With a Heavy Heart
It's finally Mac Pro Day.
I guess I should get prepared.
Okay, I'm ready.
I have a new computer.
Hey!
How many new computers do you have?
I have only one.
It is darker than the one that it replaced.
How many holes are in the front?
Well, I feel like this is a trick question, but none?
Well, the answer is either a lot or zero.
it's not no where's the microphone oh it's a top maybe you're looking at it right now casey find the microphone hole i know but then i got to move my boom and that's gonna make a whole bunch of noise mine's covered in dust oh yeah right above the camera on on the top bezel like the top facing surface there's a small microphone looking hole right above the camera
okay so apparently i have one hole on it uh i do not have a gazillion well you know most of matter is empty space so it's really a philosophical question i mean i suppose with an lcd screen in some way every pixel is a hole of light a hole of light yeah well because it's a hole through which the backlight selectively shines
Oh, my God, you guys.
It's not a hole.
I know.
It's a transparent... It's not a great analogy.
This is not a rich vein.
The point is, I have my iMac Pro.
It arrived Monday afternoon.
I spent that afternoon and evening setting it up, which sounds like a whole lot of time.
It actually wasn't that much at all because I've become a pro at setting up Mac OS from scratch.
Whee!
It came with Mojave, and I really...
really want to put Catalina on it, but I have resisted the call so far.
Because why not, man?
Why?
Is it because of the red badge, Casey?
Well, in part, yes.
But it's also because it's the new hotness.
You can write a cron job to get rid of that.
We discussed that on a past show.
Yes, I know, but it's
It's the new hotness, but I've resisted so far.
I will hopefully resist at least to the new year because apparently that's going to change something.
Hi, I'm Casey Liss.
I finally have a working computer, and the first thing I want to do on it is replace its pretty much fine, mature-ish OS with a less fine, less stable, cutting-edge one for no benefits.
That's a question that people keep asking just before we came on the air.
People keep asking it, and I haven't put it into the show formally, but every time we talk about Catalina, it's worth mentioning again.
They ask, is it safe to update to Catalina?
Like the same thing that Casey's debating.
I've got this computer, and he just happens to have a new one.
But anyway, it wants to update.
Like the computer keeps prompting you and says, oh, there's an update available.
Are you sure you want to update to it?
And as Marco has said in past shows and I've said in past shows,
I don't think there's any super compelling reason to update unless you really want one of the new apps like the TV app or something, or you really like the music app instead of iTunes output.
And, you know, I like to see the new features in the photos app, but it's scary and you have to decide whether those benefits are worth the, uh,
apparently ongoing weirdness whether it's casey's weird cursor that could have been hardware could have been software we don't actually know but we don't want him to run that experiment but my answer my personal answer is it's not a strong answer like is it safe to update to catalina probably but it but you should be asking yourself is uh what am i going to get on the other side of it other than the comfort of knowing that i don't have a badge on my system preferences icon like if there's some new feature that's in catalina that you want
probably okay upgrading to it but if there's not a you can't name a feature right now that you're dying to have in catalina don't don't upgrade right like upgrading is a risk it brings it brings on potential downsides so there has to be some kind of upside to make that worth it and for most people that just isn't there
but it's new and shiny which is not to say that it's bad like if you're running it and it works fine for you like i'm running it on my macbook air and have zero problems with it but i'm also running mojave on my uh wife's imac and i don't have problems with that either so they're both computers are fine you know and and i'm not and i do want the new features in photos but i'm also very scared of the upgrade process i've heard lots of strange things about it so i'm i'm still waiting
surprise well surprise surprise the uh the good news is that right now if you're if you're willing to classify the imac pro as i know it's not the mac pro but i would say it's a mac pro and if you're willing to accept that classification i'm not for the first time in history the three of us are using mac pros no
I'm not willing to accept that.
It's a Pro Mac.
It's not a Mac Pro.
Oh, of course.
Define the Mac Pro.
I mean, this isn't that different from the 2013 trash can Mac Pro with a monitor glued to the front.
Like, it's exactly as expandable.
Exactly as upgradable.
Like, you know, it has a Xeon.
It has ECC RAM.
It's an iMac Pro.
It's like a Pro version of an iMac.
Oh, my goodness.
Well, the three of us kind of are running Mac Pro's asterisk.
I agree with you, Marco, but of course, it's self-serving.
Now, I don't remember what you said your build of your iMac Pro was.
I think it's almost identical.
Is that correct?
Because do you have the 10-core or the 8-core?
We went over this exact thing last show.
I know, but I can't remember.
I'm actually going to go through it again for a bit I'm going to do later.
We'll get to that later.
But yeah, short version is 10-core, 4-terabyte, 64-base GPU.
Yeah.
blast for a fleeting moment i thought maybe i would have a better computer than all of you losers but no marco and i have the same computer it's a good computer what's the problem it's an amazing computer it's an amazing computer but for that for a fleeting moment before john spends thirty thousand dollars on his mac pro we'll talk about it later don't worry
Before John spends 30 grand on his Mac Pro, I thought maybe, just maybe, I have the best computer of the three of us, which would be... I already have a better computer than both of you, as measured in wisdom and stature.
Sort of the grace that comes with age and experience.
Sure.
Anyway, so I got my iMac Pro.
I really like it.
It seems to be working really well.
I really shouldn't do anything to it like Catalina, but the call is strong.
But I'm trying to be a mature adult because this is the first time in like a year that I feel like I actually have a computer that frigging works, which is nice.
And I really enjoy that.
And things are fast, but you can't make Xcode losing code completion and syntax highlighting in Swift any faster.
That still happens.
And you can't make storyboards load any faster, which is frustrating.
I don't care if you don't like storyboards.
Tell somebody else.
I like storyboards.
They work well for me, except it takes forever to load them even on this iMac Pro, and that's very frustrating.
But the advantage now is that when Xcode has bugs and stuff like that, you can quit and relaunch it way faster.
Much faster.
And the bugs happen faster.
That's also true.
Fail fast.
Yeah.
Fail fast, fail hard.
So anyway, so yeah, so all kidding aside, I don't think there's really going to be any more of Casey's Computer Corner.
I consider this a footnote.
But likely story.
Yeah, we'll see.
Hopefully this won't break anytime soon.
I did get AppleCare this time because why wouldn't I?
But yeah, this this computer is real nice and I really like it.
And I'm glad I bought it, even though even if my wallet isn't.
And again, John is going to know that pain or maybe already knows that pain.
We'll talk about that later.
Moving on, Jason Painter wanted to tell us that they bought an iMac two years ago with an extended keyboard and it bent and it was replaced under warranty one year after it was originally purchased.
The new one hasn't bent.
So based on this one piece of anecdata, maybe they solved it.
Yeah, I hope so, because I'm going to get one of these weird keyboards with my new computer, and I really don't want it to bend, so fingers crossed.
But I was heartened to hear that the one person who replied with the actual experience with the bent one was the replacement didn't bend, which is unlike, for example, butterfly keyboards, which people get replaced and then still have problems with.
Indeed.
all right moving on uh justin winchester would like to talk about destiny but i don't care so we'll move right along uh the ipad remote control it's it's just one item let me let the record show i tried all right tell me about this john uh i was talking about playing destiny on stadia and i was playing it in uh chrome the work the web browser on a mac and
and i was complaining about the lag and justin says that if you play on a chromecast he says it was flawless no noticeable input lag he was super impressed now i don't have a chromecast ultra i do have an older chromecast but i can't as far as i'm aware try stadia with that setup because i don't have the weird 130 controller thingy the only reason i could play at all is because i was
doing it on my Mac in a browser and I had my PlayStation controller paired to my Mac with Bluetooth.
So I would like to try it on a Chromecast to see if the lag is better there.
I can't imagine it being flawless and I can't imagine not noticing the lag, but I'm willing to believe it would be better than running it through a web browser.
All right.
iPad remote control and classroom.
So we were talking about loading an iPad up and how you could kind of troubleshoot things remotely, especially for people who maybe aren't as familiar with computers and stuff like that.
And Martin Feld wrote in kind of on behalf of his wife, Natasha Kandelus, and apparently she teaches in a...
class that uses apple classroom on ios and so uh speaking for martin or martin speaking through me if you will i asked my wife natasha kendalos about apple classroom on ios she's a primary slash elementary teacher and she said that it enables you to control students devices to an extent you can lock them out of the ipad to gain attention and make apps and documents open apparently the look on kids faces when their devices freeze is priceless their heads snap up to face the front of the room
Which is kind of cool for, you know, the use that it's actually designed for.
But we were wondering, you know, does Apple Classroom allow for any sort of remote control?
And it doesn't seem like it has any sort of VNC style remote control as we were hoping.
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Well, I'll just sit on back and I'll see you two later.
So, John, tell me what's going on.
You're going to participate in this, Casey.
We need you for this journey we're about to go on.
Are you ready, everybody?
I appreciate it.
All right, John, all kidding aside, I like to snark, but I am genuinely, genuinely, genuinely excited that the day has come and that you finally have information about your future computer and
unless you really ruin all of our hopes and dreams and say you're not going to buy one.
So please, John, tell me at the very least, are you going to buy a Mac Pro?
And then, I don't know how you want to take it from here.
Perhaps we can walk through the configurator, but what are you going to buy?
Well, I just...
You know, settle in here.
The holiday season.
It's a time of giving, right?
On ATP, that usually means that we're giving money to Apple, which is a form of giving, I suppose.
Apple is composed of people.
So I think on this episode, on this night, join me, won't you, as we take a tour of the MagPro Configurator.
What?
which as we all know is the most powerful tool for giving money to apple that has ever been presented to people like us so that's what i thought we would do we're going to go through the macro configurator uh we're going to look at the options and i'm going to tell you my thoughts about those options oh my god you're really serious aren't you it's not going to take that long there's not that honestly there's not that many options so don't flip out yeah all right i'm buckled in i'm buckled in so let me start john are you getting a rack mount or are you getting a tower
Yeah, so yeah, the link will be in the show notes.
But yeah, the first thing you have to do is choose your Mac Pro, which sounds ominous.
And this is the first time as far as I'm aware that Apple has released a photograph of the rack mount Mac Pro, other than maybe they showed it on a slide at WWDC when it was announced.
But this is on the product page.
They announced that, hey, we're going to have a rack mount version of this, but it was never on the product page anywhere.
They had it at the thing that Marco went to, right?
Like the press briefing thing?
Yeah.
I don't know if this was here before this was opened up, but on the design page, if you scroll down a while, it shows you that there along with the little side view that you can see the rail.
Yep.
But anyway, that one is grayed out, which is the first sort of sign that things are as they have ever been when it comes to this particular Mac Pro.
They just can't get to the damn fireworks factory.
The whole Mac Pro Day thing is a thing.
And by the way, Mac Pro Day came and went.
It was the day they announced it on stage at WWDC.
But everyone keeps saying, oh, today is Mac Pro Day, which is a way of acknowledging that there's always one more thing with this computer.
Literally, in the Steve Jobs, it never fully arrives.
And that continues to be true.
Say you wanted a Mac Pro.
Can you order one?
No.
Can you see what the options are to how much it costs?
No.
someday that will also arrive but it's frustrating but uh anyway i wasn't gonna buy rack my one so i don't care so let's let's click on configure for the mac pro tower from five thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars and zero cents so much money
so much right underneath that by the way they have a little blue text it says get six percent daily cash back when you pay with your apple card until december 31st which is a deal that many people have told me about and i'm glad exists normally it would be three percent um but six percent is twice as good
There is a small asterisk on that, though.
Apple typically doesn't charge your card until your machine ships.
And so if you order it with a ship date that is after December 31st, which at this point is almost any configuration of it, it might be charged to your credit card after December 31st.
So according to one person who tweeted at me something they were told by their business rep, you will not get the cash until they charge your card.
But as long as you place the order before the end of the deadline, you will get the cash.
