I Think I Ordered One
Casey:
I feel like our world is a little upside down.
Marco:
Did you roll over in your Wrangler?
Casey:
No, I didn't roll over in my Wrangler, but we're going to talk about that.
Casey:
Since you brought it up, I guess we can just start with follow-up.
Casey:
And coincidentally, in the very first item in follow-up, we have more Wrangler talk to have.
Casey:
Awesome.
Casey:
First of all, I wanted to publicly commend both John and Marco for John giving Marco the material with which to make a truly hilarious pre-show.
Casey:
And I had several people very kindly reach out to say, oh, my God, John was on fire.
John:
well oftentimes it was john was on fire beating you up but at the very least it was john was on fire i wasn't beating you up at all that's the whole thing like i first of all you brought the topic of the show and said i have a problem i'm thinking about a wrangler so it's like you're saying convince me not to get a wrangler and so i was trying to do what you asked that's not a problem like if you're saying i i you know i'm i'm into i'm thinking about jeep wrangler but you you phrased it as like a problem situation
Marco:
Like if you were really enthusiastic about it, saying like, look, I've decided to make a life change.
Marco:
I have found who I really am now and who I really am is a Jeep Wrangler person.
Marco:
Like we would have been supportive of you as your friends.
Casey:
Can I if I get a Wrangler, if I end up with a Wrangler, can I have can I try to find a license plate that's T-O-P-L-I-S-S?
Marco:
No, you are not allowed to do that.
Marco:
Come on.
Marco:
You are not allowed to have a giant list pun for the rest of your life.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
Anyway, so we have some follow up with regards.
Casey:
Oh, no, I got you distracted me.
Casey:
I was trying to compliment you two and you've distracted me.
Casey:
So anyway.
Casey:
So, yeah, Marco did a very good job editing down 30 minutes of garbage into eight minutes of pure comedy gold.
Casey:
That was mostly on account of John giving Marco the raw material with which to carve comedy gold out of it.
Casey:
So.
Casey:
thank you to the two of you even though i am slightly annoyed with you now i i still find that conversation hilarious but we have some follow-up about wranglers uh from david crawford who writes in case you can tell john that this is the guy with the yellow 458 speciale i probably i hope i pronounced that right i think i did anyway quite a full deal yeah exactly and i can drive anything i want but when i run out to the garage to grab a car to run around town i jump in my jeep wrangler
Casey:
My Jeep is heavily modified and was not intended as a daily driver, but I find myself driving it more than anything because it's fun and nimble around town.
Casey:
Any thoughts, John?
John:
I buy the fun part.
John:
Nimble?
John:
Nimble?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Fair.
Casey:
I think nimble in this context means it's not a terribly long car, although I believe it was a Ford.
John:
It spends a lot of time on two wheels.
John:
It's very nimble.
John:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Here we go.
Casey:
Here we go.
John:
That's the thing about the Jeep Wrangler, specifically for you.
John:
Like, it strikes me, well, first of all, for this choice of cars, if you've got a Ferrari, a fancy Ferrari, or a Jeep, neither one of those is really a great car to...
John:
you know drive around as a regular car because you're not going to take your ferrari to try to like go grocery shopping and scrape the front end trying to go into a gas station or whatever and a jeep like like fun cars like that whether they're fun sporty cars or fun like off-roady cars they're not really fun to go on like a 45 minute highway trip in a jeep wrangler or ferrari like that's not what they're about so it seems to me that you're still as far as we can tell looking for like a
John:
they call a daily driver like a car that you can use every day and yeah you can use a jeep every day and you could use a ferrari every day but they're both there's a lot of big compromises with both of those things and thus far you've been looking at cars that are more like regular cars that also happen to have a fun side to them right um so that's why i don't think either one of these cars is a good choice for you
John:
So forget about the 458.
John:
I know that was the second one on your list, but cross it off.
Casey:
Yes, totally within my budget.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I thought it was funny, nevertheless, that here's someone that could really drive anything, and they choose to drive their Jeep.
John:
That's why I suggested a go-kart.
John:
I'm making a joke.
John:
I don't know if that was cut or whatever.
John:
I suggested a go-kart because it's like a fun toy to have.
John:
You can tool around on that, and it's a vehicle, but you're not going to bring on roads.
John:
But it's just fun, right?
John:
It's way more fun than you would think because you're so low to the ground, and even when it doesn't go fast, it feels fast, and it corners.
John:
You've driven a go-kart, right?
John:
They're fun.
John:
And it gets that out of your system, so you can just have a regular car that works and keeps out the weather and doesn't roll over and is safe and all that good stuff.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We got to get out of neutral.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Let's talk about the iMac Pro since we're not going to do any of that today.
Casey:
We can dive right in and say that the iMac Pro RAM upgrades.
Casey:
And this is Rene Ritchie, I guess, saying you can't upgrade the RAM yourself, but you can take it to an Apple store or certified service center and they can upgrade for you.
Casey:
What now?
John:
that's right from renee richie so i'm assuming it's true means right from apple's mouth we you know we said that nothing is upgradable uh meaning like if you were to open it up yourself you're avoiding your warranty or whatever blah blah blah but apparently you can bring it to apple and they're all great so as far as i'm concerned i mean as marco pointed out i think and uh tweet replies this like then you have to pay apple's prices for ram which is ridiculous uh but
John:
At the very least, it shows the Apple not entirely closing the door.
John:
I wonder if that also applies to like SSDs.
John:
Could you take it to Apple and say, please take out this SSD and I will pay your crazy price to have twice as big an SSD and you'll put it in there for me.
John:
But I mean, I still think the best bet is to just buy it how you want it configured because all these upgrade options seem like they're expensive.
John:
But, you know, this is I guess this is official from Apple.
John:
If they're going to do the upgrade, then at least that's one option available to you if you don't mind the cost.
Marco:
And there are also third party Apple authorized service centers.
Marco:
So maybe you could get them to do it for you with third party RAM that would be cheaper.
Marco:
But that's a big maybe.
Marco:
And it probably wouldn't be that much cheaper, relatively speaking.
Marco:
And then if you ever had to send it back into Apple, you know, they're going to see that and they're going to, you know, make you remove it or have a problem with it or something before they'd service the machine or something.
Marco:
So like,
Marco:
It's like having all the downsides of having third-party RAM in your Mac that have been forever of trouble with Apple service sometimes and everything else.
Marco:
Everyone's going to blame that for any problems you have.
Marco:
But with the added complexity that you really can't get to it yourself to swap it in and out, and it probably won't be that much cheaper.
Marco:
So I feel like there's basically two reasons why most people want upgradable RAM in a Mac.
Marco:
Reason number one, which is probably by far the most common, is to save money from Apple's somewhat inflated costs and get cheaper RAM from somebody else.
Marco:
Reason number two is to buy it with one amount of RAM that you can afford today, and then in a few years, increase the amount of RAM to extend its useful lifetime.
Marco:
And by that point, you will probably have more money and also the RAM will be cheaper.
Marco:
This seems to maybe solve the second one, but it almost certainly won't solve the first one.
Marco:
And I feel like the first one is probably the more common case among people who would be following this kind of news and making this kind of comment.
Marco:
So while it is nice that the RAM is upgradable by somebody, the fact that it's not really upgradable by you, it might as well be not upgradable.
Marco:
I'm with John.
Marco:
I would strongly suggest that you order it with the amount of RAM that you will want for the long haul, if at all possible.
Casey:
iMac Pro input devices I thought we had talked about this on the show very briefly but you can get both the blacked out magic mouse and a blacked out trackpad and something like 150 bucks for both or thereabouts I don't remember exactly how much the configurator wasn't up when we were recording the show but we speculated like oh what do you have to buy two iMacs to get both of them because they Apple gave the reviewers both input devices which seemed weird if that's not a thing that you can buy but it totally is a thing you can buy
Casey:
Yeah, and I personally don't have any particular interest in the trackpad.
Casey:
I know it works for a lot of people.
Casey:
It's not really my cup of tea.
Casey:
But if I were to order an iMac Pro, which sitting here now I am not currently planning on, there is zero chance that I would not get both devices because even if I didn't end up using either the mouse or the trackpad, you know that you'll be able to sell that thing for a billion dollars online.
John:
I mean, Declan's college fund where you sell a black trackpad.
John:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
You're absolutely right.
Casey:
Unless there's some sort of software, like DRM, for lack of a better phrase, that prevents them from working with anything but an iMac Pro, which would be ridiculous.
John:
The DRM is that it would clash and offend your sensibilities.
Casey:
Fair point.
Casey:
I don't know I wonder genuinely once these start showing up how much the keyboard let's let how much do you think let's start with Marco how much do you think a key but what is it the the magic extended keyboard whatever it's called that and either pointing device doesn't matter which one just one pointing device how much do you think that combination will go for on like eBay or equivalent.
Marco:
i'm guessing it goes for a little above what they would cost at retail i don't think it's going to be a crazy amount and if it is and if it is a crazy amount it's going to be only very briefly uh once they are in people's hands i don't think this is going to be as big of a deal like because these are already not cheap right they're already like the trackpad is about 160 by itself like if you buy it at retail and the keyboards i don't know how much keyboard is but you know and the mouse is is 100 i think or 80 um and so like
Marco:
Yeah, maybe for the $160 trackpad, you might get $200.
Marco:
Maybe in the first week, you might get $250.
Marco:
But I wouldn't expect it to be a bigger difference than that.
Casey:
I would think it would be more.
John:
I agree.
John:
I don't think it's going to be a big premium.
John:
I was going to say like a $50 premium for the first week and then settling down after that, especially when people find out that the keyboard bends.
John:
I didn't put it in fault, but we did get a bunch of feedback about that from people who had bent keyboards.
John:
And some people actually did say that as far as they're aware, they got it and it was fine out of the box and they used it for several months and eventually the middle touches when it didn't used to.
John:
And to the point where it starts to like spin, you know, I don't know if that's from the force of typing or from like heat or something.
John:
But, you know, like when if if the contact point becomes the middle and the sides start to lift up and it can sort of start rotating itself, that's no good.
Casey:
That's super weird.
Casey:
I mean, if it's happening, it's happening, but that's super weird.
Casey:
Finally, people wrote in and pointed out to us that we missed talking about something, but I'm pretty sure we missed it because it didn't happen until after we recorded.
Casey:
And that is that the Mac Pro, not the iMac Pro, but the Mac Pro will be quote-unquote upgradable.
Casey:
And so this is from an Apple press release.
Casey:
It reads, in addition to the new iMac Pro, Apple is working on a completely redesigned next generation Mac Pro, architected for Pro customers who need the highest performance, high throughput system, and a modular upgradable design, as well as a new high-end Pro display.
Casey:
Now, this isn't really news, I don't believe, but it is Apple saying one more time, no, really, everybody, this is a thing or, well, will be a thing maybe one day.
Casey:
And it should hopefully solve a lot of the problems that you guys justify.
Casey:
Well, I shouldn't say you too, but in general, people were complaining about, and that is upgradability.
Casey:
So Marco, thoughts on that?
Marco:
no i mean this is pretty much my fault like you know we recorded and i and i had said like you know be careful to you know tame your expectations and in upgradability because i thought all apple had said before that point was that it would be modular not necessarily upgradable um but then they released this press release with the iMac pro which i think was actually earlier that day we just didn't see it um that says literally a modular upgradable design is coming with the Mac pro i was even
John:
You can bring your pessimism back and say that just the RAM will be upgradable.
John:
There's always room for worry.
Marco:
And also, it might be a situation like what I was describing with the iMac Pro RAM, which is like, who can upgrade it?
Marco:
Is only Apple going to be able to upgrade it?
Marco:
Also, what upgrades will work in it?
Marco:
Will you be able to put in any GPU?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
Will you be able to put in any RAM?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
Any disk modules?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
There's going to be limits on what you can put in it.
Marco:
But there always were.
Marco:
But the limits have increased over time with the Mac Pro towers and everything.
Marco:
Also, just technology has moved on.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
If you're talking about wanting, for instance, the old ones were very good about disk expansion, but that was also before SSDs, really.
Marco:
The SSD revolution started right at the end of the Mac Pro Tower era, really.
Marco:
And so you could put SSDs into the Mac Pro Tower, but it was not designed for them up front.
Marco:
It was kind of a hack to get them in there.
Marco:
If they weren't PCI cards, and even then, those were kind of a hack.
Marco:
Everything was about 3.5-inch disks and optical drives.
Marco:
And these days, if you design that...
Marco:
You can argue like, well, it probably shouldn't include a three and a half inch disc bay at all because high end customers probably are not using a lot of internal three and a half inch discs anymore.
Marco:
So, you know, there's a lot has changed since the era of the upgradable tower.
Marco:
And I don't and even and you can even argue for performance reasons.
Marco:
like, you wouldn't want a whole bunch of, like, just serial ATA bays in there because high-end SSDs are all using direct-attached methods now, like, directly attached to the PCI bus and things like NVMe and stuff like that.
Marco:
So, like...
Marco:
There's not a lot of upgradability that pro customers who are going to be buying the Mac Pro are actually going to want beyond, I think, RAM disk space, but not necessarily like a large number of physical disks.
Marco:
And probably the number one is GPU upgrades.
John:
Ding, ding, ding.
Marco:
I don't know whether they're going to deliver that, but I think GPU and RAM are the big ones and disk is kind of a secondary one.
John:
i think this they can get away with especially if they have a way for you to you know like they can have the super high speed storage but then some standard for some slower bulk storage but anyway gpu is the big one that's what we talked about last time gpus keep getting faster because you can make them faster by just adding more transistors you can't do that with cpus you haven't been able to for a decade or more um and so it's so important to be able to to do that uh you know
John:
even even if apple won't that you can do it that's why you know we talked about the gpus last time but more people and sending more links to people uh showing how uh a cruddy old cheese grater can be the imac pro and all sorts of benchmarks if you just take a faster gpu and throw it in there and this is an ancient cheese grater like how do how do these new gpus even work in there
John:
Because it's just PCI Express, right?
