The Pixel Stump
Casey:
Are we doing an after show?
Casey:
Should we talk about?
John:
We're going to talk about Marco's 10-year computer.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
I didn't know if that was the Mac Pro thing in disguise.
John:
You're getting sleepy, Casey.
Casey:
I am freaking dying, but I'm trying to put on the big boy pants.
John:
You can do it.
Casey:
Let's rock it.
John:
We can get this together.
Casey:
Let's do it.
Casey:
I do not know where this piece of follow-up came from, but I am in love with this piece of follow-up.
Casey:
So we discussed last week, I forget what the context was, but we were discussing ASCII art and code comments.
Casey:
This is when you're making pictures as best you can out of text.
Casey:
with pipes and hyphens and plus signs and things of that nature.
Casey:
And we were talking about it for some reason or another.
Casey:
I don't remember why.
Casey:
But someone has sent us, and maybe, John, you can fill me in where this is from, but a link called explaining code using ASCII art.
Casey:
And oh, mama, this is delightful.
Casey:
This made me so incredibly happy.
Casey:
John, tell us what's going on here.
John:
Yeah, this was an Ask ATP question asking us to weigh in on the value of comments.
John:
That led us to the Ask ER thing.
John:
I also don't remember where this came from.
John:
Sorry, I just grabbed the link but didn't grab whoever sent it to us.
John:
But yeah, it's an entire blog and it's filled with awesome diagrams showing exactly what I was talking about.
John:
Things that are easier to explain visually.
John:
than in words, whether they be data structures or memory layout with a bunch of different blocks.
John:
Someone even tried to do like an entity relationship diagram.
John:
That one's maybe a little bit less successful.
John:
But yeah, I love this type of thing.
John:
And I think we also got some feedback from sort of the...
John:
Horror stories of not understanding how the comment terminators work in your language and accidentally throwing in like, you know, an asterisk and then a forward slash.
John:
You've just ended the comment when really you thought you were just drawing ASCII art.
John:
and various techniques to defend against that anyway we'll put the link in the show notes if you had no idea what we're talking about check the site out and if you're a programmer we'll check out this site and feel bad about your own comments nice where in the timeline was the macbook pro refresh was that before we recorded last is that right that's after we talked about it
Casey:
Okay, right.
Casey:
So we've talked about the refresh.
Casey:
So we didn't know the details about what the material differences were.
Casey:
We didn't know if that meant literally materials.
Casey:
We didn't know if that was a measure of the difference.
Casey:
So iFixit has done what they do best and they've torn this thing apart.
Casey:
So tell me, tell me one of you, maybe Marco, since you love these keyboards so much, tell me what the differences are here.
Marco:
The main thing so far is that they did clearly change two of the materials.
Marco:
One of them is part of the main plastic dome that flexes for each key press, and then also the big metal cap that actually flexes again to make the contact for each key press.
Marco:
That seems to be revised as well.
Marco:
They weren't able to tell quite in what way that was revised, but it was visually obviously different from before.
Marco:
So what's interesting about this is that
Marco:
We've seen as the keyboard drama has played out that all the protections they've put in place so far seem to be about keeping dust out and keeping particles out because they can jam the actual big plastic butterfly wings that act as the hinge to the switch.
Marco:
But what we keep seeing, though, and I think the reason why the past fixes haven't entirely worked is because
Marco:
the keys that are used the most are the ones that tend to fail.
Marco:
You have, like, the vowel keys, like E. You have the space bar.
Marco:
Like, those are the ones that tend to fail much more frequently than other ones.
Marco:
And so if you have a random selection of keys that fail, that would lend more credence towards the dust theory.
Marco:
But because the keys that keep getting used the most tend to be the ones that fail the most, it seems like it might be, like, a wearing out of something.
Marco:
Like, a physical, like, a part is wearing or...
Marco:
deforming or bending or something somehow wearing out from just repeated use so i'm guessing these material changes were made to actually address that we still it's still too early to know whether it will actually work or not i i do know that um it does feel different i was able to feel one in the store the other day before you bought it i mean stephen hackett already bought one yeah oh yeah i like how you're blaming this on stephen did you already buy one
Marco:
almost no like he i was on the way to run some errands at a place that includes an apple store and where when he told me it feels different so naturally i like walked across the street immediately to go to the apple store to see how the white cars just happen to you i see how it is yeah exactly exactly um
Marco:
So I did type on one.
Marco:
Unfortunately, because they're still very new, the store still had some of the old models literally right next to it on the table.
Marco:
So I was able to do a side-by-side comparison with the 2018 keyboard and the 2019 keyboard.
Marco:
And they definitely do feel different.
Marco:
The 2019 feels a little bit softer, a little bit squishier.
Marco:
Fortunately, I still have a lot of hope that...
Marco:
this is the last of these butterfly keyboards that we're likely to see.
Marco:
And so I'm just keeping my eye on the future and ignoring all this crap.
John:
And when they mentioned it was a materials fix, there was that slight confusion about the exact meaning of the word material, but either meaning that you would have taken from their statement, it was clear that they hadn't actually redesigned the keyboard, that the essential mechanism was the same.
John:
And although there are surely parts of the functioning of that mechanism that can fail due to
John:
materials getting old or tired or whatever i still feel like there's definitely part of that mechanism that fails due to the inherent design of the mechanism itself because of the way the butterfly hinge is arranged because of the low clearances if you get a big enough crumb in there and you depress the key the little crumb can wedge itself such that the mechanism can't bring the key back up
John:
You end up with a stuck key.
John:
And it's not stuck because the dome has collapsed, although dome fatigue may be an issue, as you already talked about the frequency used keys.
John:
But the debris going into a relatively new keyboard and getting wedged under the butterfly thing points to just a basic design flaw.
John:
That debris can go in there, it can get wedged in a particular place, it doesn't have a good way to get out.
John:
It's why blowing air might fix something.
John:
If the dome was fatigued, blowing air on it is not going to help.
John:
But if you have a little tiny crumb that's wedged in this 0.25 millimeter space between the upper part of the butterfly wing and the key, and it's causing it not to be able to bounce back up, you can't fix that by changing materials.
John:
You'd have to change parts.
John:
You'd have to make something thinner.
John:
You'd have to change the mechanism, and they're just...
John:
continuing to not do that so i'm glad they're making some material changes i hope they fix some kinds of issues but i still feel like this the fundamental design of the combination of both this keyboard and the frame that the keys poke through like that whole combination of the keyboard unit is no good is that the opposite of the vittichy seal of approval yeah it's worst i hate you
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
The App Store is coming to the Apple Watch, possibly.
Casey:
This is from a friend of the show, Guilherme Rambo.
Casey:
He was saying that it is possible that... And I think Gurman reported on this as well.
Casey:
He was saying that it's possible that there will be an App Store on the Apple Watch.
Casey:
And Guilherme specifically noted that keywords had been added to one of the watchOS labs.
Casey:
And those keywords were independence and independent.
Casey:
Hmm.
Casey:
Interesting.
John:
Yeah, but I'm surprised we didn't touch on that in the last time we talked about this.
John:
I threw out that if you have an app store that was only usable on your watch, what could you sell?
John:
You could sell watch faces, and we all want that, but we'll probably all be sad.
John:
But we didn't even mention this.
John:
The idea that...
John:
a any kind of app store on the watch would have to be part of what i feel like is the inevitable eventual independence of the watch in the same way that both the ipod and the iphone i think i got that right yeah the ipod and the iphone were both tied to the mac originally you couldn't really buy either one unless you had a mac and eventually both became independent of the mac
John:
um at the watch right now if you buy it you need to have an iphone otherwise it's really no good to you at least you know to set it up initially i suppose you could divorce it from the phone at some point but anyway the watch needs to go independent and it's not just because oh it should be a standalone device and it shouldn't be tailored or whatever it's the same reason that the ipod and the iphone became independent because then you can sell it to people who don't have some other app expensive apple product and
John:
And that's important.
John:
I mean, from all accounts, what we're able to tell from Apple's earnings and everything, that the watch has actually been selling pretty well.
John:
I think Underscore just posted a chart recently that his stats showed that the Series 4 watch is soon to be the most popular watch, which means the newer watches are selling even better than the old ones.
John:
Everything's...
John:
looking up but if you can't sell the apple watch to anybody unless they have an iphone that's very limiting so the watch has to become independent and if it does become independent you need some way to get software onto the thing one way would be to have the watch be able to download apps directly another way is some support on android or a pc version of something there's all
John:
The fact that these keywords are added, I don't know what that means.
John:
I'm not really good at splunking this thing.
John:
I don't have any track record of looking at keywords associated with things, but I am 100% willing to believe that if the Apple Watch has an app store on it, it will be part of the story about how the watch can now be sold to people without an iPhone.
Marco:
And a couple other caveats, too.
Marco:
I mean, number one, the titles of things in the WBDC schedule before the keynote are basically meaningless.
Marco:
People always try to derive any kind of predictions they can to them.
Marco:
And the reality is Apple's very good at not telling more than they want to tell in those titles.
Marco:
So I would not read too much into any of the titles that exist in the app now.
Marco:
And secondly...
Marco:
You also have to remember that sometimes there will be labs or sessions or web pages or whatever from Apple that tell you not really news, but are trying to convince you to do something the way they want you to do it.
Marco:
So they might intend for us to use the Apple Watch more independently.
Marco:
They might intend for us to develop more apps and have more independence in our apps.
Marco:
But that doesn't necessarily imply by itself that they are going to
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, digging for crumbs.
John:
And to the credit of the people who dig these things, sometimes...
John:
you can find interesting stuff like actual apple marketing images at uh urls that are guessable and so it's conceivable that stuff could leak out this way i'm just saying like big picture wise whether or not it happens this year i think the watch going independent is as inevitable as uh the watch getting cellular which i think that when the day the watch came out i think we're all like this is going to have to be independent of the phone with a cell connection and they can't do it yet because technology and it's really hard but eventually they will and i think i think i read something recently oh it's from like
John:
a product designer for the apple watch did you both read that story no it was like an ex apple like an industrial designer i think talking about uh her time working on the watch uh and she was very candid because she's no longer at apple and saying how they had all these different challenges and they wanted the watch from day one to be independent of the phone but they couldn't do it uh because it's really hard and like i think she described it as like
John:
look, we have 70 problems to solve here.
John:
Let's take one off the table and save it for later because they had all sorts of issues with just trying to get the radio to work.
John:
And where do you put the antenna when the whole thing is like metal?
John:
And they had to like stick the antenna in the screen that like sticks out above the metal body.
John:
I'll see if I can find the story for the show notes.
John:
But anyway, making it have its own cell connection was deemed, you know, a bridge too far for version one.
John:
So they didn't do that, but eventually they did.
John:
And in the same way, I feel like it's inevitable that the watch is going to become independent, even if it doesn't happen this year.
Casey:
I can't say I've met or spoken to anyone that has said, I'd love to have an Apple Watch, even though I have an Android phone.
Casey:
That just seems an odd combination.
Casey:
But why wouldn't you try to do this?
Casey:
I agree that it is an inevitability.
Casey:
And speaking of things that have happened this week, like news things that have happened this week, and also speaking of Mark Gurman, there's apparently a Bloomberg podcast called Decrypted, which I was not previously aware of.
Casey:
But this week...
Casey:
They had an interview with the former chief of AppReview, whose name escapes me.
Marco:
Is that Philip Shoemaker?
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
Casey:
I listened to this.
Casey:
I don't know if you guys did.
Casey:
I think you have to take everything said here with a little bit of salt because the information's old.
Casey:
It's typically unlike someone to talk about the inside unless they have a little bit of an axe to grind.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
That being said, I thought it was fascinating.
Casey:
And it's about 40 minutes.
Casey:
And I thought it was well worth my time.
Casey:
I thought it was really, really interesting hearing some of the stuff they talked about.
Casey:
I wish I had been able to take notes.
Casey:
I forget what I was doing at the time.
Casey:
But there were a handful of things that they said.
Casey:
And I was like, oh, interesting.
Casey:
I didn't know that.
Casey:
And so I do recommend it if you happen to have the time to listen to it.
Marco:
Yeah, and he actually gave a conference talk a few months back somewhere.
Marco:
There's a video of it on YouTube somewhere if you look for it.
Marco:
And that also kind of flew under the radar.
Marco:
Nobody realized, oh, that's the guy who ran AppReview.
Marco:
But I will say again, to kind of extend your grain of salt a little bit further into one of those big crystals of salt that you get in the expensive salt boxes, I would say keep in mind that he did leave Apple.
Marco:
I think I heard that it maybe might not have been his decision.
Marco:
And the timing of his departure correlated exactly with the App Store all of a sudden getting a lot better.
Marco:
So I would take all of this with a large flake of very expensive salt.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
But it was good.
Casey:
I still think even with all of that copious amount of salt, I do think it is worth your time.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
John, tell me about Mac OS 1015, if you please.
John:
This is another rumor that's been floating around that maybe is not only interesting to me, but I found it interesting, so I thought I would throw it out there because the sourcing seems pretty solid on this.
John:
Mago has 10.15, whatever the heck it's going to be called.
John:
One of the features that it supposedly has, whether optional or mandatory, is a read-only system partition.
John:
Interesting.
John:
Which is interesting for a couple of reasons.
John:
Now, a couple of years back, they introduced system integrity protection.
