A Giant Green Field
Casey:
John, has your computer arrived yet?
Casey:
Didn't come today, that's for sure.
Casey:
Well, one would think you would hear the forklift putting it in place.
John:
Yeah, no, I saw the weight in the UPS tracking thing.
John:
Take a guess.
John:
100 pounds?
John:
No, 82.
Casey:
Oh, actually, I decided my estimate was ridiculous and was going to walk it way back, but never mind.
John:
Because the machine is only like 50, so I guess 30 pounds of packaging.
Casey:
Excited?
Casey:
I guess not, since you don't have a monitor yet.
John:
I did all sorts of preparing the wait today.
John:
Well, I tweeted some things here.
John:
I'll send you more stuff.
Marco:
If the Mac Pro arrives before the monitor, which by current shipping estimates is likely to happen,
Marco:
Are you really going to sit there and not try it, like not plug it into something else just to test it out?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, what am I going to connect it to?
John:
Anything.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Plug it into your gaming monitor.
John:
I don't care.
John:
Like anything.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I want to have I'm not in a hurry.
John:
I mean, I might actually take it out of the box and set it up kind of or I don't know.
John:
i just assume wait for the monitor to get here i gotta see what the date is going to be on the monitor so like you've been waiting 10 years for this computer it's going to arrive in your house and you're going to let it like sit in the box for a week rather than plug it into any other monitor yeah i mean what's not it's going to keep like i've i just have to see what the what the ship date is like if it's it's still going to be within my vacation time like there's holiday stuff going on too you know yeah but still here take a look at that picture for that i put in our slack that's that's just for our slack unfortunately not for our listeners sorry
Marco:
oh my god is this the attic i did some major preparing of the way as evidence from all the impressions on the ground where things used to be oh my word i you have a much nicer attic than me this is like finished yeah this it's yeah there's carpet and like a regular ceiling and everything a window you don't think i'm putting my piling my computers in a dingy attic yeah it's all finished yeah this is like this is nicer than my office i think
John:
Well, I mean, the rug is obviously gross, but, you know, 80s, what can you do?
Marco:
It's still, it's wall-to-wall carpeting and finished walls and ceiling and a regular window on one side.
John:
Windows on the other side, too, yeah.
John:
This is a livable space.
John:
It is not heated or cooled, just FYI.
Marco:
Oh, OK.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
That makes it difficult.
John:
Although like it was below freezing today and I worked up there half the day and was fine just because, you know, old houses, not too much insulation.
John:
So we are heating it whether we know it or not.
John:
It's just the computers act as a form of insulation.
John:
They retain heat.
John:
now i'm pixel peeping at these uh boxes here i'm seeing a box for a performa do you see the the sun fading on the apple logo the apple logo on the other side of that boxes looks brand new oh wow totally sun scorched oh yeah so you can see the mac pro box and the cinema display boxes are already they're empty obviously but they're already received my old computer and then there's a big spot for the boxes of the new computer
Marco:
Ah, so your procedure is when you retire something, you put it back in its own box in the attic for long-term storage.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it's not bad.
John:
That's why I have all these boxes.
John:
You're keeping a Wii fit?
John:
Yeah, I have a Wii fit.
John:
Why else would I throw it away?
Casey:
We have one, too, and I don't know why.
Casey:
I honestly don't know why.
Casey:
But I know why we had one.
Casey:
I don't know why we continue to have one.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure we had our Wii Fit long after we had our Wii.
Marco:
And it just like eventually we discovered it.
Marco:
And I'm not sure we've actually located it again or thrown it away since then.
Marco:
But, man, I'm really impressed by the diligence here.
John:
Yeah, I had to do a lot of refactoring to try to make more efficient use of space.
John:
Here's another shot of stuff that's in a layer that you can't see.
Marco:
wow this is a lot of stuff like i mean i keep a lot of boxes like generally i will keep the box to anything that i plan to resell for a non-trivial amount of money down the road or that would be very difficult to ship anywhere for servicing down the road if necessary so like you know obviously like imac boxes like i keep the imac boxes because you know that's that qualifies on both on both counts
Casey:
So I'm counting roughly 40 boxes here, but I'm also seeing like a pile of jewel cases or something in the back.
Casey:
It's hard to make out what those are.
John:
Yeah, I used to back up everything to optical disc and I printed labels for those optical discs and had nice little jewel cases.
John:
Yeah, I mean, obviously that ended, but that's what those are.
John:
I keep the boxes mostly if I think about if I ever had to move this anywhere, whether it be from a house to another or just, you know, shipping it to somebody or giving it to somebody.
