buy it, depending on pricing and concerns at the time.
Marco:
Once a Mac is out of AppleCare coverage, I don't want it anymore.
Marco:
So I try to sell it before that.
Marco:
Currently, I'm using my iMac that just left its warranty, and this is very unusual for me.
Marco:
I don't usually do this.
Marco:
But the new world where nothing is upgradable might require you to either buy less perfect and less expensive gear more frequently than you used to.
Marco:
And or get used to selling it, which is not great.
Marco:
It's not fun and it's not particularly profitable.
Marco:
But like, you know, you don't have to run everything into the ground necessarily.
Marco:
If you want super high end stuff, the old way was buy something high end and it's upgraded every 18 months, you know, until something better came out that you could upgrade the whole thing to.
Marco:
The new way is you can't do that anymore.
Marco:
You can just buy something new every three years or two years or four years and sell the old one while it's still worth something.
Marco:
This isn't a great solution for everybody, but we don't have any choice.
Marco:
The world of upgradability is gone for Macs and even many PCs.
Marco:
So that world is beyond us now.
Marco:
So it's worth, rather than dwelling on this too much and trying to fight this fight forever, it's worth just figuring out, like, how can you operate in the new world?
John:
It's coming back for the Mac Pro, though, even if it's just GPU upgradability.
John:
I'm holding that hope.
John:
you know we we again we still don't know anything about the mac pro and i want to emphasize the gpu i mean it's not just important for me like the gpu is is the i think the most critical just because gpus get so much better year over year because because of the inherent parallelism of their task that all they can basically you know as soon as there's a shrink they can fit more execution units and because the problem is so parallel like you actually get a win for that so they are still on that crazy path where
John:
Year after year, they get faster roughly in pace with transistor density.
John:
There's a little bit of a problem with RAM and bandwidth and stuff like that.
John:
But in general, their speed increases year over year are so big that if you are not on that train, if you can't participate in that train, and you're doing something that is GPU-intensive, even if it's not gaming, whatever it may be, something GPU-intensive involving video or whatever, it's like you have to throw out the whole machine because eventually...
John:
You know, two years later, the GPUs are four times as fast and you're just left in the dust.
John:
So you have to be able to upgrade the GPU.
John:
So please, Apple, make a machine where you can upgrade the GPU.
John:
Just one, just one, make it really expensive.
John:
But yeah, you got to do it, please.
Marco:
I mean, I'll just point out that...
Marco:
when apple had the mac pro roundtable and they announced that a new mac pro will exist sometime not in 2017 uh they never said upgradable they said modular i know that's a very different thing i'm saying i'm just hoping i'm just holding out hope i'm not it's not founded on anything other than like uh than just process of elimination of like how could you differentiate it from the imac pro
Marco:
uh yeah the screen will be separate so that's that's the modular part right also it could it could be upgradable it could be it could some part of it i'm just i'm trying i'm trying to get my hopes up because this is still apple and modern apple at that and so like the chances of it being that upgradable if at all
Marco:
I would not consider that a sure thing.
Marco:
If you're looking at the iMac Pro and you're thinking, oh, I want to hold it for the Mac Pro because it'll be upgradable, I would not consider that a safe assumption.
Marco:
It might be upgradable, but modular simply means you will probably be able to configure it with lots of different configurations up front.
Marco:
The iMac Pro comes with one CPU and one GPU, and they're both within a certain range of options here.
Marco:
Maybe the Mac Pro will let you pick two CPUs or two GPUs or one CPU and three GPUs.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
That's modular.
Marco:
It doesn't mean any of this stuff is upgradable necessarily.
Marco:
It might be upgradable, but we have no indication that it will be.
Marco:
And I would certainly not bet on it.
Marco:
But anyway, the other point is that with the Mac Pro, we don't actually know when it's coming.
Marco:
All Apple said was not in 2017.
Marco:
It might be 2018.
John:
It could arrive the first day of 2018.
John:
So as soon as 2017 ends, any day could be Mac Pro Day.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
New Year's Day.
Marco:
God help me.
Marco:
For the next decade, any day could be Mac Pro Day.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Or it could come out in 2025.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
Or it could come out never.
Marco:
They could just change their mind and say, you know what?
Marco:
Actually, we're not going to do it anymore.
Marco:
It's not even a sure thing that's going to exist.
John:
What it means is that every day you wake up in 2018 and later, it could be Mac Pro Day.
Yeah.
Marco:
This is like Casey's doom.
Marco:
Worrying every week that the Mac Pro will be announced and released.
John:
Realistically speaking, we know we're all waiting for WWDC and if they miss next year, then we're waiting for next year's WWDC.
John:
We do have some thing to hang our hat on.
Marco:
The Mac Pro could come New Year's Day or it could come in June or it could come in December or it could come in 2019.
Marco:
For anybody deciding whether to buy an iMac Pro,
Marco:
If you're at all on the fence about whether you might want a Mac Pro instead.