So you could place the order now and get 6% cash back on January 30th or something.
that is what one tweet from one person told me yeah the business reps don't know crap a lot of the time and that's i i wouldn't i honestly i wouldn't i wouldn't put much i wouldn't assume that was true it might be but that it doesn't have high credibility what i can say is if you have ordered a mac bro with your apple card uh and you've already done so or within the time window and you don't get six percent back because they charge your card next month call and complain and try to get that six percent because that is bs i'm hoping that the business rep person was right anyway let's configure
uh customize your mac pro and at the top it lists all the spec these are the default specs 3.5 gigahertz 8 core 32 gigs of ram uh radeon 580x with 8 gigs of dram 256 gig ssd which is way too small uh magic mouse uh keyboard with numeric keypad those are the stock stuff uh first choice you have is processor which processor is right for you
Let me interrupt you really quickly.
Are you going to be explaining what you plan to do during the tour or are we saving that for the end of the tour?
Should we hold our questions for the end of the tour?
During the tour.
Okay.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
Carry on, please.
Maybe we'll order a computer right here.
Who knows what will happen?
Don't tease me.
Processor.
You have a lot of choices.
The default one is 8-core, 3.5 gigahertz, Xeon turbo boost up to 4.
As sort of becomes apparent as you scroll through the configurator for this very expensive computer...
There aren't a lot of, like, upgrade options where you add 50 or 100 bucks and get something better.
That's not really a thing.
You have to add a zero to all those notions.
They could almost be measured in MacBook Airs.
Like, how many MacBook Airs do you have to add to get the next processor?
Right.
So 3.5 gigahertz, 8-core.
The very next option, the smallest step you can make from that is 3.3 gigahertz, 12-core.
with the 4.4 turbo so it's a lower base clock higher turbo speed uh more cores right that's add a thousand bucks plus one macbook air yeah it's not that that processor costs a thousand dollars is that processor costs a thousand dollars more than the eight core if you want to make the next jump which is from 12 to 16 again the base clock drops to 3.2 uh and the turbo is still 4.4 that's add two thousand dollars over the eight core
if you wanted to go up one more now you can do the silly ones you want the 24 core that's at six thousand dollars and you want the 28 core that's at seven thousand dollars so obviously uh the six and seven uh the the 24 and 28 core ones are you know forget about that although it is interesting that when apple distributed mac pros to all the youtubers and everything they gave them 28 core models which i mean usually they make sure they're spec'd well but like
I suppose it makes sense because they're all going to do the demos of, like, CPU-bound things that aren't accelerated if they don't use, like, ProRes and the Afterburner card or whatever.
And I think, honestly, that's what those very wealthy YouTubers are going to actually buy.
But add $7,000 for your CPU option?
Not great.
So when I'm looking at these options for me, who doesn't actually need this computer for anything important at all...
But nevertheless, I'm thinking that I don't want an 8-core because it's the one part of this computer that is the most difficult to upgrade.
I don't think it's impossible to upgrade.
I'm sure people are going to hack this thing and put new CPUs in it when new CPUs come out and so on and so forth.
But as far as I'm personally concerned, I'm never going to take that CPU out of there.
I never took any CPUs out of my Mac Pros before, and I'm probably not going to start now, especially since our Macs will be out and I'll just want to kick this thing to the curb eventually anyway.
So I don't want the 8, but the only option open to my wallet is the next step up.
So I think I'm going to choose the 12 core.
I would make probably the same decision.
Because I currently have 10 in my Mac Pro, and so I wouldn't want to go down to 8.
I'm not going to take a step down.
So if I was buying this, I'd go either 12 or 16.
The 12 would be the most likely choice, or 16 if I really wanted to...
have it be significantly better than my iMac Pro, which we'll get to later.
And also some quick real-time follow-up.
The configuration that YouTubers got, I didn't catch... I know they have two GPUs.
Do you know whether they have the two Vega 2s or two... They have the big ones.
Two Vega 2s.
They have the most expensive GPU option.
We'll get to that.
Two Vega 2 duos.
Yeah, I think so.
So if that's, if that's what they have, then the configuration sent to YouTubers is a, uh, $33,000 configuration.
It makes the two, it makes the two, uh, pro display XDRs that came with all of them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's not counting the pro display XDRs.
Or the stands.
And that's, that's the thing.
Kelly, they were showing like it's amazing performance in benchmarks and they weren't even using the afterburner card in some cases because the thing that they were doing wasn't accelerated on, um,
Well, and I think the reason... Like, they had to give YouTubers something crazy like this because... And I would imagine, like, you know, what they were seeing with render time differences, I would imagine a lot of that comes down to the GPUs.
Because even though, like, you know, a lot of it is core-based, like, we've had... The iMac Pro went up to, what, 24 cores, I think?
So, like, we've had... Sorry, 18 cores the iMac Pro went up to.
So, like...
to go from 18 to 28 at the top end like yeah that's a lot but that's not going to cut your render time by you know it by four times right like the way youtubers were showing this being like it was like four times faster than the iMac pro if you want that kind of result you're going to have to also do something gpu intensive and just destroy those gpus and put in like yeah and that's what this can do this has if they're if they if they had configurations that had four
four high-end gpus in them which because each of these cards has two gpus on it the duo series of cards here and so they had two cards that each had two gpus on them so that's four gpus with apps that run gpus very heavily in parallel like video stuff so like they had to give them a configuration like this so that they could show like massive improvements over the iMac pro if they didn't it wouldn't have actually been that much faster than the iMac pro
Yeah, although they did show some things like there was some people like 3D rendering.
It was CPU bound.
So you could see all 28 cores get pegged and it did well in that.
But obviously, obviously not four times faster.
Oh, also, before we leave the CPUs, I wanted to address this.
There's a thing here that says that you need the 24 or 28 core if you use the 1.5 terabyte of RAM option.
And that's actually not Apple being BSE.
That's Intel being BSE.
The 24 and 28 core chips are like special chips.
I forget how they're different, but they're different from the rest in the series.
And even Intel charges way more for them than they do for the rest of these.
So granted, I'm sure Apple's taking a healthy margin.
But the reason there's such a big price hike between 16 and 24 is in part Intel's fault.
Yeah, and also not a concern for me because I'm definitely not going for the 1.5 terabyte of RAM options, spoiler alert.
In the core things, though, I did want to spend money on this because it's basically, I don't plan to upgrade, it's unupgradable to me.
But...
It's really diminishing returns.
Like, I don't have much stuff that's multi-core, like every once in a while, like a handbrake rip or something from a Blu-ray.
But, like, you know, how much faster is 16 going to be than 12?
Best case, it's linear, and it's not worth another $1,000.
I mean, we have a lot of options to go, and it's already up to $6,999, right?
Manufacturer's suggested retail price, anyway.
Right.
So I'm picking 12 there, and I'm scrolling down.
next uh section is memory again with the little blue text how much memory is right for you i feel like it's a personal personal question um this is this is weird again i'm sort of thwarted by the options uh this actually is the cheapest upgrade option but the default is 32 which i think is a reasonable default unlike the ssd which we'll get to eventually um
But the next step up is $48.
All right, fine, for extra $300.
Apple's RAM prices are silly, but whatever, if they add $300.
And then the next option is $96.
Where's 64?
Where did 64 go?
64 was what I was going to get, but there's no 64 option.
So I could get 48 and add more because this, blessedly, like many tower Macs before, it has lots of RAM slots.
But Macs that have lots of RAM slots tend to have interesting rules about rules, you know, quote unquote, about where RAM should be installed for maximum performance.
Whether they have triple channel memory or you have to put them in pairs or they have to be matched in the two banks.
The best was the Mac Pro I had at work, which had triple channel memory.
but I think it didn't let you install things in multiples of three.
It was a very weird machine.
Anyway, I want 64.
64 is not an option.
48 for an extra $300 seems like too little to me, but when it comes to RAM, is it really that big a deal?
Because you have so many slots that you can add them.
uh you know and you can buy ram but then i thought of casey with his third party around not that i'm afraid of the same thing i have third party ram in my mac right now it's lasted 10 years i've granted i've had to replace it a couple times but it's fine you know they go bad this mac the mac i have uh underneath my desk now the 2008 mac pro has cute little lights that go on that shows you exactly which dim is having problems it's very nice
um but i didn't want to deal with that and so i'm thinking i mean initially i picked 48 on this i was like i'm gonna go with 48 i'm doing configs and checking prices or whatever it's like i'll just do 48 i can always add more ram
96 is a thousand dollars more right so it's a 700 jump from the 48 but if i get 96 i don't have to worry about ram for a very long time and i won't have to worry about third-party ram options who knows what those might be for this machine you know and how cheap they might be or whatever so i think i'm gonna go with 96 here
I would make the exact same choice for the exact same reasons.
Treat yourself, John.
That's what you got to do.
You can keep going.
192 gigabytes is $2,000 over the base.
Oh, no, sorry.
Not $2,000.
$3,000 over the base.
384, which is, I think, what the YouTuber's got, is $6,000 over the base.
768 is $14,000 over the base.
And why did it say 768 twice?
Because it's whether you want six modules that are bigger or 12 modules that are... Because it's like whether you want extra slots or not, basically.
Yeah, and the 1.5 terabyte one has been grayed out for me from some time yesterday.
Was it ever active?
It's because you have to pick the 24 or 28 core CPU.
Oh, so you got to pick the, yeah, right.
Anyway, that's 25 grand.
And people are shocked by 1.5 terabytes of RAM, but...
you know not to reveal too much but at work we have machines with more ram than that in them and as many you know not on our desktop machines but like in the in the data centers like and as lots of people you know tweet it out if you go to dell you can configure a computer a quote-unquote tower computer that's like 170 grand right so ram is expensive uh and the market is big and some people have very big needs um
And people serve that need by selling products for very high prices.
So this is obviously ridiculous for a quote-unquote personal computer.
But they do, you can buy tower PCs that are even more obscene in terms of the costing capability.
So yeah, 96.
In the absence of a 64, 96 seems like a reasonable compromise.
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Let's go down to graphics.
The default one is a Radeon Pro 580X with 8 gigs, which is a very pedestrian, previous generation, perfectly fine video card.
The very next option that is available to you, the next step up, is $2,400 more if you want a Radeon Pro Vega 2 with 32 gigs of RAM.
and it just gets worse from there you can get two of those for twice the price lucky you you can get a duo for an extra 5 200 or you can get two of those for double that an extra 10 grand right forget about those options i don't want the the works that i don't want or need the workstation cards it's kind of one of the things that if you remember that turned me off to the trash can as a product for me personally was i don't want a bunch of workstation cards like i understand that their capabilities are amazing and i saw the big pixar demos and like
But that's not I don't have any.
It doesn't do anything for me, even on the coolness factor.
Like none of this stuff is like I need it.
Right.
But you want it so you can do cool things that you enjoy.
And the only cool thing that I do that I enjoy that has anything to do with GPUs is games.
And games do not benefit from the extra money that you spend on a workstation-style card.
Not that they play games poorly.
They play games just fine.
But you can get a quote-unquote gaming card that plays the game just as well for a fraction of the cost.
These are not gaming cards.
These are cards for people who need them to render stuff in video or do workstation 3D graphics.
it's too rich for my blood uh and so my only option i feel like is the base video card and here again the factor that i've been talking about through all these things comes in which is it's not set in stone pick whatever gpu you want i've upgraded the gpu on this mac at least three times they come out they're on a card right you can if assuming you know i don't get rid of this computer and switch to arm and somehow the next few years i'm assuming i will upgrade this gpu because the gpu is upgradable it's a miracle
here's the only thing i have trepidation about uh when it comes to these upgrade stuff uh ram and storage or you know internal stuff like that i have i feel like third parties are going to fill that but for video cards historically we've mostly gotten by sort of with with dumb luck like apple has sold graphics cards in fact i believe the graphics card that's in my 2008 mac pro right now isn't a first party apple upgrade graphic card you know it's woefully out of date right
but but like apple used to sell hey you we'll send you a box with an apple little stamp on it that it's like graphics card upgrade for your mac pro and we will sell it to you separately right now of course like so many things about this computer there's no word on that and there's no sort of you can't buy them now like if you wanted to buy these gpu separately as far as i'm aware you just can't do it you can get them in a computer but you can't buy them separately and
Will Apple ever offer video cards that you can buy separately to stick into the Mac Pro?
I don't know.
And I can't confidently say that they will, even though this is an incredibly expandable computer and you have lots of options.
As far as I can tell, Apple considers that a thing that you choose at the time you build your machines, not a thing that you change into a machine that you already bought.