John:
And it's just a standard card slot.
John:
And how does the old Mac support it?
John:
It supports it because the iMac Pro supports it, and Apple just made generic drivers for it.
John:
And that Apple... That's not an embarrassment for Apple, but it's like...
John:
Apple wants in on that action, too.
John:
Hey, we'll make a thing where you can put a new GPU in.
John:
And people want that machine because, like, you know, extending the life of the machine.
John:
If you buy this, the super expensive system that is upgradable, part of what you're paying for, and we build into the price in some way, is that this machine can last you a long time.
John:
If you're doing GPU intensive work after a year or two of use, you don't need to throw the machine out.
John:
You can just take the GPU out and put in one that's way faster for a couple hundred bucks and a new life for your machine.
John:
That's what we all want.
John:
That's the future liberals want.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks Bone Conduction Headphones.
Marco:
Go to atp.aftershocks.com to learn more.
Marco:
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Marco:
This means small transducers rest in front of your ears, not inside or around them like most headphones, and they send tiny vibrations that you can't even feel through your cheekbones directly to your inner ear, which bypasses the outside of your ears completely.
Marco:
So unlike every other kind of headphone, bone conduction leaves your ears completely open with nothing in them.
Marco:
So for example, this helps in comfort reasons.
Marco:
If you can't wear earbuds or in-ear monitors without pain, like I can't, this doesn't have that problem because there's nothing in your ear.
Marco:
They're also really great for exercising and hot weather because there's nothing covering your ear, so it doesn't get you all sweaty.
Marco:
And for exercising, it's even better because, or if it starts raining, because they are IP55 certified for water resistance.
Marco:
And the biggest thing about these headphones, the biggest thing that I think decides whether they're right for you or not, is because nothing is blocking your ears at all, you hear all the sound from the world around you, including what you're listening to.
Marco:
So in loud surroundings, this isn't so good, but they're awesome if you want to listen to a podcast or take a phone call while doing something like walking outside where you really need to hear the world around you for your own safety.
Marco:
They're also great for practical reasons, like if you want to hear the world around you, whether it's your home or your office or anything else, and you want to hear like if someone knocks on the door, you want to know about it.
Marco:
Or say your kid is sleeping upstairs, they wake up, you want to know about that.
Marco:
With aftershocks, you hear what's in the world around you as well as what you're listening to.
Marco:
Aftershocks has two great models that I recommend, the Trex Titanium and the Trex Air.
Marco:
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Marco:
The Air is the newer of the two.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They're both very comfortable, very lightweight.
Marco:
The Air is a little bit better for comfort and weight.
Marco:
The Titanium fits in a pocket better.
Marco:
So either way, you can't go wrong.
Marco:
They're both wonderful.
Marco:
So check it out today.
Marco:
Go to atp.aftershocks.com to get a good deal on a nice pair of Aftershocks Trex Titanium or Trex Air.
Marco:
Once again, atp.aftershocks.com.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Aftershocks for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
As a final note of follow-up, did we order anything?
Casey:
I will start and say I have not, which I think I said a moment ago.
Casey:
I still don't think I will, although if I ever see one in an Apple store, I'm going to really have some tough thoughts because I've seen this thing at WWDC and it is pretty.
Casey:
But it's rare that I do anything on my iMac that I have today that I feel like is truly and utterly constrained by something an iMac Pro would fix.
Casey:
John, did you order an iMac Pro?
Casey:
Certainly you must have since this is the thing you've been waiting for for years, is it not?
John:
It took a while for me to figure out what you're even talking about.
John:
Like, what do you mean, what did we order?
John:
You were never going to order one, and I was never going to order one, and Marco was always going to order one.
John:
So, no, I didn't buy anything.
Yeah.
Casey:
So Marco, tell us about your configuration since we all know you did order one.
Marco:
I think I ordered one.
Casey:
What?
Marco:
I ordered through the business rep, but I haven't gotten the order confirmation email and my card has not been charged and it's been four days.
Marco:
Sometimes Marco blacks out when he buys things.
Marco:
He just wakes up and he boxes his front step and it's inexplicable.
Marco:
I'm not entirely sure whether my order has actually been placed or whether it fell on the floor because that was a very busy day for them or something.
Marco:
I have to follow up.
Casey:
Okay, so if you ordered one, what build, what are the highlights of what you think you ordered?
Marco:
If I did it.
Marco:
All right, 10 core.
Marco:
To put this in context, the reason I ordered this computer is that TIFF wants it in six months.
Marco:
And so she wants me to buy this now so that way when the Mac Pro comes out, I upgrade to that and I give her this.
Marco:
So I basically configured it for TIFF, which means that I got the really big SSD.
Marco:
That was the big splurge.
Marco:
The 10 core.
Marco:
64 gigs of ram not 128 because i mean my current what's the really big ssd the four four terabyte yeah four what does she for photos and stuff what does she got mostly uh photos and stuff mostly and a couple of video stuff uh around too because like you know dealing with the photos and processing them into videos sometimes and
John:
What does she have?
John:
How much stuff does she have now?
John:
Does she have more than four terabyte total storage?
John:
Are you buying her a computer that's twice as big as the one she has now in terms of primary storage?
John:
Or is it about the same size?
Marco:
When we bought the 2014s that we have now, we've maxed it out.
Marco:
But at the time, that was one terabyte.
Marco:
So it's 1TB internal, and she's had this 4TB external Thunderbolt RAID array that literally is four 1TB SSDs in RAID 0.
Marco:
Don't worry, it's very much backed up to various places.
Marco:
But that's now been operating constantly for three years in this little enclosure with this dumb little fan.
Marco:
I don't know how long it's going to last.
Marco:
I'd rather not depend on it for too much longer.
Marco:
If any of those go bad, the last thing I'm going to want to do is buy a new 1TB SSD in 2017.
Marco:
Kind of preparing for that to go away.
Marco:
Also, I just hate having another box and fan and this hot thing.
Marco:
All Thunderbolt stuff runs really hot.
Marco:
Like all the controller chips that are in the devices, they run like red hot.
Marco:
That's why it needs this giant fan.
Marco:
It's not for the SSDs.
Marco:
Yeah, basically replacing that, simplifying her setup and making it better.
Marco:
So that's why I did that.
Marco:
And again, I was also kind of afraid because I'm like, you know, I can probably never upgrade these or at least I won't want to upgrade them because whatever will be involved and whatever it will cost will probably be crazy.
Marco:
So yeah, four terabyte.
Marco:
And that was a lot of money.
Marco:
I'm not going to try to candy coat that.
Marco:
That was ridiculous.
Marco:
But the rest kind of down the middle configuration, the low end GPU, the middle RAM amount and the middle CPU, I guess.
John:
How did TIFF approve the low-end GPU?
John:
Oh, interesting question.
Marco:
So if you do the research on the 56 versus the 64, it's not that different.
Marco:
And it seems like for what we do, I don't think anything we do, you would notice the difference at all.
Marco:
Because things like Photoshop and Lightroom, they do use the GPU, but not for a huge amount of stuff, and they don't use it very hard in the way that we use these apps.
Marco:
Additionally, you're probably thinking, what about gaming?
Marco:
But even for A, most games she plays are not on the computer.
Marco:
B, it's still going to be a massive upgrade from what we have.
Marco:
And C, I don't think the gaming performance difference is going to be that big between those two.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm surprised.
Casey:
So I'm anxious to hear about this if and when it comes in, if and when you even ordered it, whether or not that was a fever dream.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
If I haven't ordered it, do you want to make any edits when I resubmit the order?
Casey:
Actually, I think John does.
Casey:
It sounds reasonable to me.
John:
I would get a big GPU because it's not that much more, right?
John:
It's like a couple hundred bucks more.
John:
I think it's like 600 more.
John:
600 more?
Marco:
I elected to spend most of the craziness on the disk because we'll actually use that.
John:
That's doing the thing where when you're buying a car and it's so expensive that $150 for floor mats seems like nothing and you forget that $150 is the same size whether you compare it to $30,000 or you compare it to $10.
John:
It's always $150.
John:
It doesn't change size, but you feel like it does.
John:
So I can use that to persuade you.
John:
Given how much you paid for the SSD, $600 for a better GPU is nothing.
John:
It's like floor mats.
Casey:
you're not wrong you're not wrong six hundred dollars is way too much for the for the gpu speed upgrade but uh what you paid for the four terabyte is also way too much so you know i don't know i don't know where to go from here anyway talk to tiff see what you think i agree all right shall we do some ask atp let's do it so i try to discourage emailed submissions because that encourages a lack of brevity however every once in a while one sneaks through that i really like
Casey:
And you added this to the show notes only because you beat me to it.
Casey:
And this is J.D.
Casey:
Lewin writes, I'm looking to dip my toe into the quote-unquote high-quality headphone plus DAC digital analog converter market, which led me to read some of Marco's older blog posts.
Casey:
At the moment, the Bear Dynamic DT880s, which I'm pretty sure is what I have on my head right now.
Casey:
770s?
Casey:
Darn it.
Casey:
It can be had for under $200.
Casey:
And a shit...
Casey:
Fula?
Casey:
I don't even know how to pronounce it.
Casey:
Fula.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Two for $90.
Casey:
This seems to be an affordable way into dangerous waters.
Casey:
My question is about source material.
Casey:
Will this setup be wasted on the AAC files delivered through Apple Music, Spotify, etc.?
Casey:
So Marco, take it away.
Marco:
Yeah, so to answer the actual question of whether decent headphones will be wasted on playing AAC files from Apple Music and Spotify, no, definitely not.
Marco:
There is a point where some people claim that they can hear differences between AAC slash MP3 slash other lossy compressed formats and lossless music.
Marco:
excuse me yeah see also high sample rates higher than 44.1 you know bit rates above 24 bit uh etc we talked about this before but but you know basically i'm not a believer in in that being noticeable by most people um i'm not sure it's noticeable by any people but i at least the few like blind tests that have been done seem to support that it really is not noticeable by almost anybody and so
Marco:
Whereas the difference in headphones or speakers, like the difference in the actual transducers that are producing the music for you, that can be huge differences in very noticeable ways.
Marco:
So when you're looking for places to spend money if you want to get a good upgrade, a good bang for your buck...
Marco:
Spend that money on the headphones or the speakers and not on the amps and the DACs and the fancy source material and the high bitrate everything.
Marco:
You will notice the headphones.
Marco:
You will not notice the DAC, and you will not notice the source material being...
Marco:
you know good or bad because unless it's encoded very low bit rates like a 128k mp3 or you know like about the same ac like as long as it's higher than that basically you're probably not going to notice it and and all the services now they all offer high quality streaming if you have enough bandwidth that is high enough that you're not going to notice it so don't worry about that
Marco:
On the headphone topic itself, the Beyerdynamic DT880 is a very old headphone, but still a very, very good one.
Marco:
And if it can be had for under $200, that's a great deal.
Marco:
There's a huge headphone revolution happening over the last few years.
Marco:
Lots and lots of amazing headphones are coming out.
Marco:
And a lot of formerly fairly premium ones are being pushed down market.
Marco:
That is one of them.
Marco:
I highly suggest...
Marco:
If you are a fan of treble in music, if you like the kind of crispness that turning up the treble a little bit offers you in music, if it doesn't sound harsh to you, Beardynamic is a great company to look at.
Marco:
Their headphones tend to be a little treble heavy, but if you like that, they are wonderful.
Marco:
They are also incredibly comfortable.
Marco:
The downside is that the 880, like almost any good and especially good and expensive headphone, has an open back to the ear cups.
Marco:
So that means, if you've never used this before, you're basically, the drivers are kind of suspended in open air.
Marco:
The backs of the headphones are just like screens.
Marco:
They're not solid material.
Marco:
And so an annoying, tinny version of what you're listening to plays out to the room around you.
Marco:
And they don't isolate you very well from outside sounds.
Marco:
So this is really a terrible setup.
Marco:
It's a terrible thing to use open headphones if you are in either a loud environment, like walking around a city, or if you are sharing an office with anybody.
Marco:
Because your music will be really annoyingly tinny and weird sounding to anyone else in the office.
Marco:
They will hate you if you play headphones in that way.
Marco:
But if you have your own quiet space where there's not other people around to annoy...
Marco:
Open headphones are by far the best sound you can get for the money.
Marco:
It's not even close.
Marco:
And there's basically three points that you need to know about in this market.
Marco:
On the very low end, you have the Grado SR60.
Marco:
Sounds amazing.
Marco:
Costs like 60 or 70 bucks, but it's pretty uncomfortable.
Marco:
Then you have the Bayer Dynamic DT880, which is the one that JD is asking about here.
Marco:
They are great.
Marco:
Tiff uses a pair at her desk still.
Marco:
They're wonderful.
Marco:
Around $200.
Marco:
Very, very comfortable.
Marco:
Everything about them is great, except they have that open back, which is impractical in certain contexts.
Marco:
And then also, if you don't like very strong treble, you won't like either of those options.
Marco:
If you like a more what they call laid back sound, where they kind of like roll off the treble, it's very much like younger people tend to like this a little bit more because it kind of goes into like the soft is loud musical aesthetic that has been taken over recently in like emo music and stuff and whatever else that I'm probably mangling the terminology for.
Marco:
If you like that, if you don't like a lot of treble and you like it to be very soft and gentle on your ears, the Sennheiser HD 650 used to be $600.
Marco:
And in recent years, they've done a bunch of special things where they're cutting the price of that or they're doing special editions with mass drop, but it's still basically the HD 650.
Marco:
that is an amazing headphone it's old and it looks kind of weird it has like speckled plastic it's a very ugly thing but it's like it's an amazing sounding headphone if you can get it for below 300 bucks and if you don't like that strong treble that the bear dynamic will give you so basically those are my recommendations ignore the source material quality just get whatever you get don't be upset it's wonderful it'll be good enough
Marco:
And if you want to spend $60 and you like treble and you don't like comfort, get the Grado SR60.