John:
How awkward would it be not to have the box and how much room does the thing take up?
John:
So when I was going through stuff today, I was like, oh, here's a box to my two gaming monitors.
John:
I don't need those boxes, right?
John:
But they were skinny.
John:
And if I ever needed to move those gaming monitors anywhere or give them away or ship them or sell them, it's much easier to have the box.
John:
So...
John:
I kept them.
John:
So that's why you see a lot of these boxes for stuff that's out.
John:
I keep the boxes because when it's time to retire them, you put them in the box.
John:
Even if you're going to recycle them, it's convenient to just have the box and bring them to Apple in the box and say, here you go.
John:
And then the box is their problem.
Marco:
they probably immediately throw it away like you're actually causing them more trouble well they can recycle but they can recycle the box too imagine how big the trash can must be in an apple store it's probably like the tiny it's probably a mac pro it's probably one of those like because they what trash did they throw away yeah so this is this is a was a pretty big refactor most i got rid of two g5 boxes which are very large oh my word
Marco:
I'm seeing some old stuff like that.
Marco:
You have a 15-inch MacBook Pro box that is black.
Marco:
When was the last time they were black?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I also have another black portable box.
John:
I didn't even know what it was from the top.
John:
I couldn't tell.
John:
I started to take out it.
John:
It was a Power Mac G4 was also in a black box, but that is still in the protective brown wrapper somewhere buried in here.
Yeah.
John:
You can see in the second picture, you can see my Syracuse Boulevard sign that I stole from Long Island poking out there.
John:
That's my original Mac box on the bottom left.
John:
And then next to it is another original Mac box that is not mine, but that I got later in life.
John:
Always good to have two of those.
John:
My actual box is fairly beat up.
Marco:
So I'm curious, why are you keeping the boxes for things like the TiVo Bolt or the Sony Handycam?
Marco:
Things that aren't particularly meaningful, aren't going to be particularly worth anything on resale, aren't noteworthy in any way.
John:
The Handycam has my actual Handycam in it, and I have the tapes and everything for that.
John:
So I think I have everything off those tapes under the computer, but it's always good to have the tapes and the thing that can play them back through a series of dongles.
John:
I can get the stuff off.
John:
So the Handycam is actually in there.
John:
That's a convenient way to store it and all the stuff.
John:
The TiVos and everything, someday I'll give them to somebody.
John:
Like, I used to have more TiVos, and as they aged out, I said, hey, does anybody want one of these TiVos?
John:
And some would say yes, and I would send it to them in the box.
John:
The TiVo Bolt is connected to television, so I'm using it.
John:
Eventually, I won't use it, and I'll put it in that box and give it to somebody who wants it.
John:
What about, like, you have boxes for GameCube controllers and the Switch Pro controller.
John:
Why?
John:
Those are actual controllers in there.
John:
The Switch for Canola doesn't have anything in it, but the GameCube ones, I have many sealed-in-the-box GameCube controllers.
John:
For what purpose?
John:
In the aftertimes, those will be currency.
John:
Gamers know these are very valuable things.
John:
Sealed-in-the-box-never-opened GameCube controllers.
Casey:
Wait, never opened?
John:
Yes.
John:
People are trying to figure out where I live right now so they can come to my house and steal these.
John:
It's a hot commodity.
Marco:
What is the going market value today for an unopened GameCube controller?
John:
That depends on who's buying, but they are less valuable now that Nintendo has, I think, started making them again.
John:
They made a Smash Bros.
John:
variant during the Wii era.
John:
It's my favorite controller, so I have a couple of them.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
It's like peering into your mind, John.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And don't look at the other side.
John:
The other side is a mess.
John:
That's...
John:
The other side is actually larger.
John:
I did not refactor the other side.
John:
Baby steps.
John:
And this thing is off camera to your left.
John:
You can't see.
John:
I've got a whole line of classic Macs over there.
John:
To the right, I've got a bunch of other crap.
John:
That brown box on an angle is when Apple started making the iMac boxes.
John:
That's the 5K iMac box.
John:
It's not rectangular anymore.
John:
That's a real stacking problem for me.
John:
I haven't quite figured that out.
Marco:
that's how i spent my day by the way so i've been looking up on ebay it does appear as though the value of an unopened genuine nintendo gamecube controller does seem to vary between about 50 and 150 depending on what it is like it seems like some of them are obviously more collectible than others but there's actually a decent amount of these in the sold listings that have sold for pretty significant prices yeah
Marco:
I mean, my attic, which is not a finished attic, it's literally just like an unfinished space with raw wood everywhere.