And like I was saying, historically, you've been able to buy, quote unquote, PC graphics cards with a similar enough architecture.
And, you know, maybe some tweaking to the firmware or whatever and just shove them into a Mac and they work.
Right.
And that's, you know, I have had video cards like that in my Mac Pro that were not Apple specific cards at all, but happened to work with some tweaking in an Apple computer because there is the same, you know, GPU family.
And as far as the operating system is concerned, it's the same drivers.
Right.
Is that still the case?
Will there still be third party cards?
Yeah.
that can run in this thing nvidia continues to be on the outs and it seems like i think we talked about it a few shows back it may be possible that nvidia will continue to be sort of locked out of the driver space for kernel drivers
uh like will they be able to will you be able to buy an nvidia card and then download from nvidia website a driver that goes into the thing i don't know um so i don't have i don't i can't i shouldn't buy this saying 100 i'm 100 sure i'll be able to upgrade in that like the next time a new gpu comes about uh we'll be able to buy a new one
Real-time follow-up from the chat room, apparently you can buy RAM.
What else can you buy?
They're actually selling the GPUs.
I mean, not technically, it's still currently unavailable, but they're listed on their site as separately purchasable items that will presumably become available soon.
So you can buy the Radeon Pro Vega 2 MPX module, $2,800.
It's what you'd expect.
I don't see the low-end one yet, but it's what you'd expect, basically.
All right.
Well, that's good.
That makes me more confident.
They're at least selling the ones that they're offering.
Now, we don't know what they're going to offer in the future.
And also, it's worth clarifying, there is one option.
It's similar to the 8TB SSD option.
They've announced that soon there will be a Radeon Pro W5700X option offered.
And by the specs, it appears to be kind of between the base GPU and the Pro Vega 2.
So it seems like there will probably be an option that is less than a $2,400 upgrade.
but still an upgrade that sits between these two.
It just isn't quite ready yet.
So that's worth noting.
And I would also say, on the expandability front, Apple intends for this to be what pros want now and going forward.
They intend to have this actual platform where they will continue to update things, to put out new MPX modules with GPUs as time goes on.
We just don't know if that's going to happen.
Their history so far with recent Pro stuff, as they've gotten back on track, they've been really good with updating GPUs for the MacBook Pros, for the iMac.
The iMac Pro, they did a GPU update, although they haven't updated anything else, but the iMac Pro yet, so I'm getting a little bit nervous.
So this could be great.
It could be that in 6 to 12 months, they release a couple of new MPX modules with new generation GPUs on them.
Or it could be that this remains a very niche product with very niche sales figures.
And we don't like to believe that Apple's a company run by spreadsheets, but it kind of is in a lot of ways.
And if Tim Cooks away the Mac Pro, then this could be just abandoned.
This could just be, oh, this was the only one they ever made.
And it didn't work out.
Not enough people bought it because it's really expensive.
Not enough people bought it, and I guess nobody wants it.
I guess we can exit this business.
That could totally happen, and only time will tell whether that's really what's going to happen or not.
Yeah, so it's basically the difference between being at the whim of Apple deciding what GPUs they want to put out in their cool black...
heatsinks and hardware and everything, which, to be clear, is what I would want.
Like, I'm not trying to come up with some, you know, giant RGB festooned, weird PC-looking thing.
But having the option to install third-party cards is good.
You know, you can be assured that if you buy a third-party, like,
equivalent GPU like they have a good relationship with AMD and I'm sure Radeons will continue to work on this thing but NVIDIA is the question because you need more and more permission from Apple these days to get a kernel driver loaded so I suppose you could turn off system integrity protection or whatever and just get your NVIDIA quote-unquote web drivers assuming NVIDIA keeps trying to make those but that's that's questionable I mean and NVIDIA and Apple have been
fighting for years and that doesn't seem to be uh changing so all that is to say yeah yeah it but the option that i expected to pick is the option that says coming soon which is why on the day this thing launched i asked on twitter does anybody have any idea what coming soon means and i asked that question in the context of the six percent cash back thing that we were just discussing because it's like look
If you really aren't going to get your 6% back if your thing doesn't ship before the end of the year, well, then if you're waiting around for the coming soon Radeon Pro, W57000, 5700X, whatever, you may be missing out on a 6% back, and that's a lot of money as we rack up the price on this thing.
So...
I think, and to be clear, no one has told me anything, so I have no idea what coming soon means, but it's a pretty safe bet to guess that coming soon does not mean, like, within an hour.
Considering how long everything is taken on this computer, it could mean before the end of the year.
Like, I don't know what coming soon means, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it means spring.
But, like...
Because the GPU is upgradable, and I'm very excited to see this page here, by the way.
It's on Apple's website.
We'll put the link in the show notes.
The title of the page... It says Mac Accessories on top.
That's the section it's in.
I think that's why I was not finding this, because I don't consider these accessories.
Anyway, the big text, the H1 on the page...
Mac components.
Hey!
It's been years since that has been a category of things that you can buy for yourself.
Now, some of them are things like the Silly Stand and the Visa Mount, and they've always had stuff like that, like Visa Mounts for your iMac or whatever.
And there's some Logitech and Belkin stuff thrown in there too, but...
These actual parts right from the little option picker, Radeon Pro Vega 2 MPX module, $2,800.
You could buy the Pegasus thing that lets you put regular drives in inside the case.
$400 for a thing with no drives in it?
Okay.
I mean, everything is expensive and black on this page, but at least it exists.
By the way, it has one drive in it.
does it yeah let's see it comes with a single eight terabyte drive and you can put your own in the second bay oh presumably you can also take out that one it's a spinning a spinning disc it's been all right for four hundred dollars yeah well the funny thing is eight terabyte ssds are almost that cheap now
Well, this is a special enterprise one, I'm sure.
I bet it's not.
This also has, I think, the first time I've seen the Logitech magnetic camera that sticks on top of the monitor, that is $200.
Yeah, that was a cool surprise.
I don't think we heard about that before the configurator and everything came up.
No, we did.
They told us about it at the launch, but they said Logitech's going to have a magnetic camera that attaches.
And we said, great, can we see it?
And it was nowhere to be found.
I don't know.
I haven't been keeping up with it, but you couldn't see it on launch day, I think.
But here it is.
It doesn't look that bad.
I already have an external Logitech camera, so I'm not sure I'm going to spend $200 on a new one.
But having a camera on the top of your thing is nice.
It would have been nice if they could have spared a little bit of budget in their $6,000 monitor to, say, put...
camera and a microphone in it but you know i understand money's tight when you're selling a monitor for six thousand dollars you can't have everything did you happen to see the belkin aux power cable kit i i did i did see that did you happen to look at the uh images that are on that product page specifically the last one i didn't click through to it what are we seeing what are we seeing here
So the Belkin Aux Power Cable Kit is a set of cables for $70 that runs from a special power header on the Mac Pro motherboard and provides those kind of aux power cables that modern gaming GPUs typically use.
The final image on this on Apple's site shows the Mac Pro with a third-party AMD Radeon something card in its kind of secondary slot there powered by these cables.
so it's it's actually showing you on apple's website or an official marketing image of you using a non-apple gpu as a secondary gpu in this machine presumably for i don't know gaming maybe i don't know not nvidia that's for sure yeah no definitely yeah well all the radian stuff is sure to work because they're basically the same cards yeah um
But it's cool to see that, to see them showing this on the site.
I mean, they do the same thing with the EGBUs, the Blackmagic stuff, and Pegasus, their favorite storage vendor.
For years, they'd show whatever the fancy Mac is with some Pegasus Raid array or the EGBU stuff.
I think...
before sort of the advent of thunderbolt when people were speculating about what they do it's like oh and apple will have these sleek external gpu boxes and it's like no they're just letting third parties do all of that which is kind of a shame because some of them are like they don't match as nicely uh but it's nice and that they actually are allowing companies other than apple to extend their computer
I love that if you just go to the Mac Accessories page, if you click on the header up top, you just go to the front page of Mac Accessories, it's showing the Pro Display XDR there, but it's showing it without the stand because the stand doesn't come with it.
And it looks so ridiculous, just this rectangle floating in space.
If you don't get a stand, it levitates.
It just highlights how incredibly audacious it is to be selling this incredibly expensive monitor without a stand and then to have the stand be $1,000.
It's amazing.
It is out of control.
Yeah, it does.
I mean, I've been watching the YouTubers play with their Mac Pros.
And initially, when seeing all the people who got the Mac Pros, like, well, this totally makes sense.
These people like actually legitimately, you know, quote unquote, need these computers in that it will save them.
They have a thing they do routinely at work that takes a really long time where they are waiting on the computer.
And by buying this horrendously expensive computer, they can wait half as long, a quarter as long.
Like that's what you pay money for.
That's the kind of gains you want, right?
So it makes sense that these people have them.
But sometimes YouTubers aren't going to be doing that much with this computer.
And they're just like... You can tell that they're in some ways not particularly the market for it.
Because they're like... The thing about the...
monitor attaching to the stand.
That makes perfect sense in the context of someone who works, say, in the film industry who has to, like, lug this stuff from set to set and sort of set up the monitor for the director to look at shots right after they've been done.
You know, I don't know that, obviously, I'm not in this industry either, but I understand the concept of you've got to pack up all your junk
and move it to someplace else and then unpack it and set it back up.
And you're like, is this really a problem?
Is that the stand is attached to the computer?
Why is it magnets?
Why does it need to come off?
Why is it a separate thing?
If you've ever tried to deal with a large monitor in any form, especially if it's expensive and fragile, the stand is a pain.
It really limits how you can pack that thing and how bulky the packaging has to be.
The ability for the panel to come off the stand
lets you pack it into a way smaller very completely flat like it's perfectly flat rectangular no weird curve like you can put that in a nice padded pelican whatever case and then the stand can be totally separate the stand is still kind of ungainly but the stand is not as fragile as a giant piece of glass so it makes perfect sense to
to me, for these things to separate from each other.
And it shows they've actually been talking to people and saying, it would be really useful to us if you didn't sell us this $6,000 thing with a weird, ungainly heavy stand that sort of clanks at the end of it.
It just, it makes our life miserable.
Can you do something better?
And of course, Apple being Apple is like, what about a cool magnetic connector and blah, blah, blah.
So that's what they did.
But if you're just going to have it on your desk, it doesn't make sense.
And that is entirely separate from the idea of, okay, but does it come with the stand or not?
So we're setting that aside.
It's just, I'm
I I'm surprised that more people aren't as sort of excited about the idea of Apple, you know, talking to the pro customers and listening and giving a feature that clearly comes from, you know, not just speculatively thinking it would be cool if the stand came up.
But like this is an actual use case.
But like every decent monitor has like a push button release to pop the standoff.
I mean, I had that on my Dell's like 10 years ago.
But Apple's monitors didn't.
That's true.
I'm saying Apple's monitors didn't because they were like, well, we can make it cooler.
Everyone else's did.
And guess what?
They didn't cost $1,000 extra.
Yeah, you know, I'm setting aside the price.
But, like, the idea that it attaches... And, of course, when Apple does do the attaching thing, yeah, you could do it with a simple release mechanism or something, but magnets are cooler.
It's the Apple way to do it.
And it's, you know, more proprietary, and they can sell you more weird-ass adapters.
And that's why the Visa adapter is like that, and...
whole nine yards so uh it's definitely an apple way to do it but i mean for years uh apple hasn't had monitors that adjusted in height which is again and not a groundbreaking concept every monitor does that right in fact apple's first lcd external monitor which none of you remember and was horrendously ugly was in fact height adjustable the telescoping thing on it have you ever seen that one it's it's ugly don't look it up but
but yeah they lost that technology they found it again with the uh the cool iMac with the metal arm anyway i'm glad height adjustment is back and i'm kind of glad detachable stand is back because it's cool even though it makes no difference in my life all right so we concluded the base graphics card before we move on to storage i wanted to call attention to i think it was baron von clack in the chat
sent a KBase link for install and replace parts in your Mac Pro 2019.
Learn about the many different parts you can replace and upgrade in your Mac Pro.
Memory, PCIe cards, Apple IO card, power supply, SSD, and wheels.
You will find links in the show notes to some YouTube videos that Apple put up showing how to do that.