John:
which is basically meant to prevent you from either accidentally or on purpose messing with the essential files that are part of the operating system.
John:
It's malware protection.
John:
So even if you accidentally run some unknown executable or intentionally run and don't realize it's infested with malware, it can't modify some driver or kernel resource or whatever in your operating system to add some sort of spyware to it.
John:
Because even you...
John:
as a user and even you as root can't modify files that are part of the operating system thanks to system integrity protection but that relies on some code that apple added for security and can you know can have its own set of flaws or whatever a step up from that would be to put the operating system on a separate partition a separate volume as far as the operating system is concerned and
John:
and to mount that volume read-only, which itself relies on protections inherent in the operating system that enforce the read-only nature of mounted volumes and so on and so forth.
John:
But presumably that code is simpler than system integrity protection, older and more reliable than system integrity protection, and just sort of more straightforward, right?
John:
Because if you mount a volume read-only...
John:
You would expect only to be able to read from it, and that is easier to secure than a weird system where we have this special case for certain files that are flagged in a particular way or on some list that you're not allowed to modify even when you're root or whatever.
John:
Thanks to the magic of APFS, adding additional volumes to your existing volume is easier now because you don't have to carve out a bunch of space and move stuff around like you used to have in the old days.
John:
As we know or should recall from the times when we discussed APFS,
John:
You can put multiple volumes on the same disk.
John:
You can put, if you have a one terabyte disk, you can put five one terabyte volumes on the disk, which doesn't make any sense because you don't have five terabytes of space.
John:
It's that space sharing thing.
John:
And they will all just compete for the available blocks.
John:
So it should be fairly straightforward for Apple to non-optionally, when upgrading to whatever this new operating system is called, make a new volume.
John:
And then put the new operating system on that volume and do it in such a way that you don't have weird errors about repartitioning.
John:
We'll see if they make it mandatory or whatever, but reportedly this is a feature of the new OS, and I think it's pretty neat.
Marco:
There is the potential issues, though, that are brought up by what common third-party app uses is this going to mess with or prevent?
Marco:
Every time they tighten security of macOS in some way, it usually breaks things.
Marco:
And so there's already lots of protections for kernel extensions.
Marco:
There's already lots of restrictions and everything.
Marco:
There's various code signing restrictions.
Marco:
There's now Apple events prevention.
Marco:
There's system integrity protection.
Marco:
Every time they lock down macOS a little bit further, it tends to break things.
Marco:
And some of those things can never be fixed, or the updated version of them has fewer capabilities than the old one did, or is harder to use, or is cumbersome, or whatever else.
Marco:
And so I do like the idea of them making macOS more secure and continuing to make it less susceptible to malware and limit what malware can do.
Marco:
That's all great, but I am a little bit concerned, what will this break?
John:
Yeah, I mean, the main thing that I imagine it has broken and continues to break is all of Apple's internal stuff.
John:
Because especially when you're trying to run diagnostics or test things or run the OS through automated tests, the expectation that you can just write some temporary files to a particular location inside a particular extension bundle or stuff, it's just convenient to do.
John:
The bundle structure lends itself to...
John:
You need a place to put things for debugging or dumping a log or doing some diagnostics, all internal Apple stuff when they're testing their own software.
John:
You can't do that anymore if all system library is read-only.
John:
And so they are the first people who have to come up with solutions to that.
John:
Same thing with any sort of applications.
John:
If you could look into, like, what is it, system library core services, there's a bunch of basically just plain old applications buried in, quote-unquote, the operating system or the system folder as we knew it back in the day.
John:
um like the screen sharing app is down there there's all sorts of little helper applications that are down there just plain old application bundles and as most people know who have been developing for mac os 10 for a long time when it was called mac os 10 used to be able to write stuff to application bundles and that is generally frowned upon now and i think
John:
perhaps banned by uh code signing in the mac app store i'm not i don't i haven't kept track of what those requirements are but you used to be able to basically modify the contents of your applications any way you wanted and with the advent of code signing that is much more difficult because really the application wants to know that it is running in an unmodified state you can do exceptions and all sorts of stuff like that but um
John:
Yeah, all those applications that are buried inside the operating system folders, they can't write anything to themselves anymore because they're part of a re-only system partition.
John:
And on and on, all the way up to, like Mark was saying, third-party applications that expect to be able to write things there.
John:
The good news is that from day one, thanks to its heritage as the next step operating system,
John:
The structure, the seemingly confusing sort of hall of mirror structure actually serves a purpose.
John:
Why is there tilde slash library, system library, slash library and the old days network library?
John:
Why are there so many directors called library?
John:
It's a hierarchy of, you know.
John:
machine wide network wide operating system home directory like the reason all those directory structures are mirrored is because they're different domains so in theory there should be a writable place for you to correctly put the stuff that you care about you shouldn't be messing with the operating system and system integrity protection probably took a lot of the uh the heat for this change because already most of the things having to do the operating system are write only and when you're running as a regular user you can't write into those directories anyway because they're not owned by you so
John:
I'm hoping it won't be that painful, but inevitably some things will break.
John:
I mean, presumably everything Adobe makes will break, but what else is new?
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:
I actually hired them when I wanted to make an Android version of Instapaper.
Marco:
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Marco:
I didn't even give them any source code for the iOS version or the website or anything.
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:
Once again, thank you so much to Mobilux for just making awesome products and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so hot off the presses.
Casey:
Was this yesterday, I believe?
Casey:
We got the thing we've all been waiting for, a new iPod Touch.
Marco:
No, I give them credit.
Marco:
So this is something that we did not see coming.
Marco:
I don't think anybody saw it coming.
Marco:
No, definitely not.
Marco:
And earlier this spring when they did the week updates and they did the new iPads and everything, we all were kind of looking at Apple Touch as maybe like the Friday thing because it was very old.
Marco:
It was previously running, I believe, an A8 processor, right?
Marco:
and so it was it was very old it was very slow and it was running a processor that the next version of ios probably won't support so they had to either update it or kill it and so they i think did the minimum update they could which is they gave it the a10 cpu they updated the capacities a little bit and that's about it everything else about it stayed pretty much the same
John:
I'm still a fan of this product.
John:
I mean, obviously, they let it go.
John:
Was it four years without an update?
John:
It's kind of ridiculous.
John:
But I like the fact that it exists.
John:
So iPods are gone now entirely, right?
John:
There's nothing left there.
John:
I tried.
John:
There's nothing left.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And first of all, this is like the world's most amazing iPod because it does run iOS.
John:
It presumably will run the latest version of it.
John:
And that's got lots of cool features.
John:
And it does all the things that you would expect to do just slightly slower.
John:
um it's not burdened by the cell phone stuff it can hold a lot of songs if you get the 256 gig model they're incredibly small in light because there's like just you know it's it's very old stuff and there's nothing big and bulky in them the cameras certainly aren't uh fancy or big and bulky
John:
And, you know, people talk about who might want to buy this.
John:
You know, obviously kids come up as a potential use for it, but also, you know, enterprise applications for point of sale type things where they don't need to have a cell connection because they're in a store with Wi-Fi.
John:
I think this is still a good product.
John:
I mean, it's certainly a lot of bang for your buck.
John:
$199 for a 32 gigabyte iOS device that runs the latest OS device.
John:
you know, presumably runs it pretty well.
John:
It's a pretty good deal.
John:
It was not a good deal like, you know, five days ago when it was an A8 with an A10.
John:
It's a little bit better deal.
John:
It's not like they're, they didn't, you know, update it to an A12.
John:
That would be something else.
John:
Like, but that's not, that's not the role of this product.
John:
So I'm glad it still exists.
John:
All my kids had iPod Touches.
John:
until they graduated to iPhone.
John:
So I still think that's definitely a valid use case.
John:
Lots of people saying, oh, they're just going to get hand-me-down phones.
John:
Sometimes, but sometimes the grown-ups want to trade those phones in because they're valuable and they get money off their next iPhone rather than giving their kids their hand-me-down $1,000 iPhone.
John:
It feels much better to get your kid a $200 iPod Touch and then if they drop it in the ocean, it's not as big a deal.
Casey:
I mean, I think this is good.
Casey:
I'm not entirely sure that there's a huge market for it.
Casey:
You know, I think kids are obvious.
Casey:
I think test devices is obvious.
Casey:
But I still think it should exist.
Casey:
I don't begrudge this existing.
Casey:
And even though I'm not amped about it, I certainly, if I was still at my job, I would be amped about it.
Casey:
So, yeah, I mean, I think this is good.
Casey:
I'm okay with this.
Marco:
I think it sucks.
Marco:
I mean, I see why they have it.
Marco:
They have to have it.
Marco:
I know why Marco thinks it sucks.
Marco:
Wait, why?
Marco:
I'm curious.
John:
Because you don't want to cram your UI into a screen that small anymore.
John:
This just extends the timeline even further.
Marco:
Well, that's true.
Marco:
And so, yeah, I would love to not need to support the 4-inch screen size because it makes it so hard to design a modern layout that looks good and scales well to the larger phones that also works on the 4-inch phones.
Marco:
But as a number of people pointed out to me on Twitter over the last day...
Marco:
I would still have to support it for a while anyway because remember when the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus came out, they introduced display zoom mode where you can actually run the entire OS at a resolution lower than what the screen will natively do to make everything a little bit bigger.
Marco:
This is separate from dynamic text, separate from everything else.
Marco:
When you set it up,
Marco:
It asks you whether you want to run in DisplayZoom or not.
Marco:
And so for people who want everything to be bigger, that's actually a pretty good option.
Marco:
And the DisplayZoom screen size for the iPhone 6, 7, and 8 size phones is this screen size.
Marco:
even if they stopped selling foreign screen devices and just killed the iPod Tux or made it bigger and they already stopped selling the SE, even if they totally stopped selling them, we still have to support that screen size for as long as the iPhone 6, 7, and 8 are supported because they have that display zoom mode that is that size.
Marco:
But anyway, I think the iPod Touch sucks for lots of other reasons, though.
Marco:
For me, again, I'm glad they did it.
Marco:
If they're going to have the iPod Touch remaining a product in their lineup, they might as well keep it updated at least once every four years.
Marco:
They couldn't possibly show this product less love without totally killing it, but
Marco:
But they're doing literally the bare minimum to keep this product going.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
I think that's all it deserves.
Marco:
My analytics show it gets very, very low usage.
Marco:
And granted, I'm not representative maybe of its market.
Marco:
But for whatever it's worth, almost no one on Overcast uses iPod Touches.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
I think the kids' market is much better served much of the time by iPads.
Marco:
And by the time they are ready to have something in their pocket that they can bring everywhere that is smaller than an iPad, they usually either get their own iPhone, which I know sounds ridiculous to a lot of older people, but that's what happens, or they get hand-me-down iPhones, whether they're activated or not.
Marco:
And so, honestly, I don't see a huge place for this for kids.
Marco:
What I do see is...
Marco:
this is used in a lot of special roles, like a lot of point of sale systems, like the kind of like roaming credit card terminal things, even in Apple stores will often use iPod touches.
Marco:
There's various like industrial applications where you have people walking around with, you know, the iPod touch as a terminal for some random thing.
Marco:
Like there are a lot of specialty applications like that.
Marco:
So when you combine that with like the some kids market,
Marco:
I guess there's enough use for this thing.
Marco:
But I think there's a reason why Apple shows it so little love that really it is the right product for almost nobody.
John:
Yeah, I can understand that.
John:
That didn't even change the case design as far as I can tell.
John:
Like, it's a different color, sure, but they sure didn't put Touch ID on it.
John:
It looks like the same case.
John:
Like, I don't think it's worth designing a purpose-built product, which I always advocate for the lower lines, like they did with the XR, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's not worth that because they probably don't sell enough of them, but it is worth continuing to update this.
John:
Because if they didn't, I just feel like having a non-phone device that can run iOS and do Wi-Fi things that is not the size of an iPad is important.
John:
Maybe the Mini fills this role to some degree, but...
John:
But financially, it doesn't make much sense to give your kids your hand-me-down $1,400 plus size phone when you could trade it in for $400 off your next phone and use the difference to buy them one of these things.
John:
um i i know kids want ipads but ipads are more expensive than this little dinky thing so i still feel like it's an important role if apple's not going to bring the prices down on any of their products having something that runs ios for 200 bucks is still it's kind of like like their cheapest laptop at various times their cheapest laptop has been a good product various times it has just been their cheapest laptop this is just their cheapest ios device and it is fulfilling that role by continuing to exist
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We have another leak from Jeremy Rambo.
Casey:
A couple of leaks, actually.
Casey:
We have screenshots, actual screenshots of iOS 13, including dark mode and Mac OS 1015, including the new music app.
Casey:
I don't know how these came to be, and I'm a little scared to find out.
Casey:
We talked about it on a podcast.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
That was Stacktrace.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
I haven't listened to it.
Marco:
I haven't gotten – I'm listening to – I'm like 20 minutes in.
Marco:
I haven't gotten to that part yet.
John:
It didn't go into too much detail, but he was basically just – start off by fighting off the ideas of people saying, if this is supposed to be iOS 13, then why don't I see this, that, and the other thing?
John:
Then why aren't the icons changed?
John:
Then why – and it's like he's talking about that these – this and the macOS screenshots are like –
John:
It's like if you install iOS 13 on your own personal phone,
John:
it doesn't replace your wallpaper, right?