Marco:
That's where we keep all of our boxes for stuff like that.
Marco:
And it is nowhere near as organized as this.
Marco:
But I probably keep about maybe an eighth as many boxes as you do.
John:
And you don't have a bunch of old computers that you've ever owned and used.
John:
There's a Mac 2 FX in there.
John:
Off to the right, off camera is...
John:
Two next slabs, the next laser printer, a next megapixel display, a next color display.
John:
To your left is the next cube.
John:
I have a lot of next stuff buried in here.
John:
That's incredible.
Marco:
I mean, just like the...
John:
amount of stuff and the historical value of some of it and the complete seemingly lack of historical value of some of the other ones like i do i keep boxes because when it's time to get rid of a thing if i'm going to throw it away then at that point i can recycle the box and throw away the thing or recycle the thing but if it's going to be carried or shipped anywhere having the box is great because a lot of these things are ungainly and weird and have lots of little parts but they fit perfectly into their own original box
John:
yeah that's that's true i can't i can't fault you there it's just and i do i guess i do try to get the boxes you know i don't keep them forever they do leave the house like those two big g5 boxes i had you know i had them because i was so optimistic you can hear back in hypercritical it's like well i got this 2008 mac pro and i'll probably get another mac pro in a few years and they tend to be the same shape so it's good to have these boxes around just as like transporting mechanisms because it's a big heavy bulky thing um and they can get damage in shipping or whatever so hey
John:
uh you know the g5 was the same shape as the mac pro was probably gonna be the same shape as my next mac pro is probably the same shape as my next mac pro and that did not pan out so those boxes uh they they were they were sort of ladies in waiting and their time was they were never called upon their time never came and so they are now leaving the house
Casey:
I'm actually more surprised than anything that you have this beautiful finished attic and I never knew it.
Casey:
Yeah, it's really nice.
John:
That's what all the stuff is.
John:
Look at that awesome laptop bag.
John:
That's how big laptop bags used to be when laptops are much larger.
John:
Do you see it in there?
John:
That's a Kensington laptop bag, leather.
John:
It was made in the era of like the Blackbird, like the PowerBook G3.
John:
I feel like I could almost fit my iMac in there.
John:
Yeah, it's huge.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Back when Kensington made really great things, like it's very old, it's still as good as the day I got it, everything all still works on it.
John:
It is currently holding, I believe, three Mac laptops are in there right now, just stacked on top of each other to approximate the size of how big laptops used to be, and there's still plenty of room.
John:
yeah there's a mac portable out the uh off camera as well in its own apple uh bag that the mac portable came in considerably larger i just can't believe you're gonna get this computer and not mess with it you've been waiting 10 years oh no no rush 10 years i said i might take it out and just like physically situate it and like see does it look okay here does it look okay there is it you know does it feel like wobbly is it secure you know i don't know
John:
I might start the transfer process.
John:
Like, I might temporarily hook a monitor up to it and figure out how I'm going to do the transfer.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'll play it by ear.
John:
But I'm not in a super big hurry.
Casey:
I don't remember exactly which computer it was that we had.
Casey:
We had bought a Gateway 2000 computer.
Casey:
This is like early to mid-90s.
Casey:
And we had bought a Dell computer.
Casey:
I think the Gateway was first and then the Dell later.
Casey:
And one of these, my dad had splurged for like a 20 or 21-inch Trinitron CRT or something along those lines.
Casey:
Maybe it wasn't Trinitron, but it was something like a fancy, fancy, fancy CRT that weighed a billion and seven pounds.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
I've carried this a few times.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
We had a situation.
Casey:
That's probably why you had those back problems back in the Tumblr days.
Casey:
It's for carrying CRTs.
Casey:
We had this like 20-whatever-inch CRT that we had ordered, and it didn't come in the same time as the computer or something like that.
Casey:
I forget exactly what the details were, but I vividly remember that my dad either went out and got or perhaps ordered a literally like 10-inch...
Casey:
grayscale monitor that's purpose was only to get us through the time before the beautiful crt arrived so we hooked up this like for the time unbelievably nice computer that's surely like one one hundredth as fast as our iphones today but at the time was amazing this might have been the pentium pro that we had i don't recall for sure
Casey:
But anyways, we hooked up this like wonderful, amazing computer to this like postage stamp of a monitor and used it like that for a week or something like that until the what I'm calling Trinitron monitor finally showed up.
Casey:
And so granted, I am a older and arguably more mature human than I was at, you know, 10 years old.