Oh, excellent.
That's what I like to hear.
So Apple is totally on, you know, they've got the KBase articles.
They've got videos they made to show you how to, I think they just have ones for GPU and RAM upgrading.
And of course they have the cool.
Anyway, check out the videos.
We will put them in the show notes that Apple is clearly pitching this as an upgradable machine.
So I know this isn't quite what they've ever done before, but it's so damn close, and it sounds so much cooler.
Why didn't they call this the 2020 Mac Pro?
Like, almost no one is going to actually get this delivered in 2019.
It's the same with that iMac that went over the year boundary.
Yeah, and the 2013 Mac Pro was the same thing.
I know zero people who got it in 2013.
Even if you ordered on day one, it came in February 2014.
And this is almost that bad.
Right now, if you order it now, it delivers December 3rd to January 7th.
So almost no one's actually getting these in 2019.
why don't you just call it 2020?
It would sound cooler.
It would indicate a clean break from all this teen garbage.
And also, it's going to sound older than it is in the future.
You think the 2013 Mac Pro, that's super old, but it's actually really a 2014, basically, right?
Yeah, that makes a big difference.
Well, it did for a while.
I'm just saying.
I take your point, but at this point, 94 years later, it's not that big a difference.
Anyway, it's a small thing, but I think they should have called it the 2020 Mac Pro.
Yeah, I mostly agree.
All right.
Storage, including how much storage is right for you, John?
Actually, before we go to storage, on the GPU thing, I just want to be clear that I'm selecting the base GPU in protest.
It doesn't actually make a difference.
Literally nothing I'm going to do with it is going to require more GPU.
Yeah.
But it is kind of a waste of money.
Like if the other option was there, I would pick it because it's not like I'm going to be a great resale value for a Radeon Pro 580 EX.
You know what I mean?
Like, and so even if the new GPU option comes out in January, like, oh, and I can upgrade and swap it in.
I'm not gonna because it would be just expensive and a waste of the money and I'd have to resell the old one or whatever.
So it's.
you know it's it's like i said before like the it's the thing is never completely done and available for you it's always like a work in progress even though like the reason i was into this gpu is because i think they discussed it like when they were discussing the gpu options i was like well i'm not interested in these super high-end workstation ones so forget about those and of course i'm not going to take the base one and there's that sweet spot in the middle and it's just not even available to me unless i want to keep waiting which i
I will defend this base GPU.
First of all, I would probably get it because I don't touch my GPU really.
And this is, it seems, I don't know too much about it, but it seems like this is fairly similar to the base model GPU in the iMac pro, which admittedly is two years old, but like this seems like, okay, it seems pretty good.
Um,
But also it's the only one offered currently that only takes up one slot instead of two.
And so if you had a need to populate all the other PCI Express slots with other stuff, you actually would want this because then this would leave you one extra slot than any other configuration would.
Yeah, it's not bad.
The fact that it's not a quote-unquote MPX module, it's great because it doesn't take up more slots.
No, it is an MPX module.
It's a skinnier one.
Right.
It's not the double-wide thing or whatever.
But the double-wide things look cool.
Yeah.
Honestly, my use case is computer that is cool.
These are actual relevant criteria for my use case.
There is no game I'm going to be using that's going to need a bigger GPU.
There's no video that I'm rendering.
There's none of that.
It's all just about the cool factor.
So base GPU.
Storage.
256.
Default.
It's ridiculous.
I don't understand...
That default.
They did so well with the defaults elsewhere.
Default 32 gig.
The default video card, as we said, is fine.
The default CPU is fine.
For people who don't want CPUs, it's still 8-core.
It's not like they offered a quad-core one.
But 256?
It's not like the SSDs in this are fantastically better than the ones in the iMac.
They're basically probably about the same.
I don't know.
I haven't seen benchmarks for it yet, but...
i don't think there's any reason to have 56 you go up to one terabyte it's an extra 400 which is the typical ridiculous markup extra 800 for two terabyte extra 1400 for four terabyte which is better than what marco paid but it still ain't great uh eight terabyte coming soon which granted wasn't i don't think was it even mentioned as an option at wwc i forget
No, they announced this with the release of the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
At the briefing, they said, by the way, because the 16-inch can go up to 8 terabytes.
And they said, we're also adding this as an option to the Mac Pro.
They didn't say when.
They're adding it, and you would think, oh, adding it as an option would mean I'll be able to click it on the options page when you put that up.
But no, that's not the case.
Not that I wasn't in the market for 8 terabytes.
It's just too rich for my blood.
Which leaves you in the curious state of currently you can get a 16-inch MacBook Pro with more SSD space than you can the Mac Pro.
Yeah, I mean, obviously you could shove way more stuff inside that case and get all the storage you want out of it, but it's, I mean, I suppose if you're doing video and you really wanted that 8 terabyte, you can't order.
You just have to wait for coming soon.
All these YouTubers who got these things with 8 terabytes, or do they have 8 terabytes?
I forget.
But anyway, I'm assuming what they're going to buy, they want the 8 terabyte, because they all talk about they have all the storage, and it's great to have all this internal storage and so on and so forth, even though they have all their external sands and all that other stuff.
They seem like they wanted to buy the 8 terabyte, but it's not an option.
I don't want to buy the 8TB.
My current iMac, my wife's iMac, has 1TB.
And I outgrew that.
So now I have my photos on an external drive.
And so I have 1TB external, 1TB internal.
And I'm pressing up against the limits of that, kind of.
So 2 terabytes does not give me much breathing room.
So it's got to be 4.
It's a lot of money.
Fully agreed.
But I can't... Even though you can upgrade the internal storage, I don't know if you're going to be able to or going to want to rip out those little pair of SSD thingies and put in another different pair of them.
And anyway, that would be a waste of the internal storage.
I suppose you'd get 256 and upgrade it with third-party, but...
Four terabytes, $1,400.
No, I'm telling you, when I bought my iMac Pro, I took the four terabyte option, and it was so embarrassingly expensive, I didn't even want to tell anybody I got it, because it cost a ridiculous amount of money back then.
It's way cheaper now.
I do not regret it for a second.
Like, even though at the time I was, I was really like angsty about it.
I was like, I really, I hope this isn't a mistake, but it wasn't.
I love having four terabytes.
I'm currently using about 3.2 terabytes of that four.
So like I'm, I'm using it and it's so nice to have it all.
in the built-in internal drive on this computer now granted on the mac pro you can add stuff a lot more easily so if you were trying to like configure this a little bit more like on a super tight budget well first of all you shouldn't be buying this computer but if for some reason you're in that state then sure if you you know do after the fact third-party expansion through drive bay cards or whatever else but or pci express ssds directly but like if you're going to get this from apple get the four terabytes
And someone's pointing on the chat room back to the GPUs briefly that if you look at the price of the base one has no price in their configurators.
And then the next one down is the Pro Vega 2.
It's $2,400 more.
If you buy that, what I assume is the same Radeon Pro Vega 2 module separately, it's $2,800.
So that prices the 580X at $400, basically.
So that's the money that you're burning if you really wanted some other GPU and you buy it later.
How much money are you wasting with that 580X?
In Apple dollars, it's $400.
How much did you resell it for?
Maybe $200 or whatever.
Yeah.
All right.
Apple Afterburner.
Now, this is nice.
This is all the other things like how much storage is right for you, what graphics card is right for you.
Afterburner, it says, do I need an Apple Afterburner card?
It should really just say, if you don't know what this card is, you probably don't need it.
Maybe that's not true.
Maybe you don't know what it is because it's just a brand name.
But this is actually the biggest surprise of the configurator for me.
I knew nothing about a field programmable Gatorade's FPGA.
That does not roll off the tongue.
I knew nothing about them other than that they existed and what they did, but I'd never been in the market to buy one because why would I?
What would I do with it?
Hold on.
Can you summarize for us what is an FPGA?
It's field programmable.
It's a bunch of logic games that you can tell, quote unquote, in the field how to configure themselves.
So when you get a silicon chip, normally like it's sort of burned into the factory.
Here's a bunch of little transistors that arrange in a particular way and perform a certain function.
And that's it.
It's like a fixed function.
They use lithography to put it on a little chip.
And that's what you get.
uh field programmable gate array lets you change the arrangement of those gates to sort of it's like programmable hardware sort of right so you can do lots of interesting things with it but as you can imagine it's much more expensive than the equivalent functionality if you just got it burned into a chip that did one thing uh but it's reconfigurable so that's what's cool about it and i didn't know what the pricing of this stuff would be like but it was so strange and foreign some people had told us that these things cost a lot of money and the other markets really exist and
I expected it to be very, very expensive.
Turns out not so much.
Especially compared to the GPUs.
It's $2,000.
A new Afterburner is free, and if you want it, the only choice is you get an Apple Afterburner card at $2,000.
I suspect the reason it's so much cheaper than the GPUs is if you were to put the GPUs down, take their chips, and look at exactly how much square footage or square inches of...
you know silicon surface area there is in these giant gpu options it's probably vastly larger than the uh the afterburner card right even though the uh fbgas are surely are bulkier for the functionality they provide it seems like this one is not monstrous uh and performs is you know they're using it to perform a few specific functions which is able to do very very quickly
but it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
So it's too bad I have absolutely no use for this card and does not contribute to the coolness factor in any way because I have no idea what I would do with it.
So no afterburner card for me.
Well, and the great thing is because it's a regular slot-filled Mac Pro,
you can always add it later.
If Apple adds some ability to this via a software update down the road that you would actually benefit from, you can then, at that time, buy an Afterburner card and stick it in.
That's the magic of the Pro... Like, all their other computers, you have to make so many decisions up front that you can never upgrade.
And so, you have to often over-buy or...
underbuy for budget reasons or for not foreseeing future needs and then your needs change in the future and all of a sudden you have to get a whole new computer just because you didn't have enough like disk space or ram or something like that and you can't upgrade it like that's why this is so great because if you make the wrong choice on most of these things you can change it later
I thought of a use for the Afterburner card.
I was thinking of at what point, aside from the rare times when I'm doing Blu-ray encoding or whatever, when I see my computer or rather my wife's computer suffering, I hear the fans go up a little bit because I don't have an iMac Pro.
uh what is it usually when that happens i bet both of you know photo analysis d ah no i know you have a bad time with that no is she unzipping xcode no it's not her it's me i'm using the computer and i hear the fans go off what the hell's going on some sort of game
it's always like a browser tab it's always something some browser window open you know when that happens like you it's the tab you haven't looked at in a while it's like a link you followed from twitter and it's some article and you started reading it and you're like i'll get back to that later and you went off to do something else and then like you're doing something else and all of a sudden you hear the fans go up and you're like i'm just i'm not even my hands aren't even touching the keyboard or the mouse nothing is going on why are the fans spinning up
And what is it always?
Some stupid, extremely inefficient JavaScript and or Bitcoin miner in some ad festoon crappy website that you would never visit normally, but you got a link to from Twitter has gone off the rails and one Chrome tab is taking 200% CPU or something.
That's always what it is.
So the afterburner card should be used for JavaScript acceleration.
So this is Bitcoin miners can go really fast and not have your fans spin up.
I'm joking in case that's not clear.
Bad job script is bad.
Do you need to put wheels on your Mac Pro?
This was a tense moment in the configurator because some options are coming soon and not available.
When I first went through this configurator, there was no option for wheels.
There was no wheels.
There was no feet.
There was no casters.
I was searching the page for any of those words.
It just wasn't on the page.
Uh, do the magic of CDNs and, uh, you know, slow rollout of content.
Anyone who puts anything up in the app store is familiar with this thing.
It's just, you know, you needed to wait a little bit.
I jumped the gun a little bit.
So yeah, feeder wheels are an option.
Do I need wheels for my Mac pro?
That's a good question.
Apple's website.
Do I need wheels?
I remember way back when, when, uh, when we did the WDC show, I remember talking about this and saying, uh,
like i was afraid that my beautiful very expensive mac would be vulnerable under my desk to people slamming chairs into it or vacuum cleaners or dogs running into it or you know all sorts of terrible things could happen to it so maybe if i had it on wheels i could like roll it out of the way or you could roll to safety r2d2 style to avoid the slings and arrows of life on the floor um
But as of a couple of shows ago when I was talking about preparing the way and I got the new side table and everything, and I was thinking about putting the Mac Pro on the little side table, if it's going to be on the side table, there's no way in hell I want wheels on it because now it would be high up on a surface, on a slick, hard surface with wheels.