Marco:
If you want comfort and still like treble, the DT880.
Marco:
And if you don't like treble and you can spend like $300-ish range, the Sennheiser HD650.
Marco:
And on the DAC side, all of those can be driven perfectly fine from the headphone jack in any Mac desktop or laptop.
Marco:
The phone, you won't get a lot of volume out of if you try to push it too high.
Marco:
But you don't need an external DAC for any of those headphones.
Marco:
You might get a little bit better performance and volume and maybe at the highest volume, maybe a little bit better bass.
Marco:
Especially the HD 650 is the least efficient of all those that I just mentioned.
Marco:
So that's the one that most would need one.
Marco:
But you're pretty much fine without that.
Marco:
If you just want to start, just get a really nice pair of headphones that can work with the built-in headphone jack in your Mac, which almost everything can.
Casey:
I'd just like to say I agree with pretty much everything you said.
Casey:
I don't know about specific recommendations of headphones.
Casey:
I haven't bought headphones in a long time outside of my AirPods.
Casey:
But I wanted to, and I think I've done this every time you brought it up, I wanted to concur with you about open headphones.
Casey:
I have an ancient pair of Sennheisers.
Casey:
I don't even remember what model they are.
Casey:
They're so damn ancient.
Casey:
I think they're a 598 maybe?
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
I mean, they're like easily 10 years old at this point.
Casey:
And I can dig up what they are.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But suffice to say, I have an ancient pair of Sennheiser open-air headphones.
Casey:
And they are phenomenal.
Casey:
They are truly, truly great.
Casey:
It is terrible to be within 30 feet of me when I'm listening to them.
Casey:
But they are really, really good.
Casey:
And I also wanted to agree with you about the quality of the source material itself.
Casey:
That you can go flack if you want, if you want to be one of those kind of nerds.
Casey:
But again, Marco was absolutely right that the best thing to do is change your headphones.
Casey:
I will, however, say if you can stand in your earbuds, earphones, whatever the fancy version.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, not even the custom mold ones.
Casey:
I'm just talking about like a really, really fancy pair of in-ear headphones.
Casey:
I think they're a lot more finicky.
Casey:
I don't think they're really worth it, but I have a really fancy pair of now very discontinued Ultimate Ears in-ear headphone things.
Casey:
And they are, when they're seated properly, they're the best headphones I have.
Casey:
But to be fair, to get them seated 100% properly is a real pain in the butt.
Casey:
So I still think Marco's right that doing something, a traditional headphone, preferably open air, is a better choice.
Casey:
But if you have ears that are conducive to in-ear things or are willing to spend the money to get your ears poured and get custom molds made to get IEMs like Marco just brought up,
Casey:
That is probably the money, no object, you know, effort, no object, best and most effective way to get good headphones, in my personal opinion.
Casey:
But a lot of people don't really agree with that.
Casey:
Hello, Marco.
Casey:
And other people don't want to spend that money and don't want to be bothered.
Casey:
Hello, both of us.
Casey:
So it's not the best answer unless you're really, really going deep into this world.
Casey:
But it's worth at least mentioning.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Jeremy Nachman writes, I've never had much interest in cars personally, but I have a nine year old who seems to have an interest.
Casey:
Do you have any car magazine recommendations that kids would enjoy?
Casey:
Doesn't necessarily need to be one targeting a kid's audience.
Casey:
When I was growing up and I was about this age, I used to love reading car and driver and I don't pay attention to print magazines very much anymore.
Casey:
And I know, John, you do.
Casey:
So I'm going to turn it over to you in a second.
Casey:
But.
Casey:
Last I saw, Car and Driver was still pretty good.
Casey:
Motor Trend was okay.
Casey:
You can also get a lot of really good stuff on YouTube.
Casey:
And that's not even like me trying to plug myself.
Casey:
Although, hey, Casing on Cars is a new series you might want to look at.
Casey:
So here I am plugging myself.
Casey:
But no, like the Motor Trend stuff that's on YouTube is actually very, very good and very digestible and not too bro-y, generally speaking.
Casey:
There's plenty of car stuff on YouTube that is very bro-y and I wouldn't necessarily recommend for a nine-year-old.
Casey:
But the Motor Trend stuff is good in terms of magazines, car and driver.
Casey:
John, additional thoughts?
John:
Yeah, the kid angle on this is what makes it difficult because I watch a lot of car stuff on YouTube, and I have in the past subscribed to, I think, every straight car magazine, not like truck magazines or hot rod magazines or more specialty type of stuff, which may be what your kid ends up getting into.
John:
But for car magazines, car driver is still my gold standard.
John:
But the reason I have trouble recommending this for a kid is because
John:
Um, like when you, when you think of car magazines, like in the worst case scenario, you're thinking of like some hot rod magazine where every single month there's a girl in a bikini sitting on the roof of a car and you're like, Oh, I'm not going to buy those for my kids.
John:
Cause that's, you know, I don't want to spread that kind of, uh,
John:
message about uh how this stuff works but here's the problem with uh even car and driver which i think has some of the best car riding and has for many years now it is relentlessly unconsciously sexist like it is in every pore of that magazine and you think well there's no girls in bikinis on the cover like it's fine right it's not though like every article is written assuming that the person reading it is a man
John:
Every joke, every gag, every cover image, so much so that they don't even know they're doing it.
John:
They don't even think that there could possibly be another joke.
John:
They don't make any attempt.
John:
And then there's some right-wing politics that's thrown in there, but I think that's less harmful because it's mixed up with everything else.
John:
I have trouble recommending that young people start their life in cars reading a magazine that assumes the only people who will ever be into cars are men, because that's not healthy for anybody involved.
John:
So I would say that YouTube has a higher chance of being sort of more welcoming, at least the YouTube channels I've seen.
John:
There are many things to not recommend them, and there are, of course, YouTube channels with...
John:
terrible bro-y people saying terrible bro-y things.
John:
What else is new?
John:
It's the internet.
John:
But A, I think kids are more likely to get into that than, you know, paper magazines, which, you know, come on, who reads those?
John:
And B, I think...
John:
you might have a better chance of steering your kid towards a, uh, a more inclusive, uh, YouTube channel.
John:
Because honestly, I don't know of any magazines that aren't effective.
John:
The car and driver is, is probably the best one.
John:
Automobile is, is fairly good too, but just all those car magazines just assume you are a guy reading a car magazine.
John:
And half the time, they don't even know they're assuming it.
John:
And it's not a good look, and it's not something that I would recommend a young person get into, because why perpetuate that?
Casey:
Let me just put out a call that if you are listening to this and you know of a YouTube channel hosted by a woman that's really good that's about cars or know an author that's either a blogger or a particular author to look at any of these car magazines that's a woman, I would love to know that because I certainly only hear dudes of various bro-iness talking about cars.
Casey:
I'd love to hear a different perspective on that.
Casey:
Or maybe not even a woman, just a different perspective.
Casey:
I mean, define that however you'd like.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I'd love to hear it, so feel free to tweet at me and let me know.
John:
And by the way, Jeremy didn't say whether his kid was girl or boy, and I don't think it matters.
John:
If your kid is a little boy who's super into cars, he shouldn't be reading a magazine that assumes everybody who's reading it is a dude either.
John:
It has nothing to do with the gender of the child or anything like that.
John:
It's just...
John:
Like, what I'm getting at is print is old, and it is mostly dominated by old people with old opinions, and even has new writers have come in, and I think I made a tweet a couple years ago, to the effect that you could see the changeover in the writing staff of Car and Driver when they started making jokes in the captions for their images that referenced things like Star Trek.
John:
or you wouldn't have seen that when like brock yates was still writing or whatever like there is a changing of the guard but it's still it's still the the boys club and it there's no reason it should be there's no there's nothing gendered about cars right so uh that's disappointing and youtube i feel like is slightly better it's also worse like you know the equivalent of the bikini girls on the hoods those youtube channels totally exist too right so you know the the internet is a big place so be careful
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And finally, from Jeff Isu, ECC RAM seems to make sense for high stakes contacts like finance, space, like space travel, etc.
Casey:
What practical effects do you expect it to have on a Mac?
Casey:
Have you ever noticed a flip bit on your machine?
Casey:
Do you just find it cool as a nerd and or want it for peace of mind?
Casey:
So, John, can you kind of do a recap for us on what ECC RAM is, why this is relevant now, and then answer the question for us?
John:
I think we did that on a couple past shows.
John:
We had debates about how important this is.
John:
So ECC stands for error correcting, where if they send the information from RAM, but they also have a bit to check whether the information you're getting is accurately represented.
John:
You think it was like a parody bit or whatever, but I think it's more complicated than that these days.
John:
But anyway...
John:
um usually they have the bit to recover the ability to recover from small errors like a one bit error they can correct that on the fly because they know which bit is off and what it should be instead and so you know what would have been some bad data coming out of ram gets corrected to the right data um why would bad data come out of ram that's the question about etc ram what what errors are you correcting who cares if you have error correcting ability in your ram chips
John:
RAM chips don't make any errors.
John:
They're solid-state components.
John:
Everything is perfect about them, right?
John:
Unfortunately, everything in the world of digital is under the covers analog until you get down to the quantum level, but we're not going to get into that.
John:
You've got to have limits somewhere.
John:
Yeah, so the question is, how often do these errors come up?
John:
And last time we talked about this, we cited a bunch of studies.
John:
We'll put two links into the show notes about
John:
two semi-recent ones one of them was a 2009 study uh that was supposedly saying that the uh error rates and ram were much higher than had previously been measured um
John:
something like 25 to 70 000 errors per billion device hours per megabit with errors on more than eight percent of dims and there's an ibm study in the 90s looking at like the causes of this like you know radiation from space essentially flipping your bits assuming you're not in something that is shielded from cosmic rays uh producing uh one error per 256 megabytes of ram per month
John:
and you know you can sell it from the 90s because they're talking about you know so one error per 256 megabytes of ram per month that's not a small number if we have four gigs of ram right um or 16 gigs or whatever you have errors happen now the question is all right so who cares who cares a bit is flipped what does that manifest in some way if you get unlucky you could take your whole computer down
John:
but chances are good nothing will happen because that bit didn't matter like there are so many bits that just don't matter not not even that it gets corrupted it ends up in the file system maybe that bit just didn't matter at all or you know it changed something it changed the the color of a pixel uh in a way that you couldn't detect or it just ended up in some garbage data at the end of
John:
uh you know at the end of some buffer that never got reached like it maybe it just doesn't matter it came out of ram and i got over him with something else but every once in a while it does matter and the reason people use ecc is because they think you know that for the small incremental cost of having ecc ram maybe it saves you from for you know for computers that run a really long time and uptime is important and
John:
correctness is important this is the the best we have for to get a little bit more safety for not that much more cost and uh that's why servers use it and that's why fancy high-end desktops with server hardware use it and i think a lot of it for nerds like us is like well it doesn't cost that much more and it makes it slightly more reliable so let's do it uh
John:
But, you know, it's not like a light comes on when it tells you it just saved you from something, because kind of like the big sky theory in aviation, the big RAM theory is the chances of one of those bit flips actually affecting something you do in a way that you notice is actually pretty low.
John:
But it just, you know, it does make us feel better.
Casey:
So the answer is no, there's no reason, basically.
John:
No, I mean, the reason is that it does improve things and it doesn't cost that much more.
John:
If it was seven times the cost, it would be ridiculous.
John:
But it's just a little bit more.
John:
And so you're like, yeah, why not?
John:
Why not do that for a little bit more?
Marco:
Also, and this could just be terrible anecdata, you know, but just anecdotally...
Marco:
my Mac Pros have been the most stable, solid machines I've owned.
Marco:
And I've used laptops full-time, I've used an iMac full-time, and I've used Mac Pros full-time.
Marco:
And it's very, very different.
Marco:
The Mac Pros were always the most stable machines by far.
Marco:
You didn't keep the trash cans long enough for your GPUs to overheat.
Marco:
I didn't use the GPUs heavily enough.
Marco:
During the eight or nine months I had one, it was rock solid.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
with cloud backup you have a wonderful fail-safe option that can cover all sorts of different risks that local backup can't you also have very convenient features so for instance if you have a cloud backup you can do things like restore a file from your home computer onto a laptop when you're on vacation if you if you need to work on that file you forgot to bring it with you you can also do the same thing from their mobile app right onto your phone so if you're on your phone and need to get a file from your home computer
Marco:
You can just restore it with their app for iOS and Android right onto your phone.
Marco:
It's very, very convenient.
Marco:
If you need to do a whole system restore, if you lose all your data and you need to actually restore from the cloud, you can use their website to download it immediately.
Marco:
Or you can have them overnight you a hard drive via FedEx.
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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Marco:
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Casey:
I have questions about the iMac Pro slash Mac Pro.
Casey:
As someone who used to know the ins and outs of what the current processors were and GPUs and things of that nature like 20 years ago when I was building my own PCs, I have not kept up in a long time.
Casey:
And it seems like, and I might even get this backwards, so jump in and correct me, but it seems like everyone is really perturbed that the iMac Pro is only coming with an AMD graphics card.
Casey:
And apparently it's like NVIDIA or Bust in the graphics card department.
Casey:
Can one of you guys explain to me like, A, do I even have that right?
Casey:
B, why?
Casey:
And C, then why isn't Apple offering NVIDIA cards and why are they so committed to AMD or at least what's your best guess, if nothing else?
Casey:
John, do you want to kind of talk me through this?
John:
The NVIDIA thing, we talked about this before, about who at various times in our life using computers has been the GPU performance king, you know, like starting from, I guess, the voodoo 3D days.
John:
Oh, I remember those days.
John:
Those were good days.
John:
3DFX and, you know, anyway.
Casey:
Did you, did the Mac, I think we've talked about this months and months and months ago, but did the Mac ever have the thing where you had a little stubby VGA cable to connect the 2D card to the 3D card?