John:
It just leaves whatever you had there before because that's how iOS updates go.
John:
So these are not marketing images of Apple showing off, here's what iOS 13 looks like.
John:
It's some person's phone that installed a build of iOS 13 on it and took a screenshot and sent it or whatever.
John:
Like that's the story behind it anyway, which is why it doesn't look like Apple's marketing images and why you see stuff that just looks like some person's phone.
John:
And obviously any of this stuff can change before release and yada, yada, yada.
John:
But yeah, actual screenshots.
John:
I mean, it's about that time, right?
John:
We were, you know, less than a week to go.
John:
It's time to start getting the real leaks here.
Casey:
It's true.
Casey:
These iOS screenshots, you know, the dark mode looked good.
Casey:
And I generally, I don't have a strong opinion about it, but I do tend to like dark mode.
Casey:
Like I run TweetBot in dark mode.
Casey:
I run Overcast in dark mode.
Casey:
I like the dark mode.
Casey:
We can come back to that in a second.
Casey:
But I don't remember who it was I saw point this out.
Casey:
And now I cannot unsee it.
Casey:
And I think I really like it is the...
Casey:
Actually, it's in Guillermo's post.
Casey:
When you take a screenshot, you have all those tools at the bottom where you can mark them up.
Casey:
And the tools for the screenshot thing actually have a little bit of depth and texture to them.
Casey:
And it's not overblown like it was circa iOS 6.
Casey:
But it's enough that it's nice.
Casey:
And I really, really like the look of it.
Casey:
And I'm really curious to see.
Casey:
It looks like the pendulum is swinging back slightly in the direction of skeuomorphism again.
Casey:
And I think I'm okay with that.
John:
It's like a children's story where, like, at the beginning of the story, everybody lives in Johnny Ives' white world.
John:
And everybody and all the characters in the story are completely white.
John:
And then, like...
John:
Yeah.
John:
But they have a little touch of color.
John:
The highlighter is a little bit yellow.
John:
The eraser is a little bit pink.
John:
It's very soft.
John:
It's not super photorealistic.
John:
It's still stylized.
John:
It looks like characters from the white world with just a little bit of color.
John:
And I like it, and I like the pendulum swinging back in the other direction.
John:
It's hard to tell how much of a trend this is given just the very limited screenshots that we have because, you know, for all we know, this is the only instance of this type of thing.
John:
But there's one thing we can say about it.
John:
It's not like...
John:
line art like the current things are i'm not even sure like we're just talking about the aesthetics right i'm not even sure these read uh better like in terms of if you were to ask somebody who knows nothing about apple what does this tool do what does that tool do
John:
they're a little bit faint and low contrast, especially since they lack the outlines.
John:
Can you distinguish between the pen on the left and the pen on the right that are surrounding the highlighter?
John:
What's the difference?
John:
One of those is a pencil and one of them is a pen.
Casey:
That's a good point.
John:
Some interesting choices of the eraser having a little X on it, because maybe without the X it doesn't read as an eraser, but with the X you might be confused a little bit.
John:
The little smudger tool, the little pencil cone smudger thing, do non-artists even know what the hell that is?
John:
Do I know what it is?
John:
Is that what that is?
John:
I think that's what it is.
John:
If it's not that, then I'm failing to identify it at all.
Marco:
By the way, I totally could not tell that the two different pencil-shaped things were a pen and a pencil.
Marco:
I thought they were just two pens.
Marco:
Now that you say that, now I can see the little hexagonal shape of the shaft of the second one.
John:
But it's really light.
John:
I hope you have good eyes.
Marco:
It's very subtle.
John:
I hope you have a very accurate screen calibrated correctly with the right brightness levels.
John:
You're not seeing that on the phone.
John:
Maybe on the iPad you might see it on the phone.
John:
You're not seeing that.
John:
yeah and it doesn't matter that much of these tools because like it's not it's not a you know daily use thing and eventually learn what they are because the positions don't change and it's fine if anything the fact that they made a pencil that looks like no pencil in the world because they had to make it white well it doesn't it doesn't look like the apple pencil no
Marco:
like it looks like no pencil in the world i don't know like that i think might say like they're not ready for this yet they're not ready to give up johnny has a white world yet because they couldn't even make that non-white and what do the numbers mean 97 80 50 yeah i i first i thought might that might be like size of the brush tip but i don't know why they would be displaying that on the icons for the non-selected tools
John:
That's a clever use of just showing what they're because each tool does have its own separate brush size and that might be what it's for.
John:
If you roll backwards six feet and grab one of these things off Tiff's desk, I bet she has one of these little paper smudging tools.
John:
I'm assuming that's what that is, but I could be totally wrong.
John:
They could be trying to draw an exacto knife and doing a bad job at it.
John:
Do you know what I'm talking about, Marco?
John:
No.
John:
Next time you do a Pokemon thing, I'll find an image of it online and you'll recognize it.
Marco:
So is the idea for it to possibly be like a blur tool, like to blur out sensitive information, hopefully better than the current tools do, which don't really work?
Marco:
Yeah, right.
John:
Yeah, I'm wondering.
John:
That could be.
John:
Yeah, it's a paper stump.
John:
That's the phrase I couldn't grab.
John:
A paper stump.
John:
A paper stump.
John:
I've never heard of this.
John:
Blending stumps.
John:
You're a blending stump.
John:
I have no idea what you're talking about.
John:
Didn't you go to art class as a kid?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I mean, like in elementary school, but they didn't have blending stumps then.
John:
let's try just search for blending stuff there i put in the chat room yeah i've i've never seen this in my life they're they're i guarantee tiff owns these i guarantee it gray paper stumps so what what do you do with this yeah yeah like if you're doing a pencil drawing and you want to blend some of the shading of the pencil and you don't want to rub your finger on it and get graphite all over your finger you rub this thing is it like rubbery or is it like no it's paper it's like it's like made of like cardboardy paper oh like rolled up like the the
John:
It's rolled around in a little cone thing.
Marco:
Well, now that you're sending me this picture of these things, I do think there's a non-trivial chance that this is what they're trying to represent with this tool icon.
John:
Yeah, for smudging away sensitive information.
John:
That's my guess, too.
Marco:
But yikes.
John:
But again, judging these not aesthetically, but as UI elements where someone is supposed to look at them, recognize the function, and remember it, if you've never seen one of these things in real life,
John:
Despite the fact that being an actual tool that artists will recognize and understand, the regular person is going to be like, what is that supposed to be?
John:
And this will be fun if they ship with anything like this, because, again, these could be non-final graphics.
John:
If they ship with anything like this, it's one of those instances where regular people are going to have to communicate with each other to spread the knowledge that if you want to blur sensitive information in a screenshot –
John:
You use the whatever tool.
John:
And I wonder what name they're going to come up with, like the conehead tool or the barber pole tool or the pointy tool next to the eraser.
John:
Like surely someone will come up with a name.
Marco:
Oh, no, I got it.
John:
The pixel stump.
John:
But they'd have to know it's a blending stump then.
John:
They'll come up with some kind of way to describe it to each other.
John:
Or Apple will talk about it in the keynote and we'll all just latch on to whatever name they use, which will probably be blending stump.
Casey:
Well, let me give you one better.
Casey:
Steve Child and Smith just pointed out to me that that is taking the place of the lasso in today's iOS.
Marco:
So can you imagine if that's actually the lasso?
Marco:
Maybe it's the exacto.
John:
but i can't be exactly that's the worst drawn exacto ever it is is definitely a blending stump it's the worst drawn pencil ever fair point i mean i can tell it's a thing that puts marks on paper like this is you're saying is it a knife or is it a thing that smudges those are pretty different
Marco:
Actually, you know what?
Marco:
The reason why I think it might be an exacto is that it doesn't look, I haven't measured this yet, but it doesn't look like the tip is straight.
Marco:
Yeah, it looks like it's not an equilateral.
John:
Well, blending stumps, first of all, that could be an optical illusion because of diagonal lines because our brains are broken.
John:
But second, blending stumps aren't exactly symmetrical.
John:
It could be artistic license.
John:
Anyway, I'm sure there'll be an entire section of the keynote just about these tools.
John:
So I'm sure we'll learn everything we want to know.
Casey:
All right, anything else in these iOS 13 screenshots?
Casey:
Do you want to talk about dark mode?
Casey:
Is there anything there that you'd like to discuss?
John:
Yeah, as the article points out, the one screenshot that show of, I guess this is the music app, shows them using, as far as we can tell, 100% black in the backgrounds, which is the most energy you can save by not lighting up pixels at all.
John:
Interestingly, you don't have to go 100% black to save energy.
John:
If you do a dimmer color, it also takes less power than bright white.
John:
But it's an interesting aesthetic choice, and it makes sense in a world where many iPhones have OLED displays.
Marco:
It is interesting, though.
Marco:
As somebody who has designed a couple of these themes now, pure black does look best on OLED displays because you lose the seams.
Marco:
You totally lose the margins between the screen and the bezel, which is great.
Marco:
However, it brings a number of challenges.
Marco:
Number one is that pure black does have that weird ripple effect when you scroll on an OLED real fast, like things kind of lag behind and there's like this weird optical effect that because of the pixels having turned all the way back off all the way back on like it's kind of it's kind of odd.
Marco:
And that doesn't happen as much with even like slightly non-black colors.
Marco:
Um, and the big, the biggest problem with an all black screen is that you lose the ability to use shadows behind things to show depth and layering.
Marco:
And it, it really, you don't realize how much you depend on like a little modal sheet that has a shadow behind it to show that it's floating above the thing behind it.
Marco:
You don't realize that you, that you need that so much, um,
Marco:
until the color behind it is already pure black so it can't be in a darker so you can't see a shadow on it and that's such a commonly used element in ios that it's going to require some really tricky design tweaks to everyone's apps doing this if they actually want to use pure black so i'm curious to see how apple has solved a lot of these problems or if they've solved them
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's not like it's going to be a requirement of dark mode.
John:
I assume that you'll actually have to be 100% black.
John:
Like you'll have control.
John:
You'll know when you're in dark mode and you can control what your application looks like.
John:
And that, you know, I'm assuming it's just like dark mode on the Mac, right?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
It's probably just like you, like probably all the standard system controls update themselves.
Marco:
And you as the app maker can respond to changes of the slice of theme and you can then theme it however you want.
John:
Speaking of the Mac, the next thing was the screenshots, the very bare screenshots of the music and TV applications, which basically just show the layout of the main window and the sidebar.
John:
If there was any content in the main portion of the window, it has been blanked out.
John:
I don't know if it was missing entirely or they just removed it or whatever.
John:
But there's things to note here.
John:
First of all, the music application doesn't look like iTunes.
John:
They rearranged all the controls.
John:
It looks like sort of a modern Apple Mac application where they get rid of the title bar and make a semi-vibrant sidebar and with a bunch of icons on it and...
John:
They shoved the search field up above the sidebar, and it's still got that iTunes play button in progress bar and a bunch of weird stuff.
John:
It's kind of homely and not particularly standard, but maybe that way it is like iTunes.
John:
It's like a modern reimagining of iTunes.
John:
Very nonstandard and weird, but...
John:
you know, it'll be recognizable as the place where you play music.
John:
The most interesting thing about it is that in the sidebar, there's actual color.
John:
There's these little icons for the various things in the sidebar have gradients on them and are bright pink and in an otherwise very drab gray window.
John:
So it's nice to have a touch of color here, but it's hard to judge his application without actually seeing anything other than the sidebar.
Marco:
I think if anything, like if you look at the pictures, like so they have the TV app and the new music app, which, you know, slash iTunes and the TV app looks like a marzipan app.
Marco:
It looks like very similar to what we've seen from like the capabilities of other marzipan apps and from Steve T.S.
Marco:
's hacking of like it has like the, you know, the selector on the top in the kind of the title bar toolbar area.
Marco:
Like it looks like a marzipan app.
Marco:
The music app looks different.
Marco:
If you just look at it for a split second, you might think it looks similar, but if you look for more than that, you see it actually looks very different.
Marco:
The title bar is a totally different structure, a totally different visual look and hierarchy and theming and shading and everything else.
Marco:
So I think this does lend credence to the rumor that
Marco:
it is not only not a Marzipan app, but that it is a lot more based on iTunes than you would have maybe guessed.
Marco:
iTunes has been rethemed many times over its very long life.
Marco:
So this just being the latest theme of it would not be that big of a surprise.
Marco:
And I think it very clearly does not look like the other Marzipan apps.
John:
Apple, like, I mean, they have sessions on this all the time about what to do with all the various names for these like title bars that don't have titles in them and where to position things.
John:
And then Apple ships their own applications for like the stoplight widgets move all over the place.
John:
And sometimes there's not like in the iTunes one, there isn't really a title bar.
John:
The window widgets are basically in the sidebar and there's nothing on top.
John:
And then.
John:
uh more recently in recent couple years they've always been trying to find a place to hide the less than sign button which is the back navigation button boy if you've ever taken a regular person and put them in front of photos on the mac and navigated them into a place and watched them struggle to figure out how the hell to get out of it they will never see way up on the left somewhere that little less than sign like it's invisible to them there's there's just a giant grid of pictures and they see the sidebar because it has text they will never find that button
John:
Half the time, I can't find it.
John:
Half the time, I hit, like, escape or whatever and try to get... It's like, oh, yeah, I have to hit back.
