No One Else Had Calipers
John:
It's real and it's spectacular.
Casey:
I should probably watch Seinfeld at some point, shouldn't I?
Casey:
No, you heard all the lines.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
I've effectively seen it from having heard all the lines.
Yeah.
Casey:
i can't decide if i want to like give you marco a chance to like talk about it and then do follow no he's not don't give marco a chance to talk about it that's the worst thing you can do don't worry marco will talk about it yeah fair fair fair all right so obviously we have some important things to talk about so let's just start by talking about the most important thing right at the top of the show the holiday store is still open ladies and gentlemen
Casey:
We've got to get through the important stuff first.
Casey:
Shameless plug.
Casey:
Of course, of course.
Casey:
This is how the professionals do it.
Casey:
So the ATP Holiday Store is still open.
Casey:
It will be for just a few more days.
Casey:
If you're one of those people who thinks, oh, I've still got time, I've still got time, you don't still have time.
Casey:
As this is being released, it is lucky number 13 of November.
Casey:
You have until the 17th, which is this upcoming Sunday, to do whatever purchasing you want to do so that you can make all your friends and family happy with their sweet new ATP t-shirts and other merch.
Casey:
So, ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
Please, if you're interested at all, please check it out.
Casey:
We have some great shirts, some great hoodies, a great hat, some great pins, all the great merch.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash store.
John:
Of course, you were kidding about the big announcement.
John:
Obviously, the big announcement today is the slightly more refined release date for the Mac Pro, which is now, say it with me, everybody, with make air quotes with your fingers when you say it.
John:
Ready?
John:
Mac Pro coming December.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
iOS 13.2.2.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
13.2.2 is now out.
Casey:
It's super important.
Casey:
Multitasking issue solved?
Casey:
I did not see the issues quite as badly as many, many, many other people did.
Casey:
But it seems that maybe this is better now.
Casey:
Marco, I think you were hitting this the most, both from a user and a developer perspective.
Casey:
How has 13.2.2 been for you?
Marco:
I actually was not hitting it much as a user, but I heard from all of them because my app is one of the apps that if it gets killed in the background, it has negative effects.
Marco:
The main issue people were seeing was that if it got killed in the background, that it would no longer be the active app if you were paused and then you hit play, then it would default to the music app or whatever.
Marco:
So I would hear from all those people about that.
Marco:
But yeah, so 13.2.2 was out and the volume of those complaints that I've gotten has dropped substantially.
Marco:
So it seems, and Apple specifically said they fixed multitasking issues with that.
Marco:
So it seems like they did.
Marco:
So I'm really happy that they got that out quickly because I was afraid I was going to have to wait until 13.3 was released and they got it out in a little point release.
Marco:
Any new issues?
Marco:
It seems like we have to ask that with every iOS 13 release.
John:
Anything new breaking your app?
Marco:
Not that I have heard about.
Casey:
Knock on wood, quickly, quickly.
Marco:
Oh man, I got some great news.
Marco:
They quietly fixed the AirPlay 2 bugs I was running into in 13.1.
Marco:
Well, that's very exciting.
Marco:
So I believe I now have what I need to build an AirPlay 2 engine.
Marco:
I kind of brought back out my code that I wrote back in May that I hit this huge roadblock of this bug and I just couldn't proceed.
Marco:
It works perfectly now.
Marco:
so that's excellent i'm very tentatively excited to finally build out my airplay 2 and voice boost 2 engines so that's it i have uh actually some promise in overcast development land for the first time in months that's very exciting if only you had a computer with which you could take to the beach and do it on oh my god oh my god oh my god i'm so excited wouldn't that be nice i'm so excited before we get too excited and talk about happy things i need to be a debbie downer for oh
Casey:
I know, I'm sorry.
Casey:
I would like to know, and this probably sounds sarcastic, but I really mean it.
Casey:
I would like to know if people, probably not you guys, because I would have heard about it, but people in general have had a similar problem to me.
Casey:
So on my beloved iMac, which is convincing me in ever different ways with each passing day, why I need to replace it would be that as it may.
Casey:
When I upgraded to Catalina a little over a week ago, it was after my Walt Disney World trip.
Casey:
I got home and I was home for a
Casey:
I haven't heard of many issues after the first few days.
Casey:
So, well, yeah, why don't I go ahead and upgrade?
Casey:
And I upgraded in place on the Mojave install I had only done but like two or three weeks prior.
Casey:
And since then, intermittently...
Casey:
I have been having the weirdest issues with my iMac.
Casey:
And I think it's software for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it happened after I went to Catalina, as the best I can tell.
Casey:
But the behavior I'm seeing, the symptom I'm seeing, is that often, but not always...
Casey:
I will have extreme lag with my mouse.
Casey:
Now, this is applicable with my magic mouse.
Casey:
It's applicable with my magic touchpad or trackpad, whatever the heck it's called.
Casey:
But what's most interesting is this magic trackpad, it does the faux clicks, you know what I mean, like they have for the last few years, where the click is just something that's firing internally.
Casey:
It's like a taptic engine or what have you.
Casey:
It's not a physical click of the glass.
Casey:
Well, what I've had happen to me on numerous times, which is both hilarious and also depressing, is I'll go mousing around and try to click and click and then click and click, click, click, wondering if like anything is happening behind the scenes.
Casey:
And then I'll realize what's happening and I'll wait for like, I don't know, two to five seconds.
Casey:
And then I'll give you one guess what this magic trackpad finally decides to start doing.
Casey:
So what I'm doing is I'm mashing on glass that's not moving.
Casey:
There's no click whatsoever.
Casey:
Mash, mash, mash, mash, mash, mash, mash.
Casey:
And then I wait three or four seconds and it's like a frigging machine gun is attached to my desk and it goes and fires all those clicks that had been queuing up in the background.
Casey:
So I am the only person I'm aware of that has had these sorts of problems.
Casey:
And I was kind of hoping that a Catalina update would come soon, since all these updates seem to be happening on an hourly basis, and it would magically make my problems go away.
Casey:
But I'm almost wondering, especially since this build, this OS installation is only a few weeks old now, and I've done so many OS reinstallations over the last two months, I'm getting really good at it.
Casey:
It's like Windows all over again.
Casey:
I almost wonder if I should wipe the iMac and bring it back to Mojave for a more extended length of time and see if that fixes the problem.
Casey:
But this is more for the audience than it is for the two of you guys.
Casey:
But since you're here, any thoughts, advice, input, anything?
Marco:
This sounds like it's like a firmware level type issue.
Marco:
Because the fact that the trackpad was not responding with the physical click sensation, I don't even think that... That probably doesn't even get to the OS.
John:
like i i'm guessing this is a lower level issue normally i would i would love to throw you know apple's recent software releases under the bus here but your iMac has been weird for a while so i think it's probably your iMac it could be john thoughts i have not seen that one before and i have the same question as marco exactly where i don't know what the input path is you know what thing decides to fire the little engine does it go all the way back to the computer my guess would have been the opposite to marco that it goes all the way back to the computer but i think it does too i don't actually know though so i you got me
Casey:
I don't know either, but the reason I think it goes back to the computer is because, you know, when you do like a force click, that occasionally makes a difference.
Casey:
Occasionally it doesn't, I believe.
Marco:
Well, first of all, you should have force click disabled.
Marco:
Second of all, I don't think it does go back to the computer because you can click it before it has paired via Bluetooth.
Casey:
interesting okay okay I'll allow it that is interesting I hadn't considered that huh well it's worth it's worth keeping an eye out so anyway so if you have had or heard about anything like this please do tweet at me I'd be curious to hear or if you happen to be like a Mac technical specialist person then and you have a magical fix I'd love to hear it because I'm very confused and I'm even though it's become fairly quick for me to reload this OS from scratch I'd rather not so do let me know please
John:
Well, the good thing is, if you need to take that thing to the Apple Store, it's way easier to carry than your iMac.
Casey:
I'm talking about my iMac, not my MacBook.
John:
No, the trackpad.
Casey:
Oh!
Casey:
No, it's happening with, like, all input, with, like, keyboard input.
John:
I mean, but we were just talking about the trackpad of firing off the series of clicks or whatever.
John:
I understand that the lag is happening.
John:
When do you ever get to, like, you know, you've got those freaking things in your menu bar showing you, are the CPUs pegged?
John:
Like, do you have an activity monitor open of, you know...
Casey:
I understand what you're saying.
Casey:
I have not noticed anything.
Casey:
But I should also mention, I don't think I stated this earlier, that the mouse cursor itself will also refresh at like a couple of hertz, you know, as opposed to like a full 68 hertz or whatever the normal is.
Casey:
It's going like, you know, it'll start to slow down and then it'll jump halfway across the screen, jump back halfway across the screen.
Casey:
And it is clearly in reaction to the mousing that I'm doing, but it's doing so at such a horrendous refresh rate and just with incredible latency.
Casey:
And so I'm kind of really confused why this would be happening.
Casey:
And my gut tells me it's software based on almost zero facts and in no small part because I really just don't want to replace the iMac yet.
Casey:
I just want an iMac Pro refresh and then I'll probably pull the trigger.
John:
Because it's your iMac, I keep thinking, like, one of the things that can cause, that historically on Macs has caused, you know, things like stutter of cursors is getting swamped with I.O.
John:
or other I.O.-related issues or errors.
John:
Agreed.
John:
Agreed.
John:
That is what it feels like.
John:
And, you know, shouldn't really happen in normal circumstances, but if your SSD is throwing errors or something, or if there's some process grinding away at it or something, I don't know.
Casey:
That's a good point.
Casey:
I didn't think about my SSD.
John:
Mac's haunted.
Casey:
Yeah, it is haunted.
Yeah.
John:
You don't even know that meme because you don't play video games.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I'll keep an eye out.
Casey:
Maybe I'll do some disk utility repairs and then cry when it tells me they're all wrong.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I guess we should probably move on to the main topic.
Casey:
And Marco had talked about how he didn't want to talk about the Apple card.
Casey:
So should we talk about that first?
John:
We should not.
John:
God.
Casey:
I'm kidding.
Casey:
I'm kidding.
Casey:
You're killing me.
Casey:
So, Marco, I guess we should talk about where you went and what you did and what you have in your possession.
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:
So I have finally the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
It's real.
Marco:
It's so awesome.
Marco:
I don't even know where to start.
Marco:
All right, so Apple was holding briefings.
Marco:
I attended one of these briefings, and I have a review unit here.
Marco:
And it is... I've had it for... As we record this, I've had it for about half a day.
Marco:
Consider this initial impressions.
Marco:
First impressions after half day use.
Marco:
There was a presentation that was fully on the record done by Shruti Haldia, who is the MacBook Pro product manager.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
And it was kind of like a little keynote for groups of journalists.
Marco:
And it was, I got to say, it was really well done.
Marco:
It's almost, I kind of think it's a shame that they didn't do this publicly because if they would have done this presentation publicly, it would have gotten such massive applause.
Marco:
for the things that it addressed and how it addressed them.
Marco:
I think this is a really big deal.
Marco:
So I just wanted to quickly throw out there, Shruti Haldir did a really good job presenting it.
Marco:
They started out, she said that they asked, what do pro customers want?