That is not a good situation to be in.
I think not because they're $400 bargain price of $100 per wheel, but mostly because my current plan is to try putting it on the little side table thing.
No wheels because it's not I don't feel secure with it up off the ground with wheels.
I think that makes sense.
I think I would probably get the wheels if I was getting it because I don't have any notion of putting it up.
I would definitely have it on the floor.
And if it's getting me on the floor, I want wheels not only because, you know, just in case, it helps move it around.
It's giant and heavy.
That would actually be nice.
Also, if I ever needed to bring it to the beach, it might help.
And also... Oh, God.
I wouldn't be out there.
I would put it in some kind of case.
You'd be pulling it along the sidewalk with a leech.
With a leech.
life yeah like it's like it's your like red rider wagon that you're dragging exactly exactly and but also like i would want it first of all i would be i'd be afraid of those feet scratching up my floor it like if it gets nudged slightly like wherever it was wherever it was sitting on my floor would probably scratch it up you know there's rubber on the bottom of those feet there's got to be right oh i don't i hope so i would also just i would appreciate the extra inch of ground clearance that would give it because that would make it easier to clean under
Oh, don't put vacuums under there.
That's how it gets dinged.
Not vacuums.
You could stick a Swiffer head under there.
Yeah, yeah.
I assume there's rubber under there just because if anyone's familiar with the Apple style of monitors with a sort of L-shaped tongue of aluminum bent underneath them, the iMacs are like that.
Their displays have been like that for ages.
I'm sitting in front of one of the earlier models that have a very thick tongue on it.
And they all look like it's just a bent piece of aluminum.
But if you pick those up and look on the bottom, there is actually rubber underneath that big aluminum thing to...
keep it grippy to keep it from scraping up your desk so on and so forth so i'm assuming that these feet have rubber under them so kvnava 9 in the chat room said what if they offer giant wheels like they do for bikes meant for riding on the beach yeah so if they have like the fat bike fat bike tires oh my god i would i would buy that in a second it would make it so much that i would actually bring to the beach then i would i would pull it with its power cable or whatever you know down down the half mile sidewalk from the ferry to
The half mile sand covered sidewalk.
Not recommended.
No.
Oh my goodness.
The other factor with these is that I think I had been thinking anyway, I had been assuming that you get wheels as an option and you either buy it with wheels or buy it with feet.
But the way it would work is the feet would get unscrewed at the factory and they would stick in wheels or vice versa.
Like they would just come with those things in it.
But that's not the case.
The metal tube that runs from top to bottom in this case is apparently all one piece and there's no connecting or disconnecting.
So if you get wheels, you've got wheels.
And if you get feet, you've got feet.
And you cannot take one, as far as I know, that has feet and switch it to wheels or vice versa.
I think you can, but I think Apple's telling you that you have to have an authorized service provider do it.
It's a little vague on that point.
I think you can do it later, but you're not supposed to.
Does it mean you have to replace the entire metal tube?
I don't know.
They don't appear to be selling the wheels directly.
I'm guessing it's just because they don't want you to install them yourself.
So in that same KBase article, install and replace parts in your Mac Pro, it does mention wheels.
And it says you can configure your Mac Pro with wheels to make it easier to transport.
If you already have your Mac Pro and want to add wheels, to Marco's point, contact Apple or an Apple authorized service provider.
there you go we need i fix it to tear this thing down to say like i mean because obviously you can just replace you know the entire internal skeletal case then you get one of the wheels but the options because here's what the options say they say stainless steel frame with feet and stainless steel frame with wheels like they they phrase it as part of the frame itself whether it's actually can be disconnected we need i fix it to open this thing up and see if they can get the the feet or the wheels off or if it's just one big piece
So yeah, feet, which is nice because it saves $400.
But I do think the wheels look super cool.
And it's going to be, you know, so what if I get it, try to put it on that little side table and it's like too wobbly or it doesn't fit in my office or like it looks weird or I don't like the sound or whatever.
Then it's going to go back on the floor and then it's going to be on the floor with no wheels.
But...
oh i'll feel better about saving 200 bucks uh input devices magic mouse or trackpad and it just says learn more what about which input device is right for you apple what happened to that phrasing i thought we were friends i'm not going to use any of these input referrals i really dislike trackpads i don't like apple's mouse even though it is a fine mouse it's just not the style of mouse that i like so i'm going to stick with the default which is magic mouse too
I'm loving the Apple peripheral lifestyle.
I have both, the trackpad on the left, mouse on the right.
I will say, though, I saw these peripherals in the demo rooms because they have a different color scheme.
Instead of just being all space gray like the iMac Pro, they have black tops and then silver aluminum bottoms.
And it's a very high contrast look.
I actually don't think they look very good.
I thought they looked kind of weird in person.
And so I'm actually not envious of these input device color schemes at all.
I forget if I have an iMac Pro.
I know Casey brought someone's iMac Pro input devices.
I don't recall if I did.
I might have one of those keyboards upstairs somewhere.
That's the problem.
I've got too much stuff and I'm too old and I forget things.
Someone's listening right now is like, yes, you have it.
I gave it to you.
How can you not remember?
I bought underscores and then I now have a set of my own that's brand new that I've not touched.
Well, that's not entirely true.
I bought underscores that included both the mouse and the trackpad.
The iMac Pro that I bought, I only got the default option, which was the mouse because it was cheapest and I knew I wasn't going to use it.
yeah i i'm pretty sure i have a brand new unopened version of my the current my current keyboard the old apple extended with the white keys like the pre magic key switches or whatever i think i've got one of those upstairs too so i have a lot of options with keyboard anyway keyboard you have no options here magic keyboard with numeric keypad is your only option let's see could you change oh you can change the language but that's about it
Pre-installed software.
I was trying to upsell you on the software.
You want Final Cut, you can get it.
You want Logic, you can get it.
I'm skipping all of that.
What's in the box?
A big giant Mac Pro.
A really cool power cord.
They're into the braided stuff now.
So it's a braided power cord.
I think the USB-C to lightning cable is also braided.
The mouse and the keyboard.
Are you ready to continue?
See, that was it.
We've sailed through these options on the Mac Pro.
What my screen says right now is $9,399.
Real-time follow-up from somebody inside your house.
I am being told that you bought Jason Snell's old iMac Pro peripherals.
Sorry, Jason.
I'm old and I forgot things.
All right.
So, yes, I agree.
$9,400 and you don't have a monitor yet.
Yeah, but we're just going to continue.
We're not done here.
No.
Continue.
There's a big item left to decide on.
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You click continue, and the next page it goes.
At the top, it has a banner that says Mac Pro with an add to bag button.
Granted, we didn't click add to bag, which is Apple's insistence on calling your thing a bag and not a cart, which honestly, what kind of bag could fit something this big?
I suppose it might not fit in a cart either.
Maybe you need one of those Home Depot sleds, you know?
anyway it hasn't yet been added to my bag it's just sitting up there you can add to bag but before we get there it says expand your mac pro workstation and has the disembodied floating monitor the marker was talking about before expand your mac pro workstation pro display xdr your choices are no thanks which is free nice of apple to give you no thanks for charging you standard glass which is five thousand dollars and nano texture glass which is six thousand dollars
We have one small item on the nanotexture glass.
Apple has a support article.
This might have been up for a while, but it was just going around recently.
For the Pro Display XDR.
If you get the nanotexture glass, Apple admonishes you.
Use only the dry polishing cloth that comes with your display to wipe dust or smudges off the screen.
Don't add water or use liquids to clean the nanotexture glass.
Never use any other cloth to clean the nanotexture glass.
If you lose the included polishing cloth, you can contact Apple to order a replacement polishing cloth.
So not only should you not use liquids, don't even use your garbage dry stuff.
The only, literally the only thing you can touch this screen with is Apple's own cloth.
And if you lose that one or it gets gross, you have to buy another one.
For an undisclosed amount of money.
I love this so much.
Having seen both the standard glass and nanotexture glass in person at WWDC, I have always been on the side of the standard glass when it comes to this monitor.
I think the nanotexture looks fine, but no way does it look $1,000 better to me.
So for me, it's a no-brainer decision to, you know, forget about nanopicture.
And that cleaning thing, look, I have enough problems with my TVs with burning in them.
Do I need another source of anxiety in my life, this monitor that you literally can't touch with anything of any kind ever?
Like, what if someone got a finger grease on it?
And I'd be like...
i'm gonna dry rub that finger grease off i feel like the people who are the crazy bidet proponents like you know how are you gonna get this thing clean but just taking a dry thing and rubbing it on it and the thing is for a lot of the videos i saw people who had the earlier view units these things everyone's like oh nanotexture it's gonna be great i'm gonna get the nanotexture are you like are you in an environment like in this these big sort of production houses where you're gonna be doing like real work with real people there like
Are you just going to have fingerprints all over that thing?
Are you going to defy the wisdom of the 75-degree angle wizards telling you that Apple's website clearly says you cannot use any other cloth?
It's 75 degrees exactly, and do not touch this thing with any other cloth.
You get water on it, forget it.
Have you seen Gremlins?
But even if you don't put water on it, you'll destroy it.
You'll destroy it if you put anything else on it.
So not only do I not want the nanotextured glass, now I'm a little bit afraid of it.
Yeah, that kind of gave me pause as well.
I mean, again, I'm not ordering one of these.
But I've been telling myself all this whole time, if I got this, I would get nanotexture.
But now I'm not so sure.
Because I've been living with the glossy iMac for the last...
five years or whatever it's been fine you know it's there's occasionally been annoying reflection on it but it's not the common case and like yeah if it's gonna have like this finicky side effect of i'd be afraid of anything ever getting on it and afraid of anybody ever touching it and like you know like what if what if someone you know who's like you know cleaning my my house wipes off the monitor like with the wrong cloth like what's oh my god like it's like i don't want to have to worry about that for the lifetime of this product
yeah and to think you personally cough for about three months out of the year yeah your own you're gonna your own flam and spit's gonna be all over this thing eventually you're looking at it and seeing these tiny specks and you'll be like what do i do about those am i gonna get those off with a dry cloth you'd be there you'd be like you know rubbing away that thing like 500 strokes in each direction on time and every time you feel like a fisherman's friend oh god
So I'm saving people money or people listening to this now.
They're like, why?
I was going to get that nanotextured glass.
But now that I think about it, there's no way.
Anyway, so I've just gone through this configuration process of this computer that, you know, configured, quote unquote, the way I want it with all the compromises.
And conveniently, at the top of the page, it says add to bag, but does not show me the price.
can i scroll to see it anywhere there it is it's the very bottom you can see it so this is nine thousand four hundred dollars manufacturer suggested retail price am i going to add a five thousand dollar option six of this thing five thousand option for a display that can lay flat on my desk i guess or be supported by a small child as is suggested at wwdc
I could lean it against a stack of books.
I could fashion my own stand from a larger stand.
That's a Simpsons joke, Casey.
You could buy the Vesa Man adapter for only $200 and get your own Vesa stand.
I could.
I could do that.
That might not be able to support its weight.
Yeah.
Honestly, this thing just sort of leaning...
slightly back on your desk uh with whatever supporting it completely hidden by the monitor would be less offensive to me than attaching this to a third-party stand again my stupid use case is you know focused heavily on aesthetics which makes no sense to anybody but let me be me you know the part of the reason i want a first-party monitors because it matches the computer and looks cool on the front and the back yes it's a stupid reason that's my reason you get your own reasons
So do I really want this thing in a third-party stand?
Do I want it at all?
What do you think?
Of course you want it.
You absolutely want it.
Come on.
Standard glass with the pro stand.
Yep, that is correct.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
It is utterly ridiculous, but that is correct.
Everything about this is ridiculous.
You don't need any of it, but you want it, and it makes you happy.
You've been waiting a freaking decade.
You just get the thing you want, which is the standard glass and the pro stand.
So here's the thing, and we discussed this at length, you know, mostly not restated because nothing has really changed.