Casey:
But I'm surprised, John, that you're not after 10,000.
Casey:
You're not just waiting at the front door for the delivery carrier to arrive and take the Mac Pro into your office and come out three weeks later.
John:
This is a thing that will come up later in the show, but physically speaking, I'm pretty sure I can't actually connect this new computer to any monitors in my house unless I buy an adapter.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Because on the back of the video card are, you know, USB-C shaped ports.
John:
And I have no monitors that accept that as input.
John:
So I would have to get an adapter, at least one adapter, sometimes possibly two.
Marco:
Does your cinema display, does that take DVI in?
Marco:
Which one?
Marco:
The one I'm looking at right now?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
It's a mini DisplayPort.
Marco:
Oh, right.
Marco:
It's the newer one.
Marco:
Right, okay.
Marco:
So that, I think you can passively adapt that to HDMI, and then you can probably get a dongle.
John:
Yeah, no, I can dongle.
John:
For sure, I can dongle them.
John:
If you happen to have a Thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter, that might work.
Mm-hmm.
John:
that's that's what i would need is a all i need is a thunderbolt two to three i have a thunderbolt display too uh it's buried somewhere in that thing uh all i would need is a two to three to hook that up um and then maybe yeah but i don't have any of those dongles so all right we'll see the bigger question is how would you how are you going to do the migration from the old computer to the new one because the old computer lacks like the the fastest port it has is firewire 800 gigabit ethernet
John:
Okay, so that's my plan A. I have many plan Bs and Cs and Ds and so on and so forth, but plan A is Ethernet.
Marco:
Doing migration assistant over target disk mode is by far the best way to do it if you are in a situation where you can do that.
Marco:
So anybody who doesn't know, you hold down something that involves T on boot, and it turns the source computer into basically an external hard drive for the destination computer.
Marco:
And you connect them via a cable.
Marco:
These days, you would probably use a USB C to C cable that has to be actual thunderbolts with the actual lightning bolts on the end, not just a USB cable.
Marco:
and then you can do the transfer that way.
Marco:
When I got my new 16-inch, I did that from the old laptop, and it was amazingly fast.
Marco:
And I did it multiple times, because I did first the review unit, and then I got my own, and then I did it to that.
Marco:
And multiple times, having a regular USB-C Thunderbolt cable, which is about $20 on Amazon.
Marco:
They're not super cheap, but they're not super expensive.
Marco:
A regular Thunderbolt 3 cable really was very, very fast, and did the whole transfer for me in like...
Marco:
about two hours each time and that's transferring like hundreds of gigs of music and stuff so that was great now in john's case since the 2008 mac pro doesn't even have thunderbolt one uh that option is out so i think any option that you would use a cable for besides ethernet would require a hilarious chain of dongles that probably wouldn't actually work so yeah i guess ethernet's the way to go
John:
It would work.
John:
I could do FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt, which I have that adapter, and then I should go to Thunderbolt 2.
John:
Then I could go Thunderbolt 2 to 3, maybe?
Marco:
But you have a direction flip in the FireWire end of it.
Marco:
Would that actually really work?
Marco:
Because that adapter was made to connect FireWire 800 peripherals to a Thunderbolt 3 host.
Marco:
that's kind of not quite what this would be.
Marco:
I mean, I know Firewire was like a kind of hostless protocol, so it actually might work way better than something like USB would work, but I don't know.
John:
I just used that dongle today because I was, well, this is a story.
John:
For a variety of reasons involving me shuffling things around in Synology, I had occasion to back up 400 gigs of data from one of my laptops to a disk image on my Synology, right?
John:
So fine.
John:
So I, you know...
John:
that i i got a neat that's what i got that ethernet adapter remember anyway uh i plug in the ethernet adapter and sure enough it's not that fast but it's faster than my wi-fi um and i start the backup and it ran for three days like three days 24 hours a day uh it just it it got to like the 99 mark after the first day but apparently like as i think it was using super duper i think super duper sorts files by size that's my impression anyway so it was towards the tail end it was tons of little files and doing that over the network was really killing it so
John:
that finally got updated um but and then i said then i was trying to mount that image and it would take forever too so i'm like maybe i need a local copy of this image so i pulled out an external firewire 800 drive which of course i have hanging around and i connected it to my 5k iMac with a firewire 800 thunderbolt 2 connector that worked fine and i felt like i was getting full speed out of that so i'm just one dongle away from connecting that to the mac pro i suppose if that's what i wanted to but
Casey:
So I've gotten myself lost.
Casey:
So what is the missing dongle to get?