John:
You know, it's not like a web browser where you're accustomed to forward, back, stop, reload, address, like it's a paradigm that's been hammered into our brains.
John:
These Mac applications that fancy themselves weird single-window browser things that have this lone back button that they chuck somewhere into the upper left and hope people find it.
John:
Like, I feel like this...
John:
A lot of these Mac applications, Apple's included, are kind of out in the wilderness trying to figure out what happens at the top of the window exactly.
John:
Like, what's going on up there?
John:
And Apple's answer is, I don't know.
John:
Just try some stuff.
John:
Throw some things up there.
John:
How are things supposed to be aligned?
John:
Beats made.
John:
Just do something.
John:
I mean, in some respects, I think that's fine.
John:
Like, it's one of the lessons from the –
John:
apple human interface guidelines back from the classic mac os days that i referenced several times and in fact i think quoted in its entirety in one of my mac os 10 reviews that things don't have to look exactly the same you those three window widgets as long as they are basically the same distance from each other and in the same arrangement
John:
and in the upper left somewhere you don't always have to have them the exact number of pixels off the left and top edge they don't always have to be aligned exactly the same way like if they're up there people will see them recognize them and understand what they do mostly the same for the back button its main problem isn't the fact that it moves around it's the fact that it's so far out of like the flow of the the otherwise uh you know the paradigm the application the navigation paradigm is otherwise very different than that button indicates so i don't begrudge apple and
John:
moving things around and having things in weird positions but i feel like there should still be some best practices and some standard widgets to let you achieve the best practices and it seems like instead that every application is an opportunity to find new homes for all this stuff and that the navigational paradigm unlike for example original ios which was so clear of like you can come up from the bottom you can go to the sides they have the you know whatever that nav bar controller thing like there were certain paradigms that were like
John:
If you use this paradigm in your application, this is how it works, and people will understand it, and it's always the same in applications that behave like this.
John:
And even as they've expanded it to have things coming up from different directions and card interfaces and stuff like that, they've always had sessions that say, if you do this, make sure you're essentially spatially consistent.
John:
Don't have things appear from the bottom and then disappear to the left, because it makes no sense.
John:
Don't have things zoom in and then fade out instead of regressing or whatever.
John:
And I think Mac applications are like,
John:
They could use them as the don't do examples.
John:
And Apple's own applications could be used as the negative examples.
John:
Say, don't make an application that behaves one way, but if you get caught into this little navigational alley, you have to find the back button that you otherwise never need because you can navigate with the sidebar that switches in one dimension and then the tab bar that switches in the top dimension.
John:
And then in the main pane, there's a separate set of navigation, but then also occasionally you need to go to the thing that's in the title bar and hit that back button to get out of it.
John:
It's just, if you tried to map these out, they make no sense spatially and they don't,
John:
They don't present a coherent paradigm.
John:
Sorry, I'm bagging on these applications that we have these empty screenshots of, but I'm a little bit frustrated with the state of macOS application design, independent of the marzipan thing, because that doesn't really make it really worse or better.
John:
And if anything, it could make it better if what we get on the Mac are applications that don't behave like Mac applications in terms of navigation, but behave like iOS 4 applications, and at least they have a consistent navigation paradigm.
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Casey:
We should probably give John his moment.
Casey:
John, there are rumors about Apple's Pro Display.
Casey:
Be still your heart.
Casey:
What do you think?
John:
It's all of our moments.
John:
Not just my moment.
John:
Everyone wants an Apple Display.
Casey:
Yeah, I want one.
Casey:
I'm sure it'll be very affordable.
John:
Occasionally I hear people talking about this on podcasts and they forget that it's not rumored that Apple's making a display.
John:
Apple said they're making a display.
John:
Like...
John:
The rumors are like, what about, what is that display exactly like?
John:
But this is not speculation.
John:
Apple said they're making a display, so they're making a display until we hear otherwise.
John:
Anyway, latest rumor about it I thought was interesting.
John:
We talked about this before, about 6K display versus 8K and what the weird dimensions are and 31.6 inches.
John:
You know, all these other things about this is a little bit more information here about it being P3 and supporting HDR and night shift and true tone and all the other stuff.
John:
But the most interesting part of this rumor and the new piece of information as far as I'm concerned is what size and shape would this monitor be?
John:
31.6 inch.
John:
A diagonal doesn't tell you that much because there's lots of different shape screens that can be like that.
John:
This article says that it is basically the 5K display that's on all the 5K iMacs and the iMac Pro.
John:
with wings uh so basically take the 5k display and add pixels to the left and to the right so exactly the same height and exactly the same pixel dimensions as the 5k but just more on the left and the right so it's sort of an ultra wide format display which are very popular with people these days um and i think that is clever and fairly perfect because
John:
Those wide displays are popular, despite the fact that I would prefer it to be taller, but I understand that's not the trend these days.
John:
And it potentially allows this monitor to be placed alongside either a current or a future iMac and have exactly the same height screens.
John:
So you could line them up alongside each other, and you could buy two of these displays plus your big 5K or 6K iMac display, and they would all look nice together.
John:
That's probably not going to be true when this is introduced, because...
John:
I can't imagine this thing being offered with a stand that allows it to be aligned with the current iMacs, but as I've said before, I hope that the current iMacs are close to the last generation of the specific hardware design, and they can revise it slightly and have new iMacs come out that match the display.
John:
and that have face id built in and all sorts of great stuff and that would be great but anyway i i would prefer something with the proportions of the old 30 inch ample cinema display but taking the 5k display and just making it wider has a certain sort of logical progression and appeal to me so i'm still looking forward to this monitor
Marco:
Yeah, me too.
Marco:
I mean, the world of PC monitors is quite miserable for Apple fans.
Marco:
There's a lot of options out there that are very, very different from what we're looking for.
Marco:
First of all, there just aren't really any 5K monitors.
Marco:
There isn't really anything above that.
Marco:
In the PC world...
Marco:
what we would call non-retina screens still dominate a lot of the screens that are out there and that are in use and when windows still doesn't really have great retina support and windows customers still largely don't demand retina screens or they are happy with the more intermediary resolutions that are like kind of like 1.5x kind of you know what we would consider compared to like the 2x that retina is for certain densities so like the world of non-apple options out there
John:
while pc people seem okay with them for apple people it's not okay and so to have if anything the the non-retina ones are an advantage because some of the most demanding customers in the pc space are gamers and they do not want retina because games can barely drive the 1x resolution on these very wide monitors if you gave them retina
John:
they would never use that resolution.
John:
No game wants to run that many pixels.
John:
So the highest-end consumer, sort of consumer-oriented purchasers, not pro people who are working on 8K video editing, whatever, but just consumers, and they want a really big, wide monitor that they can play games at, at 1X in Apple parlance.
John:
So I feel like that's still driving the market over there.
John:
Oh, totally.
Marco:
And I'm also just very excited to see Apple...
Marco:
basically grow past the resolution or the, at least the point resolution that we have been at and not exceeding since the release of the 30 inch cinema display.
Marco:
Like we have had 25, 60 points across the,
Marco:
since then and in fact the cinema display was taller the cinema display was 1600 points tall and the new ones are the current 5ks are only 1440 so the 30 inch displays that we had of yesteryear while they were non-retina actually had a little bit more screen real estate than what the 27 inch retina ones offer us now and
Marco:
And so I'm just very excited to see this potentially break out of that and just give us a little bit more space.
Marco:
Because I do think that the limit of your field of view is probably not that much bigger than where we are now with these monitors.
Marco:
But I don't think we're at that limit yet.
Marco:
I think we can go a little bit bigger and we can make use of that space without turning our necks.
Marco:
And so to have Apple push that boundary for the first time in a long time, I'm very excited about that.
John:
Plus, you're going to need all this extra space on the left and the right to park all your little Marzipan iPhone apps next year.
Marco:
The two little skinny columns.
John:
You could fit like six iPhone apps.
John:
Call them the phone alleys.
John:
Phone alleys.
John:
Phone alley right and phone alley left.
John:
If you ever wanted to make your side dock maximum icon size, which I think is 512 now, can you make the dock big enough to get a 512 pixel icon?
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
But anyway, you'll be able to on the 6K display.
John:
You'll finally have room to do that.
Okay.
Marco:
yeah so anyway i'm looking forward to it and the reality is like it's going to cost what it's going to cost we know modern apple we know their their game when we get them to finally make what we want it always costs about 40 more than we want it to and that's what's going to happen here it's going to be 40 more than we think it should be and we're going to eventually buy it anyway right i was going to see that's why we didn't make any decent for 10 years yeah that's it so you could save your pennies
Casey:
Let's assume for a second that John gets his wish and the Mac Pro is announced.
Casey:
And let's even go so crazy and say that it's available at the end of June.
Casey:
I'm just kind of pulling that out of the hat.
John:
That is crazy.
Casey:
That's very crazy.
Casey:
No, it's absolutely crazy.
Casey:
But just for the sake of a thought exercise, I assume both of you are insta-buying it.
Casey:
Or, John, are you going to find some reason to figure out why it's not good enough for you?
John:
I don't find reasons, but I do think about things before I buy them.
John:
I'm not going to make an impulse purchase after 10 years.
John:
I'm going to look at it and be excited by it, and then I'm going to decide, is this a thing that I want to buy, or do I just want to get an iMac Pro?
John:
I will think about that and make that decision.
Marco:
So actually, I had an idea for a little segment to do here.
Marco:
Basically, this is probably going to be the last episode that we record where we don't know anything about the Mac Pro.
Marco:
And so I kind of wanted to go through like final predictions of our guesses on some some points here about the new Mac Pro.
Marco:
So I first thing, what do you guys predict about the case shape and size class?
Casey:
Size class just gives me the shakes.
John:
Size class, I think we could get pretty quickly.
John:
It is not going to be full tower sized.
John:
I will be shocked if it is as big as a cheese grater, right?
John:
I mean, not that I would object to that, but I will be very surprised if it is as big.
John:
I can imagine, though, it being close to as big.
John:
So I would say it's not going to be as small as the trash can, probably not going to be as big as the cheese grater.
John:
But if I had to pick a position in that spectrum, I'm willing to believe that it might be closer to the cheese grater than the trash can.
Casey:
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Casey:
The thing that I'm really wondering about is, you know, we've heard reports that it's going to be like a bunch of pizza boxes that you can stack up.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And that's how it becomes modular.
John:
I'll get there.
John:
I'll get there.
John:
I'll get there.
John:
Have we heard reports?
John:
We've heard fantasies.
John:
Yes.
Casey:
Well, okay, fair, fair, fair, fair.
Casey:
But what I'm driving at is I don't know enough about the hardware to know, is it really feasible, unless Apple does something truly custom, is it feasible to split a motherboard, so to speak, across several physical boxes?
Casey:
Is it really feasible to have an eGPU as the only GPU?
Casey:
Is it really feasible?
Casey:
feasible to have, I don't know, like a box full of hard drives or SSDs or what have you.
Casey:
Is that what Thunderbolt's really for?
Casey:
Is PCI Express going to fix this problem?
Casey:
I'm throwing buzzwords out because I'm so far out of this game now.
Casey:
But that, I think, directly affects what this looks like.
Casey:
If it's the sort of thing where we don't have the technology to split this out physically into several boxes, then yeah, I think it's something that's going to be like a mini tower of the late 90s where it's
Casey:
Bigger than the trash can, but not quite a cheese grater.
Casey:
But if it is modular in the physical sense of the word, then all bets are off at that point.
Marco:
Yeah, that honestly... So I will say my size prediction is on the assumption that it's not going to be modular, like with separate boxes.
Marco:
Because I think the separate boxes thing is still a fantasy and may always be a fantasy.
Marco:
Because the practical realities of such a setup...
Marco:
are just so complex and so compromised in so many ways that we want the mac pro not to be compromised in that i just i don't see it happening it presents severe challenges for things like cooling noise uh power distribution you know the thermals that result from that um compatibility forwards and backwards compatibility with various modules weird combinations being possible like it just presents so many problems that
Marco:
And it's so incredibly ungraceful in a way that I don't think Apple would do.
Marco:
I don't think we ever have to worry about the separate box thing becoming the reality.
Marco:
So if we're assuming that it's one box, my guess on the case size class is...
Marco:
see i don't think it's going to be as big as john like john you were kind of leaning more towards like possibly as closer to the cheese grater than to the trash can i think it'll be closer to the trash can but still bigger so i'm kind of thinking like if you if you put like two trash cans next to each other and draw an enclosing box around them that i think is roughly the size we're talking about so bigger than the trash can but still a pretty small computer
John:
I don't know if that's big enough to fit a full-length PCI card in there, though, and I'm assuming it will have PCI cards.
John:
So that's kind of what I'm using to sketch out the box in my head.
Marco:
We'll get there, too.
Marco:
But yeah, because that is a question, and I mean, I don't think anybody uses full-length cards anymore because that required the old 90s towers to do a full-length card that would go past the speaker.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
you know yeah but uh but like you know a modern graphics card that we'll get to that but um yeah so i'm leaning towards two trash cans worth of volume and like the enclosing box around them but do you think they're gonna try to do some kind of overly clever shape or do you think they're gonna go with a rectangular solid
John:
There's one question to consider before that that none of us have been even thinking of.
John:
But I mean, I don't think this is a high possibility, but I do occasionally entertain it.
John:
We are all thinking of a vertical thing because for the longest time, pro computers, the tower has been the form factor.