Marco:
People who buy the 15-inch MacBook Pro, which is their most popular pro product, which I'm not surprised to hear that, but that's good to know.
Marco:
So she said people want
Marco:
a larger display, fast performance, the biggest battery possible, quote, the best notebook keyboard ever, massive amounts of storage, and an awesome sound system.
Marco:
And, of course, then went through, and she went through each of those points, and just how they delivered on that with the 16-inch.
Marco:
Almost everything, I believe, that was rumored about this machine ended up being true.
Marco:
And that's a very good thing.
Marco:
So, start out, obviously, the screen,
Marco:
It is 16 inches.
Marco:
Now, the last one, I believe, was 15.4, so it's not like a whole inch increase.
Marco:
You do notice it.
Marco:
It seems bigger.
Marco:
The margins seem slimmer.
Marco:
The footprint of the machine has only grown a little tiny bit, like barely grown at all.
Marco:
And the weight is up from 4.0 to 4.3 pounds.
Marco:
It's got like a millimeter thicker...
Marco:
But if you're looking at this thing on a table, they had a hands-on afterwards, and they had it next to their older machines also, as you compare.
Marco:
At a glance, it just looks like a 15-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
And you start using it, and you pick it up, and it just feels like a 15-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
This doesn't feel like a bigger machine, even though it technically is a little bit bigger.
Marco:
But it kind of looks and feels just like the size we've had for a while now.
Marco:
And in fact, there were parts where I was looking at different ones on the table, and I had to look at the...
Marco:
inverted t arrow keys oh yeah i had to look at the arrow keys to know whether it was this model or not in some cases like that's how similar the overall package looks to what we've had did they tell you where the 0.3 pounds went obviously they shaved a little weight making those arrow keys smaller and the
John:
And the screen, I mean, the screen is a little bit bigger, but the glass is the same size, right?
John:
So 0.3 pounds, I'm hoping it all went into battery, but did they make that pitch?
John:
They did.
Marco:
So the 2015 generation, that one, the battery size slowly increased on that one.
Marco:
The actual model year 2015, which I consider the best one ever, that had a 99.5 watt hour battery.
Marco:
And actually, they described this in the presentation that the FAA in the U.S.
Marco:
limits the size of carry-on batteries for planes to 100 watt-hours.
Marco:
They were at 99.5.
Marco:
They went almost right up to that and didn't cross that because if you have a battery that big, you've got to check it in your bag.
Marco:
Nobody wants to check their laptop.
Marco:
The previous generation, the 2016, you know, the first touch bar generation actually dropped the battery capacity down to somewhere around like 80 or 76, something like that.
Marco:
And I think they've tweaked it a little bit over time here, like in the revision since then.
Marco:
So the previous one was 84 watt hour.
Marco:
The 2019 revision, 84 watt hour.
Marco:
they have now brought it back up to exactly a hundred.
Marco:
So they said it was, they said it's the largest battery ever in a Mac notebook, which is true by 0.5 watt hours, but it's true.
Marco:
Um, so that I, I would say, you know, that seems like where most of the weight has gone, like to, to go to, to,
Marco:
increase the battery size by whatever that is, about 20%.
Marco:
That's probably where most batteries are really heavy.
Marco:
The quota battery life, I haven't had time to really get an idea of how good the battery life is.
Marco:
The quota battery life has gone from 10 to 11 hours.
Casey:
It cranked it to 11.
Marco:
yeah and like the processors are all the same that we got earlier this year like the intel hasn't released new cpus yet so the cpus are all the same ones the the six and eight core uh i7 and i9s the ninth generation ones um the gpus are new uh i don't know anything about gpus so i can't really tell you but the gpus are new the radon pro uh 5000m series uh seven nanometers they have a lot of really cool sounding specs that i can't really describe why they're good uh so they're new and that's that's good yeah
John:
do you know if the previous gpus were also seven nanometer or did they make a pitch for these gpus being more power efficient you know i don't know i mean it's a new series of gpus from ati or amds rather uh so i don't i don't really know if like how much better because i don't follow gpus i don't follow that world at all i'm also just thinking like how much is it going to eat your battery and you mentioned seven nanometers i don't recall if the last ones were seven so if these are seven that bodes well for battery life
Marco:
yeah I mean they might have been but like I mean it is it is pretty good like again like we've talked before about like trying to update individual components rather than like waiting as things age and they've done that with GPUs like they there was like we forgot like there was a 15 inch and 13 inch update in what was that about May that they did the update before so like there was already an update like six months ago to these machines so this is same CPUs new GPUs and again it's only because it's Intel's fault that they don't have new CPUs as well
Marco:
I would guess the battery life is, you know, you have the same CPU, probably a similar power envelope GPU, and a 20%-ish bigger battery.
Marco:
So that's probably where that comes from.
Marco:
The power adapter is up to 96 watts instead of 87 watts.
Marco:
Same size, though.
Casey:
That's a little annoying.
Casey:
It's only annoying in the most ridiculous way.
Casey:
When I bought a second power adapter for my MacBook, I got the biggest USB-C power adapter I could, the one for like the 15-inch at the time, thinking, oh, maybe one day I will have a big boy again, and I don't want to have to basically throw away my existing power supply.
Casey:
You don't.
Marco:
you don't have to well it's you know what i mean that's only for like develop for like delivering like maximum peak power if you're like if you're like rendering a video at final cut like that's when you need all that power when you're sitting around like doing even doing coding like like i i i will almost always be traveling with a power brick that's from some third party that is small and light that is nowhere near the full like previously my previous laptop was 60 watts and i would travel with a 45 watt brick because it was super small and it was fine
Marco:
And you hardly ever actually need that peak power.
Marco:
So if it's your secondary one or your travel one or whatever, as long as you're not rendering Final Cut or playing high-end games, you don't need all that power all the time.
Marco:
You could get away easily with one of these machines, probably with a 60-watt adapter most of the time, and you'd be fine.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's fair.
Casey:
But you also forget that I write exclusively in Swift.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Fair point.
Casey:
No, I mean, all kidding aside, though, that it is it is pretty nice that they have put so much power into like battery and electricity power.
Casey:
We will talk about, you know, whether or not it's a fast processor and so on.
Casey:
But.
Casey:
But it is nice to see all that power and to see the battery life is such a big priority.
Casey:
And to the point that they're willing to make something heavier, which, as we discussed a couple of months ago, I can think around iPhone time, we had all kind of thought that things never got bigger and never got heavier.
Casey:
And this computer is both bigger and heavier.
Casey:
And I think for good reason.
Casey:
So that's kind of exciting.
Marco:
I think so far, again, it's been not that much time yet, but I think they spent that additional budget well.
Marco:
It's always a trade-off.
Marco:
Everybody wants them to be thin and light, and everyone complains like crazy that their laptops are too heavy, even though they'll put a four-pound laptop into an otherwise 16-pound bag that has all sorts of crap they don't need to carry, and they're like, this laptop's too heavy.
Marco:
It's like, no, that's not the problem.
Marco:
Empty your bag.
Marco:
Anyway, or you're an adult.
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
These things just be 10 pounds.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
But anyway, so before I leave the CPU area, they've also changed or they've improved the thermal architecture.
Marco:
So they've made the heat sink bigger, redesigned the heat pipe, made the fans bigger and higher capacity and 20% better blades and all sorts of stuff.
Marco:
So they said that they have raised the sustained workload heat output level by 12 watts.
Marco:
of how much the thermal system can cool, it's now 12 watts higher.
Marco:
I wasn't able to find out what it was before, but I would estimate that before it was probably somewhere around maybe 80, 90 watts, something like that.
Marco:
So to be a little bit higher than that is pretty good.
John:
A real-time follow-up on the GPU...
John:
As far as I can tell, in 20 seconds of Googling, the previous GPUs were 14 nanometers.
John:
So these being seven, bodes well for power.
John:
And I like the fact that the cooling is upgraded, because that's what I was talking about a couple shows ago.
John:
The iMac Pro-ification of this thing in one respect, in terms of, on the outside it looks the same, and it's got the same CPU, and an updated GPU, but the experience of using it.
John:
How often are the things screaming?
John:
How often are the CPUs throttling?
John:
I'm not sure if you had a chance to test that, but I'm sure people will, like...
John:
This is the upgraded sort of pro experience.
John:
Even if the CPU is exactly the same, if it is quieter and cooler and can run heavier loads and has a bigger battery, that is a pro experience.
Marco:
Yeah, and I haven't spent really any time with the 2019 previous 15-inch models, like the ones that went 6 and 8 core.
Marco:
I spent very little time with those, and so I don't really know how much the fans spun up on those.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
So far in my testing of this so far, which again, admittedly is not like super heavy, but I've, I've, I've heard the fans here and there as I, as I really push it or as Dropbox runs, it seems so far to be very similar to the previous ones, maybe a little bit more tame in the fan noise department.
Marco:
So like I haven't heard the fans very loudly and I haven't heard them for very long.
Marco:
And that includes doing things like my overcast build test, which is like, you know, max out the CPUs for about a minute.
Marco:
And it was barely registering for that.
Marco:
So I think anytime you heard the fans on a recent MacBook Pro, you will probably hear them here too, but maybe a little bit quieter and for a little bit less time.
Marco:
Before I leave the performance area, I will say I did that test.
Marco:
And again, these are the same CPUs we've had for six months, but I didn't have one.
Marco:
So this was the maxed out 2.4 gigahertz i9 8-core.
Marco:
And it builds overcast almost exactly as fast as my 10-core iMac Pro.
Marco:
Wow!
Marco:
Because the CPUs are, I believe, one or two microarchitecture generations ahead of the Xeons and the iMac Pro currently.
Marco:
So, again, this has been the case for a little while now with these laptops.
Marco:
But truly, what they've made here performance-wise is in very many ways like a mini iMac Pro.
Marco:
Or like a mini Mac Pro.
Marco:
And in fact, they did a lot of demos where they would do something on a new Mac Pro and then do something very similar on the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
They had a million of these Pro Display XDRs in the demo rooms and everything.
Marco:
It was very similar to that hands-on area at WBDC this year.
Marco:
There's just Mac Pros and Pro Display XDRs everywhere and people doing really cool stuff that I will never do on them.
Marco:
Not a single person had a three-track podcast project in Logic open.
Marco:
Everyone's like, here's a 200-track orchestral composition by professionals.
Marco:
And I'm like, all right, how is this going to run denoising my air conditioner out of a recording?
John:
Did any of them get that?
John:
I don't know the exact wording.
John:
You'll have to insert this for me.
John:
The system busier disk too slow dialogue from Logic.
John:
That would be great.
John:
I did not see that dialogue once.
John:
Question for, you said that they had MacBook Pros hooked up to Cinema Display XDRs.
John:
Pro Display XDRs.
John:
Do we know if they can drive that at the full native res?
John:
Full native res and they can drive two of them.
Marco:
wow is that new for the is that new for like the 2019s or new for the 16 inch uh i don't know that offhand i don't know but but yeah they can they can drive two of them at full res and they i saw many of them that did and of course in addition to their built-in display doing its own resolution so yeah it was it was quite impressive
Marco:
There were some times during some of the demos where I did hear the fans spin up because they were totally understandable.
Marco:
They were running like Maya and stuff.
Marco:
It sounded very similar to the way they've always sounded when they're pushing the GPU and CPU really hard.