Part of what I was, you know,
fraught and upset about the the announcement excited by the new mac pro but also uh you know had some trepidation it was all about the monitor because yes the computer is horrendously expensive uh and yes i just configured it up to like nine thousand five hundred dollars uh but you know it's it's not unreasonable like a lot of people are sending us the the audio clips of old episodes where it's like i'm not gonna spend fifteen thousand dollars on a computer uh the computer as configured by me here
you know not particularly frugally but whatever it's under 10 grand for the computer and then you just buy a monitor how much can a monitor cost this monitor screws everything up in terms of like totally i i do want a bigger monitor and i do appreciate that this one is a cool big monitor but it's not it's like even in my use case if i want a cool thing
It is not worth $5,000 to me.
Like, it doesn't do anything.
But, like, if it was just a 5K iMac screen, I'd be happy.
If it was a 6K iMac screen, like, everything the same as the iMac, but, like, bigger and more pixels, that's the monitor I would buy.
And that would be two grand, and I would be like, fine.
This thing...
Like it is wasted on me, totally and utterly wasted.
I'm sure it's going to look cool.
It will look better than my television set or whatever.
But like it is the most frustrating part of this whole experience.
We talked about it at length.
Apple should do something better.
Instead, they went super high end, which I can't blame them for because the whole point of this product is to plant a flag at the very, very, very high end.
So good job, Apple.
You've done that.
But for me personally, it's very disappointing.
that they did this and so it is with a heavy heart that i click standard glass so you are spending five thousand dollars on this monitor and you in what stand are you getting then
It's with an even heavier heart that I click Pro Stand.
There we go.
There we go.
That's the only option that makes sense.
Everything else sucks.
If the point of this is to have the Halo computer that you've waited so long for and that you really want and that you've worked and earned your hard-earned money to buy...
That is the option to pick.
I know it's ridiculous.
Again, this whole thing is ridiculous.
But you want an Apple monitor for your brand new top-of-the-line Apple computer, damn it.
And this is the only option they have for you.
And yeah, it's completely ridiculous.
And I find it especially ridiculous that they've told us on a number of occasions that developers are their biggest pro market segment.
And I can't think of any developers, except John Syracuse, who are going to buy this monitor.
Because it totally does not do what developers need.
What developers need is what John said.
A lot of space, but still otherwise consumer-grade.
We don't need the crazy XDR stuff with the fans, which I want to ask you about.
The fans and the huge thousand nits of brightness.
We don't need that.
And the iMac 5K screen and the iMac Pro screen is really good for photos.
It has full P3 color gamut.
It's not a garbage monitor.
It's really good for things well beyond development.
Yeah, they've been selling, as far as I know, they've been selling the same panel in iMacs since the second version of the Retina iMac, which I think was 2015, when they added P3.
I'm pretty sure it's been the same panel since 2015.
It's fantastic.
Just put this panel as an external monitor, and yeah, you could charge $1,500, $2,000, that'd be fine.
It doesn't even need to be bigger.
If it can be bigger, if you can give us 6K, that's even better, but we don't even need that.
We just want this monitor that you've been shipping in IMAX for four years as a standalone monitor to buy that you can plug into any other computer.
That exists!
It's the LG 5K!
You don't have to like it, but it's the truth.
It sort of exists, Asterix, but it's in this terrible plastic enclosure with bad backlight bleeding all around it.
Yeah, so for as weird I am as I am with all like, oh, it's got to match the computer and the aesthetics and the cool factor and stuff like that,
I'm not that far outside of the sort of mainstream of the tech enthusiasts, you know, because people in, you know, the tech enthusiasts in general like cool computers.
That's what makes them tech enthusiasts.
Right.
In the same way that people who are into cars like fast cars that they're never going to own just because they're cool.
Right.
And so most people sensibly are not doing the stupid thing that I'm doing and buying this very expensive computer.
Right.
but they appreciate Apple's case wrapped around an LG LCD.
Like, they understand it like it's literally the same panel in both of these things.
But most, I think, even plain old developers are willing to spend $100 or $200 more to get a cool Apple case because it matches their computer and it looks cool.
Like, there is a threshold of looks coolness, and you're willing to, like, in general, Apple customers are willing to pay a little bit more for something that looks cool.
So the LG one is unsatisfying, even within the realm of, like,
practical people with actual needs they want more screen space so they can see more code they don't really care about color gamma but they do do photos in their computer too so if they're going to have a big desktop it's nice to have something with a p3 display so great get that lg panel can you put it in a case that at least passes my threshold of acceptability and it feels like the lg1 is both flaky and not particularly expensive feeling but still actually kind of expensive as casey pointed out in the past few shows so it's just a very unsatisfying product
Yeah, I'd rather be really upset for a little while about how much money I spent on the right product than buy the wrong product and be kind of upset about it forever.
I think that's fair.
And then the Pro stand, I mean, we've gone to those before.
It's very silly.
I hope it's a good stand.
It seems the magnet thing is cool.
The interlocking mechanism is cool.
Hopefully it won't get loose over time.
I have some faith because Apple's usually good at these kind of mechanical things like witness the iMac arm.
which did get looser over time but held up surprisingly well in very hostile environments with children yanking on the thing so i really hope their uh very ridiculously price stand will hold up well so there we go uh we're not done yet but i was gonna say you've got more to do we get to the bottom now we scroll like the banner at the top that says add to bag that's still there all right but if you keep scrolling i've picked my two options here
At the bottom, I have a new subtotal.
It says $15,397.00.
And there's an add to bag button.
I'm going to click that.
But all the essentials and then some, John.
Do you want AppleCare?
Yeah.
So at the top now, it says review bag.
$15,000 with accessories.
But there are more options.
AppleCare Plus for Mac.
$300, perhaps the cheapest thing you can buy for this thing.
Cheaper than wheels.
Yeah.
cheaper than the monitor stand cheaper than any of the gpu options cheaper than any of the cpu upgrades oh my word uh yeah apple care uh i think in the the relative cost of this thing i tend to buy apple care for my computers uh
i bought it for the mac pro that's sitting below me i bought it for all the portable things that i knew my kids were going to be using because that just makes sense uh i think i bought it for my eyes i'm i'm i tend to buy apple care am i coming out ahead probably not it just makes me sleep better at night so i'm clicking on add to bag for apple care which is weird because it doesn't go off to a different screen it says underneath item added to bag but the add to bag button remains there and active bad ui apple
next option apple care plus for apple display because unlike i think unlike in the past i think i recall in the past buying apple care that covered the display if you bought it yeah if you if you bought like a like a like a mac pro old cheese grater or a power mac g5 with a apple display that's not a purchase there was a unified apple care that covered both of them yeah
That does not exist in this case for the Pro Display XDR.
Not only that, but the Pro Display XDR AppleCare, which lasts the same amount of time as the Mac AppleCare, costs $200 more.
It is $500 for the AppleCare for the display.
I was thinking, I would imagine, if you think about it from Apple's perspective, if you're an insurance actuary and you're trying to figure out what's this actually going to cost them over time,
The parts that can go wrong in a Mac Pro are... First of all, it's unlikely that anything inside of a modern Mac Pro is ever really going to die within three years because it has very few moving parts except fans, and they're cheap.
Otherwise, if one of the solid-state components dies, which is very unlikely in the first three years, then fine, you can replace just that part.
Whereas, what can go wrong on a 6K display...
dead pixels or image retention and those kind of problems you have to replace that entire panel and i'm guessing it's probably not possible i'm guessing you have to replace the entire thing and so you figure like if something goes wrong that's a lot of pixels that could die and
And there's pretty much no servicing it.
Like you have to replace the entire super expensive component or entire thing.
Whereas again, with the Mac pro you can replace like just the bad Ram stick or whatever, and you're fine.
So that's, I'm guessing it's actually, they're probably figuring it's actually more expensive for them to provide extra warranty coverage on that display, which by the way, it's probably a good indicator that you should probably get this Apple care for it.
Yeah.
You don't say, Marco.
Interesting opinion coming from you.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And also the other thing I would add is it's much more prone to accidental damage.
It's a huge, fragile thing that comes off the stand and is meant to be carried around if you're in that type of environment, like from station to station.
Like, it's breakable.
Yeah, here's the thing that's killer about all this.
Like, AppleCare, I'm going to buy this.
I'm going to have peace of mind.
If you're in sort of the geological time set that I deal with my products in,
it's always shocking to look at this and say three years but you're barely getting started in three years these all run out in three years so if you buy apple care for your very expensive display and then four years later you ding it with your elbow you're like well good thing i had apple care what what do you mean good thing you got apple care apple care it's gone i know you can do the thing where you keep paying monthly and we talked about that on past shows but in general like thinking that you're going to get apple care you never have to worry about anything is not true if you keep your computers as long as i do
all that said uh i live in deadly fear of breaking this way too expensive monitor that i don't need so i'm clicking add to bag apple care plus for apple display are you getting any other accessories they are offering me a thunderbolt 3 cable which is usbc on both ends and is white get that crap out of here i only use black cables to connect to my computer are you getting the logitech webcam thing because otherwise you won't be able to do like video calls on your computer
i told you i already have a electric uh camera sitting on my desk right now because my monitor remember my monitor also doesn't have a camera in it it's so old everything old is new again you missed the entire era of webcams built into monitors i skipped over the original eyesight because i didn't i don't know why i didn't get it then i just like there was no use for it and it was expensive and got really hot and it was weird um so i didn't get the original eyesight and then i got a monitor with no camera in it and then i just kept using that computer for a decade
so oh my goodness so i do have logitech camera um there are other options you can buy a bunch of dongles luckily i have a bunch of dongles already uh actually my own dongles like i you know work gave me some dongles for my dongle book at work but i bought some of my own peripherals when there was this big sale at one point so i do have a bunch of usbc peripherals unfortunately they're white but whatever um what else is on this page all those different adapters do you buy airpods pro icloud apple music
I'm all good on the iCloud and the Apple Music.
The auxiliary power thing for $70, no thanks.
No, I think that's it.
So I think I've clicked on everything.
Let's review bag and see what we've got.
Interestingly, when I clicked the AppleCare stuff, it didn't update anything.
So you're at about what, like $16,000-ish?
Oh, no.
Your bag total, your bag total is $17,207.19.
Wait, $207?
Wait, I missed something.
Hold on.
oh it's tax that's why that's why i'm sorry the subtitle before tax should be like 15 696 16 195 oh i missed the apple cares ah 16 195 here's the thing about about the prices it normally if you go through like if you've gone through the configurator to like figure out which macbook do you want or whatever when i was doing my macbook air uh you can tell when you screwed up because you're like oh the price is like double what it should be like
You just look at the number and you know you've accidentally put the quantity to or something.
But with this computer, looking at the number does not tell you at a glance whether you accidentally added two monitors or two computers or anything.
Because the numbers are so big, they just are breaking my brain.
The estimated tax in my particular zip code is $858.34.
And yours apparently is a couple hundred dollars more than that.
So the tax...
Tax.
Mine's $1,400.
Welcome to New York.
The tax.
The tax on your, or I guess I should say in this context, the tax on y'all's computers is basically a MacBook Air.
Yeah, my tax is a MacBook.
My tax is a 13-inch MacBook Pro, actually.
Yeah, California tax is, I think, sales tax is 10%.
Yeah, so that would be... Oh, golly.
Okay, so... Yours is what, 8.5, Marco?
Something like that.
8.8, I think.
Something like that.
Yeah, Massachusetts is 6.25.
I think mine's four and a half or something like that.
I forget.
So anyway, so $16,195 before tax.
Holy smokes.
Shipping is free, though, so you've got that going for you.
Oh, thank goodness.
You're not going to spend the extra $9 for express shipping?
The best part of this to me is that I'm scrolling down this page and I see Mac Pro.
Order today.
It delivers as early as December 30th.
Pro Display XDR order today delivers as late as January 15.
So you could hypothetically in a best slash worst case scenario, you could receive the Mac Pro on December 30 and not receive the display until two weeks later on January 15th.
Yeah, I mean, I would be fine with that.
Like, I'm not in such a hurry, like, oh, I've just got the computer without the monitor.
Like, it takes me so long to, like, you know, you've already heard about the preparing the way.
That continues.
I still have to do stuff I was looking at.
I was looking at new mice today.