John:
But for a long time before that.
John:
even quote-unquote workstation computers many of them were they would lay flat and you'd put your gigantic monitor on top of them you had the next slab you had all the traditional desktop macs that came that desktop bcs my first computer was a desktop and that's what desktop meant was was it laid it was basically a sideways mid tower and you and you put your monitor on top of it um and that seems very unlikely just because of the primacy of towers and
John:
And honestly, like you probably wouldn't like ergonomically, it's not great.
John:
There's so many reasons why they wouldn't do it.
John:
But I mean, the Mac mini is technically that form factor, even though it's so tiny, you can't really put anything on top of it.
John:
So I don't rule that out entirely.
John:
That doesn't really change the shape and the volume.
John:
uh and marco's thing of like two trash can volume i've been thinking more like three trash can volume slightly redistributed um so we're i think we're kind of in the same ballpark but the trash can is so small that's why i say closer to the cheeseburger than the trash can if you know if you actually look at the volumes and pick the you know find the midpoint it's you know it doesn't take much to be bigger than that
John:
But anyway, what was the next one we were going to do?
Marco:
Well, so actually, and one small comment, because we're never going to get through this topic.
Marco:
One small comment.
Marco:
The Mac Pro also has to fulfill the role for certain uses of having a bunch of them put together in compute farms or data centers or whatever else.
Marco:
In previous generations, the XServe would serve this function.
Marco:
The XServe was basically just a Mac Pro in a 1U enclosure.
John:
And the trash can was perfect.
John:
It was perfect to put in racks, right?
John:
It was absolutely designed to be the hardest thing to put in a rack.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Didn't Mac Mini Colo or Maxiadium, didn't they actually build, like, custom rack mounts for these?
Marco:
They put them on their side and put, like, three of them across a rack.
Marco:
That took all the space in the rack, basically.
Marco:
So, yeah.
Marco:
So, the trash can was...
Marco:
about as bad as you can be for rack mountability.
Marco:
So the new Mac Pro, now that they're, again, reconsidering what pros actually need, and I can't imagine that they're going to bring back the X-Serve or have any other kind of alternate shape.
Marco:
So if we assume that one computer here...
Marco:
is also going to attempt to be better for putting in racks that might lend credence to it being a little bit bigger and flatter now i still think it's unlikely but maybe they would consider that like maybe maybe it would be an appropriate size that you could lay down two of them and that would be the approximate width of a rack who knows
John:
Oh, that gets to your next topic, which is, is it a weird shape or is it not?
John:
And while I don't think Apple cares much about rackability, I have been thinking that it will be more rectilinear than the trash can, which is not hard because that's a cylinder, but I'm thinking that...
John:
Just practically speaking, this is why the cheeseburger is such a design.
John:
It does not shy away from the fact that it's basically a rectangular saw.
John:
It's got handles for flare, but cool air goes in the front, hot air goes out the back.
John:
It is rectangular because most of the things that have to go inside it are rectangular, and they don't bother putting flares or fins on it, and they don't hide the fact that the sides are absolutely straight.
John:
The front is absolutely straight.
John:
The back is absolutely straight.
John:
If you want to see a tower with flare, look at the blue and white G3.
John:
Or the G4 and the Quicksilver and the Wind Tunnel.
John:
Those all had a lot of flair, but in the end there was a rectangular solid buried in the middle of all that cool stuff.
John:
But the cheese grater was just more modern Apple design of not hiding from what they are.
John:
So I keep picturing something in my head that is...
John:
Not shy about its rectilinear nature.
John:
Now, I could be entirely wrong.
John:
They made a freaking cylinder, right?
John:
Who knows?
John:
And they do love their rounded corners, right?
John:
But that's what I keep picturing.
John:
And I guess that counts as not a weird shape, like not an octagon, not a dodecahedron, not a pyramid, right?
John:
even if it's got rounded corners something rectilinear which ties into the rack mounting and that like okay it's not made to rack mount but it's also not grossly inefficient in terms of space use it just like a sphere or a cylinder especially a cylinder that doesn't even go the full like depth of the rack you're just wasting space i mean if any of the mac mini is is more efficient use of rack space because you can vertically stack them and just pile them up into so that that's what i'm picturing right now is
John:
Not an entirely crazy shape.
John:
Not even as crazy as a cylinder.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm kind of thinking the same thing.
Marco:
I think the cylinder... First of all, I think it humbled them a little bit.
Marco:
It was too clever and resulted in major problems as a result.
Marco:
But I think if you're trying to make the smallest enclosure...
Marco:
that can still fit a couple of PCI cards maybe, or a couple of GPUs.
Marco:
Really like a compact rectangle of some kind is probably the way to do that.
Marco:
So I think they're done with the fun shapes for now.
Marco:
At best, maybe a cube, but a cube is a really inefficient use of space if you want to fit standard cards.
Marco:
So I don't even think they would even do that.
Marco:
I'm leaning more towards some kind of approximate tower shape, even if it's a really small tower.
Casey:
Yeah, I would say the same thing.
Casey:
Absolutely.
John:
And I don't think that means it has to be boring either.
John:
You can do a lot with surface finishes and details.
John:
Like I said, the blue and white G3 and that whole line, the Yosemite, before there was an OS called Yosemite, there was a tower called Yosemite.
John:
That was a beautiful, there's a tower called El Cap too, by the way.
John:
Oh, my word.
John:
That design was an amazing combination of
John:
utility, like in the end there was a metal rectangle in there with a door on the side, but also beauty and not all the flares and bulges didn't take up that much extra room, but I feel like modern Apple would even think that that's too much ornamentation and would make the
John:
The shape, whatever the shape is, the generally rectangular-ish shape, whether it has rounded corners or not, beautiful because it's simple and has nice surface finishes and maybe one or two interesting details on it.
John:
I don't think it will have RGB lights.
John:
Sorry, Mike.
John:
But I think there's a lot you can do within the constraints that we've outlined to make this a really good-looking machine.
Marco:
All right, next question.
Marco:
This, I think, is interesting.
Marco:
Do you think it will have single or dual CPU sockets?
John:
This is tough.
John:
My gut instinct is single.
Casey:
So what would a dual socket CPU bring?
Marco:
Right now, you're limited with the performance of processors today.
Marco:
Like what you see in the iMac Pro.
Marco:
The iMac Pro has one CPU socket.
Marco:
So you can raise the core count to a really high core count.
Marco:
But it costs you in maximum clock speed and turbo boost speeds for all the cores.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
you're still limited by the amount of power and heat dissipation that you can get out of one socket.
Marco:
So typically the workstation CPU, the workstation CPUs might be in the range of like 160 watt power output max.
Marco:
And so you're limited by like, you can cram 18 cores in there or whatever the number is that year, but those are going to be 18 slower cores than if you put in like two nine core CPUs.
Marco:
I know this is a bad example because having it is an odd number.
Marco:
Anyway, so like,
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The Mac Pro, to a large degree, I think, has to justify its existence here.
Marco:
Why does the Mac Pro need to exist above and beyond the iMac Pro?
Marco:
And the iMac Pro, just for slimness and thermals and space, is probably always going to only have one CPU socket.
Marco:
Dual CPU sockets would be a way for the Mac Pro to differentiate itself and to raise the ceiling of what it can do.
Marco:
All that being said, I don't think they're going to do it.
Marco:
Now that we have such high core counts in single sockets, that usually covers the massively parallel CPU workload pretty well.
Marco:
And the gap between the clock speeds that you get from the low core and the high core models is shrinking over time, like over different Xeon generations.
Marco:
And also, I think a dual CPU enclosure
Marco:
has to accommodate such radically different things.
Marco:
Like a second CPU socket, and I think, I don't know if the current chipset is like this, but in the old chipsets, it would also have a second bank of RAM slots.
Marco:
Having that be accommodated by one case design that Apple probably wants to keep kind of small, as we discussed in the last question,
Marco:
I don't think they're going to do it because I think it would require the case to be significantly bigger, the power supply to be significantly bigger, beefy upgrades to accommodate another 160-watt CPU.
Marco:
All this for a gain that, while I would like it and I would probably buy it that way, I don't think most of its buyers would opt for.
Marco:
So I don't think they're going to do dual CPU sockets.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
First of all, por que no los dos?
Casey:
Why couldn't they have lower grade builds that are one way and just heinously expensive builds that are dual socket?
Marco:
And by the way, that's what the cheese grater did.
Marco:
The cheese grater had both options and accommodated them very well, and they weren't upgradable.
Marco:
If you got the single socket model, there wasn't a second empty socket there.
Marco:
Like, it was just blank.
Marco:
And if you ever wanted to upgrade, you'd have to do a very pricey and very substantial upgrade to actually change that out.
Marco:
So they could.
Marco:
Like, they could absolutely configure that in two different ways, even have two different power supplies or whatever else, you know, have very different things.
Marco:
But I just, I don't see them doing that for this game.
John:
It reminds me, I should have been lording this over you that every time you make fun of my computer, I'd be like, I've got twice as many CPUs as you do.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, definitely.
John:
Each of which is one one hundredth of speed, but you know.
Marco:
Yeah, you have like eight iPhone 5S cores in there.
Casey:
The thing that what you were talking about, Marco, made me think is that I think you're onto something with the differentiation between the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro.
Casey:
And I kind of wonder if the Mac Pro is going to be Apple saying to us, oh, you want something professional?
Casey:
Well, f*** you, here it is.
Casey:
And that'll be $20,000, please.
Casey:
You know, I kind of feel like this might be Apple thumbing their nose at us and saying, okay...
Casey:
You whined.
Casey:
You complained, John Syracuse.
Casey:
For a decade, you complained, John Syracuse.
Casey:
Well, here you go.
Casey:
That'll be $20,000, and it's amazing.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
It's amazing, but it's the cost of a car.
Casey:
I hope you're happy now.
John:
Apple is so far, though, from that high end of the market.
John:
They've retreated so far into the consumer land that they're just trying to get back in the game, and I don't think you can come back in at the top.
John:
You can't be charging people that.
John:
Even in the pro market who ostensibly could use that, they're not going to trust you enough to give you that much money.
John:
I don't think they even want that.
John:
Apple's been that pro lab where they talk to the people and they say, what would you like that you're not getting out of the iMac Pro?
John:
And the needs are going to be more than the iMac Pro, you know, reliability, upgradability, all the other things or whatever.
John:
But they're not going to say what I need is like, you know, 75 of the biggest CPUs and a giant box that goes in a closet.
John:
No one's asking for that.
John:
And it's just too big a leap from where they are.
John:
So I don't think they're going to do that.
John:
It's not the reason I think they're not going to do dual core.
John:
I think it's just not the right tradeoff in terms of like Marco said, like, what do you get for that extra, incredible extra cost and heat and all the other compromises you have to make for it?
John:
you don't get that much i don't think people are going to be asking for it like and i don't think apple is going to go that way like if they did do a dual cpu option if they're successful and they return to the pro market after a few years if it still makes sense to make that trade-off at all i can imagine them introducing a dual core one but a i don't think it'll make sense and b i think they have a long way to go before they're even in the position to give the big fu model like i don't i don't think they can get from where they are to there in one jump
Marco:
Well, honestly, and if they don't do it in this generation of Mac Pro, they're probably not going to do it before an ARM transition.
Marco:
And that would probably change everything.
Marco:
Like, you know, who knows what their needs would be.
John:
Yeah, then everything's a CPU.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
You got one on your keyboard.
John:
One runs a touch bar.
John:
There's one that runs your computer.
John:
There's one on the display.
John:
You open up the box and ARM CPUs come out, just sprinkling down like dust.
Marco:
For the record, I don't think this will be an ARM computer.
Marco:
I don't think they're ready to do that yet.
Marco:
It would be really cool if it was.
Marco:
That would be a really interesting, awesome story, but I don't think it's quite that time yet.
Marco:
But I do think this is most likely to be
Marco:
the last and only Intel Mac Pro left in them.
Marco:
Whatever this is, maybe they'll update it in 18 months for the next Xeon CPUs or whatever, but I don't think there's going to be another generation of Intel Mac Pro after this one.
Marco:
Anyway, so moving on to the GPU area.
Casey:
Are we really doing this?
Casey:
Are we really going to push the WWDC stuff to the after show?
Casey:
This is really where this is going?
Casey:
This is WWDC stuff.
Casey:
So moving on.
Marco:
GPUs.
Marco:
Single or dual?
Marco:
Are they upgradable?
Marco:
And are they standard PCI Express GPU cards that you could just buy off of Newegg or Amazon and stick in, maybe from a whitelisted list of whatever supported?
Marco:
Or are they like special Apple modules that only Apple can make and sell you or whatever?
Marco:
And how many are there?
John:
You came up with that question.
John:
All right.
John:
I think I have an easy answer for that one.
John:
Support for dual GPUs, standard PCI slots.
John:
You didn't ask, but not NVIDIA.
John:
And what was the other question?
Marco:
Single or dual Macs, and then upgradable or not, and upgradable with standard cards or special Apple things?
John:
Yeah, upgradable standard cards with support for two of them.
John:
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Marco:
That, I think, would be the best outcome.
Marco:
I think that's what most people are asking for, besides the NVIDIA question, which I guess might be separate, but I think that would satisfy the most people, is...
Marco:
replaceable, standard PCI Express GPUs supporting up to two of them.