Marco:
I would say fan noise, don't expect significant differences.
Marco:
It's a little bit better just because it has more capacity.
Marco:
Otherwise, it's fairly similar in that area.
Marco:
We'll get to the keyboard in a minute.
Marco:
I swear.
Marco:
I want to not cut the other stuff because I have a lot to say about the keyboard.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Yeah, surprisingly.
Marco:
Let's see what else.
Marco:
So the SSD, I believe it's roughly the same performance, but there's now an 8 terabyte option.
Casey:
That's bananas.
Casey:
That's bananas.
Marco:
Well, if you're going to buy your two XDR displays, you have to get the 8 terabyte model just to match the price.
Marco:
And they've raised the RAM ceiling to 64 gigs.
Marco:
That's nice.
Marco:
One of the big complaints about the 2016 Touch Bar Laptop Generation was that
Marco:
That RAM ceiling, I believe it was 16 in the 2016 generation, right?
Marco:
Yeah, it was 16 for a while.
Marco:
It was ridiculous.
Marco:
And pros were just like, I can't fit my stuff in 16.
Marco:
And so that was a big point of contention.
Marco:
And over the last few revisions, they have raised that to 32 at some point.
Marco:
But still, anytime you can raise that, you...
Marco:
you raise the limit of what people can do with these things and, and who needs a desktop and who needs a laptop.
Marco:
And so to have, you know, eight terabyte SSD and up to 64 gigs of Ram as options, I know they're going to cost probably a fortune at the time of this recording.
Marco:
I don't know how much they cost, uh, that, that, that was not disclosed yet.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's, it really is like, it's like a, you know, a mini iMac pro and I'm, I'm very happy about that because,
Marco:
The fact is we've had really good laptop performance for a while now.
Marco:
Not only did the SSD revolution kind of usher that in, but also as Intel has been terrible at delivering on their new process nodes, they've been upping the core counts and really refining the microarchitecture or their CPUs and everything.
Marco:
So the processor performance and the disk performance and GPUs have gotten so good that...
Marco:
If it weren't for the stupid butterfly keyboard, I would have loved to do lots of work on laptops for all these years, but I haven't because of that.
Marco:
Before I get to that, the last major area that they wanted to touch on, which I think is worthy of it, is the audio subsystem.
Marco:
So they've upgraded both the speakers and the microphones.
Marco:
And this is, you know, not only as an audio nerd, like this is cool, but it's also just cool as like, as like a Mac fan, they don't really touch the speakers or microphones in ways that are announced.
Marco:
very often, like you get an, you get an upgrade like every five years, maybe where they'll say, Oh, we've also changed the microphones.
Marco:
Now there's two of them or whatever.
Marco:
Typically microphones that are built into anything are terrible and they're like not usable.
Marco:
And so one of the most common tragedies in podcast recording is when somebody like Casey accidentally uses their built-in mic.
Marco:
Maybe in Skype they had their real mic sliced, but in the recording app they were using to record their track, maybe they accidentally had their built-in mic selected.
Marco:
Hypothetically.
Marco:
Yeah, hypothetically.
Marco:
It happens all the time with podcasts, especially podcasts that have guests that aren't necessarily doing this a lot.
Marco:
You'll hear their built-in mic and they sound like they're talking at the bottom of a well and you'll hear their pets and their neighbors and lawnmowers and you'll hear everything and they sound distant and echoey and it's terrible.
Marco:
Apple has actually really improved the built-in microphone, which I didn't think that was something that was ever going to be done.
Marco:
It's like whenever they touch audio, it's kind of like when they make the screens better.
Marco:
No one was asking for that.
Marco:
but once you have it you're like oh my god this is amazing how do we ever do without this you know like no one no one ever really asks to be to have these areas pushed forward they just you know occasionally somebody does it and then it like sets this new standard you're like oh my god like and and in the in the in the realm of audio
Marco:
Apple has really kicked butt in recent years with their audio engineering like the built-in speakers.
Marco:
I remember I think what what kicked off for me was the first iPad Pro where it had those that had the four speaker array and the iPad Pro at that time not only sounded like almost unbelievably good for a tablet that was like sitting on a table, but it embarrassed all their laptops.
Marco:
And one of the ways that the touch bar generation kind of painfully embarrassed my beloved 2015 generation was that they made the speakers a bit better.
Marco:
And now in the 16-inch, these speakers are a lot better.
Marco:
And the microphones are a lot better.
Marco:
In fact, so I will I'll drop in here a clip of me testing the microphone.
Marco:
And so this is I'm sitting at the same desk using, you know, from the same position that I'm talking to you now through my like big desktop mic.
Marco:
This isn't going to replace a studio microphone.
Marco:
But if you are somewhere where this is all you have or if you accidentally record your built in mic for a podcast, it's now way better.
Marco:
So here here's that clip.
Marco:
So this is me at the built-in mic.
Marco:
It's just on my desk.
Marco:
I'm sitting in front of it, like at regular desk height, so I'm probably about, I don't know, a foot and a half away from it, something like that.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know how this sounds yet.
Marco:
I'm going to listen back to it, but I think it's going to probably sound pretty good.
Casey:
That sounded incredible.
Casey:
Like, it doesn't replace your big, fancy mic, just like you said, but...
Casey:
When somebody like me screws up and records from the onboard mic, that would sound passable.
Casey:
Now, the only thing is you didn't like type or click or anything as you were recording that.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So I kind of wonder how bad that interference would be.
Casey:
But from the clip that you sent and played from the clip that you played, it sounded good.
Casey:
It sounded surprisingly good.
Marco:
The only thing that it really doesn't compete on is that your mouth is physically more distant from the mics.
Marco:
The mics are over there by the escape key.
Marco:
The escape key!
Marco:
Oh my god!
Marco:
We'll get there.
Marco:
Normally, when you're using a studio mic for a good podcasting, the mic is a couple inches from your mouth.
Marco:
When you're using something that's built into the laptop, it's a foot and a half from your mouth.
Marco:
No matter, like, I've had lots of really nice high-end microphones, all different price points.
Marco:
None of them sound good when they're far away.
Marco:
You have to have proximity to the person to really make it sound good.
Marco:
And so considering how far it is from my mouth, it sounds really good.
Marco:
Like, I don't think there's any other mic I could put at that distance and have it sound that good that's below maybe $1,000.
Casey:
I don't know, man.
Casey:
I've spent a lot of money on this microphone, and you'll notice this.
Casey:
problems whatsoever.
Casey:
It sounds just great.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
No, that actually is very impressive.
Marco:
Yeah, and then the speakers are also really, really good.
Marco:
I mean, this is something you kind of have to experience it to hear.
Marco:
I can't really play it for you in a useful way, but when I went to the beach for my last work trip where I brought the iMac Pro...
Marco:
uh i didn't bring any speakers on that trip i i just figured i'd wear headphones and so i just brought a pair of headphones and my iMac pro before i plugged the headphones in i said i decided let me try the built-in speakers on the iMac pro which i'd like never heard because i don't use them at home and the built-in speakers of my iMac pro filled the room this was like a big living room in this rental it filled the room it was amazing i didn't i never used the headphones the whole trip i just listened to music from my built-in speakers of my iMac pro
Marco:
And the new MacBook Pro is almost that good.
Marco:
It can't quite fill the room that well because it's a lot smaller.
Marco:
But it's almost that good.
Marco:
It's surprising how good music sounds.
Marco:
The only weird little niggle about it is that if I'm waving my hands around above the laptop as I'm using the laptop, if I hover my hand so that it partially covers the path between one of the speakers and my ear...
Marco:
I can hear the difference.
Marco:
The music sounds noticeably worse because my hand is blocking it from getting all the way unobstructed to my ear.
Marco:
In a way, it's a little bit weird.
Marco:
I'm sure I get used to that.
Marco:
When you're not waving your hand over the speaker, it really sounds very good.
Marco:
It goes very loud, surprisingly loud.
Marco:
Every other laptop, you play music from the built-in speakers and it sounds like built-in speakers.
Marco:
It sounds terrible.
Marco:
You can tell this is not a high priority for any other manufacturer because
Marco:
nobody cares about how good their built-in speakers are and people don't care and the manufacturers don't care well you know what apple cares and sometimes when i need it i care huge upgrade in the quality of the speakers even from even from the 2016 generation which itself was a huge upgrade over the 2015 generation so i am very pleased with speakers and the microphones like as good as a built-in mic i've ever heard yeah
Marco:
So it's still a built-in mic, but it's surprisingly good for what it is and where it is.
John:
I wonder if any of those monster PC gaming laptops might have good speakers.
John:
Have you tried TIFFs to see if they're so big and so... Yeah, they're crappy.
Marco:
It's simple as that.
Marco:
I mean, I don't think this is like a huge downside because most people don't use their built-in speakers that much.
Marco:
But when you do use them, you want them to sound good.
Marco:
And until now, I just thought it was impossible.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I just assumed built-in speakers will always sound terrible, just like until the AirPods Pro.
Marco:
I thought, well, earbuds will always sound like crap.
Marco:
But yeah, it turns out you can make things sound good, and that's pretty cool.
Marco:
And Apple has.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by HelloFresh.
Marco:
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Marco:
And there is something for everyone with HelloFresh's wide selection of plans to choose from.
Marco:
They currently have classic veggie for vegetarians and family plans for more family-friendly dishes.
Marco:
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Marco:
you can look forward to your hello fresh delivery knowing that dinner just got that much easier i know i use i've used hello fresh before and it is great because you don't have to decide what to cook every night that's that's something like as an adult i just get tired of deciding and they can decide for you and their meals are really good they're really easy to make all the ingredients come pre-measured in labeled meal kits you know which ingredients go with which recipe and it's all delivered right to you you don't have to shop or anything
Marco:
It brings you exactly as much as you need and not a bunch of excess of certain fresh ingredients that would go bad really fast.
Marco:
You can feel confident when cooking them too because they give you simple recipes outlined on pictured step-by-step instruction cards.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That's HelloFresh.com with special code ATP30.
Marco:
Thank you so much to HelloFresh for sponsoring our show.
John:
Before you move on to the keyboard, one thing we skipped over is the screen.
John:
We know it's 16-inch.
John:
It's a little bit bigger than it was before, but what more can you tell me about it?
John:
It's changed in other ways, has it not?
Marco:
So it is the same brightness, 500 nits.
Marco:
It's still P3 wide color.
Marco:
It's higher resolution.
Marco:
It's a little bit higher DPI.
Marco:
It's 226 PPI now.
Marco:
I forget what the other one was, but it's like a slightly more dense screen, but not to the point where if you were using the scaling mode before or the native...
Marco:
Whatever step you had the sizing on, you're probably going to use that same step on this one.
Marco:
You're mostly just getting the additional real estate, not getting a huge density increase.
Marco:
There's a small one, but not a big one.
Marco:
For the most part, I kind of stopped noticing the screen.
Marco:
It's vast, especially because I'm coming most recently from a 13-inch.
Marco:
So it is significantly larger than what I'm used to using.
Marco:
And there's tons of space, but it is...
Marco:
quality-wise, I think it's very similar to what we had before.