Marco:
Yeah, just buy it and sell it like Marco.
Marco:
Well, yeah, because it's like you don't really know when it's coming.
Marco:
Again, you don't even really know if the Mac Pro is coming.
Marco:
Yes, Apple said they're working on it.
Marco:
But things could change over time.
Marco:
You never know.
Marco:
Until it's actually out, you can't guarantee that it will be available.
Marco:
You can't guarantee this thing will exist.
Marco:
And because we don't know anything about it, or even when or if it's coming out, then I think if you are really tempted by the iMac Pro...
Marco:
and you're not patient, and you need to buy something soon, and you really can't wait until June just to see if it'll come out by then, then this isn't a bad option.
Marco:
I have a feeling, my prediction here of what's going to happen here, the iMac Pro is probably going to be so good, and it's probably going to satisfy so many pro needs, that when the Mac Pro does finally come out, it's going to sell really badly.
Marco:
and then apple will use that as justification to really finally kill it i i expect the next mac pro to be a single release product line i don't expect it to ever get another update after its initial release because i don't think it's going to sell well and i say that not happily because i want that computer but i
Marco:
The iMac Pro, I think, is going to solve so many Pro needs.
Marco:
For so many people, possibly even me, it's going to be good enough.
Marco:
And the timing of this is also going to exacerbate this, where people who have been dying for a high-end Mac Pro update for the last three years, a lot of that demand is going to go to the iMac Pro simply because it's out first.
Marco:
And so then when the Mac Pro comes out with probably the same generation components, at least the same generation processors, maybe GPUs will have a small update by then, but like when the Mac Pro comes out, say in six months with the same generation stuff at a higher price point after so many people have had six months to just buy the iMac instead, I really don't think it's going to sell very well.
John:
Well, the 8K screen will be a big draw.
Marco:
We'll have to see.
Marco:
Honestly, I do wonder if they're going to do an 8K screen because all they said was they're doing a pro display.
Marco:
They didn't say what size or anything about it.
John:
I'm more optimistic about upgradable GPUs than about the 8K screen, but we'll see.
Marco:
Yeah, so all this is to say...
Marco:
If you're thinking about buying this, but you're making an assumption about the next Mac Pro, really question that assumption.
Marco:
First of all, can you just wait and see?
Marco:
If you can wait and see, wait and see.
Marco:
But you don't know how long that wait's going to be.
Marco:
And then secondly, is what you're waiting for actually going to happen?
Marco:
Do we actually know that?
Marco:
Is it likely to happen?
Marco:
Have they said anything about it?
Marco:
And chances are, the answer to all those things is, we don't know or no.
Marco:
Ultimately, I have a feeling this is the new Mac Pro in practice.
Marco:
Whether they release something next summer that nobody buys or not, it's a different story.
Marco:
But I think we're going to look back on this point in Apple history when we're all even older men in a few years on this podcast, hopefully, talking about, oh, remember when the iMac Pro came out and when the Mac Pro became an iMac, basically, like...
Marco:
I think this is the new line of Mac Pros for the long term.
Casey:
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
Casey:
It might not be.
Casey:
We have a lot more to discuss about this, but we have gone long and we have an interesting holiday schedule coming up very, very soon.
Casey:
So I think we should probably just stop here.
Casey:
And we will talk next week about the press tour with this.
Casey:
And we'll talk next week about the new interesting hardware and encryption sort of things.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
The T2 chip?
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
There's all sorts of cool stuff in there.
Casey:
Yeah, so we have plenty more to say.
Casey:
And as much as I joke, I'm actually pretty interested to talk about some of this stuff.
Casey:
So we will save that for next week.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Hover, and Fracture.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
We'll be right back.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's K-C-L-L-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U
Marco:
So, Casey, do you want us to talk even more about the Mac Pro?
Casey:
About the Mac Pro?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
About the iMac Pro?
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
That's fine.
Marco:
If you look at what this iMac Pro is versus what the 2013 Mac Pro was, and technically still is, this is a Mac Pro.
Marco:
It just happens to have a screen glued to the front of it.
Marco:
But it's really no less upgradable than the 2013 Mac Pro was.
Marco:
It's way faster in every way.
Marco:
It has more options, bigger.
Marco:
And it supports desktop retina correctly.
John:
I think RAM and SSD upgrade.
John:
I think it's not really more.
John:
RAM and SSD upgrade.
John:
That's a lot.
John:
It was so easy to take the top off the trash can.
John:
It comes right off.
John:
It comes right off, and right there in front of you, totally reachable, is the SSD and the RAM.
Marco:
Was the SSD actually... Does anybody see someone?
John:
I'm pretty sure.
John:
It was just on the outside of one of the boards.
John:
You can just yank it out of the slot, put another one in.
John:
Let's see.
John:
Oh, yeah, they do sell one.
John:
Yeah, Mac Pro 2013.