Casey:
Do you know what I'm talking about?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I was pretty sure it did not ever have anything like that.
John:
The Mac never had gaming or VGA.
John:
It did have VGA.
Casey:
Their Macs had VGA.
Casey:
You know exactly what I'm talking about, though, don't you, Marco?
Casey:
Like, you had one of these.
Marco:
Yeah, it would connect to your 3DFX accelerator card.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Oh, those were the days.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Anyway, John, carry on, please.
John:
So, you know, as the market is consolidated, it's settled down in the latter years.
John:
as being ati versus nvidia and occasionally they would swap places of in what generation of card you know there's they would revise their architectures and then they would have multiple cards and you'd have overclock cards and stuff and then they revise our anyway at various points uh nvidia had the fastest meaning like basically for games like who can run insert hot 3d game here the fastest sometimes it was nvidia sometimes it was amd um
John:
If you looked at the swings, it seems that in the most recent years, NVIDIA has been on top more, but it really depends on the specific application.
John:
But for right now, NVIDIA is on top in a lot of markets.
John:
In games, I think they're on top.
John:
Because they make a lot of cards that make sacrifices in precision for the purposes of performance.
John:
And very often ATI, which is now AMD, would tell you, yeah, that's fine.
John:
But if you want to do real serious work with like a program that requires higher precision that AMD is better or whatever.
John:
But also because NVIDIA and AMD have chosen different platforms for compute on GPUs, and NVIDIA's one that they're... What is theirs?
John:
CUDA.
John:
CUDA, CUDA, yeah, is right now more popular.
John:
And so we had someone actually write into us about this earlier.
John:
This is Daniel who said, in addition to NVIDIA being faster, there's lots of software now that uses GPU acceleration, but only NVIDIA.
John:
So their application software written, it's accelerated for GPUs, but literally only accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs.
John:
The example gives us Redshift and Maya and 3D, new plugins for Nuke like Eddie and GoGhost on the 2D side.
John:
so part of it is like just market success that nvidia was able to convince software makers of these big expensive pro applications to write their software to only be accelerated by nvidia cards so that forget about who's faster forget who has better cards or whatever if it literally won't work with amd graphics cards uh that's bad like it'll you know would run in an accelerated mode and then secondarily if you're into games or lots of other applications
John:
chances are that right now nvidia sells the absolute fastest card that will run whatever your gpu thing is the fastest that's why we had that question a while back was saying if the mac pro doesn't support nvidia is it a failure or whatever i don't think it is for the most part uh and you know if if you have to use one of these applications that is only accelerated by nvidia chances are good you haven't had a mac in a long time
John:
Because for whatever reason, I'm not sure what the reason is, but for whatever reason, Macs have not shipped with NVIDIA GPUs, either standard or optional, for a long time now.
John:
So it's not as if people are out there using Macs with NVIDIA graphics card waiting to upgrade.
John:
All these people who are using these programs presumably are already using PCs.
John:
But anyway, that's why I think people are concerned about the NVIDIA situation, because part of the promise of the Mac Pro is it's a modular system and it's upgradable.
John:
But how upgradable is it really if you can if you can only ever put in a new AMD graphics card?
John:
I mean, that's great.
John:
Like, it lets you extend the life of the machine, like we said before.
John:
But.
John:
There was a time that some Mac users may remember when you could buy a Mac, like the one sitting next to me right now, that could run cards from both of those manufacturers.
John:
And that time was good, and we would like that time to return.
Marco:
Yeah, I think, I mean, some other angles to consider.
Marco:
I mean, so first of all, the explanation of why we have not seen any new Macs with NVIDIA GPUs in...
Marco:
something like three or four years, is possibly related to there was a massive series of NVIDIA GPU failures in MacBook Pros.
Marco:
We heard rumblings here and there from various uncredible sources that there might be some kind of big political rift between Apple and NVIDIA from that time.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It does certainly seem like there is definitely, like, it is a choice that Apple is making not to ship NVIDIA GPUs in all of their computers since a few years ago.
Marco:
It is not just coincidence.
John:
And on that issue, though, on it being a choice, which, again, I have heard as well, the weird part about it is that modern Apple especially...
John:
has always been really enthusiastic about always having two suppliers for everything that it does like you know even just like because if they get themselves in a situation where there's one they get themselves into a qualcomm situation and they're just like they need someone to play off of but everything the ram who's manufacturing their systems on a chip like ssds screens
John:
best case apple wants to have two sources not just for redundancy but so that you don't become under the thumb of one like you can become under the thumb of qualcomm it's like who else are you going to go to no one else can make your radio chips ha ha ha like so it would behoove apple to go to both of them and play them off each other who knows maybe that's exactly what they're doing and nvidia just keeps losing losing the contract but from the outside it just seems like they are now a
John:
single single vendor source for their gpus that can't be healthy i mean and maybe the long-term plan is apple is going to make its own gpus because it's a core part of their business and they kind of have been doing that on the uh you know the the portable side what was it was this the first one that's all their own uh gpu with no imagination tech
Marco:
i believe so yeah but they haven't done that on the mac and they probably won't because for all the reasons that we've discussed before about investment in the mac but it just it just still seems weird to me that it seems it's a much more natural fit for apple's business practices to be supporting both but they haven't recently well and i think there's there's a couple angles here i mean number one like you might be right like amd just might be winning all these bids because it it certainly seems clear that apple has a pretty good relationship with amd and for things like if you look at the 2013 trash trash can mac pro
Marco:
those were total custom GPUs just for that, that AMD made at Apple's order.
Marco:
So there's clearly a good relationship there where AMD will probably make Apple pretty much whatever they ask for, which is... And the...
Marco:
The pricing that they give Apple appears to be pretty good.
Marco:
If you look at the workstation GPU pricing that AMD charges, and then you look at what Apple gives you in the stock configuration of the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro, it does seem like AMD is giving Apple a pretty good deal.
Marco:
So it could just be that.
Marco:
But you're right that Apple does have two suppliers for a lot of things.
Marco:
One of the big ones that they don't is Intel for their CPUs.
Marco:
And maybe, ironically...
Marco:
The winner of that bid otherwise would be AMD.
Marco:
But maybe they have a similar relationship with AMD on the GPU side that they have with Intel on the CPU side, which is kind of this assured exclusivity in exchange for their good relationship with AMD.
John:
The difference is that Intel can give them the very best chips of that kind in the world, whereas AMD at various times cannot.
John:
And although this also brings in a topic that kept getting pushed down in the show notes, but the several weeks ago or months ago deal where Intel is bundling AMD GPUs and sort of like not on the same die, but like in the same package.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
And so that's an interesting synergy between Apple's two favored vendors and Intel.
John:
It makes some sense to me that Apple's going with Intel.
John:
There's that relationship and there's the IBM, even more so than AMD, has proven that they will make one-off custom chips for Apple like in the MacBook Air back in the old days.
John:
Uh, there's a lot of, uh, speculation that the reason Intel put so much work into its internal GPUs with the embedded, uh, DRAM and all that stuff is because that's what Apple wanted them to do.
John:
So I'm sure Apple likes your relationship where they have a big say in what products get generated and, uh,
John:
Honestly, the competitor to Intel is not particularly competitive, and we get back to, again, Apple probably wants to just make its own chips if it ever comes to that.
John:
But the difference in that scenario is there is no software that only runs accelerated on AMD CPUs, right?
John:
It's not the NVIDIA situation where there's whole classes of software that are written to CUDA and that Intel doesn't support it or whatever.
Marco:
And overall, there is a huge difference in the results here.
Marco:
As you briefly alluded to, if you are Intel exclusive for your PC CPUs, you're fine.
Marco:
Because the vast majority of the time, Intel is the leader in that race, usually by a pretty big margin.
Marco:
AMD's CPU business has been second run basically since the Pentium 4.
Marco:
It had a good run there for a little while where it was king, but then it wasn't.
Marco:
So if it was the other way around, if Apple had this great relationship with AMD for the CPUs and would never use Intel CPUs, they'd have a pretty big problem.
Marco:
They just wouldn't be very competitive a lot of the time.
Marco:
And the problem is they now have that problem on the GPU side.
Marco:
On the GPU side, I think they do okay with power per watt, but they don't have the sheer performance edge that they would have if NVIDIA was their only supplier or if they would use both like they used to.
Marco:
It used to be that every generation of a Mac or a MacBook Pro, they would alternate between which vendor they were supplying, just whoever had the most compelling one that they could get in a volume or whatever else.
Marco:
But by going seemingly AMD only for GPUs for at least the last few years, I think it is really starting to hurt them, especially at the high end.
Marco:
I've heard from so many people who see the news about the iMac Pro or the Mac Pro and just write it off as, sorry, we can't do that because it doesn't support CUDA.
Marco:
And the only thing that might be an escape valve here is external GPU support.
Marco:
I think with Thunderbolt 3 now supporting external GPU boxes, that might be their answer.
Marco:
It might be like, we're going to keep using AMD for our main GPUs, but if you're a pro customer and you want a CUDA card for your work, maybe putting it in a Thunderbolt chassis is close enough.
John:
Yeah, the benchmark still, especially for these applications that need this, like that's where the bandwidth actually does come in.
John:
Doesn't come in games, probably.
John:
If you're just interested in games, you can probably get away with any GPU.
John:
But for all these fancy computational things that actually send a lot of data back and forth, Thunderbolt isn't, you know, it's not even close to the bandwidth of an internal card.
John:
I think Bearfeet also has done benchmarks with that, too.
John:
Like, you know, let's try a MacBook Pro with an eGPU versus the iMac Pro with its internal versus a good old cheese grater with some $900 NVIDIA graphic card shoved into this ancient internals from 2010 or 11.
John:
And the stupid cheese gritter wins every time because it's got an internal GPU with more bandwidth than everybody else.
John:
And it's got the fastest, the latest card from NVIDIA.
John:
And so, like I said, when the person originally asked the question, would the Mac probably be a failed product?
John:
I don't think so.
John:
I mean, it's silly that Apple won't support it if it's like some weird political reason or whatever.
John:
But...
John:
whatever you know if you buy a computer with the fastest available gpu next year it's not the fastest gpu anymore and so if you just pretend every mac pro you're buying is already a year old as long as you can either a upgrade it so that every single year you can buy a faster gpu or b that apple revises it and so every year if you bought a new one it has a faster gpu in it like the worst situation is they they put it out with a
John:
competitive pretty fast gpu that may actually by the way be faster in your particular thing because if you're not running games and you're not running a cuda accelerator application sometimes the amd gpu is the fastest really depends on what you're doing but the trick is you need some way to stay on that performance path the fact you can't have the fastest one and then just never offer another gpu for three years
John:
and not have it be upgradable so that people need some way to every year reap the benefits of the embarrassing parallelism of the graphics world um and that's that's what the mac pro has to deliver if it can't deliver nvidia that's a bummer for some people but what it has to deliver is the ability to get back on the gpu train you can put in the uh all aboard uh screen from crazy train right here marco
Marco:
Oh, I was going to put on Back on the Train by Phish.
John:
No, I do not approve of that.
John:
Crazy Train.
John:
Every podcast needs a viper slap.
Marco:
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Marco:
I actually had a call with Apple PR last week about the iMac Pro after we recorded.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Did you get a call, Casey?
John:
I didn't get a call.
Casey:
I did not get a call.
Casey:
Well, of course I didn't get a call.
Casey:
I mean, come on.
John:
You sound like the biggest iMac Pro fans that figured they would call Casey, you know.
Casey:
Yeah, Casey has a review unit.
Casey:
That would be the ultimate troll.
Casey:
Oh my God, would that be amazing?
Casey:
But no, I have received no calls of any sort.
Casey:
I am not special.
Marco:
Well, anyway, they reached out to me and said they wanted to schedule a call.
Marco:
I was very pleasantly surprised.
Marco:
And so I prepared some questions and I didn't really know what to expect.
Marco:
But it was really nice.
Marco:
It was really, you know, pretty open, pretty laid back.
Marco:
I mean, you know, and to set the expectations a little bit, like sometimes people will get mad at, you know, like somebody like when John Gruber has his podcast where he'll occasionally have an Apple executive on.
Marco:
Some people get mad that he doesn't ask certain questions.
Marco:
like things like, you know, when's the next Mac Pro coming?
Marco:
Because like, you know, the reality is like Apple's not going to tell you about future products.
Marco:
It's kind of a waste of a question.
Marco:
Like if you're only given a limited amount of time, it's a waste of time to ask them questions they are unlikely to answer.
Marco:
or likely to give you the answer you want.
Marco:
So asking about when future products are coming, or really asking anything about future products, is a waste of time.
Marco:
So I didn't.
Marco:
I'm sure someone's going to be mad and write in because of something I didn't ask.
Marco:
But that was generally... There might be things I just didn't think about, but generally there were a lot of things that I didn't ask because...
Marco:
the real question, even if it wasn't phrased a certain way, you can tell the real question is really about a future product.
Marco:
So for example, I wanted to ask about why are there so many USB-A ports and a card reader on the back?
Marco:
But I knew that's really a question about the MacBook Pro.
John:
That was my question.
John:
So you didn't ask that?
John:
That was going to be my first thing to ask you.
John:
You didn't ask my question?
Marco:
I actually did kind of ask it, but I didn't get the response that was like, well, you know, our pro customers hated the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
Like, no, it wasn't like that.
Marco:
It was basically explaining, like, you know, we offered the ports as many as we could for our pro customers, et cetera, like that kind of thing.
John:
Yeah, no, that's that question, those type of questions, because you can't ask them about future things.
John:
You can only ask them about the product.
John:
So basically, that's the only way you're ever going to do anything is to say...