Marco:
And unfortunately, one of my nitpicks with the previous generation was that they use these scaling modes by default, that the native 2x pixels of the panel is one step down, or I guess one step up in size from how they ship it.
Marco:
So they ship it in a mode that simulates a higher resolution than the actual 2x of the panel is.
Marco:
And you have to make everything one step larger to be the actual 2X pixels.
Marco:
Now, I actually usually run my Retina MacBook Pros as the native setting, even though it makes everything a little bit bigger.
Marco:
I get a little bit less screen space for it.
Marco:
I actually prefer how it looks at that size most of the time, unless I'm doing something, unless I'm doing like heavy coding and I'll step it down.
Marco:
But usually I run it at the real native setting.
Marco:
But anyway, this doesn't change what they have.
Marco:
It's still shipped by default in a scaling mode.
Marco:
So it's still,
Marco:
very slightly blurry at its default settings.
Marco:
And if you want it to be sharper, you have to lose screen real estate.
Marco:
And so again, that's a trade-off I make because I like how things look at that size.
Marco:
But, you know, it's unchanged.
Marco:
This is one of those things, and I'll get to a lot of these later because there's a lot about this laptop that's unchanged.
Marco:
It's one of those things that...
Marco:
It's a trade-off.
Marco:
I know it's a trade-off.
Marco:
I know there's battery life costs, there's panel actual money costs of the panels, the battery life of driving all the extra pixels that would require to have the panel be the higher resolution to actually be true 2x of its default setting.
Marco:
So I get all that.
Marco:
they made the decision to leave it this way and so i'm ambivalent towards that like i wish i wish they would up that i think it's a waste to have such great panels in all these other ways and then to have them scaled by default and slightly blurry on even their highest end notebooks that have all this other work put into the displays i think that's i think that's a shame but it's a trade-off and they're they're continuing to make the same trade-off so i'll keep pushing for it and hopefully someday they'll change their mind on that
John:
It's incongruous with 32 gigs of RAM and an 8-terabyte SSD.
John:
That is the most glaring thing.
John:
Obviously, maybe don't make it at the default.
John:
It's expensive.
John:
It uses more battery.
John:
It costs more, right?
John:
But the fact that you could spec this thing up so high and still you can't get a high-res screen, let people make that trade-off.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Which they used to do.
Marco:
Before Retina, that was an option.
Marco:
It was a very inexpensive option to upgrade from the 1440 to the 1680 screen.
Marco:
It was like $200.
Marco:
And it was great.
Marco:
And I think, you know, 64 gigs of RAM, that uses a lot of battery too.
Marco:
RAM uses battery.
Marco:
I have a feeling, I wonder...
John:
would it use the same amount of battery as 64 gigs of ram would yeah i don't know what the comparison is but like for those applications as you said that you were they were showing you where it's hooked up to these two big displays and it's doing this fancy stuff and the fans are spinning those are plugged in anyway right like that's that's the use case for people people who need this and know they need it make it an expensive option just like the eight terabyte ssd it's not going to it's not going to detract from the reputation of the laptop as having good battery life because only the people who really want that
John:
you know option will choose it right so but it it's it's hanging right there for them like we'll get to more of this later and we start summing up but this is part of the iMac pro or mac proification of laptop that apple continues to choose not to pick up they have they have not like they did it in the ram they did it in the ssd they're not doing it in the physical attributes of the uh the laptop like the screen
Marco:
Oh, and they've also now done a... You can now set different refresh rates on the LCD panel, the built-in one, and they now... I don't know enough to tell you why these matter, but they now have certain fractional refresh rates that are not exactly 60 hertz.
Marco:
There's like 48 or whatever for certain video production uses.
Marco:
You want your...
Marco:
your frame rate of your monitor to be an even multiple of the frame rate of whatever video you're looking at as you're editing it or something like that again this is not an area of my expertise but they now have different refresh rates that you can set in display settings so that's pretty cool for people who need it and
John:
all these refresh rates are lower than 60 so it's not like there's 120 or anything like that it's all like fractions step down from 60 now this is interesting to me because like they're apple's not behind but like there's there are more places apple can go with this that would actually benefit them one of them obviously is 120 hertz like with the pro uh what they call promotion display on the
John:
iPad Pro and everything, that might provide a nicer experience and give you more options on a laptop.
John:
But really what is waiting for them there is variable refresh.
John:
And that's something that has come in with – there's a bunch of gaming applications for that where the GPU is synced with the refresh rate of the monitor to exactly –
John:
to not have the monitor syncing at 60 frames per second, regardless of what the GPU is able to produce to try to get them more in sync, and in things like the watch, to save power, which is very relevant to laptops.
John:
So this is like their first foray into maybe having adjustable refresh rate, like manually adjustable, right, for the purposes of video.
John:
But I have to think that at some point in the semi-near future, say, the next generation of these laptops, which could mean three years or whatever,
John:
variable refresh rate is right there both to save energy and for potential gaming ar applications and then also the ability to adjust to various frame rates especially if like high frame rate video becomes a thing like if you're trying to edit 120 frame per second video for some hollywood movie on your laptop you can't really do that that well on a 60 frame per second uh display so i'm looking forward to changes in that area i didn't expect them i didn't in fact i didn't expect this uh variable refresh rate but i think
John:
It is very relevant to laptops, and I hope Apple jumps on board soon.
John:
Yeah, and to clarify, this is not variable refresh rate.
Marco:
It's just different settings that you can set globally.
John:
Yeah, you manually pick it from a pop-up menu.
John:
It's not a thing that's adjusting itself.
Marco:
Yeah, it's just like how it was in the CRT days, when you could pick lots of different refresh rates from most CRTs.
John:
It's similar to that, but way newer.
John:
You could drive your neighbor crazy by setting it to whatever the lowest refresh rate is, where Flickr will probably be visible.
John:
Like, there's something wrong with Microsoft.
John:
My display.
John:
It used to happen to people's CRTs, only they wouldn't notice.
John:
I'd go over to their house and they'd have their CRT refreshing at like 50 hertz.
John:
They'd be like, no, this cannot stand.
John:
The funny thing is, usually that rate was 60 hertz, which is our current fastest refresh rate.
Marco:
But it's different for LCDs.
John:
60, well, it's a little bit different in CRTs, but I feel like people who had their CRTs like below 60 or some frame rate that was incredibly blank and it was like, you've got to get that over 100 and it was just, ah, it felt so good.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
yeah so i believe that's it for the display and before i move on to the keyboard i wanted to talk about ports no changes oh that's too bad yeah no sd reader no additional or different ports every all the ports that the ports are exactly the same i think we can have a positive spin on this by saying that means they didn't get rid of the headphone jack yeah
Marco:
It's still on the wrong side, but yeah, this headphone jack is still there, still on the wrong side.
Marco:
You still have four USB-C ports on the 15-inch.
Marco:
Again, it's just like the display refresh.
Marco:
I mean, the display density.
Marco:
It's trade-offs.
Marco:
It's all sorts of trade-offs.
Marco:
The way they've designed the enclosure
Marco:
it's just like before where there's like a huge, uh, intake vent.
Marco:
As soon as the ports end on each side, like on the, on the lower edge, right after the ports end, it becomes an intake air vent on both sides.
Marco:
Like there is no space there to put an SD card or more ports or anything unless they redesigned a lot of other stuff.
Marco:
So like it would, it's not like a small job to do that, but again, it's trade-offs.
Marco:
Like if it were me, uh,
Marco:
I would put one USB-A port, an HDMI port, and an SD card reader because those are the things that people need very frequently.
Marco:
And I still very firmly believe that it is not a good customer experience to ever need a dongle.
Marco:
And dongles should be reserved for old, outgoing technologies that most people don't need anymore.
Marco:
So for instance, when the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, the very first Retina MacBook Pro came out,
Marco:
you needed a dongle to use things like Ethernet or Firewire.
Marco:
And at that time, most people were no longer using Ethernet or Firewire on their laptops.
Marco:
And so I feel like that was like an okay transition to make then because it's like most people who buy these won't need to buy an adapter to do this older thing because most people aren't using these things.
Marco:
Whereas on the USB-C generation laptops, I don't know anybody who has any of these laptops who doesn't need at least one dongle on a regular basis.
Marco:
Like something, either a USB-A adapter or a power pass-through for Casey's terrible laptop or whatever.
Marco:
And that's unfortunately still exactly the same.
Marco:
You still need dongles.
Marco:
You know, I will say like...
Marco:
Time has slightly healed this wound and it will continue to very slowly heal this wound.
Marco:
So like, I think Apple's just kind of waiting it out at this point.
Marco:
Like USB-C is becoming more common.
Marco:
We are seeing more and more cables and peripherals and more things are coming with USB-C cables.
Marco:
Uh, you know, so slowly this is solving itself.
Marco:
Dongles are getting slowly less terrible.
Marco:
People are able to find a few that seem to work okay for them.
Marco:
So like,
Marco:
Over time, this is slowly changing, but I still think it's a terrible customer experience to have a brand new laptop and almost immediately need some kind of weird dongle for some port it doesn't have.
Marco:
But they continue to make that trade-off.
Marco:
Eventually, this will solve itself, I think, but it still hasn't after three years so far of being all USB-C on these laptops.
Marco:
We still need dongles, and that's unfortunate.
John:
So are any of these ports or all of these ports have... I wish we knew more about the display connection because I'm wondering if they're the same in their Thunderbolt 3 and their USB-C, but do they support a higher version of DisplayPort that lets them drive the big monitors?
John:
I'm not sure if there's any difference in capability behind these strangely shaped ports.
John:
My son, of all people, asked me the other day, a friend of his was asking him a question about whether we had any Macs with...
John:
Uh, I don't know if it was like, he was asking whether we had any Macs with USB-C ports that aren't Thunderbolt ports.
John:
So he gave me some mishmash.
John:
Like Casey's.
John:
Didn't understand what he was asking.
John:
And so I was faced with having to try to explain to someone who knows absolutely nothing about this, uh,
John:
what the deal is with usbc and thunderbolt it's really hard like starting for first principles because i had like the only the only thing that i could explain to him was the rectangular usba because he's seen those and he has them like in his room to charge his stuff because he got usba lighting ports to charge his devices he's familiar with those wires but everything else after that is gibberish like look the hole in the side of the computer is the same shape but by looking at the shape he can't tell what thing it does some of them are thunderbolt but some of them are not and there's different versions of thunderbolt but the earlier version had a different shape and it's like oh my god
John:
doesn't make any sense so anyway what i was asking is are the little shaped holes that are the same in number and shape and probably the same in capability do they support a higher version number of displayport when in the mode that they're supporting displayport i don't know but i don't think so
Marco:
I haven't followed the intricacies of DisplayPort versus Thunderbolt and everything.
Marco:
It's still Thunderbolt 3.
Marco:
I know that.
Marco:
So I'm guessing a lot of that might depend on the GPU.
Marco:
But regardless, I think it's the same as it was before in that area.
John:
I mean, it does play in that mode where it's like, I'm just a DisplayPort now, right?
John:
That's like one of the modes that it can be.
John:
It can be in USB-C mode and Thunderbolt mode and DisplayPort tunneling.
John:
I don't know the details.
John:
Anyway, the point is it looks the same on the outside.
John:
It has different capabilities than the earlier ones that had the similar shaped holes in them, though, because these can drive the XDR at native res, and earlier models could not.