Like, I'm fine with taking this slow and having the changeover be slow and careful and methodical.
I mean, I'm not...
you know john roderick level who's had a new computer in a box in his house for a year but i i don't i'm not in a hurry to get like i don't i don't care about that um that said i was worried about the six percent uh shipping stuff i was slightly reassured by that tweet but i don't know um anyway let's let's talk about these numbers here because it's ridiculous i don't need this computer that is too much money i'm not going to pay seventeen thousand dollars for this entire system it's just literally too much money luckily there are many avenues available
to not just fancy podcast hosts, but everybody, if you are persistent enough, to try to save money on this.
One of them is, in theory, you could find a state that doesn't have sales tax, like neighboring state of New Hampshire, and perhaps go there to buy it when they're available in stores.
Speaking of which, someone sent a list.
I should have prepared for this better.
Delaware also?
Yeah.
Yeah, someone sent a list of the Apple stores that are going to have the Mac Pro in them for you to look at.
It is not all the stores, at least initially.
So if you go to your local Apple store, unless you live in like a major city or whatever, I think the only store in the Boston area is the one on Boylston Street that will have a Mac Pro in it.
None of the Apple stores near me will have it.
But anyway, if you can find a...
uh a state without sales tax you can save some money by willing to drive over there and buy it in that location apple uh the company has a friends and family program for its employees where people who work for apple can offer to as the name says their friends and family a fairly substantial discount on hardware and in general and in my experience uh the discount i i
i think it might be like a flat percent but occasionally like the discount varies like you can get less money off of the cheaper products and maybe more off the ones that have higher margins uh it's it's hit or miss um but it's something a lot of employers you may or may not know this but if one of the advantages of working for a big corporation in a jobby job is they often have a program through which employees can buy discounted hardware from apple believe it or not um
6% cash back.
If you happen to have an Apple card or perhaps two Apple cards, a husband and wife, one could buy the monitor and one could buy the computer and you can both get 6% back.
All this is to say, I'm not going to pay a lot for this muffler.
I'm not going to pay 17 grand for this system.
By the way, no one knows this.
If you're in the state of New York and you're going to use your computer primarily for software development or website development, look up form ST-121.3.
You probably don't have to pay sales tax on it.
There you go.
And finally, business reps.
Depending on how you can ingratiate yourself slash pretend you are a real business with the business reps at your local Apple store, they can often give discounts as well.
So if you combine all these together, kind of like when people buy new cars...
since this is new car pricing here you don't want to pay the windows sticker price uh and right now with the six percent thing uh it's bad in that like there's a time limit and best case you have to uh order by december 31st worst case it's already too late you know depending but you're always getting three percent back right so i plan to leverage everything at my disposal to try to save money on this stupid computer
it's okay i know you've been waiting a long time you've been you've been not buying a lot of computers i have it's okay well i mean i don't i don't feel bad about buying the stupid computer i want i'm excited about buying a stupid computer i feel bad about that much money leaving so and how much money is it and how much of a discount but all that is to say is that i this is over my limit that if i actually had to pay 17 i would not buy this computer in this configuration but
I'm not going to pay $7.
I'm not going to pay $7.
Yeah, you would.
You would just grumble a little bit longer about it.
Agreed.
I don't know.
I'm glad I don't have to determine that.
I feel like it's like $1,000 per week of grumbling.
i mean if you just if you just combine this together like the the sales tax that i'm saving the six percent cash back and like a friends and family discount you're already well into double digit percentage discounts on this right so it like you know like they say in the ads the more you spend the more you save like percentages seem like nothing until the numbers get this big and then all of a sudden they seem like something yeah especially when they stack so there we go we did it uh season of giving yeah
Give all that you can give until it hurts to one of the world's richest corporations for a computer you don't need.
Merry Christmas.
So here it was earlier tonight.
I priced my iMac Pro, my brand new iMac Pro, you know, as though I was just a rando off the street.
And before tax, if I computed this correctly, it was $7,200.
And I almost fell off my chair thinking about spending that much money on a computer.
You are talking about a computer now.
pre-discounts and anything else that is literally ten thousand dollars more than that so it's interesting that you mentioned that i actually prepared a little bit to uh i hope this is a good time as any uh so you know i was looking at this as well for myself thinking do i need a mac pro should i get a mac pro because i you know i would i would probably like one in some ways it would actually be worse than my current setup like for my own practical needs but like it's hell it's a
so i looked and i i configured a mac pro that's almost identical to what john just did using almost exactly the same reasons my only difference is where i added the wheels and the trackpad and the mouse and i had the anti-glare pro display in my in my setup although i might i might reconsider that now anyway that came to 17 344 before tax and i looked up my mac pro
Only difference from what you just said, Casey, was I had the mouse and trackpad, so that came to $7,517, which is almost exactly $10,000 less.
The iMac Pro that I have, compared to this Mac Pro setup, you know, the Mac Pro would be maybe like...
a third better in a lot of ways like i'd have the screen that was about a third bigger i would have about a third faster cpu performance maybe you know like about a third more ram like you know stuff like that like it would be like about a third to 50 percent better you would not have a third better single core performance that's for sure that's true it might have worse you might have worse single core performance or at least similar yeah so like you know i like in most ways it's like you know a quarter to 50 percent better than what i have now
What I have now, I'm extremely happy with my iMac Pro.
I love it.
And so I thought, for such a jump, this isn't really worth spending $17,000 to me, or stacking up all of John's discounts.
It's not worth it to me, because what I have now is already close enough to that in every way that I care about.
Like, who this computer is for, really...
is it's for people who the other computers in the lineup can't be specced in the ways that they need for a really good reason.
So, for instance, if you need 384 gigs of RAM, you can't put that in any other Mac.
That's what this is for.
This computer is to cover all those edge cases.
If you need six GPUs or four GPUs, if you need that, you can't do that with anything else.
So that's the computer for you.
if you need like 12 internal drives and these weird promise arrays, like, yeah, again, you can do that.
If you need PCI express slots without using some weird buggy enclosure with limited bandwidth, like through a Thunderbolt cable or whatever, like if you need a bunch of PCI express slots for the kind of work you do,
this is the computer for you, right?
So, like, there are a whole bunch of edge cases where this is the computer for you, and I think that's really what it's for, is, like, if what you want to do can't be done with the other models in the lineup, this is for you.
None of those apply to me.
The iMac Pro is an amazing computer for everything I do.
I don't need more than that.
So I thought...
For the same price as this Mac Pro setup, I could buy this iMac Pro and what else?
Now, I did the math.
So, for the same cost as the Mac Pro setup, I could buy the iMac Pro.
That's, you know, two-thirds is good.
A 16-inch MacBook Pro of my preferred configuration, the $2799 configuration.
my iphone 11 pro 256 with the apple leather case an ipad pro 11 inch 256 cellular with with the keyboard folio and the pencil an apple watch series 5 stainless steel airpods pro i'm figuring i'm recreating my whole setup here i could also uh buy the peak design everyday backpack to hold all this stuff i could buy my my herman miller embody chair
A standing desk from Ikea.
I'm re-hearing my whole desk here.
The Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard for business.
My current favorite headphones, if I only had to pick one pair, the Dan Clark Audio Eon 2 closed-back headphones, which are $900.
And you know what?
You could be a podcaster, too.
The Rode AI-1 USB microphone interface, the Shure SM57 microphone, and a good cup of coffee for $4 or less.
That is...
the total amount.
So you could have my entire setup with all this Apple stuff.
You could have the iMac Pro, the MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, backpack, desk, chair, everything.
You could have all of that for the same price.
Now, suppose you don't need that.
I have a couple other options for you.
You could also get
this iMac Pro, three of my MacBook Pros, seven HomePods, an AeroPress to make some good coffee, of course, and a month of Disney Plus.
Now, suppose you don't want that option.
I also have a more luxurious higher-end option.
The iMac Pro...
the 16-inch MacBook Pro, 81 pounds of macadamia nuts, and a Rolex.
And a Rolex!
I'm worried about the macadamia nuts spoiling.
I don't think I could eat 81 pounds before they go over.
Well, you wouldn't have to order them all at once.
All right.
Oh, I do have one more option.
It's a lighter, more fun option.
You could get the iMac Pro, a Nintendo Switch with Mario Kart and Stardew Valley, a Domino's medium pizza with pineapple and pepperoni...
oh i don't want this this bundle is sounding terrible and a 1994 toyota mr2 oh it's not getting any better you don't have any money left over for something good to add to this bundle so you can get a car and an imac pro and and a switch and a pizza uh or you can again you can get the 85 the 81 pounds of macadamia nuts and the rolex and the macbook pro you know there's a whole bunch of different options you have here but
the traditional, uh, sort of hypothetical scenario in the context of very expensive Apple computers is the one that really makes us all depressed because we can't tell the future, which is if instead of buying insert expensive Apple computer here, you had taken that money and put it into Apple stock, you, you would now be a millionaire.
It's like, Oh, well that fine.
If you did it in the eighties, fine.
But there are really terrible ones where it's like, instead of buying a power Mac G five, if you'd put that money into Apple stock, you'd have like 500 grand now.
Uh,
I'm making no predictions about the future price of Apple stock, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But those always depress me.
In the quote-unquote true spirit of the season, like buying things is like in general, like the fad now, the saying, meme or whatever that all the youngsters know about is buy experiences, not things, right?
But if you buy neither, that can be even better.
That's what the investing advice is like.
Instead of buying the thing that you wanted that was fancy, if you...
Put that money into an investment that you magically knew would be amazing, which is the ridiculous part of the scenario.
But basically, like, don't spend it.
Save it.
Put it in the 401k.
Put it in government bonds.
Put it in something like that.
Don't buy the thing.
Save that money to help you have experiences later, like the experience and be able to afford health care for yourself when you're old, so on and so forth.
So this is not...
I was going to say, we are professionals.
Do not, please, listeners, do not buy a Mac Pro.
It's a stupid thing to do.
I will inevitably regret it when the ARM Macs come out that are so much faster than this thing.
And so there's a very short time window before both of you will once again be able to make fun of me about how your phones are faster than my computer.
And by the way, I'm pretty sure the iPhone 11 Pro still beats the Mac Pro that I'd expect in single-core performance.
I need to double-check these numbers on Geekbench anyway.
Obviously, that's not why you're buying a 12-core computer and a multi-core crushes it and then GPUs, it crushes so on and so forth.
But the single-core performance of these computers is not good.
Not good at all.
And the more cores you get, the worse it gets.
If you'll permit me a small journey, one of my favorite things to do when I'm really and truly bored is to look at like random YouTube videos about cars or motorcycles or what have you.
Now, I know almost nothing about motorcycles, but one of my favorite styles or flavors of motorcycle video is people who drive or ride, I guess, a Suzuki Hayabusa, which is the like, to the best of my understanding, the most crotch rockety of all crotch rockets.
Yeah.
These typically get, or I guess often get turbocharged, and you'll see videos of these things doing like 200, 250 miles an hour on public roads, which is just terrifying and dangerous and terrible.
But I bring all this up to say the Hayabusa is, by some arguments, especially for people like me who are ignorant about motorcycles, the creme de la creme of motorcycles until you go into like the Ducati world, right?
Yeah.
To get a 2020 Hayabusa, the base MSRP, is $14,799.
But nothing is a monkey's paw.
I mean, those things are going to kill you faster than cigarettes.
Like, forget it.
If you gave that to somebody, that was a plot point on a recent television show that I don't want to spoil.
But, like, giving them to someone is basically like giving them a dead fish wrapped in newspaper.
Like, it's basically saying, we hope you're dead soon.
That's true.
Have fun.
I mean, they probably don't have to do a lot of warranty repairs.
That's also true.
But my point is just that even with the 395 destination charge, this is less than the MSRP of John's future computer.
Although John's computer probably lasts longer.
It will.
It will.
Speaking of the display stuff, one other item that Apple put up, I think, for the first time, their compatibility list for the Pro Display XDR.
and it is obviously the the fancy mac pro the 15 inch macbook pro from 2018 the 16 inch macbook pro from 2019 i uh i think the macro pro from 2018 and later so it's 15 inches they later revised it to say 2018 and later because even apple forgot that they were that there was a 15 inch update this spring the 21.5 inch imac from 2019 the 27 inch imac from 2019 and
Any Mac model with Thunderbolt 3 ports paired with a Blackmagic eGPU or Blackmagic eGPU Pro.