John:
uh why does product that you're at that that we're talking about right now have feature right so right why does that you can't even say why does the imac pro have usba ports and the macbook pro doesn't you have to just say i noticed there's a lot of usba ports in the back why are those there or like why does it have them and like and to give them the opportunity to give their canned pr answer and if they don't have a canned pr answer because they thought no one would ever ask that then they have to think on their feet and maybe you get a little bit of insight but sometimes they're very forthcoming about you know
John:
like they could say there's some specific customers that we talked to that have really important usba peripherals and we thought like you never know what they're going to say and that's a way to get legit information out of it you just have to know how to phrase it not as this computer doesn't have them why does the iMac pro have them because that's not going to put them in the right frame of mind to give you any good info right exactly anyway it's very clear that they really are very heavily focused on developers for this machine
Marco:
It wasn't immediately obvious when the PR first came out on whatever day it was that all the Embargos lifted on the first week review units.
Marco:
It wasn't incredibly obvious then because everything that came out first was all YouTubers.
Marco:
And so we all thought, myself included, like, wow, they just gave it to YouTubers?
Marco:
I guess that's understandable.
Marco:
But then as it turned out later that day, we saw a bunch of tweets and blog posts, many of which were from developers.
Marco:
And it's very clear that they actually were reaching out to a lot of developers for this, and developers just aren't that good at being at minute one after an embargo and stuff like that, because developers are not usually reviewers or journalists.
Marco:
So it's kind of like trying to coordinate cats to all do something.
Marco:
Although I still believe that cats are all a hive mind, and they're all the same cat, just different visions of the same cat.
Wow.
Casey:
Oh my goodness.
Marco:
Yeah, very strong focus on developers here.
Marco:
You could tell that they worked with a lot of developers in development.
Marco:
They talked to a lot of developers.
Marco:
They clearly cared a lot about developer needs.
Marco:
A lot of these are going to sell to high-end developers.
Marco:
They're going to sell to people like me who...
Marco:
are willing to spend the money on a very, very fast machine for our app development.
Marco:
They're going to sell to VR developers, hopefully, and high-end developers, content creators, etc.
Marco:
So they were very concerned about making sure that this was a good machine for developers.
Marco:
And I really respect that.
Marco:
And even though I'm a little bit biased in that because I'm a developer and this worked out for me because they wanted to talk to me,
Marco:
So obviously I'm a little bit biased, but I thought that was a really good angle.
Marco:
They seemed sincere about it.
Marco:
They seemed like they had really done their homework, done their diligence and done their research.
Marco:
And for instance, like one of the things was that 10 core they find is the most ideal configuration for most developer workflows.
Marco:
And they know this because they actually did tests and worked with people and figured out what people do.
Marco:
And they were able to tell that usually after about the 10 core mark, today's tools tend to not use many of the cores after that or you're bottlenecked by other things like I.O.
Marco:
So that made total sense.
Marco:
One of the things I asked about, because, you know, last show we had a lot of discussion about the thermal design of the iMac Pro and about the idea that they were downclocking the two base CPUs by like 10% or something at their base clocks.
Marco:
And we're kind of saying, you know, John had a lot of thoughts about it and kind of saying like, you know, why drop down the performance to fit in the enclosure that nobody was asking you to fit it in?
Marco:
So I asked a lot about this, and they were pretty unwavering about that they didn't, like, cram it in here unnecessarily.
Marco:
They tried to see if they could fit workstation components into this case, and they could.
Marco:
You know, they did a lot of redesigning of the thermal, so, like, because there is no 3.5-inch disk offered in the iMac Pro, that frees up a pretty large block of pretty premium space right in the middle.
Marco:
Because 3.5x disks, compared to the internals of an iMac, are huge.
Marco:
And it certainly does seem like they have filled a lot of that space with heat sink, basically.
Marco:
Because it certainly has a massive heat sink apparatus back there from the pictures.
Marco:
So the impression I got from this question is that...
Marco:
They didn't have to compromise to fit the workstation parts into this case.
Marco:
They designed it, it fit, and there seems to be headroom, which I'll get to in a little bit.
John:
So what do they say about the downclocking?
John:
We had some feedback about that.
John:
So there's the base CPUs that you talked about, but there's also the GPUs, which I didn't know whether they were downclocked, and I speculated that maybe they'd be 90% downclocked, but someone emailed the show to say they're actually 83% downclocked versus what they would be like if you took that same...
John:
card and put it in a pc and so uh and also one other bit of feedback about downclocking specifically the gpus uh again i don't know if the providence of this information is sound or not but someone emailed to suggest that amd has been optimistic with the clock speeds and that
John:
really if you run them at the quote-unquote rated speed that it shortens their life and apple cares more about them so that they just buy you know they just always run them slightly down clocked anyway just because if they don't they'll have reliability problems i don't know if that's trash can fall out or just total bs or just speculation or whatever but anyway um all we know is the the numbers we can look at and apparently if you buy this exact uh
John:
card from AMD and on a regular card slot, the iMac is running them 83% slower, which is, you know, not insignificant.
John:
So when they say, can we fit it?
John:
Yes, they could fit it.
John:
But if you can fit it by...
John:
down clocking and using slower speed things i did you really fit it or did you have to compromise on something like i feel like their answer to you is just rephrasing the question like why did you fit everything inside the case we wanted to see if we could yeah but why why didn't like the real question is why didn't you make a new case and that the reason there is like well we didn't want to spend that much money on it it would be a lot of design time we wouldn't you know like there's other reasons that they're probably not going to tell you of why they didn't design a new case because surely
John:
it is faster to market and cost them less money and less time and less everything to use the same external design um probably get to well i was gonna say they get to use the same visa mounts but they did change that part of the case so i don't know
John:
um it's still slightly uh mysterious to me but anyway that from as far as we can tell you take those same parts and put them in a an ugly boxy pc and you can get them all to run at faster speeds or use higher bin parts yeah i mean the gpu i honestly i i don't have any qualifications to talk about gpus so i didn't ask really anything about them because i i don't know anything about gpus um but on the cpu part as gruber points out a lot like
Marco:
Apple doesn't usually lie.
Marco:
Like, you know, they'll spin things a certain way if they want to, but they don't usually outright lie.
Marco:
Like, usually if they tell you a straight-out answer, that is the truth.
Marco:
And in this case, like, they were very clear that, like, they didn't need to change the case.
Marco:
And there's some thermal stuff that I'll get to in a few minutes that I think probably supports that theory if it ends up panning out that way.
Marco:
Um...
Marco:
On the subject of the CPU downclocking, so I did some research before the call, and I discovered that it's only the 8 and 10 core that are downclocked from their retail speeds, from the retail parts.
Marco:
The 14 and 18 are identical.
Marco:
They are all rated at the same TDP, so the same heat capacity of 140 watts.
Marco:
They all are the same.
Marco:
the 8 and 10 core chips are special chips that were made by intel just for apple's oem use here um that's why they even have different model numbers they have a b on the end and they're like slightly different numbers than their counterparts if you look i'll link to the wikipedia table that lists all this all the sky like uh zeons um so you can see like they're these are special chips that are only used in you know by apple and so far only in the iMac pro and
Marco:
Their answer to that was basically like, you know, they are the custom part from Intel, and that's just how the clock speeds bend out for these chips.
Marco:
One of the things they wanted to make sure of is that all of the processors that are available in the iMac Pro have the same AVX512 processing capacity.
Marco:
These are the new instructions that are, I think, new to these chips, or at least new to the current generation of Xeons.
Marco:
These are super high-end vector instructions for certain types of math that can be very well optimized.
Marco:
Some of the Xeons that are in this family only have one compute unit.
Marco:
The high-end ones have two.
Marco:
Apple made sure that all of theirs have two.
Marco:
That being said, I looked up the specs for the corresponding parts that are slightly higher clocked, and they have two also.
Marco:
So I'm not entirely sure what that means right now.
Marco:
That could have been a later change in the release cycle for Intel where they decided to put two on those, or they could have been referencing different parts they could have used but didn't.
Marco:
The important thing that I got from the call is that they didn't see this as an artificial lowering of the clock speed.
Marco:
This is just how they were binned out for their custom part.
Marco:
And they made sure their custom parts all had the same AVX 512 dual processing units.
John:
What's custom about them besides the AVX stuff?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I can ask them.
Marco:
I mean, they're friendly.
Marco:
They'll probably answer an email if I ask them.
Marco:
So I think our concerns about the thermals are probably unwarranted because what I heard from them, which confirms what I heard from other people who were at their demos or who have had review units so far, it sounds like there is a lot of thermal headroom.
Marco:
They had certain demos at these events that were running on loops all day long that were stressing all the CPU cores at like 60% or higher all the time, and that you couldn't even really hear the fan.
Marco:
And what I was told basically is that the way the thermals work out in this generation, that you can hammer the CPUs pretty hard, and you probably won't hear the fan spin up.
Marco:
You will pretty much only hear it get loud if you're hammering the CPUs and the GPUs.
Marco:
And this actually is plausible to me because this is actually not that different from how the Skylake laptops work.
Marco:
The Skylake and what is it?
Marco:
Ivy Bridge?
Marco:
I already forget.
Marco:
So the current laptop generation compared to the old one that I'm still holding on to is way quieter under CPU load.
Marco:
It doesn't spin up for nearly as long and cools down much faster and everything else.
Marco:
So given that these are the Xeons from the Skylake family, that actually, I think, makes sense.
Marco:
That's believable to me.
Marco:
And it does seem like they've designed this with a lot of thermal headroom.
Marco:
So for the moment, having not used one of these yet, having not owned one of these yet, it does sound like they are not concerned about thermals.
Marco:
And all the demo units and all the review units out there so far have shown pretty awesome thermal and noise performance.
Marco:
So, so far, it seems tentatively like it might be pretty awesome on the thermal and heat front.
Marco:
And therefore, that also supports...
John:
their position that these aren't really downclocked for meaningful performance reasons well you keep excluding the gpu because you didn't want to talk about it but it's more possibly more than half of the heat in here and certainly half of the equation like if the if the if this info from this is just from a listener because i don't know the clock speeds of this gpu and stuff but if if these gpus really are at 83 of the clock speed that if you were to buy the same card and put it in a pc and get the fastest one
John:
Like, why would you choose to do that if you've got the thermal headroom?
John:
It doesn't, you know... Especially if it's, like, literally the same part downclocked and not just bin differently for pricing thing.
John:
Like, I don't quite understand how that math works out.
John:
So it sounds like, for the CPU, we have some good information on it, and certainly you've been doing things that stress the CPU, and it seems like there's plenty of room, but kind of like in the trash can, if you happen to do something that uses them both at once, what does that do to things?
John:
Like, you know, why... The explanation for why the...
John:
the cpus are down clocks like oh that's just how they bend out and maybe they had to be slower clocked because they've got the two avx units and the normal ones of that size didn't that kind of makes some kind of sense right but why on the other side of the case where the other fan is blowing into you know well actually both fans are rolling through the same heatsink but anyway on the other side of the case where the gpu is um why if that if that stuff actually is clocked down and by the way if you're if you know the exact clock speeds of like the the gpus cpu and memory buses please
Marco:
send it to the show um like that doesn't match up with the idea that there's plenty of thermal headroom because especially like on the on the high-end part why wouldn't you run those at their full speed yeah and honestly i again i just i don't know whether they're whether it's run at full speed or not um i i will say that like you know they didn't nothing they said indicated that it couldn't handle stressing both the cpu and gpu just that you'd be more likely to hear it
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
And I would imagine the demos, they should actually did stress both of them.
John:
We haven't been there for the demos, but I think the demos probably did stress both the GPU and the CPU.
John:
So maybe those are a good example.
John:
And maybe, again, they traded the quiet for like, look, if we clock this at 83% of max speed, we can just be quiet all the time, no matter what.
John:
And isn't that a better pro experience then?
John:
allowing it to get noisy you know for this particular case because maybe some people are using applications that are stressing both of them all the time and it's not a great experience for the pro mac whose fans you can't escape by putting it under the desk to be noisy like i can i can come up with all sorts of reasons why they can explain this because again this is the the compact pro machine it's not it's not the mac pro right um
John:
But I don't know which of those explanations that I could come up on my own is the right one, if any.
Marco:
You know, and maybe I think what you said about kind of like hitting like a constant load minimum heat performance kind of thing, that might be related to the way the CPUs are clocked because I think it says something that these all have the same TDP.
Marco:
So like when driven fully, like at maximum, all the cores stressed, they will all cap out at the same heat output.
Marco:
um at all the core counts however only the bottom two chips had their base clocks reduced from from the intel retail parts so maybe it really is like a heat and noise thing because the way turbo boost works is you know with all the all modern intel chips like if it has thermal headroom it will increase its its
Marco:
clock speed, until it hits a certain maximum that it won't go past, or until it starts getting too hot, or until more cores get engaged and then it starts to reduce the overall ceiling on them, so that it keeps below that threshold.
Marco:
But it doesn't ever go below the base speed.
Marco:
And the turbo clock is reduced.
Marco:
On those two that they've modified, the 8 and 10 core, they did reduce the turbo boost max speed as well, so I don't know what that means in this theory, but
Marco:
By reducing the base clock, it's still going to turbo up a lot when it's in use.
Marco:
But it's going to run at the reduced base clock speed when it's not doing heavy lifting.
Marco:
And so maybe that is primarily there for lower noise and heat when it's most of the time doing pretty light work.
Casey:
So really, all of our, well, maybe not all, but a lot of our qualms from last episode may be a little premature.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, yeah, the answer really is we don't really know yet until we really get these machines.
Marco:
Well, until I get this machine.
Marco:
You guys aren't getting it.
Marco:
But although, well, I'll get to that in a minute.
Marco:
But until we really get these machines, we really can't be incredibly sure about any of these things.
Marco:
I am hopeful now after having this call and also having heard from the reviewers and the people who were at these events, it doesn't sound like there's reason to be concerned about the thermals yet.
Marco:
And that's pretty promising.
Marco:
I'm very happy to hear that because that was my big concern going into this.
Marco:
It seems like there's a lot of headroom and that they didn't need to make the case bigger and make it full of holes like what John wanted.