Marco:
We were sponsored this week by Mack Weldon.
Marco:
Better than whatever you're wearing right now.
Marco:
And not better than whatever I'm wearing right now, because I'm wearing a bunch of Mack Weldon stuff.
Marco:
I gotta say, I love Mack Weldon.
Marco:
This is a premium men's essentials clothing brand.
Marco:
They believe in smart design, premium fabrics, and easy shopping.
Marco:
I have been a Mac Weldon customer since before they were a sponsor of ours.
Marco:
I heard them on other podcasts.
Marco:
I gave them a shot a few years ago and I've been buying their stuff ever since.
Marco:
And I actually kind of sought them out as a sponsor because I wanted to talk about it.
Marco:
I just love Mac Weldon's clothes.
Marco:
I have all sorts of stuff from them now.
Marco:
So every day I'm wearing their underwear.
Marco:
Most days I'm wearing their socks.
Marco:
I'm usually wearing one of their t-shirts too, especially in the summer.
Marco:
I love their silver line stuff, which is naturally antimicrobial.
Marco:
I get that as the, as the underwear material as well.
Marco:
And they actually, they want you to try their underwear.
Marco:
They have this cool guarantee where if you don't like your first pair of underwear,
Marco:
They'll give you a
Marco:
And the new warm knit sweaters.
Marco:
I love the warm knit stuff.
Marco:
It's kind of like a waffle knit pattern on a long sleeve shirt.
Marco:
Absolutely love those.
Marco:
They are always coming out with new colors, new materials, new designs, new, totally new items.
Marco:
I love Mack Weldon.
Marco:
I got to say, I'm wearing them again almost every day.
Marco:
All the different seasons, I'm wearing something from Mack Weldon.
Marco:
They have new tech cashmere fabric this year.
Marco:
That's really, really nice for like sweaters and hats and gloves.
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
You're going to love it.
Marco:
MackWeldon.com.
Marco:
You can get 20% off your first order by using code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
Once again, MackWeldon.com with code ATP for 20% off your first order.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Mack Weldon for keeping me clothed, frankly, most of the time, and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Have all your keyboard prayers been answered?
Casey:
I think so.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
So there's one big one, and that is that the touch bar is still required on the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
You know, the touch bar came out in 2016.
Marco:
I don't like it.
Marco:
I know a lot of people who don't like it, who if there was an option to buy the same computer without a touch bar, even at the same price,
Marco:
I know many people who would take it.
Marco:
And Touch Bar is not required for Touch ID because the MacBook Air has no Touch Bar but Touch ID.
Marco:
So we know they can do it, you know, but this computer requires the Touch Bar.
Marco:
Now, I wish it didn't, but there are two critical changes here that I think will make it less bad of a thing for people who didn't like it before.
Marco:
Number one, we have a hardware escape key again.
Marco:
Hooray!
Marco:
Thank God.
Marco:
Now, I should actually say, I don't actually use it anymore because ever since the other laptops got rid of it, I converted myself to use Caps Lock for Escape because macOS has a built-in thing in the keyboard panel to do that.
Marco:
If you go to modifier keys, you can set Caps Lock to be Escape and I never even need Caps Lock for anything.
Marco:
So I remapped that and now I just, I kind of had the muscle memory where I hit it with my little finger and that's it.
Marco:
I hit Escape really easily.
Marco:
It's closer now.
Marco:
It's actually better.
Marco:
So I actually don't need the Escape key personally, but I know a lot of people do
Marco:
Don't want to do that remapping and want that to be there.
Marco:
So that's a huge improvement if you are a touch bar hater.
Marco:
And also, one of the most important changes they could have possibly made, they made the space between the keys bigger.
Marco:
thank god so this along with the inverted t arrow layout i think are actually more important than the travel distance so the travel distance i'll get all this at once travel distance is doubled what the butterfly is it is one millimeter travel depth for the keys so for comparison it's funny i actually i went around i'm i think i'm gonna write a blog post and put a graph of this in it
Marco:
I went around yesterday with my calipers, which I actually brought into the briefing as well.
Marco:
Of course you did.
Marco:
No one else had calipers.
Marco:
I went around and measured a whole bunch of keyboards to see how big are the keycaps, how much spacing is there between the keys, how much travel do they have, etc.,
Marco:
And I found, first of all, it was interesting that the total height of the main area of the keyboard, which I measured as from the top of the delete key down to the bottom of the right arrow, so not including a function row or a touch bar if it has it, just that distance...
Marco:
on almost every keyboard I measured across a huge range, I should say I measured from a, I measured a titanium PowerBook G4, a white plastic MacBook, the 2015 generation MacBook Pro, the butterfly keyboard MacBook Pro,
Marco:
uh the ipad pro 11 inch smart keyboard my filco mechanical 10 keyless keyboard with the big clicky key switches and my microsoft sculpt ergonomic keyboard i measured all those and it's funny like that the height of the main key region on all of them is right around 90 millimeters
Marco:
And so what I found interesting was how little variation there is in that.
Marco:
The overall size of these keyboards was very similar, actually.
Marco:
I guess we figured out a long time ago, keyboards should be about 90 millimeters tall from the bottom of the arrow to the top of the delete key.
Marco:
So, cool.
Marco:
So what matters then of how big the keys are and how much they're spaced, what shape the keycaps take, how much they travel down and everything...
Marco:
And there was a huge range of these.
Marco:
So like my big Philco mechanical key switch with one of the, like, I forget which cherry color switch it has, but it has one of those like cherry mechanical switches in it.
Marco:
The, the travel on that was 4.3 millimeters.
Marco:
So,
Marco:
And so for reference, this laptop, the new one, is one millimeter.
Marco:
The butterfly was half a millimeter.
Marco:
So it's twice as much travel.
Marco:
The magic keyboard was 1.2.
Marco:
So this is very close to the magic keyboard, but kind of like a third of the way between the magic keyboard and the butterfly in travel distance.
Marco:
And I could actually say about the same thing for the key margins as well.
Marco:
So magic keyboard, 2.8 millimeters spacing between the keys.
Marco:
New MacBook Pro, 2.5.
Marco:
Old MacBook Pro with the crappy keyboard, 1.8.
Marco:
So huge variation, like huge drop there.
Marco:
And the 2.5 millimeter key spacing actually compares pretty well.
Marco:
Like the iPad smart keyboard, which I think has very wide key spacing, is 3.1.
Marco:
So, compared to 2.5, you know, you can see, like, the 2015 MacBook Pro with the other, you know, the previous generation scissor keyboard, 3.5 millimeter spacing.
Marco:
And about 1.5 millimeters of travel.
Marco:
So, again, we are, we're going, we're, like, hitting, like, roughly magic keyboard levels, but slightly less.
Marco:
So, like, a little bit less key spacing than the magic keyboard.
Marco:
A little bit less travel than the magic keyboard.
Marco:
But way closer to that than to the butterfly keyboard, which sucked.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
overall i would say that they really have and i should say too like they are calling this a magic keyboard like they said in the presentation they said that the uh you know they defended the butterfly a little bit but i i don't care um and i will say to be honest though like it does seem like the the 2018 or the 2019 new materials revision the third gen revision they did this past may
Marco:
I haven't heard of many problems with it, so I think they actually might have mostly fixed it, but I don't care.
Marco:
It still sucks.
Marco:
So even if they fix it, I still hate it.
Marco:
But it's good for people who have it, I guess.
Marco:
But anyway, they so heavily focused on the keyboard during the presentation.
Marco:
They knew we all were too.
Marco:
And they said they went back, they had people studying physiology, and they wanted to focus on all these different areas, key shapes, the feel, acoustics, what makes people accurate and what doesn't.
Marco:
And they said something that's funny.
Marco:
I actually wrote this like two years ago in a blog post.
Marco:
They said that they already make a fantastic keyboard that meets all those criteria.
Marco:
It's the magic keyboard that shifts with the iMac.
Marco:
It's like, yes, we know.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
and and they really are saying that they they're bringing the magic keyboard to the macbook pro like that's how that's how they're framing it and based on my measurements and based on the feel i can say that's pretty damn accurate like it isn't exactly the same it's actually like in some ways it's better than magic keyboard um
Marco:
if you if you were a fan of the increased key stability with the butterfly keyboard which is one of the only advantages that they ever touted for it which was like if you hit like the edge or the corner of a key the whole thing depresses more evenly than on the previous types of scissors keyboards it would kind of like slant and that's better with the 16 inch keyboard than even with the magic keyboard which itself was better than previous scissors and
Marco:
There's a rubber dome that they tweaked to make a better feedback mechanism or something.
Marco:
Sorry, I'm not really sure on many of the details here.
Marco:
And I'm sure we'll find out a lot of this through teardowns down the road.
Marco:
But short version is they really focused a lot on these.
Marco:
and they they say they said right in the presentation this is the best typing experience ever on a mac notebook and i might agree with that it's been a while since i've used the old mush keyboards on like my powerbook g4 that i love so much but it's really good it's it is not like super high travel
Marco:
But it is not so low that you really care.
Marco:
You know, laptops have always had lower travel than desktop keyboards, but it's been like close.
Marco:
It kind of in the ballpark that you would kind of forgive it for being a laptop.
Marco:
This is finally back in that area.
Marco:
Like when I was typing on this, even just the initial things of just like the setup wizard, like migration assistant, typing in my wifi password, every key press, I was like, yes, finally.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
Thank you, God.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm an atheist, but thank you, God.
Marco:
Like I am, I was so happy to just type in regular things because you know what?
Marco:
It didn't feel noteworthy.
Marco:
It felt like a keyboard.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And this is after three years of their laptops feeling like they hated me.
Marco:
Like, I had to type in something on my 13-inch afterwards, like deactivating something.
Marco:
And I just immediately wanted to throw it in the garbage.
Like, it's...
Marco:
I should warn everybody out there.
Marco:
If you've been using a butterfly keyboard and not a fan of it like me, the second you use one of these things, your old laptop is trash.
Marco:
You will immediately want to get rid of it.
Marco:
So if you don't want to buy a new one, don't touch one.
Marco:
It's like don't test drive a Tesla.
Marco:
Don't ever touch one of these keyboards because it's just so nice.
Marco:
What's nice about it, it dramatically changes the
Marco:
the way the laptop feels to me because it changes from something that has literally felt hostile towards me for three years.
Marco:
And frankly, it felt like they were never going to fix it.
Marco:
It felt like they thought it was fine.
Marco:
So for three years, it felt like this hostile thing where all of their laptops were telling me, we don't want you using us.
Marco:
We hate you.
Marco:
We hate ourselves and we hate you.
Marco:
That's how it felt to me.
Marco:
It's just so hostile.
Marco:
And to have this new keyboard that...
Marco:
Not only did they put a lot of effort into it, and not only did they really try to make a keyboard that people liked a lot, which I don't think that was ever a goal of the butterfly, but they succeeded.
Marco:
And they made a really freaking good laptop keyboard that is still thin...
Marco:
Still has the stability that some people like.
Marco:
Still has the kind of snappy feedback a little bit.
Marco:
But has significantly more travel.
Marco:
Has easier to find keys.
Marco:
Has the inverted T arrows.
Marco:
Has a real escape key.