John:
At this point, I would do that for my wife's iMac,
John:
I wish I could upgrade the SSD right now because I would pay for a two terabyte one.
John:
It's $1,200 for two terabytes.
John:
Well, I would buy a third party one, obviously.
Marco:
No, this is third party.
Marco:
This is from OWC.
John:
That's for the Mac Pro, though.
John:
I'm assuming it's not the same thing in the iMac.
John:
No, you're right.
Marco:
In the iMac, it's probably different.
Marco:
But anyway, for all intents and purposes, if Apple came out and said, this is the Mac Pro now, if they didn't pre-announce the existence of a new modular one next year, or not this year, we would grumble for a few weeks about how it wasn't upgradable.
Marco:
I would grumble forever.
Marco:
Yeah, I was going to say a few weeks.
John:
You know why I would grumble forever?
Marco:
You're going to grumble forever no matter what they release.
John:
No, the reason I would grumble forever doesn't have anything to do with almost anything we discussed except for one part, the fact that things might be downclocked.
John:
Because the whole point of the top line of the computer is to be the fastest it can be.
John:
And so don't take the world's fastest parts and then downclock them.
John:
right that's that's the biggest thing you need to have a world's fastest mac that is not intentionally hobbled by some stupidity now if they change the imac pro to not do that and to run all the parts at their maximum speed to get the highest binned parts from all the manufacturers right and run them at their high bin speed
John:
then yeah i would be less grumbly but if this specific one with its rumored down clock parts that cannot be your top of the line computer because it's so it's it's like it's like you know this is this is our top of the line car it's you know it's the the the accurate nsx right uh but we've detuned the engine by putting a restrictive exhaust on it so we've cut off 100 horsepower that's just sitting there
John:
Like, what are you what are you even doing?
Casey:
But you could make that argument for everything, though.
Casey:
You can make that argument for any car.
Casey:
Everyone.
Casey:
Every freaking car is an aftermarket exhaust car.
John:
Car is a bad example.
John:
But for silicon parts like they've been to a certain clock speed and the more expensive ones are the ones that can go faster.
John:
Right.
John:
And to not run them at at their top speed or to buy slower speed chips because you can't cool them.
John:
you've made a bad top end computer then like you're leaving money on the table like you're charging enough money that you could put in the top end part but instead you buy the slower or worse you buy the top end one but don't run it at its maximum clock speed that is just an embarrassment you can't do that you got to have a fastest computer with all the fastest stuff that's the whole point of the top of your line is to be the top of your line
Casey:
I think you're getting a little overly worked up.
Casey:
If some GPU is running at 90% of its maximum capacity, who cares?
John:
What are you leaving that 10% there for?
Casey:
Who cares?
Casey:
It's still infinitely better.
John:
People who want the very fastest computer are willing to pay for it.
John:
That's who cares.
Casey:
That is, but by definition, John, that is the fastest computer.
Casey:
This is all bold because it's hypothetical, but like in this hypothetical world, that is the fastest computer that Apple sells.
Casey:
There is no other discussion to be had.
John:
Yeah, I know, but like, but it's not, it's, you know what I mean?
John:
Like it's, it's, it's like saying whatever Mac app, if the fastest computer they sold was the adorable, it's like, but that is the fast, you would know that it is possible to make a faster one by doing obvious things, right?
John:
You enjoy your PC then.
John:
Like, what do you... No, I'm with John on this.
Marco:
Because the role of it is to be the top.
John:
Haven't you read my case for the true Mac Pro successor?
John:
Like, this is the whole point of your top-of-the-line computer, right?
Casey:
I mean, yes.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm not arguing that there should be a top-of-the-line computer.
Casey:
I'm not arguing that it should be really damn fast.
Casey:
But if you're...
Casey:
But if you're worried about a processor being four gigahertz instead of 4.1, like who cares?
John:
It's still people who buy this computer care.
John:
That's who cares.
John:
Like, because I'm not saying like, oh, you have to do something magical to make it faster than everybody else.
John:
But like, don't take a part that runs at 4.1 and run it at four.
John:
why like why oh we had to do that to fit into the thermal envelope and it gets back to what marco and i was talking about who's asking you to fit it in a skinny case versus who is asking you to get the fastest everyone can buy people buy whole new computers for a 10 speed bump to things that they do right they say my computer is too slow if i get 10 to 20 improvement on this it makes a difference in my work day in my you know compile cycle in my render time in my whatever
John:
right they'll buy a whole new computer for for a double digit percentage speed increase and you're saying i'm willing to leave double digit speed increase on the table so i can fit it into a skinny case that's not asking for that so that's why i'm saying i would grumble forever about this because it is a wrong-headed thing to say we're going to make the fastest computer we can for our most demanding users but we're going to do a super obvious thing that makes it slower in some small way well but so you're out you keep asking who cares i'm telling you who cares you don't care but i care
Bye.