Marco:
So we'll see if that actually pans out.
Marco:
But I think it's plausible.
Marco:
I asked a few more things, kind of like side notes here.
Marco:
On the T2, one thing I thought was very interesting is that it is indeed the SSD controller.
Marco:
Like, it is the disk controller.
Marco:
And in all of the configurations, not just the 4TB one, it uses dual SSD modules.
Marco:
And it uses them in parallel for performance.
Marco:
And so even if you get the terabyte, that's just using two 512s.
Marco:
And with the T2 controlling it, it isn't abstracted to the OS as two disks, the way if you just plug in a two-disk enclosure without any kind of RAID functionality, it shows up as two disks.
Marco:
It isn't like that.
Marco:
It shows up as one disk.
Marco:
The controller shows it as one device.
Marco:
But behind the scenes, it is actually using two in parallel.
Marco:
It's one of the reasons why they're so freaking fast.
John:
We got anonymous feedback about that, by the way, about the dual module thing.
John:
And I think what it boils down to is you can just do the benchmark.
John:
Look at the performance.
John:
It's like three gigabytes per second read and write, roughly.
John:
So I think it's a little bit less for write, right?
John:
So the debate about single versus dual, the feedback we got is that it's not actually a dual module.
John:
It's just one module that's split into two bits of silicon.
John:
But the bottom line is that...
John:
what is it like four pci express lanes going to this controller yes uh like you you get the results you get and you know what whether it's because they're dual or it's just one good way they could have put it on a single chip for different packaging reasons is that they are giving you the pci express lanes to get maximum performance out of the ssds and that the performance is better better than any other mac essentially um and
John:
Did you ask them about the encryption stuff as well?
John:
A little bit, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I didn't have a lot of questions on it because I didn't know enough to ask really about.
Marco:
But yeah, it is certainly doing all the encryption in hardware, like in the T2.
Marco:
So there's two different types of encryption going on here.
Marco:
There's the hardware encryption, kind of like what iOS devices have, where the actual data on the flash is encrypted, even if you're not using file fault.
Marco:
It is encrypted.
Marco:
And if you take that SSD stick or whatever it is,
Marco:
out of the iMac Pro and put it in some kind of enclosure or another iMac Pro to try to read it, you won't be able to because the key to decrypt it is secure enclave style stored on that T2.
Marco:
The reading of the flash is tied to that hardware.
Marco:
So the only way to read the data on the flash is if you can get that computer to read it for you.
Marco:
If you do things like set a firmware password or something, obviously that's going to provide pretty good security on that so it can't boot other things.
Marco:
Actually, I didn't ask too much about...
Marco:
What's different now with the new secure boot stuff with things like firmware passwords and boot options and whether it will boot external media and stuff like that.
Marco:
I know a lot of that has changed mostly for the better, maybe entirely for the better.
Marco:
So I can't really talk about that because I don't know enough about it yet.
Marco:
So there's that level of encryption.
Marco:
And you can also use FileVault on top of that.
Marco:
And if you do use FileVault, its encryption instructions are now hardware accelerated.
Marco:
So that's not even running on the Xeon.
Marco:
It's running on the T2.
Marco:
It's not taxing the Xeon at all.
John:
Hardware accelerated.
John:
You got my pet peeve again.
John:
Oh, now it's hardware accelerated.
John:
Instead of being executed on hardware, it'll be executed on hardware.
John:
but yeah you got the important point is that you don't have to make the cpu won't be involved in this so most people are speculating like you know that you know what what performance hit do you get for using uh encryption with hfs plus or apfs and you could measure it and you know apple's like it's really small or whatever and i think some testing has shown that the hit might actually be more with apfs than it was whether it's because it's better encryption or whatever um
John:
theoretically uh well first of all you know assuredly this will give you more cpu because your cpu won't be doing any encryption stuff none zero it'll all be done by the t2 which is great like i like the idea of these little custom co-processors handling this type this very specific function surely they have instructions just for it it's great the second possibility that someone will have to benchmark to find out is okay your cpu is freed up
John:
does the t2 do that encryption job faster than the xeon used to because you know it's dedicated type of thing if it does that means there will be less of a performance hit for enabling file vault on an imac pro with t2 and that's something we'll have to benchmark
Marco:
I'm guessing there's probably some kind of smart implementation detail.
Marco:
In the T2's role as the disk controller, and doing that hardware encryption the way iOS devices do, it's already encrypting everything in and out at full speed, even when 5V is not on.
Marco:
So I'm guessing by using FileVault, you're probably just having another mode of that same encryption or having the keys combined in some way or something like that.
Marco:
I don't know the details enough to say.
John:
It could be.
John:
And if that's the case, there will be zero speed hit because it's doing it whether you have FileVault on or not.
John:
And so this should be borne out by the benchmarks.
John:
But it's an intriguing possibility.
John:
This brings me back to the good old days of...
John:
philips tri-media accelerator you guys don't remember that but no but they're they're have it very even in the early days of mac it was 10 which maybe you were uh you were around for and remember the idea of apple adding chips to max to make them faster in basically magical ways it's like yeah you can just take a cpu and some ram and a motherboard and throw them together but the apple special sauces they'll put special magic chips on there that will make your mac better
John:
this is the actual reality of the t2 apple made its own chip and threw it on there and i mean even on apple's own page like the list of stuff this thing does in addition to what we listed is image signal processing for the front-facing camera audio controller uh of course the secure enclave uh the the encryption oh actually this is right from apple's marketing page the data in your ssd is encrypted using dedicated aes hardware with no effect on the ssd's performance it's not clear whether they're talking about file vault or the other thing um
John:
But yeah, they're actually doing something that they have very rarely done in the past, which is throwing a chip, a chip that nobody else has, to their computer specifically to make them perform better.
John:
And who doesn't like that?
John:
That is a great pro feature.
John:
And if it lets them... These are things that you should be able to measure.
John:
If it lets them...
John:
go faster on benchmarks because the cpu is not involved in all in any of the encryption on the disk stuff that's that's a clean win and if the t2 as is rumored is heavily based on an existing iphone chip that's a great reuse of ip like they already did the work to design this chip for their flagship product you can repurpose this chip and throw it in with a combination of a bunch of other stuff and maybe even repurpose some software that you have to do say image processing from the iphone or whatever
John:
you know and maybe uh disc controller stuff i don't know how much of that is shared with the ios devices that might be using a similar thing this is a smart way to make a better faster computer and i hope the mac pro has something just like this even though you know presumably doesn't have a front-facing camera or whatever
Marco:
And I think one of the things we said when the Touch Bar was launched was this actually does show they are putting significant engineering resources into the Mac still.
Marco:
Not as much as we would like sometimes, but clearly it isn't just sitting around being completely neglected.
Marco:
This wasn't a half-assed update.
Marco:
This was like a significant engineering effort and with significant new things being put into it, not just like a stock Intel motherboard and stock parts.
Marco:
So give them full credit where credit is due.
Marco:
This is major engineering work going into the Mac.
Marco:
And for a long time, it seemed like that wasn't happening.
Marco:
So this is a nice change of the narrative and it's good to see results.
John:
one one aspect of this integration by the way of like getting to the ssd specifically of like great performance the encryption addressed for free the secure enclave uh this is from uh our anonymous uh source again uh this person says they feel quite confident stating there will never be a third-party ssd upgrade for a t2 equipped mac because the integration is so tight i mean maybe it's tight down to being soldered in or maybe it's tight just down to like
John:
this is not something you can buy off the shelf.
John:
There's tight integration between the storage and the controller and the encryption and all that other stuff going on there.
John:
Um, that it is a very custom solution.
John:
And that is very much like iOS devices where no one considers, uh, you know, upgrading the storage.
John:
You buy a 64 gig phone, you know, like, Oh, I'll have to market upgrade it to one 28.
John:
No, you won't like, cause it's, cause it's so integrated into like everything inside a phone is from, has from day one been so tied up with the whole security environment of phones, uh,
John:
And the T2 brings the Mac closer to that ideal in good ways and bad.
John:
We haven't gotten to the secure boot stuff yet, but like bringing closer to the ideal of a phone of being...
John:
more resilient to hardware attacks like this the old adage in the world of desktop and even laptop computers is physical access trumps all security even servers physical access trumps all security if you are physically there with the hardware doesn't really matter what you've done security wise because if you're physically there there are so many things that you can do to to own that machine right with phones
John:
the whole idea has been to make them resilient to that old adage does physical access trump security here you go here's my phone if apple has done a good job it should be really hard for you to get anything out of it like anything at all aside from you maybe like freezing the thing of liquid nitrogen and extracting the data from ram but even then it might be encrypted like you know so anyway the t2 and the associated secure boot machinery and secure on cloud and all that stuff
John:
are an attempt to bring the Mac more into that direction for good and bad.
John:
Mostly good in terms of security, but bad in terms of us as computer enthusiasts who occasionally screw up on our computers.
John:
uh have gotten used to the idea that you know physical access trumps all security is good for us when we screw when we mess up our own computers say well it's all messed up but because i'm physically here in front of the computer i'm going to plug in this other drive and boot from it or you know i'm going to go in target disk mode and just pull the data off or whatever like even though i've hosed my os installed by messing with the bootloader or something like there's always something we can do to save ourselves not so much with an iphone uh and maybe not so much with one of these iMac pros either depending on how you have it configured
Marco:
Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why I would strongly advise, similar to the RAM argument, don't assume you're going to be able to upgrade these later.
Marco:
As you said, we heard from that anonymous tip, they don't think that it's likely that we're going to have upgradable SSDs from third parties.
Marco:
I didn't ask this during the call, so I don't have any kind of official statement on this, but I would guess the same thing.
Marco:
It seems very likely that that's going to be the case.
Marco:
I don't think...
Marco:
you're going to see third-party T2 SSD modules.
Marco:
And as we briefly discussed last week, I don't think that's that different from how it is now.
Marco:
The last few generations of Macs that we've had, you haven't had third-party SSD modules usually at all.
Marco:
Or if they do come, they come years after the machine is launched.
Marco:
And they're usually very expensive because they're custom stuff from OWC or something like that.
Marco:
So if you can at all order your computer with the disk space you need up front, do it.
Marco:
And otherwise consider external expansion because internal upgrades down the road are just getting less and less likely to be possible or affordable.
John:
So the secure boot stuff, Cable did a bunch of tweets about it because he got one too, right?
John:
He's another developer who got one of these.
John:
Yeah, he got a review unit.
John:
Yeah, that's right.
John:
He didn't just get a call.
John:
He actually got a computer, which is cool.
John:
So he did a bunch of tweets about it.
John:
One of them was a screenshot of a new, I guess it's an app called Startup Security Utility.
John:
uh and it's where you can enable and disable the firmware password but it also has two little sets of radio buttons one called secure boot and the options are full security which i don't know what the defaults are but full security ensures that only the latest and most secure software can be run this mode requires a network connection at software installation time i'm a little bit confused about the details of that because ensures that only the latest and most secure software does that mean like if it's not the latest software it won't boot it but it will force you to do an update before it will even boot i don't know anyway
John:
medium security requires verifiable software to boot but not the latest software so you can just keep using your old os and no security does not enforce any requirement so all of our macs now fall under the category as far as secure boot is concerned of no security like if the if there's an interesting name for what apple thinks of this thing
John:
if you plug in a drive that has an os that can boot your machine it will boot right it doesn't do any verification that that operating system is like completely valid and hasn't been rooted and it sure doesn't care if it's the latest version you know you can whatever like my 2008 uh mac pro what did it ship with did it ship with snow leopard
John:
Maybe before that.
John:
Maybe it shipped with Leopard.
John:
Yeah, I think it shipped with Leopard.
John:
It'll boot Leopard right now.
John:
It doesn't care that Leopard is ancient.
John:
So that's what Apple considers no security.
John:
And there's also an option for external boot.
John:
And you can select disallow booting from external media, which is pretty straightforward.
John:
It's like, oh, you messed up your computer?
John:
You want to boot from another disk to try to save it?
John:
Nope, not if you have this thing set.
John:
Or the option to allow booting from external media.
John:
So a lot of the T2 stuff is like, you know, you can make your iMac...
John:
much more like an iphone or if you change these settings it can just be like a normal mac has always been now it's clear the direction apple wants you to go in the top items and all these radio buttons are the the most secure ones but there's an interesting uh tech note help article uh that i'll put a link to that like what do you do if you have your iMac pro set to the most secure settings and you screw it up
John:
The recovery procedure, kind of like the recovery procedure when you screw up your phone and you have to sort of go into DFU mode or whatever, the recovery procedure for your iMac Pro requires you to have another Mac and that you can connect to your iMac Pro.
John:
And if you think about it, it's like, look, you always need some other thing to plug your thing into.
John:
Like when you put your phone in DFU mode, if you don't literally have any other hardware, it just sits there staring at you.
John:
right it's not it's not you need some other device to connect to do in the case of the mac pro what you need to connect to it would be kind of neat if you connect it to an iphone to recover it like it would download from the internet the os update and funnel it through um but anyway this is the brave new world of security the whole point of all the secure boot software is so that your computer can verify that it is running like you know clean software software that you know there's this sort of chain of trust that each thing in the chain verifies the next thing where was it cable had a good tweet about it um
John:
uh the new chip means that uh storage encryption keys pass from the secure enclave to the hardware encryption engine on chip your key never leaves a chip and allows the hardware verification of the os the kernel the bootloader firmware etc and each uh each component in turn verifies the next so it's a chain of trust starting with the secure enclave essentially so that each thing uh each thing that that runs next knows that it is being kicked off from something that is secure and it's the way the phone security works and it's the way this security works and it's you know
John:
It's not like it's foolproof, like any security thing.
John:
If there's a flaw, it can be exploited to get in.
John:
That's how jailbreaks have always worked.