Marco:
And it just seems like, oh my god, why didn't they have this three years ago?
Marco:
But I'm really glad they have it now.
Marco:
And finally, I can go back to using a laptop and not be constantly...
Marco:
irritated by this unchangeable fundamental quality of it.
Marco:
It is such a nice feeling.
Marco:
It's like this weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
Marco:
The world made a couple of big mistakes in 2016.
Marco:
One of them has now been fixed.
Casey:
Wow.
Marco:
And it really, it's like the dawning of a new day.
Marco:
Finally, the long night is over.
Marco:
Like, finally.
Marco:
It is, I can't describe, although I'm trying poorly, I can't describe how nice it is to just start using this and be like, ah, okay, things are getting right in the world again.
Marco:
Finally, I can use a laptop and not hate every minute of typing on it.
John:
So speaking of success and this being a successful keyboard, did they mention anything or tout anything about the reliability of this keyboard?
Marco:
Honestly, I'd be surprised if they ever mentioned that.
Marco:
But it's a scissor mechanism, which inherently means that it is...
Marco:
first of all a lot less likely to break we've had scissor mechanisms for a long time like the butterfly mechanism was a whole completely new design lots of like very you know precise tiny fragile things had to go perfectly with it for it to work scissor there's just the design of scissor keycaps are much more resilient to problems and having increased travel means that like you can probably pop off the keycap and just like the whole way they attach is different so like
Marco:
it's probably going to be way easier to service these.
Marco:
Time will tell.
Marco:
I don't know, and they didn't really hit it too hard, but I'm guessing these are going to be way easier to service than the Butterflies.
Marco:
Probably similar to previous laptops.
Marco:
We've had scissor key laptops for a long time.
Marco:
Many people have had keys replaced or had to get service on them, and it's been fine.
Marco:
Occasionally, it requires a huge expensive replacement, but for minor stuff, it usually doesn't.
Marco:
And most people...
Marco:
In the lifetime of their laptops, most people don't need expensive keyboard repairs.
John:
I've repaired a scissor key switches myself on older laptops when they'd get old or wear out or start flopping off or some kid would break one off and you'd put it back on.
John:
There are tiny, delicate parts in there for sure, but they're not so delicate that I destroyed my keyboard by trying to fix it, which was...
John:
Nice.
John:
And yeah, the scissor mechanisms are tried and true.
John:
It's interesting, though, that the main... So you hated the keyboard even when it was working perfectly, but Apple's big problem with the keyboards is that they weren't working.
John:
Yes, some people like them, some people don't, but not working is just a universal, right?
John:
And it's kind of weird to pitch a new keyboard without...
John:
i mean i don't know how you do it like they're not they don't want to say anything as ongoing lawsuits so they can't really say anything about you know they could have at least said this is our most reliable keyboard ever or they could have said look we'll pour a bucket of sand on top of it and type and it'll keep going which is probably not true you probably shouldn't do that because there are other reasons other than your keyboard working that you don't want sand leaking into your laptop right but it's kind of weird that like
John:
I would have expected them to somehow address what is the main problem with their keyboard.
John:
The main problem with their keyboard was not that Marco didn't like how it felt.
John:
The main problem was that it would stop working sometimes, like my spacebar, which still doesn't work.
John:
And by the way, I've been holding out for these laptops.
John:
I'm hoping when I bring this thing to work and say, hey, by the way, the spacebar doesn't work, I'm going to do that at a time that when they order me a replacement, they could potentially get a 16-inch.
John:
Instead, they're just going to get it repaired for $900, so it's going to suck for me.
John:
Yeah.
John:
At least I would have the highest chance of getting me a new one of these.
John:
But anyway, reliability is still a question.
John:
And unfortunately, although we suspect that these will be better because the travel is bigger, because this is a mechanism, at this time, we can't say.
John:
Because Marco's had this for half a day.
John:
My 2017 laptop, which admittedly I mostly used docked at work, so I didn't use the keyboard a lot, it took...
John:
pretty much two full years for the spacebar to die.
John:
I still find that infuriating, but it didn't die immediately.
John:
So, and same thing with the 2019s that you were mentioning before.
John:
They seem like the problems are okay.
John:
If the problems only come up after, you know, a year and a half, two years, we're not going to be able to tell that now.
John:
So, you know, we talked about this before, like if and when they come out with a new keyboard, we just have to take their word for it.
John:
So I would have loved some reassurance to say, and we reliability tested these and we poured potato chips into them and we had our robots poking them at 20 different angles.
John:
And like whatever it is that they didn't do with the butterflies, they should have done with this one.
John:
And they could have touted that.
John:
I mean, we love seeing robot fingers poking keyboards or whatever.
John:
And speaking of the travel stuff and older keyboards, I'm sure you have all these numbers from your caliper travels.
John:
What was the travel on the 2015 MacBook Pro keys?
John:
Are you going to consult your wall poster that shows you key travel in millimeters for all Apple laptops?
Yeah.
Marco:
um yeah so here i i i breezed by it earlier let me see the uh 2015 key travel was about one and a half millimeters so about about 1.5 uh magic keyboard is 1.2 and this new laptop is 1.0 butterfly was 0.5 so we are we are in the ballpark of the old one what you get with this like when the butterfly came out and it was very controversial still is there were the people like me who hated it
Marco:
And there were a lot of people who said, we actually prefer this to the old one.
Marco:
And a lot of people would go back to one of the old ones and say, this is too mushy.
Marco:
They didn't like going back to the old ones once they were used to the more crisp feel of the new one.
Marco:
I think this new one is going to really satisfy both groups well.
Marco:
And again, one of the biggest problems with Butterfly was that they took this incredibly controversial keyboard.
Marco:
Again, even if it worked perfectly, even if it never had any reliability problems,
Marco:
It was a very controversial design.
Marco:
Lots of people really hated it.
Marco:
Therefore, it was never a suitable keyboard to be the only keyboard.
Marco:
You can't have something that a whole bunch of your customers hate if that's the only option you're going to give them for an entire category of products.
Marco:
And that's what they did with Butterfly.
Marco:
I think with this...
Marco:
This is presumably going to trickle down to the rest of the product line.
Marco:
Presumably, this will soon be the only keyboard you can buy in an Apple laptop.
Marco:
And I think that's fine because this new one is, I think, going to be a big crowd pleaser.
Marco:
It is not as extreme in either direction.
Marco:
It's not a super high-travel, mechanical, clicky thing like you get from an external gamer keyboard.
Marco:
It's not a super flat butterfly thing or like a virtual keyboard on a touch glass or anything like that.
Marco:
It's just a regular laptop keyboard.
Marco:
It's the kind of laptop keyboard that used to be the only kind of laptop keyboard.
Marco:
The kind that you would barely even mention because it was fine.
Marco:
That's what this is.
Marco:
That is, if you're only going to offer one type of keyboard for all your laptops, it has to be that.
Marco:
It has to be something that everyone says, that's fine.
Marco:
And this has a way better chance of achieving that than the butterfly ever would.
Casey:
So as someone who loved the Magic Keyboard when it first came out, it was my favorite keyboard by a mile when it first came out.
Casey:
And then I got my MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
And over time, I came to really, really like this keyboard.
Casey:
It has its faults.
Casey:
I've had to take air to it more than zero times, which is I've never taken air to a Magic Keyboard before.
Casey:
Certainly not...
Casey:
I've never been forced to anyway.
Casey:
So I do actually quite like the MacBook keyboard.
Casey:
I do like how sturdy it feels.
Casey:
Is it a deal breaker?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
But it does, I don't know, it does make the Magic keyboard feel not mushy, but comparatively slightly more mushy than the MacBook keyboard.
Casey:
And it sounds to me like what you're describing is basically the Magic Keyboard with a little bit less travel, which I'd be fine with, and a little bit more, if not a lot more, sturdiness or stability, which to me sounds like you're taking the best of both worlds and mashing them together.
Casey:
So I am all in on this.
Casey:
This sounds excellent.
Marco:
I'm telling you, I think people are going to love this thing.
Marco:
I don't think there is going to be anybody who is really, truly upset by this move.
Marco:
Only the most diehard butterfly lovers are really going to care.
Marco:
And honestly, they had their time in the sun.
Marco:
whatever butterfly metaphors I can make.
Marco:
It's time for them to fly south for the winter or whatever and make room for us.
Marco:
No, I don't know.
Marco:
But all I want was to go back to a world where we could stop talking about the freaking keyboards.
Marco:
And after this episode, I think we've achieved that.
Marco:
I think finally we can go back to talking about anything else because this won't be a constant source of friction in our computing lives anymore.
Marco:
Once this takes over the product line and once the butterflies are all out of mainstream usage in maybe four or five years...
Marco:
we're going to look back on this time the way people look back on like that chiclet keyboard on one of the whatever computer that was john you probably know i don't i know what you're talking about but i don't remember i think it was a compact but i don't remember yeah it's like some like this some like you know terrible computer that that or maybe was was it pc jr was that at the ibm pc jr
Marco:
maybe it was like they're like as membrane over yeah although there were membrane keyboards as well i don't know if that was the checklist one i used a pc jr though my friend had one it was not a good computer yeah probably for other reasons as well but yeah so like i i really do think we're gonna look back on the butterfly era as this tragic mistake that was made for a few years like like when back when apple had like bad ceos like the weird business people ceos like i think it's gonna it's gonna be like that kind of era and
Marco:
Thank goodness it's ending.
Marco:
Like I truly think this keyboard I think is so good and it will have probably a significant effect on Apple's bottom line for saved warranty repairs compared to the butterflies.
Marco:
I have a feeling this is going to take over the product line quickly.
Marco:
I would be shocked if any butterfly keyboards are still sold one year from now.
Marco:
I bet one year from now they're all out of the lineup.
John:
And I think it'll be good for their sales because like you said, if someone has one of these existing ones and especially if they had any problems, even if it's just like a sticking key or they had to blow it out with air, once they try one of these, they're going to be looking to offload these as fast as possible and replace it with basically an equivalent machine.
John:
Oh, I didn't really need a new one, but I need my keyboard to be reliable and this one is nicer.
John:
So they're just, you know, I think this will be good for Apple's bottom line.
John:
Imagine making products that people like could be good for your bottom line.
John:
Yeah.
John:
There is surely pent up demand for the keyboard.
John:
So hopefully that will be reflected.
John:
And that's why they need to get it out in the rest of the line as fast as possible.
John:
Yeah, I hope they do.
John:
I hope that I hope it doesn't lag behind and kind of Tim Cook fashion where like the MacBook Air has the butterfly keyboard for the next three years from like, come on.
John:
Like, I really hope it does go through all the other computers as fast as possible.
John:
We'll see.
John:
although i you know so sticking to the keyboard here i still have my same raft of keyboard complaints that i've had for a while some of them are actually still new from the butterfly obviously all we really care about is that this is a reliable keyboard and it sound you know as far as we can tell they've done everything that they could do that isn't all we care about to set them i know but like hey i hated the butterfly keyboard before it broke for everybody
John:
I know.
John:
I know.
John:
I'm just saying, like, in the big picture-wise, Apple can't have keyboards that don't work on their laptops.
John:
Like, that is the major problem that we're addressing here, and of course, we can't tell.