So that's it.
There is one Mac notably absent from this list of computers that can drive the Pro Display XDR, and that is the iMac Pro.
Why?
Because it is essentially a 2017 computer.
And if you'll notice, all these computers are from 2018 or later or have any GPU thing.
And they all have discrete GPUs.
Yeah.
so the 13 inch is not there at all um yeah and i mean it makes sense and i think honestly like it's fine i don't think it's a particular use case but it does get back to marco trying to make decisions about this computer um i have no problem believing that you're going to stick to your decision for at least some time not to buy a mac pro or at least not this mac pro but i have a feeling that you're
your determination will waver not because of the computer but because of the screen because you've seen the screen it is a really nice screen it is wasted on you just as much as it's wasted on me but it does give you more space and it does look nicer than the 5k so the moment when the moment arrives that you somehow convince yourself that there's some scenario in which you can get that display onto your desk which obviously isn't now because you can't hook it up to your computer and it wouldn't fit in there physically anyway but my desk isn't big enough
Somehow, some way, if you get into the headspace where you're going to do everything on a 16-inch MacBook Pro again or something, or who knows?
If something's going to happen, you're going to hook it up to a Mac Mini once it can drive it?
I don't know.
But I feel like you will hold firm on the tower, at least until they come out with an ARM one, and of course you'll buy that.
But if you can get some scenario where you can get that screen, I think it will lure you because it is a really nice screen, and that is the thing that you look at all day long, and it would make a difference in your life, and you would appreciate that difference.
Okay.
Well, I'll tell you what can really push my decision.
Right now, I've spent the whole last episode and many episodes before this talking about how much I love my iMac Pro and how it really is the computer I need.
And I don't really need more than it.
But the iMac Pro is two years old.
It hasn't been updated yet.
It...
It could be Intel's fault, but it's getting near the time when it probably isn't Intel's fault anymore.
And so look, Apple might decide that the Mac Pro is where they're going to focus, and they might not update the iMac Pro anymore.
This might be the only one they ever make.
And if that's the case, then in a few more years when this thing is getting pretty outdated, and I want to upgrade...
the only sensible upgrade for me will be a Mac Pro.
Or whatever the consumer iMacs are at that point, but I'd probably want the Mac Pro out of those choices.
And so, if the iMac Pro is left to die now, which I really hope it isn't, because as we just illustrated with the value arguments, like...
if you wanted to know like what's why should the iMac Pro still exist price it out and you see ten thousand dollars of why it should still exist but like if the iMac Pro doesn't still exist then I would kind of be pushed up market but for my needs which I honestly I hope that doesn't happen I really hope they keep doing the iMac Pro as well whenever there's new chips for it and I think there still aren't but I think there's about to be so I hope that happens
The other thing that can change my mind about this is if the monitor situation changes.
If they do actually end up shipping a good Apple 5K reasonably priced monitor that isn't Super XDR everything, or heck, a 6K that isn't Super XDR everything, which I don't think they're going to do.
But if they do that, then that changes things.
Because, yeah, my iMac Pro configuration, the way I specced up my iMac Pro was I think about $7,000 or maybe even almost $8,000.
And so to spend, like, nine for a Mac Pro, that is, you know, the kind of configuration I would want, isn't that much more.
I would just have to solve the display problem in a way that I'd be comfortable with.
That's, again, like what you said earlier when we were talking about the display.
Like, the display is what really kills it.
When you look at, like, this computer is so overpriced, a lot of that's the display.
And if they offered more good first-party display options...
that would change the Mac Pro narrative a lot.
That would make it way more accessible.
It would still be a very high-end, very expensive computer, just like the iMac Pro is.
The iMac Pro isn't cheap either.
But it would make it a lot more justifiable to people like software developers who don't need that super XDR color and brightness and everything, who just need a big monitor and a really fast computer.
That's what we need, right?
So if either of those things change, if the iMac Pro goes away...
or if the monitor offerings come down market.
then I would really strongly consider a Mac Pro for my future needs.
But if neither of those things happen, I think I'm going to stick with the iMac Pro for the foreseeable future.
It's really good for me.
I love this computer.
I'm not even dying for a new one.
My current one is totally fine.
I'm almost two years into it.
It's great.
If my computer died today and I had to buy a new one, which, well, I wouldn't.
It's under AppleCare.
But if somehow I had to buy a new computer today...
I would probably still choose the iMac Pro for my needs because it really does solve them very well.
And I would rather spend that extra $10,000 anywhere else or nowhere.
All right.
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
Apple, Apple, and Apple.
Thanks for sponsoring this week.
Eero, Linode, and Bombas.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
I think for the after show, for our loyal listeners who know that the show continues after the song, even though the song says now the show is over, they're still here.
They know it's not over.
They kept listening to the podcast.
Those people out there, which I assume is all of them, but we all know it's not.
We all know somebody stopped this.
Those people are going to be wondering, all right, when is going to jump and order his Mac Pro?
He just configured it.
Did you click the buy button at the end of this thing?
Did either of you click the buy button?
No.
No.
No, I did not.
I didn't either.
Because I already ordered that computer and it's on its way.
Oh, hey, that's awesome.
Do you have an estimated ship date?
Arrives December 27th through January 6th.
Nice.
With the monitor, too?
The monitor says arrives December 30th through January 7th.
I hope so very much since your birthday falls on a Tuesday.
How amazing would it be if one or even better, both of these items arrived on that particular Tuesday?
That would be the best birthday gift.
That really would.
Yeah, I mean, I'd rather have it arrive sooner than that, because I want time to set it up.
Like, not because I'm dying to get it, but just because I'm on vacation for the holidays, right?
And so that's the perfect time for me to have time to set it up in my monk-like way, taking forever to do everything.
So, yeah, well, we'll see.
How long would it take you to set this up?
Like, I still don't have all of the sort of furnishing arrangements sorted out.
I'm still...
Still preparing the way.
You better hurry up.
You don't have that much time left.
I don't have a lot of things on my desk, but I'm reconsidering all of them.
I have a microphone that I'm talking into right now that's connected through a cable to my Mac, but my new Mac, A, won't be in that same place, and B, you won't have ports in the same place.
So I've got cable routing decisions.
I have some other junk on the table that I'm probably going to get rid of.
I already mentioned the CD cases that are underneath that I'm going to get rid of.
I haven't even put in my new UPS.
It's just sitting here unplugged next to my old UPS that is actually running the computer that I'm talking to now.
So there's more stuff to do.
So plenty of work ahead.
Sooner would be better than later.
Although what I really want is that it arrives on a day when it's not snowing or raining.
Well, it's winter in the Northeast, but that's unlikely.
I know.
It's a tall order.
And I need to be home when it comes and, you know, the whole...
nine yards.
So, uh, yeah, I've got that to look forward to.
Oh man, I'm so happy you did it.
I was so afraid you'd chicken out.
Me too.
Yeah, and it, well, it's, like, honestly, it was because of the, the doubt about the 6% thing.
Um, and, like, the only thing that was making me wait for is speculative things about the video cards and other things like that, and it's like, like, I just, the whole, it's the point of it being upgradable.
Just...
Like, it's unsatisfying in that, like, hey, you got to configure your dream computer.
No, I didn't.
You just heard me walk through it.
That's not my dream computer.
It's the computer that I could fit into my dream.
Like, it's just not, like, there were parameters, right?
And there are things, and so I had to make compromises, and I was rushed by the 6% thing, but, like, I feel like, you know...
And on the one hand, after 10 years, you can't wait any longer.
On the other hand, after 10 years, what's waiting another six months?
But you just got to do it.
You had to.
I keep saying almost nobody needs this computer, but there's always that little asterisk, except John Syracuse.
You need this computer.
I don't need it.
I just want it because it's really cool.
No, no one else needs it.
You need it.
It's okay.
The main reason I said this is while we're recording, I see email arriving in another window of people saying, hey, I can get you a discount or whatever.
Rest assured, all the discounts I listed, I did my best with the discounts.
I do not need anyone else to offer me any discounts.
If Apple wants to send review hardware in the future, I am totally open to that.
So Apple, if you're listening, please feel free to send us review hardware.
Even though we don't have 8K cameras with which to shoot videos that are going to be shown on someone's phone, we still can...
talk about products in an intelligent manner, uh, and, and entertain people while we do it.
What you need this Mac pro for really is to have like three Chrome windows open at once.
Yeah.
JavaScript accelerator for afterburner.
Get on it.
Web kit team.
Oh, my word.
Well, I'm very happy for you, John.
Congratulations.
This is the best... Congratulations slash condolences.
Well, that too.
This is the best quasi-birthday present in the world.
It's funny, as soon as the configurator was available, the very first thing I did, before I even spoke to you about it, I sent a text to your wife saying, you know, hey, my thoughts and prayers during this difficult time, because last I heard, she was a family CFO, and oof.
It is kind of funny, though.
Like, you know, there's that.
What do you get?
The person who has everything.
Right.
And it's like, oh, it's so hard to shop for some people in your life.
And so often those people are like, you know, your spouse.
What the heck does anybody get you for Christmas or your birthday this year when you've just ordered this thing for yourself?
Like you cannot compete with that with anything else.
I just I just ordered an item that is related to this.
There's lots of preparing the way stuff.
Unfortunately, it's not good for gifts because I'm like, well, I can't wait for Christmas that I need it now.
You know what I ordered?
A smaller level, because I have a level, but it's like a big level.
I needed a smaller level forever.
Like every time I use my stupid big level, I'm like, this level is way too big, right?
It's too big for this purpose, but I'll just get by, right?
Like when I'm leveling my refrigerator, it's like this level is so big it sticks off the end of the refrigerator.
I just needed like a 16-inch level or a 14-inch level or something like that.
And what finally, after like 10 years of needing a smaller level, what finally pushed me over the line?
Leveling my little side table where I'm going to put the Mac.
i mean i can try to eyeball it but i want it to be perfectly level and my big level is literally too big to fit in there so i ordered myself a level so that's an example of me thwarting someone who could have gotten like a good thoughtful christmas gift it's like oh i'll get you like a nine dollar level that's small that's a great christmas gift and i would say but i can't wait for christmas for it because what if the computer comes before christmas
I love the idea so much of somebody getting you a small level for this problem.
Yeah, that's the type of purchases I'm making.
I don't even want to go back through my Amazon history of all this garbage I'm buying to try to sort this stuff out.
This is fantastic.
Anyway, I don't need any gifts for Christmas.
If it was up to me, no one would give me any gifts for Christmas.
Some people don't like that.
So I have to cooperate with their desire to give me gifts, but...
i sure don't make it easy no i yeah i'm the same way as well but yeah and i i would love i would love to someday reach a point where like we get gifts for the kids and the adults don't but i don't think the family would would tolerate that but the kids thing is is difficult too because the i'm i'm a big proponent of the kid age cutoff but it's really difficult to suggest that policy yeah
Because what you're basically saying is, I don't want to get your kids gifts things anymore.
But sometimes it's one of those things where you look across the room, across the family table, and you see everyone else.
And you can see in their eyes that they don't want to buy gifts for the kids after their concert X age.
And you just all say it at the same time.
And it's like, oh, thank God.
Because there's so many kids and there's just too many of them.
There's too many gifts.
And what do your kids want?
And what do your kids want?
And it's just like, enough.
After whatever, you know, 16, 18, you know, 13, whatever age we all collectively decide, we don't all get each other's kids' gifts after this age.
You get your own kids' gifts or whatever, but we don't have to give each other.
So I'm a fan of that.
Many people are not a fan of that policy.
And if they're not, you just have to deal with it because what are you going to do?
It can't be unilateral.
It has to be unanimous.
Well, I will suggest, I think the best gift that your family could possibly get you is to never mention how much money you've just spent on this computer again.
That's not good.
It never comes up again.
It's never a thing.
It just gets forgotten.
I'm going to bring it up.
Are you kidding?
It'll be on my tombstone, probably.
Maybe the Mac Pro will be your tombstone.
Here lies John Syracuse.
He spent way too much money on an Intel computer right before Apple switched to ARM.
Ha ha.