Marco:
That being said, that, again, like, modern GPUs use as much heat and stuff as modern CPUs do, so you are talking about a substantial thermal design here, and the question is...
Marco:
Would the GPUs have just their own giant gaming coolers on them?
Marco:
Like the giant heat sinks that modern GPUs have on them taking up the two slots.
Marco:
Would they have that kind of thing?
Marco:
Or would Apple want to do something a little nicer and more integrated and quieter and more powerful where Apple has their own custom cooling integration with maybe the whole rest of the system or something like that?
Marco:
So some kind of more advanced cooling setup than just using the big-ass fan that comes on the side of the graphics card.
Marco:
That, I think, is a big question, and that's why I think maybe they wouldn't support standard PCI Express cards, because cooling and thermals are such a big challenge when you're cooling, when you have a sideways fan hanging off of a giant PCI Express card, wedged between itself and another PCI Express card right next to it, making its own heat.
Marco:
It's a very difficult cooling situation in there, and to try to do it without having just a loud fan
Marco:
I think flies right in the face of using standard PCI cards.
John:
Modern GPU killers are actually pretty amazing, especially the good ones.
John:
They use very large fans, very large diameter fans.
John:
They just look like giant water wheels, and there is enough room to get a fairly quiet one in there to eject the air out sideways.
John:
That said, I really wished for the entire life of Apple's pro computers up to the trash can that Apple did more custom coolers, but they didn't.
John:
They put these crappy OEM...
John:
GPU cooler fans blowing in some random direction.
John:
They relied on these 17 fans in the cheese grater to just shove all that air out the back anyway, no matter what the thing does.
John:
But those fans would go bad.
John:
They would get noisy.
John:
They didn't do a very good job cooling.
John:
The trash can was actually...
John:
theoretically an upgrade in that area because it had one big fan that was supposed to handle everything and no separate weird gpu coolers it turns out that one fan wasn't enough to do the job and the gpus would overheat so you know oops apple's bad but i like i like the thought but i think you can have standard replaceable cards that just happen to come with coolers that are apple designed i really hope that's true that apple designed coolers that come with apple's cards
John:
whether you buy one or two of them that are quiet and efficient and integrate with the cooling, not because they're like part of the whole system, but just because they, the airflow was designed with those coolers in mind.
John:
And then when you buy a third party one, they'll have to find a way to integrate.
John:
But I think that's the only reasonable path.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Upgradable RAM, I think, is a pretty safe bet.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
What about upgradable SSD modules?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
You really think so?
Marco:
See, I think no, because the T2-based Macs, they all have this custom pairing for encryption and everything between the modules and the T2.
Marco:
So that's why I think they're probably going to continue down that same path.
Marco:
There is a question about whether there might be a slot for more SSD modules, whatever the M2, whatever the slots are for SSDs these days.
Marco:
There might be a couple of those in there.
Marco:
That would be nice.
Marco:
Even that, I think, is unlikely.
Marco:
I think they're going to leave the disk expansion up to external only.
Marco:
And I hope they don't, but I bet it's going to be like...
Casey:
two modules inside the case just like the iMac Pro uses two modules in parallel I'm guessing it's two modules inside and you're on your own for anything else after that and they're not and they're not upgradable what if what if it's not that so I think that what you just said about externally you know upgradable makes the most sense without without doubt
Casey:
But what if it's a kind of in the middle where it is upgradable, but you have to bring it in?
Casey:
What just went through that?
Casey:
There was like you could upgrade the RAM and something, but it wasn't user serviceable or something like that.
Marco:
I think it's the Mac Mini.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Yes, you're right.
Casey:
That's what it was.
Casey:
That's what it was.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
The Mac Mini, I believe the RAM is upgradable without, you know, destroying the machine, but you have to bring it to Apple to do it or so they say.
Casey:
What if it's one of those scenarios with the SSDs where, yes, they will sell you a heinously overpriced SSD and you have to give your computer to Apple to do it, but they should be able to do so without utterly destroying your entire machine?
John:
I think the best case scenario for the internal storage is that Apple sells you the computer and lets you pick how much storage is in it.
John:
And as far as Apple is concerned, it's not upgradable.
John:
But if you actually look inside the machine...
John:
Physically speaking, you can take it out and put a different module there.
John:
And then, you know, other world computing or whoever finds a way to sell you a thing that will fit in that slot and gives you some kind of procedure to sync it up with the encryption and, you know, like kind of like unofficially upgradable.
John:
But like, honestly, I feel like the regular internal storage is not, you know, I think of what pro users might might want.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that's not soldered in either, right?
John:
It's two little modules, but it's just because the iMac is not particularly friendly to open up.
John:
There hasn't been a big market for aftermarket SSDs for the iMac Pro, if that would even be possible.
John:
But assuming this thing is easy to open up and assuming the storage does look like the iMac Pro, it's potential for a third party fair to head upgrade that.
John:
And the only remaining question is, is there any place inside this case besides that place?
John:
where you can put storage and i'm not entirely willing to roll that out i mean especially if you just get with one gpu you got a pci slot so there's you know you could buy a pci card with ssds on it for sure oh that would yeah that's true that if if we do have standard pci slots which i sure hope we do that would actually be really nice yeah you're right
Marco:
Do we think just two disk modules to start or four?
Marco:
Maybe one way they can differentiate from the iMac Pro is by upping the disk bandwidth even more.
Marco:
And so you could run four M.2 SSDs in parallel.
Marco:
I mean, you've got to figure all this stuff, we're going to be very limited by PCI Express lanes and stuff like that.
Marco:
So I don't even know if they can offer all this and support dual GPUs and everything else.
Marco:
But maybe they have more modules.
Marco:
I can't afford four modules at Apple's SSD prices, so I'm going to go with two.
Marco:
All right, so speaking of price, my final question for the Mac Pro predictions, starting price.
Marco:
What is the cheapest one you can get?
Marco:
Keeping in mind that the iMac Pro starts at $5,000 for a pretty decent configuration.
Marco:
That's one terabyte, eight core, 32 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
So iMac Pro starts at $5,000 but includes a screen built in.
Marco:
So what do you think for starting price?
Casey:
I will be stunned if it's less than $7,500.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
No, that's too high.
Casey:
I think.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm telling you.
Casey:
It's going to be a fortune.
John:
Price is right rules.
John:
You've gone over.
Casey:
$1.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
No, I really think this is going to be a freaking fortune.
Casey:
And I take your point about it not including a screen.
Casey:
I really believe that this thing, it will be amazing.
Casey:
I'm not doubting that.
Casey:
But I think it will be just prohibitively expensive.
Casey:
And this is coming from someone who buys a lot of expensive Apple stuff.
Casey:
Like I think it's just going to be insanely expensive.
John:
If they had a stripper model, they could offer a machine for $3,999.
John:
Hold on.
John:
Hold on.
John:
Sorry.
John:
A what?
John:
Stripper.
John:
It's a car terminology.
John:
Like it's the model with like the cloth seats and the manual windows and no AC and no radio.
John:
It's the way John likes to buy cars.
Marco:
that's not how i buy cars at all um but they're not going to have a stripper model for this so i think the starting price will be four nine nine nine i actually agree i i think the imac pro they they they specced it up to one terabyte and 32 x ram minimum so that they could price it at five thousand dollars because like you know the upgrades like they cost apple a lot less than they cost us so
Marco:
I think they did that for a reason, but I don't think they could really start the Mac Pro higher than $5,000.
Marco:
You'll be able to configure it up to some crazy amounts.
Marco:
You might be able to configure it up to $20,000 for all we know if you spec up everything to the craziest amounts, but
Marco:
I think the base price, because keep in mind, the current Mac Pro, the base price is $3,000.
Marco:
So it's still a price increase, a substantial one at that.
Marco:
But I think it'll probably come specced similarly to the iMac Pro, if not more, you know, higher specced.
Marco:
And I'm thinking $5,000.
Casey:
I think you've probably convinced me.
Casey:
I still think it's going to be just hilariously expensive, but you're probably right.
Casey:
I do like the synergy of having this start at about the same cost without the screen, so it's actually quite a bit more expensive.
Casey:
I see your point, and I think that makes sense.
John:
They're probably going to Apple Arcade us, though.
John:
Even if they have a teaser for this thing, there's no reason they need to tell us the price.
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
Well, they might tell us the starting price.
Marco:
I think they did with the iMac Pro, didn't they?
Marco:
Didn't they tell us the starting?
John:
I mean, if it's shipping in December, there can be more details later.
John:
We'll see.
John:
Depends on how much of a teaser it is versus a very long pre-announcement.
John:
Six months from now, you'll be able to buy this.
Marco:
Or they'll blow right by it.
Marco:
Remember when the Apple Watch was announced way earlier than its launch and they blew right by the edition pricing?
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
Every Mac Pro is an edition.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
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Marco:
we should talk about our other WVDC predictions.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't have that much that hasn't been rumored.
Marco:
The Mac Pro, I think, is the most interesting part for our show.
Marco:
And there's a million other podcasts giving more accurate predictions about software changes and all this stuff.
Marco:
And I don't actually think we're going to see any more hardware besides the display in the Mac Pro.
Marco:
I mean, I guess that's one.
Marco:
So one question is, do you think we're going to see, say, the 16-inch MacBook Pro previewed?
Marco:
And I'm thinking no.
John:
Yeah, I've been thinking no ever since they pre-announced things, but I keep going back and forth.
John:
Like, my gut instinct is no.
John:
Like, the whole reason that they did the speed bump before, the thing is just basically to tell you, the 16th isn't ready, so don't bother.
John:
I mean, it's just fine.
John:
Like, that makes perfect sense.
John:
But if they're already pre-announcing a computer that's going to ship in December, maybe...
John:
it would be super neat and get a lot of buzz even if it wasn't available to purchase in theory it wouldn't kill sales of the 15 inch because it's like a different newer thing and it would be potentially more expensive because apple loves introducing new models that are more expensive than the existing ones seems highly unlikely to me but i always like it's like you know christmas eve you always like you think about what it would be like if you got everything you wanted like imagine if they had a mac pro teaser and the 16 inch and it's got a new keyboard and none of them are available to buy but you'd just be jazzed about them right
John:
Seems highly unlikely, but I'm not willing to entirely rule it out because I think Mike brought this up on the recent upgrade.
John:
it doesn't you know there's nothing about what apple has released that would make it awkward for them to introduce a 16 inch a totally new form factor 16 inch like it's differentiated enough within that it's not shipping now it's a totally different computer and it's like a different size screen even if it's you know even if it's just the screen and not the the overall size that they could survive that and say well but why did you just introduce this 15 inch i feel bad it's like well the 16 inch is a different thing
John:
Again, seems highly unlikely, but I'm unable to banish it from my mind as the amazing fantasy of how great this WWDC could go.
Marco:
Yeah, me too.
Marco:
I can't say it definitely won't happen.
Marco:
I can't say, oh, they would never do that because they might do that because of all the reasons you said, they might actually still tell us about it even though it doesn't seem like it's shipping anytime soon and even though they just updated the MacBook Pro.
Yeah.
Marco:
They still might.
Marco:
I think it's, you know, it's not out of the question.
Marco:
But anyway, so I actually, I had another idea for kind of how we could structure this part if you guys are up for it.
Marco:
Wait, hold on, hold on.
Casey:
I just had an epiphany.
Casey:
I think I would like to steal a connected term and I will do my risky pick.
Casey:
I'm going to do it right up front.
Casey:
I know we're not scoring or whatever, but I would like to put on record a risky pick that I will regret later.
Casey:
I don't think we're going to see a Mac Pro teaser.
Casey:
Oh!
Casey:
Why would you be that person?
Marco:
Why would you do that?
Marco:
Why do you hate fun?
Marco:
Let me just take this knife out of my back.
Marco:
I think this is yours.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Well, first of all, you started it, sir.
Casey:
But secondly, the reason I say that is...
Casey:
I want there to be a Mac Pro teaser, despite the fact that I will not be able to get a word in edgewise on this podcast for six months.
Casey:
I do want there to be a Mac Pro teaser, or hell, maybe even a release.
Casey:
I mean, if we're going crazy, let's get crazy.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I wonder if there's so much software stuff, all of the leftovers from 2018 that got pushed to 2019, all of the stuff that was originally slated for 2019 that hopefully most of which made it, that's a big, long, busy keynote.
Casey:
Additionally,
Casey:
It is impossible to please nerds.
Casey:
I can assure you that.
Casey:
I have lived it for years.
Casey:
It is impossible to please nerds.
Casey:
And the only way I think Apple gets away with a Mac Pro announcement of any sort, probably a teaser...
Casey:
is by not announcing a price.
Casey:
Because I really think the price is going to put off a lot of people, which it shouldn't, because this is obviously going to be the crazy, you know, we spared no expense, that's a reference, John, we spared no expense computer.
Casey:
But I think it'll still be an off-putting price.
Casey:
So if they don't put the price in, everyone's going to complain and say, oh, it's surely too expensive because Apple, and nobody's going to want to buy this.
Casey:
Nobody will be able to buy this because it'll be too expensive.
Casey:
They put the price in, oh, it is too expensive.
Casey:
Nobody's going to buy this.
Casey:
And in so many ways, okay, it's not modular like we thought it was.
Casey:
Or, oh, it's modular but not the way we want.
Casey:
Oh, there's only one GP.
Casey:
It's going to be nitpicked to death.