John:
But there are other things about this keyboard that still bother me, and this has been a problem in Apple's line for a long time.
John:
So, since...
John:
right after the tie book i guess the first macbooks the the very first uh aluminum macbooks that i believe began the era where well actually maybe it was before that but anyway whenever the era began where apple decided that they're going to offer you multiple sizes of laptops but every single one of them will have a keyboard that's exactly the same size
John:
There are advantages to that.
John:
The user experience is the same.
John:
You get used to the key layout on one.
John:
You can use all of them.
John:
Like I understand all the advantages, but like just we were saying before about ports and eight terabyte SSDs and 64 gigs of RAM.
John:
At a certain point, it becomes ridiculous.
John:
The most ridiculous has ever been as the 17 inch MacBook Pro or 17 inch PowerBook before that.
John:
It was a 17 inch laptop with the same exact keyboard as their 12 inch laptop.
John:
It looked dumb.
John:
It was dumb.
John:
Now they have a 16-inch with basically the same size keyboard as their 12-inch, give or take a millimeter or two according to Marco's calipers.
John:
It doesn't look as dumb, but it is dumb.
John:
We're celebrating the inverted T arrow keys, which obviously is better.
John:
You can feel for them.
John:
You could have a full-size inverted T. There's plenty of room.
John:
You could have a page up, page down, and home.
John:
You could have all sorts of things.
John:
You could get the stupid FN key out of the lower left corner so control could be back there if you don't already have it remapped to caps lock.
John:
With more room, and they have more room, you can do more things and include more keys, and Apple continues to resist that.
John:
Again, I understand the reasons.
John:
Everyone's got their reasons, their excuses.
John:
Oh, we need room for the speakers.
John:
Oh, we need this.
John:
Oh, we need that.
John:
Bottom line is there's more room there.
John:
Look at the world of laptops.
John:
When they have large laptops with 16-inch screens, there's room for more keys, and people use it, and users like it.
John:
Johnny Ive doesn't like it because it's not symmetrical, so we can't have the inverted T poking down out of the rectangle of the keyboard.
John:
But he's gone now, but his replacements apparently still like symmetry.
John:
Another symmetry thing that drives me nuts, the previous generation of keyboards, as we noted many, many episodes ago, the bottom row of keys with the space bar and the modifiers was taller than all the other rows of keys.
John:
I thought that was a great idea.
John:
Because that bottom row serves a special purpose.
John:
This space bar, the biggest key on the keyboard.
John:
Maybe it doesn't need to be any taller, but it's nice.
John:
The modifiers, you smoosh them with one of your less dexterous fingers while you hit another key because you cored with them.
John:
Having the modifiers be slightly taller than the rest of the keys was nice.
John:
More space for the half-height arrows.
John:
yeah they did away with that in the 2016 models because symmetrical exactly symmetrical down to the millimeter keys look nicer there's no reason to like making it slightly bigger someone did that intentionally and it was smart and they got rid of it because it's not as symmetrical like talk about the level of symmetry not only can we not break the rectangle outline of the keyboard but we also can't have that bottom row be a little bit bigger we have to make it smaller like it's ridiculous
John:
The touch bar, which Marco mentioned, which is not optional in his pro models, one of the problems with the touch bar is accidental input.
John:
I myself have removed the Siri button because occasionally I hit the Siri thing and it would bloop, you know, like I go for the delete key and I hit where the Siri button was.
John:
So I removed it from my touch bar.
John:
occasionally while i'm thinking about something my screen will go black and i realize one of my fat fingers leaned on the little brightness down button on the touch bar and by the way if that happens to people who are less technically savvy they may not realize what happened i think their computer is broken because it's a very strange experience you don't notice it happening how can you prevent accidental input on the touch bar you can move it farther away from the keyboard more than you know 0.02 millimeters farther away as they've done with the extra spacing or whatever
John:
But how can we move it far away from the keyboard?
John:
There's no room.
John:
There's totally more room.
John:
To give an example, in the olden days, the Apple Extended Keyboard 2 had a huge space between the number keys and the function keys.
John:
It was great because you'd never accidentally go for a number key and hit a function key.
John:
It was a gigantic amount of space.
John:
Now, there's less room on a laptop, but there's more room than one or two millimeters.
John:
That would be less aesthetically pleasing.
John:
It is certainly nice when the space between the touch bar and all the keys is exactly symmetrical, but it's not as good ergonomically.
John:
These concerns about the laptops and sort of the battle of form versus function make me think that there is still plenty of room for improvement and design innovation in especially the large pro laptop space that I really hope Apple latches onto.
John:
And I don't want this to sound negative because I'm really excited that they've fixed the worst problems of their laptops and have made a keyboard that Marco likes.
John:
But I mentioned the iMac Pro-ifications of the laptops before.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is half of iMac Profication, because if they had gone all the way, it would be more versatile and have more ports and more capabilities and would have broken out of the mold than the previous laptops.
John:
This is exactly in the mold of the previous laptops, but it's an alternate universe one where they made them good.
John:
Which is great.
John:
We want to live in a universe.
John:
We want the universe where they make the laptops good.
John:
But it's the same design.
John:
It's four USB-C-shaped holes on the outside, headphone jack, same size keyboard as everybody else, screen, laptop, giant track bed.
John:
It's the same exact design.
John:
And I think that's a really good design.
John:
I just continue to hope that there's room at the top of their lineup and the largest, most powerful laptops for them to...
John:
you know break out of that design mold and give us something more capable uh and and you know frankly better in terms of like the ergonomics of the keyboard and the key layout and everything there is room for improvement there and i really really hope that somehow some way apple can find the courage to break out of the rectangle of the keyboard and to put a different keyboard on their largest laptop than on their smallest
John:
see i i actually don't know if i agree with you on that i would love things like full height arrows which you would need i guess like another row on the right probably to do that like like a home end page up kind of row at least no you just move you just move them down one you know what i mean like oh that's interesting the left and right would be it would break out of the rectangle of the keyboard the left and right would be uh like lower oh boy yeah that's not gonna happen but like because it's ugly but not because it's ergonomically bad it's great
Marco:
Yeah, well, and I really do think like Johnny Ive has been gone for officially something like six months, but I think his exit was much longer than that in practice.
Marco:
I think it was a slow, gradual exit over probably a couple of years.
John:
I'm using him as the stand-in for that ethos of like, well, the bottom row of keys can't be half a millimeter taller.
John:
They have to be exactly the same size or I'll notice that that ethos does not serve anybody.
Marco:
Whether it was Johnny or not, the fact is they've had significant change in design leadership since the 2016s came out.
Marco:
And now they have made some changes that do break symmetry, that are less attractive.
Marco:
First of all, giving us the inverted T arrows back, that's a huge breaking of symmetry on the keyboard.
Marco:
Giving us the escape key.
John:
Yeah, but it's a pre-existing one.
John:
They did that in the 2015s as well.
John:
I wouldn't say the escape key is breaking symmetry because it's mostly symmetrical with the Touch ID, although it's kind of surprising they're not exactly the same size.
John:
I know they're not the same size, but they're still... The escape key is wider than Touch ID.
John:
I understand.
John:
It wasn't the MacBook Escape as well.
Marco:
And even the key margins.
Marco:
I'm really convinced that the whole reason the keys were so damn close together on the butterfly was simply that the thinner margins looked better.
Marco:
even though it was awful for ergonomics and accuracy.
Marco:
But I really do think that's why they did it.
Marco:
I can't think of any other reason why they would have.
Marco:
And so they have made a number of changes in this area that are aesthetically regressions, but that dramatically improve usability, accuracy, etc.
Marco:
And so that's why I think I'm actually hopeful.
Marco:
Again, they made it thicker and heavier and a little bit bigger.
Marco:
Because that was required to achieve things people really wanted.
Marco:
Same thing on the iPhones, right?
Marco:
The iPhones were made thicker and heavier because it achieved significant gains that people wanted.
Marco:
So I think we actually are seeing the early days of Apple stepping back from the worst of form over function that I think is going to be the one negative asterisk on the Johnny Ive era that we're going to look back on is way too much form over function.
Marco:
I really do think we're seeing the Mac Pro, the new Mac Pro is way uglier than the trash can Mac Pro, but it's what people wanted.
John:
The Mac Pro is the example of going all the way.
John:
There is nothing in the Mac Pro that is functionally compromised for the sake of aesthetics.
John:
Nothing.
John:
And the iMac Pro is close to that because they use the same case.
John:
But in general, they went halfway with this thing.
John:
They did the guts.
John:
They said better cooling, bigger capabilities, everything we can possibly do on the inside other than the screen, we're going to do.
John:
But it's still basically the same design as it was before.
John:
And I applaud all the things they did to the keyboard to improve on it.
John:
But they haven't broken with their existing orthodoxy for the past decade.
John:
The half-height-hour keys existed before.
John:
So they're just going back to a design they had.
John:
And by the way, the spacing between the keys, my guess is that someone thought bigger keys would be better, because by reducing the spacing, you do make larger keys.
John:
And you can see someone thinking that and saying, oh, larger keys would be better.
John:
They'd be easier to hit.
John:
And maybe some people even agree with that, but obviously you don't, and I don't think I do either.
John:
But it might have been aesthetics, but it might have also just been bigger keycaps.
John:
All I'm saying is that this feels like a...
John:
successful incarnation of the design of the 2015 MacBook Pro updated for modern internals and technology with a dose of the iMac Pro internals saying, let's just blow out the doors on the capabilities of the inside of this thing.
John:
But it's not a fundamentally different design in the way that the Mac Pro
John:
is a fundamentally different design than the trash can, is a fundamentally different design than the iMac Pro.
John:
Again, no one is looking at the Mac Pro and wondering how it is differentiated from the trash can or from the iMac Pro.
John:
Whereas if you look at this laptop, you might wonder how it's differentiated from the 13-inch.
John:
There are explanations for that, but they're more subtle than, I can just look at this and know this is a more capable thing, or this is a different design.
John:
It's not a different design.
John:
It is a better iteration of the previous design.
Marco:
Yeah, but I think ultimately, this is hard to distinguish from a 2015 if there isn't a 2015 next to it because you have the inverted T arrows and it's the same kind of size class and everything.
Marco:
At a very casual, quick glance, it just looks like a MacBook Pro.
Marco:
Simple as that.
Marco:
It just looks like the way they've always looked, quote, always, right?
Marco:
And I think the new Mac Pro...
Marco:
It doesn't look like anything like the trash can, but it is very similar in lots of ways to the old towers that only ancient dinosaurs, I guess, are still using these days.
Marco:
In a way, they had their form over function peak, which was the trash can,
Marco:
And customers said no, and there were problems with it.
Marco:
And so they went back to what they had before that misstep.
Marco:
And they've done a lot of that same thing here.
Marco:
They have gone much of the way back to before the 2016 Touch Bar generation misstep.
Marco:
Not as far back as they did with the Mac Pro.
John:
and and i and to some degree i don't know how much further back they could have gone with some of these things well they need to go forward because they've they've never made a laptop like i described like i'm obviously asking them for to go way farther i'm not saying you should go back to the mac portable which i mean you know i guess you go by that far you can get some weird keyboard layouts but they've never made anything as ugly as what i was describing i mean and it makes sense because they're the nice looking computer company i'm just saying that i think there's room for that uh arguably they never made a tower computer as ugly as the mac pro but obviously there was room for that too
John:
Wow.