John:
Like, you know, it's not impenetrable, but it is a far cry from the world of all the Macs that we're sitting in front of now, which is like la-di-da, they'll boot whatever the heck you give them.
John:
They have no idea if your operating system has been, you know, root-kitted or whatever.
John:
They have no idea how new it is when they're booting, and this iMac changes all that.
Marco:
I wonder a little bit, like, you know, one of the problems that I have with High Sierra is that it's pretty buggy still, but yet Apple's really pushing it heavily through, like, the auto-update mechanism and stuff like that.
Marco:
The idea that to have the best security, you should be running the latest OS is often true, but not always true.
Marco:
And sometimes running the latest OS has other downsides, like certain things that are still broken or too different or that break your workflow, like dropping support for some old app that you use or something like that.
Marco:
I wonder how this mechanism will be useful in practice if you want to still use the old OS for a while because the new one isn't good enough yet or doesn't support the things you need to support yet.
Marco:
is this going to force you to upgrade unless you turn down your security to the medium level?
John:
Yeah, you have to change down to medium security, which, you know, like, they're loaded terms, full versus medium, but for exactly the reasons you stated, it's great that they give you these options.
John:
Like, you don't have to go to no security.
John:
Unlike, for example, what is it,
John:
What is the thing on the Mac called?
John:
The thing that protects all your system files?
John:
System integrity protection?
John:
SIP?
John:
Yeah, there we go.
John:
SIP.
John:
You can either add that on or off.
John:
And maybe there's some developer mode that's kind of in between you there.
John:
But very often it's like, look, to use this fancy piece of software...
John:
you have to disable system integrity protection and even i who are willing to hack their mac up a little bit i'm also like it really makes me rethink whether i want to completely disable system integrity because i like the protection the additional protection and uh uh it provides additionally protection from myself screwing up my own computer by modifying system files which i you know prone
John:
have done in the past right so it makes me think twice about doing it having medium security where it requires verifiable software to boot meaning that it verifies that like this is these are legit copies of everything the bootloader the kernel the all you know everything else but does not require you to have the latest software that's the mode that i think is most appealing maybe all the time but certainly when a new release comes out because you like if the machine literally will refuse to boot until it updates itself that is a behavior that i think pro customers will not
John:
appreciate so again i have no idea what the default is but remember you know if you get one of these machines remember to use this utility and pick the option that makes the most sense for you um i mean even if only like if it refused to boot until it had the latest and it literally had to run the software update to high sierra for all you know that is like causing the latest version of adobe creative suite not to launch right like
John:
You know, if you're a pro machine that you use to do work every day, you come in one morning to try to do work and it's like, oh, I won't even boot until I update myself.
John:
And then after it boots, the application that you use on this all day doesn't launch anymore because it's not yet compatible.
John:
That's not a great experience.
John:
uh medium security sounds like a good compromise for most people and disallow booting from external media like are you in an environment where physical security is actually that important to you or do you want the option of saving your own butt if you screw something up by plugging in an external drive i feel like i would leave that on allow booting from external media but everyone's uh security exposure and environment is different maybe you're working on
John:
uh the next star wars movie and it's really important uh that if someone breaks into the office they would have a really difficult time getting your computer to boot from their external drive in target disk mode so they can copy all your precious files off of it
Marco:
All right, and then a couple other just little tidbits that I asked about or a little bit of information I've picked up since then.
Marco:
The quick thing, the PCI Express layout.
Marco:
I know this sounds really boring.
Marco:
Trust me, there's a reason I'm saying it.
Marco:
It has the GPU running on 16 lanes.
Marco:
It has two Thunderbolt controllers running on four lanes each, so eight total.
Marco:
And the 10 gig ethernet port runs on four lanes.
Marco:
All those are directed to CPU.
Marco:
Everything else, including the T2, is done through the DMI, which goes to what used to be called the Southbridge.
Marco:
I don't know if Intel still calls it the Southbridge anymore, but it's like the controller on the chipset that controls USB and all sorts of other lower speed peripherals than the GPU.
Marco:
The T2 is the largest bandwidth consumer through that bus, and the DMI bus seems to have approximately the same bandwidth as four PCI Express lanes, and you can see that in the benchmarks of the SSD.
Marco:
that basically the SSD clearly can run with the bandwidth of four PCI Express lanes, so that does seem to be pretty good.
Marco:
I didn't ask, because I got this information after the call, so I didn't ask why the T2 wasn't connected to one of the CPU lanes directly, because the CPU has 48 lanes, and by my count, only 28 of them are being used, or at least only 28 that I can account for.
Marco:
But the reason I bring this up, a lot of people look at this machine and they wonder, why do we have to pay for Xeons?
Marco:
Why can't Apple just ship a cheap tower that I want that has an i7 chip in it or whatever?
Marco:
This is one of the reasons.
Marco:
So the best i7 you can get in, say, the regular iMac has 16 lanes from the CPU total.
Marco:
This is using 28 of them.
Marco:
This shows you, like, if you drop down to one of the consumer CPUs,
Marco:
you would be required to cut throughput or to cut possible bandwidth on some of these components.
Marco:
And maybe you won't notice.
Marco:
Some people argue, well, you can cut a GPU down to X8, down from X16, and it's fine.
Marco:
Well, yeah, maybe it's fine, but is it the best it can be?
Marco:
Getting to John's argument, is that the best or is it fine?
Marco:
So it is very clear that they are using the throughput of the Xeon here.
Marco:
And one of the reasons I was thinking about this was kind of trying to do some research on, like, do they have enough free PCI Express lanes coming off the CPU in a theoretical Mac Pro that they could offer multiple card slots while also supporting more than one GPU with an X16 connectivity lane?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the answer appears to be yes.
Marco:
It appears to be they can probably offer two X16 GPUs and still have enough lanes for other stuff.
Marco:
But I'm not like I don't think they would also offer additional PCI Express slots beyond maybe just those two.
Marco:
All this was theoretical, trying to educate myself to make better Mac Pro predictions.
Marco:
And then finally, I asked, remember when the 5K iMac first launched?
Marco:
At the time, Thunderbolt 2 was not powerful enough to drive a 5K display at 60 hertz.
Marco:
It didn't have enough bandwidth.
Marco:
to drive a Fico display at 60 hertz.
Marco:
And Apple made a big deal about, even during the presentation, pointing out they had developed their own timing controller, or T-Con, and they had embedded that in the iMac to help drive the display by basically multiplexing two streams together.
Marco:
I asked if they still do that.
Marco:
The answer?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Because I figured, like, you know, now things are faster.
Marco:
Maybe they wouldn't need that anymore.
Marco:
But nope, they still do it.
Marco:
So that's useful to somebody, maybe.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And then finally, I asked if the AppleCare pricing is a mistake or not.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
One of the little flukes about AppleCare pricing is that Apple keeps flat pricing for a product family.
Marco:
So if you look at a MacBook Pro,
Marco:
The price of AppleCare for a $2,000 configuration of the 15-inch MacBook Pro, that's the same price whether you get the base model or whether you spec up all the specs and it costs like $5,000.
Marco:
AppleCare stays the same price because it's just the price of what it is for MacBook Pro.
Marco:
The iMac Pro is classified as an iMac for AppleCare purposes.
Marco:
And so whether you spend literally $1,300 or $13,000, AppleCare is the same price of $169.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
and when i when i ordered this like you know it shows you like on the second page it shows like the order screen of like do you want to add the apple care to your car i thought it was a mistake i'm like there's no way that like a ten thousand dollar configuration this computer that apple care is under two hundred dollars there's no way but it turns out that is not a mistake that's just what it costs
Marco:
So this is one of those things that, you know, I say like I buy AppleCare selectively based on the economics involved in each decision.
Marco:
I would definitely recommend buying it on an iMac Pro just because, you know, A, these are really expensive parts if you ever need to get them serviced.
Marco:
You know, I would assume that servicing this is going to cost more simply because the components are more advanced and higher end and will cost more.
Marco:
And B, that is such a cheap price for AppleCare relative to the cost of the machine that it seems like an exceptionally good deal in this case.
John:
One thing about the PCI Express lanes, back in the cheese grater days, maybe all the cheese grater days, I think they had like one good slot for your good card and then one slot with like half the number of lanes.
John:
But for the purposes of... In those days, for the purposes of having crossfire dual GPUs for games and stuff like that, most games could get by with 8 lanes instead of 16.
John:
So you'd put one card in the 16, one card in the 8, but just run them the same speed and they would work.
John:
Or just having two cards to have a larger number of monitors back before you could drive 10,000 monitors off your laptops.
John:
It was a big deal to have two video cards, each of which could drive two monitors, and you get a big setup like that.
John:
So...
John:
uh it's conceivable that a mac pro could have one 16x slot and then a bunch of slower slots some of which you'd still put uh cards in especially if you just want to expand the number of monitors if you who knows maybe you're making some weird simulation thing that needs 15 monitors right if you have enough slots it doesn't matter that they're not all 16 lanes you just need enough to drive a monitor right um
John:
So there's a lot of flexibility.
John:
I continue to think that card slots won't be what the Mac Pro is about, but who knows?
John:
Like, you just need a couple of slots to make it so much better than zero slots, right?
John:
And I would be perfectly happy if there was only one 16X slot in there and then just, you know, one or two lesser ones or even zero lesser ones because...
John:
All I really care about is the ability to upgrade the GPU.
John:
But other people's mileage may vary.
John:
I do wonder about slots in the Mac Pro.
John:
Has Apple successfully entirely killed the market for any card you can buy to stick in a Mac?
John:
I suppose not because a lot of PC cards will still work in there or will work in there with some minor change, right?
John:
But it's not as if there's tons and tons of cards being sold to Mac users because what would they put them in?
John:
It's been many, many years since Apple has sold a computer brand new that takes expansion cards, PCI Express cards in them.
John:
So I have to imagine if you were in the market of selling whatever, cards for whatever that go inside a Mac...
John:
that that's been a difficult market for a while right so you know that's that's something to watch for like it seems like there's plenty of lanes to go around it gives apple lots of flexibility uh apple could certainly use them all on a mac pro but it would not be absolutely shocked if it turns out that even in the biggest beefiest configuration of mac pro there was actually still a couple of lanes left over for something
Marco:
Maybe the eGPU situation now will keep that market alive for compute cards and GPUs.
Marco:
I don't expect that market to come back for things like video capture cards.
Marco:
Some of the big uses of PCI cards in the past have been custom high-end video capture cards, certain RAID controllers, and stuff like that.
Marco:
That's probably not coming back.
John:
or even like putting usb3 in a really old cheese grater stuff like that like i mean these tiny little cards that look like they're you know embarrassingly small like they don't even think they should be taking up a card slot like there's there's lots of things that you can do and those cards don't have to be super mac specific they can again lengthen the life of your computer by giving an interface that it didn't have before or whatever even like a 10 gig ethernet card and a mac pro didn't come with 10 gig ethernet or whatever
Marco:
I would guess that the only likely role of card slots in a new Mac Pro is GPUs slash compute cards.
Marco:
If they do that, I'm guessing there's a limit of two slots.
Marco:
If for nothing else, for bandwidth or for just sheer size or Apple being Apple and not wanting to offer you a ton of PCI slots because they view those as unnecessary slash the past slash a burden.
Marco:
And all of those, I think today that would be a reasonable position to take.
Marco:
As long as you can support GPUs and compute cards, I think you're okay.
Marco:
So Casey, are you still with us?
Marco:
Hi.
Marco:
So now comes my final thought on this for this 10-minute period.
Marco:
So they call this the iMac Pro.
Marco:
And John said he'll never buy one.
John:
When did I say I would never buy one?
John:
I don't recall saying that.
Marco:
Like an hour ago.
Marco:
But I do... I think it's very, very clear by looking... Look at what this machine actually is.
Marco:
The only reason it's called iMac is because it has a closed back and a screen on the front.
Marco:
But by all accounts, this is a Mac Pro.
Marco:
like the reason we're talking about it so much the reason we're so excited the reason it's so damn fast is because it's a mac pro it's in everything but name and shape but it isn't like even the shape is not that different from what we had from 2013 forward one of the reasons i'm so happy about this is that we've been crowing for years for a mac pro update well they just gave us one this is a mac pro update
Marco:
And it isn't exactly what everybody wants.
Marco:
A lot of people still want what an expandable headless tower will offer them.
Marco:
And I might be one of these too.
Marco:
I'll decide when it comes out.
Marco:
But I'm just really excited about this machine because they gave us a new Mac Pro.
Marco:
It's a Mac Pro.
Marco:
Period.
Marco:
No matter what they call it, this is a Mac Pro.
Marco:
And that's really great.
Marco:
I'm really excited about that.
Marco:
I just cannot wait to be using a Mac Pro again, even if there's an extra letter in front of it.
John:
we'll see how excited you are when you have to bring it in for image retention yeah i'm honestly a little worried about service issues like that it's like the most prosaic things like the the guts of it all work great great but it like the the screen ends up being with you know it's the all-in-one factor like that that if something goes wrong with it uh even if everything else is working fine the whole thing has to go in so anyway um and and it's been brought up by a lot of other people and i've been thinking about it lately too as i sit here in front of my nearly 10 year old monitor
John:
that 5k screen and iMac is great tying it to like it's going to age much more slowly than the internals because it's not like the 5k screen is going to be cutting edge forever say 8k screens come out it's like oh that stinky 5k screen but that 5k screen will be a great screen for years and years and years and years like
John:
you could you could keep assuming it was reliable and it kept working you're not going to turn your nose up at that screen anytime soon like there is no second retina revolution where we have another 5x increase in resolution because there's no benefit to that maybe hdr will start to make it crappy but if we got oled on the desktop have like those real oled black levels oh man that'd be great but i don't that doesn't seem like it's happening soon
John:
Yeah, OLED and HDR.
John:
But I say because I'm sitting in front of a 10-year-old monitor here, this monitor is not retina.
John:
It's not great.
John:
The black levels on it are atrocious, but it still looks nice.