Casey:
And if the rest of the conference feels like such a home run to Apple, which I think it does...
Casey:
Why would you throw this risky teaser in?
Casey:
And I can answer that question, right?
Casey:
And the three of us have answered that question.
Casey:
And I still think they should do it.
Casey:
But I can balance this math equation in such a way that them teasing it just doesn't make sense.
John:
The only thing we know about modern Apple, though, is that regardless of what their internal monologue might be personified as a company, when they introduce a product, what they project is that they think this product is great.
John:
Whether it is or not.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
Right?
John:
So the doubts about like, oh, but what if they don't like the Mac Pro?
Yeah.
John:
They think everyone's going to like the Mac pro.
John:
They think that whatever the issues were, they fixed them.
John:
Like it's the whole point.
John:
Like they're, they're proud.
John:
They may be nervous about how it's received, yada, yada, yada.
John:
But like, I feel like they're, when they do an intro, they would never hold off on introducing the thing because they're afraid people might not like it.
John:
It's always like, well, this is great.
John:
I mean, hell, they thought everyone would love the touch bar.
John:
Like it's just, that's the, that's what they put out.
John:
Whether that's internally what they're thinking or,
John:
the presentation is we think these are the best laptops ever look at this amazing touch bar so on and so forth and they will give the exact same message to the mac pro but i also told uh tim cook through our friend jason snell that he can make it a one more thing i'm okay with that so we do all you do you do the whole thing you do all the marzipan stuff like everyone's super excited all the new os features everything we've talked about it's just all amazing you can mix app kit and ui kit in a single application look at all these things we've ported and it's just amazing and all the
John:
And there's one more thing, and it's my Mac Pro.
Casey:
This specifically says John Syracuse on the front.
John:
I've already planned the keynote.
John:
That's how it's going to go.
John:
I see.
John:
The only question was the 16-inch laptop.
John:
Is there any more hardware stuff that is a blip on anyone's radar?
John:
Anyone?
Anyone?
Marco:
I mean, the MacBook 12-inch is due for an update.
Marco:
The Escape is due for an update, but I don't think we're getting those.
Marco:
There's no time for that.
John:
Sorry, Casey.
Marco:
They're probably going to be unimportant.
Marco:
So actually, I had a quick idea.
Marco:
I have a list of things here that I think are at risk for not being mentioned at all because...
Marco:
from most likely to not be mentioned at all, to more risky.
Marco:
I'm curious to get your read.
Marco:
What do you think out of this list will not be mentioned at all during the keynote?
Marco:
Is keynote only, not State of the Union, keynote only?
Marco:
Number one, I think the most likely, easiest pick, messages apps.
Marco:
Like the apps that you can make for iMessage.
John:
Oh, that's punching down.
John:
Yeah, we're going to hear nothing about those, right?
John:
It's an interesting question because one of the possible announcements is cross-platform iMessage, which is probably a little probability, but it's always out there every year.
John:
If they did cross-platform iMessage and if third-party iMessage applications are still a thing, they would have to mention them as part of that segment.
John:
I think they may show iMessage applications.
John:
But that's different than reminding people that this is a place where you can, you know, make applications, right?
John:
So it's separate from like, let's remind you that we have a platform where you can message applications versus we have some new applications to show you or whatever.
John:
So I think they will probably not remind us that messages applications is a thing unless they're significantly enhanced.
John:
But I think there's pretty, you know, even odds that we will see a messages, one or more messages applications being used.
Marco:
in the keynote but see that won't count i'm talking about actually mentioning like and and not even like not even a tiny word on the on one of the word cloud slides like that doesn't count oh the word cloud slides uh if it's enhanced like if they've enhanced it now message applications can do this thing that they couldn't do before that that goes on a word slide for sure if if they did that at all right but i'm this is what i'm saying like i don't think we'll even see that but anyway all right so moving on a little bit riskier now
John:
tv os you think tv os is getting mentioned in the keynote yes absolutely what are they what are they going to say about it that they haven't like what's i don't know they'll say something though i mean they it depends on how much of a services recap they have time for because surely there will be some form of server services recap of talking about their various plus this is why this is tricky right because like they're going to want to mention the tv app and they're going to want to mention you know apple arcade that games run on all the platforms right so that's it's tricky right
Marco:
Yeah, I think that gets mentioned.
Marco:
See, I'm saying no to iMessage apps.
Marco:
I think I'm also saying no to tvOS, but it's a riskier pick for sure.
Marco:
All right, getting a little bit harder now.
Marco:
The HomePod.
Mmm.
Casey:
I think it'll get mentioned like as this works with the HomePod.
Casey:
I don't think it'll get mentioned in the sense of look at the new things the HomePod can do.
John:
I don't think anyone will say the word HomePod.
John:
No, I'm going to like verbal versus slide.
John:
I'm willing to believe there will be a picture of a HomePod on a slide and the word HomePod on a slide.
John:
I give it a 50-50 chance of a human being saying HomePod.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm going to say the HomePod is not mentioned in the keynote.
Marco:
All right, getting more risky now.
Marco:
siri definitely mentioned yeah they're always mentioning siri whether it's better or not it's going to be mentioned yeah it's yeah i guess like they use the word siri to describe any kind of like on-device learning thing also like siri found these photos for you yeah i guess you're right all right more specifically shortcuts
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
They're super proud of shortcuts and everybody likes them.
John:
Why wouldn't they mention it?
John:
Even if they haven't done anything, they're going to mention it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think so, too.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Now, here's one I think will be very interesting.
Marco:
AR.
Marco:
Oh, it's their catnip these days.
John:
Of course.
John:
They can't get through three slides without mentioning AR.
John:
Yep.
John:
The question is, are they going to have an AR table?
Marco:
Do they have an AR table or not?
Marco:
It has been their catnip for a few years now.
Marco:
But I think at this event, there's going to be so much else.
Marco:
that they might want to save AR stuff for the fall event where they introduce new hardware.
Marco:
AR goes better with, like, here's the new iPhone or whatever that does new AR crap.
Marco:
I actually think there's a solid chance they won't mention AR at all during this keynote.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They did the ARKit enhancements.
John:
That's going to get a one-word mention, and it will get expanded in the State of the Union.
John:
Until and unless they can the Glasses project, like either they release the Glasses or can the project, they're going to keep mentioning AR because they keep enhancing ARKit.
John:
ARKit will be enhanced.
John:
There will be sessions on it.
John:
It will be mentioned in the State of the Union.
John:
I think it will get a single mention in the keynote.
John:
And if they have an AR table, like, well, no, when we sit down and we see a giant table, it's like, all right, get ready for another AR demo.
Marco:
Yep, lost that bet.
Marco:
I'm actually voting no on AR.
Marco:
I bet it doesn't get mentioned at all.
Casey:
I think it'll at least get mentioned.
Casey:
It wouldn't surprise me if there was a demo.
Casey:
I mean, I'm being a little hypocritical, right, because I just made this big passionate speech about how there's not going to be any time for anything during this keynote, and they're going to have to cut the Mac Pro, but...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
They just freaking love AR.
Casey:
It's so untorned.
Casey:
There's always time to mention it.
John:
ARKit enhancements exist and will be mentioned.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
And last one, which I think is the riskiest to evaluate, watchOS.
Casey:
You don't think that there would be a mention?
John:
How do you get out of this keynote without mentioning and without talking about watchOS?
John:
I don't know how you that's.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, I know you're pessimistic about watchOS.
John:
You're pessimistic about watchKit, but there is a new watchOS.
John:
It's going to have like a new watch faces.
John:
They're going to mention watchOS.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
But what if, you know, like new watch faces, there's not much for developers to do there.
Marco:
That would be very likely saved for a fall event when there's new watches.
Marco:
If the focus of the OS, like if it's a pretty quiet year on that front and it's a really packed keynote, maybe that might slip to the State of the Union.
John:
I mean, there's going to be WDC sessions on watchOS.
John:
You're assuming this is not the year that we get basically UI kit for the watch?
John:
I haven't been following those rumors.
Marco:
I mean, there aren't that many rumors about the watch in general, but I'm pretty sure that's not happening this year.
Marco:
So I'm talking about just being mentioned in the keynote.
Marco:
My rationale here, I think watchOS probably will be mentioned in the keynote, but I think it's definitely worth considering because it is going to be such a jam-packed keynote with everything else.
Marco:
And it doesn't seem like there's that much this year for watchOS that would be relevant to developers, you know, enough to make it into a very packed keynote.
John:
Yeah, I don't think you can get out of the keynote without mentioning watchOS.
John:
I think that's a pretty sure thing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, I think you're right, but it's definitely worth thinking about.
Marco:
All right, I'm done.
Marco:
I also have the MacBook Pro on here, but we already answered that.
John:
Yeah, and so there's no other hardware on the software.
John:
We don't have to cover all the things, new versions of iOS, macOS.
John:
We don't have to go into details on the individual features.
John:
There's been so many rumors and leaks about it.
John:
I don't think we have time to speculate about what the new iPad situation will be like.
John:
They've kept that stuff under wraps.
John:
We'll just be surprised, but we know that's going to be a big feature.
John:
I think this is a solid keynote.
John:
Just for the three or four pillars of just the iPad enhancements, Marzipan, and the new iOS stuff that we already know about.
John:
The thing about Marzipan is it spans iOS and the Mac, so it lets you talk more about the Mac and it lets you talk more about iOS at the same time.
John:
Depends on how hard they want to pitch the unification model, right?
John:
Obviously, that's more of state of the union stuff showing how you can mix AppKit and UIKit and if you can do that and all that stuff.
John:
But just that stuff.
John:
Basic touching on the new features of our platforms, the Marzipan story and the iPad story.
John:
And then one more thing, hardware tease for a product that most people aren't going to buy but that I think most people are excited about even if they're not going to buy it.
John:
that's a good wwc you know right there and you know there's always room for some weird thing that hasn't even been rumored right like a location tile thing i guess that's been rumored but like just something like that if say we hadn't heard of it there's always room for a little wild card like that i mean heck sometimes they have people bringing up like remote control cars on stage you never know what's going to happen at one of these keynotes didn't they just fold that company yeah yeah they did um
Casey:
So what do you think that my final question to you guys is, how do you think Marzipan will be approached?
Casey:
Because I think it's a given that there's going to be some sort of update about it.
Casey:
You know, since they introduced it last year, they're going to want to have a touch point to use business crap lingo.
Casey:
But they're going to want to talk about it again.
Casey:
And what do you think the presentation will be?
Casey:
Because I can see this being as simple as, oh, maybe Messages is now Marzipan.
Casey:
And look at how the Mac is now influencing iOS, because in order to get UIKit to support thing, that made it easier for us to support that same thing on iOS, like a pointer, for example.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Do you think that they're going to lean heavily into it?
Casey:
Do you think it's going to be kind of the 50,000-foot view of what's going on?
Casey:
How do you feel this is going to be pitched, Marco?
Casey:
And then I'd like to ask John after.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think Marzipan is going to be the story of the year.
Marco:
I think they're going to pitch it very heavily.
Marco:
It's going to take up a lot of the time, or at least a lot of the substantive talking time, if you exclude videos and crap.
Marco:
I think it's going to be a major focus of the keynote and of the conference and of the next year because it is such a big ordeal.
Marco:
Marzipan is not one API that some people might get used from, like what Siri intents were last year.
Marco:
like it's way bigger than that it's so much more like it it is such a huge undertaking that involves tons of changes to both the mac and ios and to all the underlying ui kit frameworks and everything and you know who knows if there is an app kit story here but regardless like there is so much that is touched by this there's so much that's changed by marzipan
Marco:
that I think they will talk about it.
Marco:
It will be pushed very hard.
Marco:
It'll be celebrated as like, look at how great this is.
Marco:
Look at how much progress we have made and how much progress you all can make with your apps.
Marco:
That kind of thing.
Marco:
And a little wild card prediction here.
Marco:
I think they're actually going to call it Marzipan.
Marco:
Interesting.
John:
So a little faith in Apple's ability to come up with new names.
John:
They're like, well, just go with the codename.
John:
You're not going to come up with anything better.
John:
You'll probably just embarrass yourself.
John:
So just go with the Jaguar strategy.
John:
Yeah, no, I agree with Marco.
John:
It's going to be the biggest story.
John:
I think, you know, if all goes well, I feel like they're pitching it as this is the future of developing for Apple's platforms.
John:
Now, they can't lay out the whole plan now.
John:
They're not going to tell you their three-year plan.
John:
for it, but imagine a presentation where that's what Apple is thinking the entire time they're presenting it.
John:
It will probably mostly be presented about the story that I think my original discussion and take on Marzipan on the very first show where we talked about it is that
John:
There is an untapped resource of tons of really skilled developers who know UIKit.
John:
Now, you know, Apple's perspective, we can get them to develop for the Mac and the developer's perspective.
John:
Now I can target a new platform with skills that I already have.
John:
That is probably the main message that's going to be there.
John:
And Apple's apps, instead of them telling us what they've ported, will be, as they always are, demonstrations of what you can do, right?
John:
Apple tends not to lean heavily on the things that benefit it or, you know, like Apple being able to...
John:
Put all the wood behind the arrow and not have a split strategy internally is an incredibly important aspect of Marzipan.
John:
But they maybe will touch on that briefly, allude to it in a subtle way.
John:
Mostly they're going to be talking about what you, the developers, are now able to do.