Casey:
I'm excited.
Casey:
I really am.
Marco:
You should be.
Marco:
It's really good.
Casey:
The big problem I have with this announcement is, well, two problems.
Casey:
Number one, I'm not planning on spending money on a laptop soon, but it sounds like I'm going to have to.
Casey:
But I guess the good... Don't touch one.
Marco:
The silver lining here... Actually, I have a... If you love the butterfly keyboard so much, I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro that you can...
Casey:
Oh, here we go.
John:
It gives you a freaking price.
John:
That's what I was saying about people wanting to offload their old things.
John:
I wonder if the price on these things is really going to drop through the floor because I think people will want to get rid of their perfectly good, completely working, very fast butterfly keyboard laptops.
John:
Get rid of it while it still works.
John:
A lot.
John:
Yeah, and they'll want to sell them and then there may be a glut in the market so maybe your resale price won't be that great.
Casey:
Well, what I was going to say is I'm really not interested in a 16-inch laptop, having not seen one yet.
Casey:
And I'm not arguing that it is amazing and fantastic in every possible way.
Casey:
But I like having a smaller machine.
Casey:
And unless I go the route of replacing the iMac with this and like a 5K monitor, or maybe I'll pull a John and buy half a Civic.
Casey:
I mean, buy one of these, you know, Pro Display XDRs.
Casey:
But I'd rather have this in the 13-inch form factor.
Casey:
So now the clock is ticking because I agree with what you guys are saying, that this is going to trickle down to the rest of the line.
Casey:
It's only a matter of time.
Casey:
But man, will I be sad if it takes like two years for it to trickle down to the 13s and the airs of the world.
Casey:
And I really hope that sooner rather than later, this gets put into the other size devices.
Marco:
And I think it probably will.
Marco:
I think the ideal scenario that I would like to see is for them to do the same kind of screen embiggening move onto the 13-inch MacBook Pro to make it like a 14-inch MacBook Pro or whatever.
Marco:
So you'd have – I think the Air would stay where it is.
Marco:
The Air would stay at 13, and then you'd have MacBook Pros at 14 and 16.
Marco:
I think that would help in a lot of ways.
Marco:
It would help further distance the 13-inch Pro from the Air because it's very close still.
Marco:
There are some big ways that it's different, but I think it needs more big ways it's different.
Marco:
And that would help a little bit, I think.
Marco:
And just because, again, this is so good.
Marco:
But also for the last couple of years, I've been using 13-inch laptops, and I've loved them.
Marco:
I actually really enjoy the 13-inch form factor, and I might go back to it in the future, but for now, this is so much better that I'm just going to stick with it because it's just awesome.
Marco:
But if you're a person who likes the 13-inch size better, and you can be patient, again, never touch one of these.
John:
never try one but if you can be patient and wait again i don't think it's going to be long i think it's going to be less than a year honestly before you have a 13 inch macbook pro with the same keyboard but we'll find out yeah it's the air that i'm worried about and if they ever decide to resurrect a 12 inch size i wonder if this keyboard first of all would fit in there because of the travel like because arguably the the butterfly keyboard had its you know
John:
its reason for existing was this very very thin thing and they're like this keyboard's so great let's use it everywhere which was a bad move um but uh if i'm you know i'm very confident that the 13 inch macbook pro is going to get it in short order i just worry about the air uh because it deserves it like there's room for it and an air with that keyboard would really like i know when people excited they brought back the name air and everybody loved their airs and it's wedge-shaped uh
John:
but i just have i do not have good feelings about my macbook air maybe it's the double spaces coming out of that space bar like it's fairly new and that one you know exhibited this problem very quickly and and now i'm just waiting for worse problems i don't i don't like this computer just yeah just because of the double space bar if you could give me that same air with this keyboard i think i would have affection for it i think i would love it i think it would be like my old you know 2011 air right because everything else about the computer is great size and weight it's got touch id which i love
John:
You know, and I know we're kind of we've been in the bargaining phase of like, please just give us a good keyboard and they have so we're all happy.
John:
But hanging out in there somewhere in the distance is, you know, face ID on laptops and all sorts of other potentially cool things that.
John:
Hopefully now that we're sort of out of the dark days of Apple's laptop that we can start making forward progress again.
John:
Again, I don't expect Face ID to be on a laptop first, but I really hope that does come to the Mac, and I really hope it does trickle down to laptops.
John:
As much as I love Touch ID, Face ID will be even better, and hey, why not both?
John:
I think it's time for Apple's laptops to start moving forward again.
Marco:
Yeah, and finally, I think we can finally focus on that now.
Marco:
We can finally move past the basics being broken, which they have been for three years.
Marco:
And that makes me feel really good.
Marco:
Finally, I can stop worrying that they're going to make something that I totally hate as the only option.
Marco:
I'm much more confident now that they have their heads on straight, they're going in a better direction now, and they...
Marco:
seem to care about the basics more than they did a few years ago.
Marco:
And that means a lot.
Marco:
And now I can start complaining about things like ports and cellular.
Marco:
Cellular is a big one.
Marco:
I really still want that very badly.
Marco:
It was funny.
Marco:
Today, I wasn't sure.
Marco:
Last year, I had a Mac briefing to which I brought my MacBook Pro to take notes on.
Marco:
And the next day I had an iPad briefing to which I brought my iPad Pro to take notes on, figuring that the people in the room might appreciate that I was using their thing.
Marco:
And this time to what I suspected to be a Mac briefing, I brought only my iPad Pro for two main reasons.
Marco:
Number one, I hated typing so much on my MacBook Pro that I knew I was going to do a lot of typing, taking notes.
Marco:
I'm like, you know what?
Marco:
I don't want to type on this thing.
I don't
Marco:
I would rather type on my smart keyboard.
Marco:
So that's what I brought.
Marco:
And number two, it has cellular.
Marco:
And so everything I'm doing is constantly synced.
Marco:
I'm able to quickly things up.
Marco:
And yeah, you know, tethering exists.
Marco:
Tethering is fine, but it also sucks.
Marco:
And there's lots of cases in technology and life where you have an option that is fine, but kind of sucks, but you take it because it's your only option.
And
Marco:
And if tethering was the only option we ever had, then fine.
Marco:
I guess it would be fine.
Marco:
But we have phones.
Marco:
They have cell modems in them.
Marco:
We have watches that have cell modems in them.
Marco:
And the iPad has had cell modems offered since the very first iPad, which in a few months will be 10 years ago.
Marco:
It's time to bring it to the Mac.
Marco:
And I know it's hard.
Marco:
I know there's reasons.
Marco:
It's time.
Casey:
No argument here.
Casey:
I would love it.
Casey:
I don't know if I'd buy it, to be honest.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Here's the thing.
Casey:
Here's the thing, though.
Casey:
As much as I want it to exist, I don't know if I would do it.
Casey:
It's like the Mac Pro.
Casey:
As much as I give you guys a hard time, I want the Mac Pro to exist, but I would never buy it.
Casey:
I want cellular to be an option, but I don't know.
Casey:
It's...
Casey:
It's a tough call.
Casey:
I don't know if I would do it because I just don't find myself on the go to that degree with my MacBook that often.
John:
I think it would be, especially for people who have been the Apple ecosystem for such a long time, I think it would be a real game changer just because we're not used to the idea that you can bring your laptop somewhere without Wi-Fi.
John:
that to me is such a it's even a bigger change than ipads because ipads you know especially the mini were kind of like you know big phones or whatever and so i get that but i think it would just open up new new possibilities like so much so that you would you would find yourself like forgetting that you can do that on your laptop and like you know saying oh i want to go there all but i can't bring my laptop because i have no network wait i would have network connection i i am all for it and especially if it's not too expensive it would be great
John:
That said, I have cellular on most of my iPads, and I always loved having it, except on my current iPad, I'm having... The last time I went to WWC, I'm like, oh, I better get cellular set up on my iPad.
John:
And it's the thing that Apple can't really control.
John:
It's carriers.
John:
for some reason i can't give anyone money to give myself a cellular connection on my ipad like the thing in settings just dies with an error and never loads anything and basically i'd have to call some carrier on the phone and do something somehow like i've had cellular on this before but whatever state it's in now it's kind of borked and so i really that whole experience is crappy
Marco:
If you bring it to a carrier store, they can do a lot there.
Marco:
I did that once.
Marco:
It was fine.
John:
Yeah, I'm sure.
John:
I'm sure there's a solution.
John:
I'm not saying it's broken.
John:
I'm sure this can be fixed, but it can't be fixed by me stabbing at the screen with my fingers, which is disappointing.
John:
And that is still the truth of the terrible cellular world we live in in the U.S.
John:
is that bringing that to any of your products introduces that.
John:
But that's not Apple's fault, and there's nothing they can do about it, and most times it goes okay.
John:
I just want to bring that up as my sadness about the fact that my...
John:
My cellular capable iPad is now not cellular capable unless I'm willing to get on the phone and or go to a store.
John:
It's a hard life.
Marco:
But our keyboard nightmare is over.
Marco:
And I'm so happy.
Marco:
I'm so happy.
Marco:
The death of the butterfly keyboard begins today.
Marco:
And I cannot wait to dance on its grave when the last one is removed from the lineup.
Marco:
But it doesn't matter because now I have an option that isn't that.
Marco:
So as long as that takes, it doesn't matter to me because now I can buy one that isn't.
Marco:
whatever the first laptop was they released with a different keyboard I would have bought even if it was the lowest end one the fact that it's the high end one is even nicer because I like the high end ones I'm just so happy to have this and I can finally use a laptop again
Marco:
And actually enjoy it.
Marco:
And not be, like, just irritated the whole time.
Marco:
Oh, I'm just so happy.
Marco:
It's so good.
Marco:
It's so good.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
Thank you, Apple.
Marco:
It's so good.
Casey:
You know, missed opportunity on Apple's part.
Casey:
How amazing would it have been if they reincarnated the MacBook with this new keyboard?
Casey:
So, Marco Arment, I'm happy to report we have a new keyboard, but it's in a one-port MacBook, and that's what you get.
Casey:
Enjoy.
Marco:
I would have rather used that than my 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
Oh, God, that would have been amazing.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Mack Weldon, Squarespace, and HelloFresh.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Casey:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Casey:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Casey:
Cause it was accidental.
Casey:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Casey:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss.
Casey:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Casey:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
Hey, what's going on?
John:
Casey lost us again.
John:
Are you back?
John:
I hope you should stop your recording, Casey, and commit your files to disk and put them in Dropbox immediately.
John:
Yeah.
John:
His computer is falling apart.
John:
I think pieces of his computer are falling out the back as it goes down the road.
John:
chips are just littered behind it smoke is coming out a little bit it looks like so based on this current error message she's pasting us it looks like his microphone and speakers have now stopped working when your speakers have problems that's unless that unless the speakers are also his headphones i don't even know what's going on his computer is a mess and that's that's not even like a t2 max so like it it isn't like the t2 freaking out no like i feel like there's some kind of haunted computer
John:
There you go.
John:
This is for the two of you so you can get my earlier reference.
John:
Know your meme.
John:
Moon's haunted.