John:
Here's what might qualify for looking nice, especially with Apple monitors.
John:
Color uniformity.
John:
uh and general sharpness goes a long way right the fact that this is still like if i make the screen entirely white i can't tell there's like a dark splotch and a light splotch and stuff like that no image retention as far as i'm able to tell all the pictures are still alive looks about as good as the day i got it yeah it's small but uh you know if if i wasn't me i could have been using this monitor with a series of macs right and it kind of makes me feel bad about i have a uh 27 inch thunderbolt display
John:
up in the attic which granted is an external display but because it's like a thunderbolt weirdness i don't have stuff to plug it into without a dongle type adapter but i you know and if i could have plugged that into my current mac and it wasn't 10 years old i would have um anyway uh all this is to say that
John:
For all of the iMac Pro's greatness, all-in-one is still an all-in-one, and it's great for what you want it to be, but the all-in-one compromises are still there, and you have to be aware of them.
John:
And no matter how awesome they make the internals, nothing changes the stripes of an all-in-one being an all-in-one.
John:
And mostly I think about it because...
John:
that you know maybe i think about it because my wife's monitor and her 5k iMac looks so much better than the thing that i sit in front of every day i'm like man i would love to use that as a monitor and i know that it will never happen when the when the guts of that 5k iMac become old and slow i can't just use it as a monitor for another machine which you could you could do with one of the older non-retin iMacs if i recall correctly but anyway i'm looking what i'm saying is i'm looking forward to the pro display almost as much as the uh the mac pro
Marco:
Yeah, I really am very excited to see what that ends up being.
Marco:
But honestly, if we didn't have anything, any hope of a Mac Pro coming, if we didn't have the statements from Apple saying they're working on one, if this was it, if this was the only thing that was going to be the new Mac Pro...
John:
that's not bad it would still be amazing i would still be very excited i i would have ordered it if that was if that was the case i would have ordered it and i wouldn't have been too grumpy about ordering it i mean i would have got my grump about here's what i would have been grumpy about i would have been grumpy about making a mac pro but i wouldn't have been that grumpy about having to order this because i would you know
John:
At various times, I have actually considered replacing my Mac Pro with a 5K in my darkest times.
John:
And it's clear that the 5K is not like a Mac Pro in any stretch of the imagination.
John:
It's consumer CPUs.
John:
But...
John:
it would be you know at a certain point it's a big upgrade so i i would mostly be complaining about uh why aren't you gonna make a mac pro but then when it came to like okay fine if you're not gonna make a mac pro you're not gonna do that thing i guess i'll settle for what you do get and settling for the imac pro is a hell of a lot better than selling for a 5k imac so come on i mean i
Casey:
I admire your enthusiasm, John.
Casey:
I really do.
Casey:
But both of you would be going bananas.
Casey:
Maybe not Marco after this phone call, but up until this phone call, the two of you would be inconsolable about how this is BS.
Casey:
They're not taking pros seriously.
Casey:
I want expansion.
Casey:
I want to be able to get inside of it.
John:
That would be true, but it would be less about complaining about specifically the iMac Pro and more about complaining where is the Mac Pro and how are you, you know, all the people you're abandoning with not making Mac Pro.
John:
I mean, the whole thing, they have the April, but we don't have to do that.
John:
Like, they changed their mind.
John:
Everyone's all happy.
John:
We're just waiting patiently.
Marco:
Also, a lot of those ships sailed with the 2013 Mac Pro.
Marco:
A lot of that was like, oh, you can't expand it anymore.
Marco:
They killed all the slots.
Marco:
They made it really expensive.
Marco:
That all happened in 2013.
Marco:
So we would have considered that already a lost cause.
John:
And I think I was less angry about the 2013 because I think I and a lot of other people just assumed, okay, but this is the first one.
John:
This is the first trash game.
John:
Give them a break.
John:
The second and third generation trash fans will surely be great.
John:
And that was...
John:
That turned out to be a mistake.
John:
But that's why we weren't like, oh, I don't like this 2013 trash can.
John:
I didn't buy one.
John:
I said, this is not for me.
John:
I'll wait for the second or third gen.
John:
Once you can hook a retina monitor update, how long did we talk about that?
John:
We made assumptions that were not founded, that that computer would be updated.
John:
I hope Marco is not correct about this Mac Pro, because honestly, whatever this Mac Pro is,
John:
if you didn't do not have a 10 year old computer like me you'd be wise to wait for the second generation this one but maybe you wouldn't be because if marco's theory is right and there never will be a second generation this new mac pro it would be very unwise to wait for it and you should just get an imac pro now and just be happy so i don't know um i i have no choice i have to get the mac pro when it comes out it's just it's just been too darn long uh but i worry about it being a one and done computer because that's not what i want from it
John:
Well, but I mean, at least if it is, you'll have 10 more years.
John:
If it doesn't have overheating GPUs or some other weird thing, who knows?
John:
I mean, it's going to be an octagon and it'll spin when you use it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Who knows what this thing will do?
John:
Like a rotating restaurant.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Squarespace, Backblaze, and Aftershocks.
Casey:
We will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t marco armen s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a syracusa it's accidental they didn't
Casey:
So, how was it talking to Apple?
Casey:
It was pretty cool.
Casey:
I hear, you know, all the things you said.
Casey:
I've been here.
Casey:
I just didn't have anything to add.
Casey:
But that's got to be pretty neat.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
It was mostly it was just like, you know, an honor that they decided to take their time to talk to me.
Marco:
You know, like, you know, I wasn't talking to like Tim, but I was talking to people who matter in Apple who have busy things that they could be doing.
Marco:
Like, you know, like they have these schedules and in the middle of this launch, they have to talk to a lot of people and they decided to talk to me for like an hour.
John:
Did you ask them when your review unit would arrive?
Marco:
No, I did not presume that I'm getting a review unit.
Marco:
And I told them right up front because they asked if I ordered one, and I said yes.
John:
Oh, you should have said no.
John:
I'm waiting for my review unit, right?
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But, yeah, so it's mostly just an honor.
Marco:
And the call also just went really well.
Marco:
Like, you know, it wasn't...
Marco:
you know if you you might think talking to apple is you know like the way tim cook is in tv interviews like you know very careful reserved a little bit cold maybe but no it isn't like that like these are just humans who are you know on on the call trying to be helpful to you trying to be friendly and again like they're not going to like let slip something about the next iphone or anything but you know you're still talking to people you're not talking to like a robot so it's just a nice friendly call sounds to me like you got handled by apple pr
Marco:
Oh, we're definitely going to have people who say that.
Marco:
But look, I brought a bunch of questions to them.
Marco:
Some of them were a little bit challenging or difficult.
Marco:
And they took them all in stride and told me what they wanted to tell me.
Marco:
And I'm not going into this saying that because I talked to them, everything's going to be perfect about this computer.
Marco:
I don't know yet.
Marco:
But so far, it seems pretty great, and I hope that I've been fair in representing my opinion and my thoughts here.
Marco:
I don't want to make it sound like, now that they talk to me, I'm going to say only the good things and be brainwashed and everything else.
Marco:
It just sounds like this is a really good computer.
Marco:
And I think most of the early reviews bear that out.
Marco:
We will see what happens once I get one, once we get one, if John ever buys one.
Marco:
And over time, we will see, like, are there any long-term problems that develop, like reliability issues or heat or things like that.
Marco:
But so far, it seems pretty great.
Marco:
And from what we know so far...
Marco:
I don't see any of those problems on the horizon anymore.
Marco:
You know, I was very concerned about thermals before.
Marco:
Between what they've said and what other people have said who have seen or used or who have one of these computers, that doesn't seem to be a problem.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Maybe that's great.
Marco:
We'll find out.
Marco:
I do hope that I'm representing these things fairly and that I'm not unreasonably biased because they're being friendly towards me.
Marco:
But I don't think I am.
Marco:
I think I'm being reasonable here.
Marco:
But if I am, I know you guys will tell me.
Marco:
And if not, all of the listeners will.
John:
Of course you are.
John:
I mean, you can't help but be influenced by that.
John:
But as long as you call out the fact that you may be influenced by it, I feel like listeners should be able to take that into account.
Marco:
The other thing is when I talk to people at Apple, I don't pull punches.
Marco:
I'm not super apologetic or differential or anything.
Marco:
I just treat them as peers.
Marco:
Part of that is because I don't have a real job and I don't really have a boss or anything.
Marco:
I don't really treat anybody like they're my boss.
Marco:
Part of that is that
Marco:
As I increasingly get into my mid-30s, soon to be my late 30s, I just don't care anymore about anything.
John:
Can that be the title?
John:
I just don't care anymore about anything.
John:
It's the follow-up to my autobiography.
John:
Nobody cares about me, but I do care.
John:
Second volume, Marco Arment.
John:
I just don't care anymore about anything.
Marco:
No, but like I'm not afraid.
Marco:
If I'm talking to somebody at Apple, I'm not afraid of like, you know, if I say the wrong thing or if I or afterwards, if I'm on a podcast and I say the wrong thing, like, are they going to cut off, you know, my PR access or something?
Marco:
Because until this moment, I didn't have PR access.
Marco:
You don't have any PR access to get cut off.
Marco:
I don't like I have nothing to lose.
Marco:
And also everything in my job, everything in my career, my life to this point has not needed PR access.
Marco:
And so it's one thing, if I was like The Verge and I get cut off from PR, that's a much bigger problem.
Marco:
For me to get cut off from PR, it doesn't really hurt me much.
Marco:
And so I'm not afraid to be honest and to say when things are bad.
Marco:
And most good journalists, they try to maintain that same balance even if their access does depend on that because even if their access does or does not, their credibility depends on them being balanced and being fair and being willing to criticize when it's warranted.
Marco:
And so I'm not saying everybody with PR access is afraid to criticize, but that is definitely a trap that I would fear falling into if my access increases.
Marco:
But I think I'm okay because –
Marco:
I don't really have anything to lose.
John:
I have to say, one of the best things about Apple PR, in my experience, is because they're so selective in who they talk to, they tend to know who they're talking to.
John:
So they will tailor...
John:
Not just what they say, but even who you talk to.
John:
At various times in my Mac OS X reviews, I had interactions with Apple PR.
John:
And in almost all those cases, I didn't have to go through the analogy being level one, level two, level three support.
John:
They would just hook me up directly with the engineer who works on whatever...
John:
thing that I want to ask you.
John:
Partially it's because I'm asking questions that Apple PR thinks are the most boring questions in the world.
John:
Tell me about the exact technical details of some subsystem that I'm going to put in my umpteen page review that no one is going to read all of.
John:
So they don't care.
John:
But the thing is, they're efficient.
John:
They're not going to make me ask a question of a high-level PR person who's then going to ask someone below that, who's then going to ask an engineering manager, who then is going to ask an engineer through this giant game of telephone to get back to me.
John:
They just will connect me directly to the people who know, which it sounds like they would never let an engineer talk directly to the press.
John:
they do they do in if they know who they're talking to and what they're asking about and the parameters are very clear that you're just specifically asking about exactly how facebook integration works on with contacts and some specific version of the operating system and as we as most people know the engineers will just tell you the truth they wrote the thing they designed the subsystem it's a boring answer to a boring question that doesn't reveal anything about future anything but very often i had those kind of specific questions and and to apple's credit they didn't say oh
John:
you know we're not talking about that now or we'll get back to you or give me some vague generality that's just reading from a page a web page you can get they'll bring you right down to the uh the engineer so i would imagine when they're talking to marco they've got people sort of appropriately scaled to the type of questions that he's likely to ask which would be very different than if they're talking to you know time magazine or whatever it's a different set of people because they because they know who it is they're talking to
Marco:
Yeah, I asked, you know, very technical questions, very specific questions about implementation details of the iMac and things like its processors and its PCI lanes.
Marco:
And I got answers to all those questions from the people on the call.
Marco:
Like they knew their stuff.
Marco:
Anyway, like, you know, my attitude towards them is very much like I love talking to them, but I don't need to be talking to them.
Marco:
Like my job does not depend on it.
Marco:
And so I hope that will help, you know, basically keep me in check here from getting, you know, too biased, I guess.
Marco:
But we still all want review hardware.
John:
So Apple, please send it.
Marco:
And the funny thing is, like, even if I don't get review hardware, that doesn't really affect us.
John:
You're just going to buy it.
John:
but for those of us who aren't going to buy every single thing review hardware and this sounds like oh you get review hardware like you don't get to keep it like you give it back to them it's just so that you can talk in it in a more informed way on your media then you know like so you can write about it for your website or so you can talk about it on your podcast i continue to maintain that podcast is a form of media little apple seems not yet to entirely agree when it comes to reviewing it's but anyway um it's if apple decides they want to get their message out
John:
uh through a particular person or venue or whatever review hardware is a great way to do that because even if they don't get it early even if you just get it day of it just lets that person know what it's like to use that thing and then give it back after a week um and that's that's part of the pr effort so i don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that someday that apple could give uh podcast review hardware it just doesn't happen yet so i'm saying we're willing to be in that pilot program call call us apple you
Marco:
Yeah, maybe for a major desktop Mac release in 2018.
John:
Just send it right to Casey's house.
Casey:
That would be so amazing.
John:
You can pick it up in the back of the Jeep Wrangler and just whip down the highway with it.
Casey:
Can you imagine if I got on the horn one day and was like, hey, you know that Mac Pro that's not coming out for a week?
Casey:
Yeah, you know, the good news is I have one.
Casey:
The bad news is I just couldn't be bothered by unboxing it, so I'm not going to be able to talk about it at all.
Casey:
You two would lose it.
Marco:
The bad news is it fell out of my Jeep Wrangler because I didn't have the doors on.
John:
Yeah, it went over a big bump and it just tumbled out the back.
John:
But it seems like it's fine.
John:
I'm sure it'll be okay.
John:
It's all solid state.
John:
There's no platters.
John:
It's got a glass front and back like the new phones.