John:
You have these skills.
John:
You have this knowledge.
John:
We have this great framework.
John:
These platforms used to be very different from each other from your perspective.
John:
Now they're much more similar.
John:
That's the story.
John:
Marzipan is the story of WWDC.
John:
Secondarily, unless you're for teaching the iOS stuff for the iPad, but the biggest developer story.
John:
It's the biggest developer story since Swift, basically.
John:
It's like Swift, then a bunch of other stuff happened, then Marzipan.
John:
i would say it's way bigger than swift way bigger yeah i think it's about even uh because like swift was presented the same way as in like they didn't present it as here's this cool experiment we're thinking about they presented it from day one as like this is the new language for apple's platforms and we forced all of our presenters to have swift on all their slides and people were like what you know and objectively but they forced everyone to have swift on all the slides and like they were faking it till they were making it like
John:
It was clear what they wanted to happen with Swift, but even on day zero, they were like, Swift, the future of development in Apple's platforms, whether you are ready for it or not and whether we're ready for it or not.
John:
And they have been executing on that strategy ever since.
John:
I think it is pretty big because not only is it a complete language change across all their platforms, but it was an entirely new language.
John:
It wasn't just like they switched to another language.
John:
So Swift is pretty big.
John:
and marzipan i mean depending on like the three-year pan may be bigger than swift but what they start out with now is uh i think it's an even footing you know marzipan swift is something that like swift is a developer tool it's a it's a fancy large-scale developer tool but it's a developer tool
Marco:
It can result in apps being built better or more efficiently or whatever, but it ultimately really only benefits developers.
Marco:
Marzipan is huge for developers in different ways than Swift.
Marco:
Marzipan changes major business realities for developers.
Marco:
That's, I think, a way larger type of change.
Marco:
It's not going to be an everyday kind of change, but it's merging markets together.
Marco:
That's a huge...
Marco:
business shift for developers but more importantly marzipan will have massive value to users like your users don't give a crap what language your app is written and they don't even usually know and they certainly don't care and like if i converted my entire app to swift over the next year
Marco:
Nobody would care.
Marco:
Nobody would notice.
Marco:
Nothing meaningful would be significantly better for my users.
Marco:
Whereas Marzipan is both a huge change for developers, and I think for the better, and also provides massive value, hopefully, to users.
Marco:
Because it'll bring all this amazing software from iOS much more easily to the Mac.
Marco:
And so the Mac will just have a lot more software than it's had before.
Marco:
That's huge for users.
Marco:
That's why I think this is way, way bigger than changing a language that is something that really only affects developers, and honestly, frankly, not even that much.
John:
I was judging them from the perspective of developers.
John:
This is a developer conference.
John:
There's lots of changes that have affected users in unexpected ways, but I think there's a disconnection between how much it affects users and how much it affects developers.
John:
You should think about the population of applications available for the Mac,
John:
with the mac os 10 transition and with the introduction of coco and with this sort of you know the the deprecation of carbon a lot of those changes have really affected the mac ecosystem just give one example the having app kit available and bringing over like the those next developers and the few people who got into you know the coco world and
John:
It seems like technologically it's not that big of a deal.
John:
And developer-wise, it's like, well, I'm not sure how this is going to go.
John:
But it was one of the sort of mini Mac OS X renaissances where all of a sudden we had a bunch of new applications that, you know, we knew them as like the new Cocoa applications or the...
John:
applications made by next developers or the omni stuff or net newswire like just a certain crop of applications made possible by an api that already existed and a language that already existed but if you were a mac user during that time if we like erased coco and you were a mac user during that time and you were forced to only use carbon applications you would have been sad and it would have been a very different era um but technologically speaking
John:
It's not like they introduced a major new thing.
John:
It wasn't like they invented a new language, an entire new API or whatever, whereas Marzipan is bringing an API that is entirely new to the Mac.
John:
UIKit had nothing to do with the Mac for the longest time.
John:
So I feel like it's a big technological change.
John:
How that affects users remains to be seen.
John:
They will get shovelware.
John:
There will be applications that don't behave like Mac applications.
Marco:
You have that now.
Marco:
You have shovelware and non-Mac-like applications today.
John:
Electron and stuff like that, right.
John:
But I feel like there's a disconnect.
John:
So when I'm judging the significance of events in terms of things that have been announced at WWDC, I'm judging it entirely from the perspective of...
John:
developers and the technical underpinnings of the application right so mac os 10 was a big change but the slow dominance of coco was not a thing they even announced to wwc it's just a thing that slowly happened but that had a huge effect on users so similarly i feel like yes of course marzipan is going to have a huge effect on on users but that's not why it's a big deal it's a big deal because it's the first step towards the unification of all of apple's platforms under a uh
John:
Not a single top-level framework, but much closer to a single top-level framework than we have ever been before.
John:
Because we got rid of Carbon, and Cocoa can be subsumed, absorbed by UIKit, and then it just becomes variants of UIKits across all of their platforms.
John:
That's the end state.
John:
And I feel like Swift is as big an announcement as that from the perspective of the developer.
John:
From the perspective of users...
John:
It's hard to tell.
John:
Obviously, Swift didn't affect them at all.
John:
Marzipan is going to affect them a lot.
John:
But lots of things have affected users a lot that have just not been that significant.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
If you want to sum up user and developer, I'll give it to Marzipan.
John:
But I still feel like Swift is a very big deal.
Marco:
All right, let me stop while I'm ahead.
Marco:
Thank you for our sponsors this week, ExpressVPN, JamfNow, and Mobilux.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week live at WBDC.
Casey:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Casey:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Casey:
It was accidental.
Casey:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
Marco:
We've heard a few of our friends, in particular Mike Hurley and Stephen Hackett over at the relay area.
Marco:
We have heard them mention a few times on recent podcasts that they are interested in buying the new Mac Pro and keeping it for 10 years and being able to upgrade it and everything and basically have the same computer upgraded slowly for 10 years.
John:
It's like they've never listened to this program.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so I wanted to both mention this to provide my skepticism for the reality of this and also to ask John as the owner and user of a 10-year-old computer to describe to them what this experience is like.
Marco:
My theory is that
Marco:
They would never make it anywhere near 10 years.
Marco:
Oh, God, no.
Marco:
Absolutely not.
Marco:
When you're holding on to an old computer, even if it's as upgradable as the old cheese graters were, which I don't think it will be.
Marco:
We mentioned earlier, we think the GPUs will probably be upgradable.
Marco:
The RAM will probably be upgradable.
Marco:
But the SSDs probably won't.
Marco:
CPUs probably won't, or at least only within the little narrow family of whatever CPUs were available at the time.
Marco:
You could put in another member of the same family, same generation, but not the next year's model.
Marco:
So CPUs are not that upgradable.
Marco:
RAM, yes.
Marco:
Discs, maybe.
Marco:
But also other stuff about it, like the speed of its ports, the type of its ports, either not upgradable at all, or only minimally upgradable, maybe later via PCI cards.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Uh, and so, and even that I think is optimistic for, for a new Mac pro.
Marco:
So the reality is like, if you use a 10 year old computer, you have not only like 10 year old performance, but you also have 10 year old limitations on like what kinds of things you can even plug into that computer and, and that kind of thing that doesn't tend to be upgradable very easily.
Marco:
Like for instance, like, you know, like if, even if you have the 2013 Mac pro, those are Thunderbolt,
Marco:
two or one ports on that two uh it is usb3 uh but it can't drive a display over a certain resolution and everything else if you have a cheese grater mac pro which is the actual 10 year old ones these days you have usb2 ports not usb3 unless you've added them via a pci card uh you have no thunderbolt at all right
John:
It's not on mine, that's for sure.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, like Thunderbolt never came to the cheese grater.
Marco:
I've got FireWire part of the front of mine.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, you have FireWire and USB, FireWire 800 and USB 2 is what you have for a 10-year-old computer.
Marco:
So, you know, I don't think the idea of somebody buying, like somebody like us who's like really into this kind of thing, buying a Mac Pro justifying it's probably very high price by saying it'll last us 10 years, I don't think that's realistic at all.
Marco:
But John, you are the one of us who has actually done this.
Marco:
So what do you think about this concept?
John:
Well, first of all, this is silly because it's going to be an arm transition probably.
John:
And there's no way in hell they're keeping a computer with the old CPU.
John:
It's like that's a degree of difficulty that didn't even I could get up to.
John:
And all these people always want to get new things anyway.
John:
But here's the thing, like especially for the Mac, it's not just about a computer for 10 years.
John:
It's about a like top of the line pro computer for 10 years.
John:
Top of the line pro computers have compromises.
John:
that makes sense when you first get them.
John:
They're big, they're hot, they have all sorts of ports and wires poking out of them and everything that you can convince yourself are the right compromises for you or that you're willing to live with because it's the biggest and baddest computer.
John:
But as it stops being the biggest and baddest computer, the desire to replace it with a Mac Mini or a 12-inch MacBook, all of which end up being faster than it,
John:
would be irresistible, let alone replacing it by what you really should have got anyway, which is an iMac Pro, which these people already have.
John:
So I don't think they would have the will to keep it.
John:
I don't think they should keep it.
John:
And there'll be so many much more tempting options as the thing ages.
John:
Even I wouldn't have kept this computer that long if I didn't have lots of mitigating factors, like my specific needs, but also the fact that my wife has a 5K iMac and I've had access to modern Macs.
John:
you won't be able to run the most recent OS.
John:
Forget about what you can plug into it.
John:
You won't even be able to run the most recent OS.
John:
I can't sync my notes to this computer anymore if the notes use features that aren't available in this version of notes.
John:
It stops being functional.
John:
Even if you stop upgrading the software on it, it stops working with all the rest of your stuff.
John:
So...
John:
There are so many reasons stacked against them that they won't do that.
John:
So if anyone is thinking of buying a computer and saying, well, I can justify the price because I'll use this for 10 years, you won't.
John:
The time to use a computer for 10 years was starting in 2008 like I did.
John:
This is the wrong time to use a Mac for 10 years.
John:
You're not going to make it.
Marco:
you barely made it yeah and and you had to do a lot of upgrades like like i think one thing that that held you over significantly was that during your 10 years the ssd revolution happened and that made a huge performance jump like you know a 10 year old computer had hard drives in it so like you know adding ssds that helped a lot you've also upgraded the gpu in that time you've upgraded the ram of course the discs like you know you've done a lot of upgrades over time some of which are factors that i don't think will be upgradable on the
John:
Yeah, and the thing is, like, the performance, and, you know, setting aside the SSD thing, like, we're on SSD now.
John:
Your 10-year-old computer performance-wise, that won't be your problem.
John:
Like, especially if parts of it are upgradable, but, like, even if it just never gets any faster, things are fast enough at the baseline that your 10-year-old Mac Pro...
John:
Performance is not the reason you want to abandon it.
John:
It will be because you can get better performance in a way smaller, lighter, cheaper, simpler, better, able to support modern.
John:
Like you'll be able to get a better computer for less money.
John:
So there'll be no reason to keep dealing with this behemoth.
John:
When you know you could just – it may even be the case, and, you know, market user experiences, it may even be the case that you'll be able to sell it to somebody if you sell it at the right time and buy a better computer with the money that you sold it for.
John:
Better for your needs, that it'll actually be faster.
John:
It won't have any of the expansion or weird esoteric features that you never used anyway, and it'll be way smaller and lighter and better and everything like that.
John:
so i don't think it's going to happen uh i like i like the idea that they're trying to convince themselves to buy a fancy computer a fancy mac i like the idea that they're thinking about you know how quickly they'll be able to denoise podcasts or work in final cut pro and all that is probably true but 10 years that you're not going to get 10 years of service out of that
John:
See, if it wasn't for the ARM transition, I would keep the computer, not for 10 years, but for a pretty long time, if and only if it was one of those computers that's a good one.
John:
So to give an example, my current Mac Pro, every time I come up to my Mac Pro that is over 10 years old and I hit the space bar, it wakes up.
John:
It always wakes up.
John:
And I don't reboot it.
John:
It just runs forever.
John:
It always works.
John:
It does exactly what it's going to do.
John:
That's a good one, right?
Yeah.
John:
If your computer occasionally, like my wife's 5K iMac, freaks out and has some kind of dialogue telling me to reenter my keychain password and nothing works and I have to reboot the thing to get it to work and I have no idea why it's causing it, no way in hell I'm keeping that computer for 10 years.
John:
If it's flaky, if all the laptops I've ever owned and you lift the lid and sometimes they don't wake up, or a kernel panics 3.5 times per month for inexplicable reasons, I'm not keeping that computer for 10 years.
John:
But if you find a good one, this is my philosophy, you find a computer that...
John:
you know it was really awesome when you bought it and it was super fast and you really loved it but now it's getting kind of long on the tooth but it continues to just work reliably like i i frequently look at the 5k i'm like i'm glad it's not my computer because my computer never does that stuff it just it just works and i don't know if it's a software problem i don't know if it's a hardware problem i've had computers that are like this computers that are not like this my power mac g5 was a little finicky right you know and i had a
John:
a quadra that was very solid even though it was a garbage computer uh i had an se 30 that was amazing my previous champion computer you know so if i find a good one i will keep it for a long time but the arm transition is going to stop even me from doing that because there's no way i'm going to be running like an intel mac six years into the arm transition i'm going to get rid of it and buy an arm replacement