John:
Anything shaped like USB-C.
John:
The only dongles I have that have USB-C on one side, that's what I need to plug into the Mac Pro, the USB-C shape connector.
John:
The only adapters in the entire house I have that have that shape connector on one end are USB-C to USB-A, which, of course, is not particularly useful to me.
Casey:
So what would you want the other end to be?
Casey:
So USB-C to what?
John:
I want it to be Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2, if such a thing exists.
Marco:
It does.
Marco:
Yeah, Apple makes one.
Marco:
I think it's like $50.
Marco:
I use it for something.
Marco:
I bought it back when the USB-C transition happened, and I've ended up using it, I think, like three or four times since then.
Marco:
And I was really glad I had it each of those times.
Marco:
It isn't something that you would typically need very often, unless you want to continue to use any FireWire peripherals in your post-Mac Pro world here.
John:
I mean, I'll just harvest the drive mechanisms out of that.
John:
That's what I plan on doing.
John:
Mr. Palmer in the chat says he's migrated multiple computers using Firewall 800 to Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3, and it works fine.
John:
So if I want to do that, I could, but for $50, I'll pass probably.
John:
I'll just use Ethernet.
Marco:
You'll use it until the first two tries where it hangs at three-quarters of the way complete for three days, and then you realize, okay, never mind.
John:
I just did USB-C to Ethernet, which maxes out at like 300 megabits, and that ran for three days, and it was fine.
John:
Again, not in a hurry.
Marco:
So now it's good that the monitor is going to be slow.
Marco:
Plug in HDMI anything, start the migration, and then by the time the migration finishes, your monitor should be there.
John:
Is there HDMI out on my video card?
John:
I don't know if there is.
Marco:
You don't have any dongles that go USB-C or Thunderbolt to HDMI?
John:
uh no what do you use for projectors at work let me think uh oh no maybe let's see maybe i have one at work yeah i could probably bring that in just go pick up any computer bag turn it upside down and shake it and certainly like an hdmi usb c adapter is going to fall out of it yeah i think i have one of those at work i suppose i could do that i do have one hdmi monitor my gaming monitor yeah exactly so just like plug that in start migration yeah we'll see
John:
You're the worst.
John:
I'm patient.
John:
I still have to shop for a mouse.
John:
I'm a little bit behind on my stuff here.
Casey:
So you're actually going to upgrade from your 30-year-old mouse?
Casey:
I shouldn't make fun of you.
Casey:
I'm excited about that.
John:
My old mouse is so gross.
John:
I need a new one.
Marco:
May I make a daring suggestion?
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Just use the magic mouse and see how long you last.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
That's my immediate plan is I'm going to use the peripherals that come with it, but I know I'm not going to like it.
John:
I'm very familiar with that mouse.
John:
I like it.
John:
I'm using one right now.
Marco:
I flipped it upside down and charged like a turtle just this morning.
Casey:
I thought you were using some sort of more bulbous mouse, Marco, no?
Marco:
I've tried them over time here and there, but what really got me was years ago, kind of like in the middle of my time at Tumblr, I discovered the, whatever the Logitech, I think it was the something, MX Revolution, that's what it was.
Marco:
Logitech MX Revolution, when they first gave it that weighted flywheel as a scroll wheel.
Marco:
And the cool thing about that is that you could flick it kind of harder than you would normally scroll, kind of like give it a good flick up or down, and the wheel would detect the velocity and it would unlatch itself and just freewheel, like free spin.
Marco:
And you could use that, and then you could just kind of touch it back and it would lock back into place wherever you wanted to stop it.
Marco:
So you could use that to scroll inertially
Marco:
And it would, like, you know, without Apple's, like, you know, touch devices, which is, before that, the only way to do that inertial scrolling on a Mac was to use one of Apple's magic things, which I didn't like at the time.
Marco:
So I had that, like, that kind of flywheel thing, and it was great for very quickly scrolling through webpages and everything.
Marco:
It was fantastic.
Marco:
What let it down is that...
Marco:
to do it well on the Mac and to make it work right in a few different ways required their stupid software.
Marco:
And it just, it was fine for like six months and the software would break and the next update wouldn't be as good or whatever.
Marco:
And the next, eventually an OS update killed it in some way.
Marco:
Like I made it so that I had to use software that didn't work or something like that.
Marco:
Somehow I forget, I forget how it, how it ended up dying, but somehow I couldn't do it anymore.
Marco:
And then,
Marco:
it seemed like Logitech then failed to make any other mice that were as good as that one for like 10 years after that.
Marco:
I don't know what happened, but whatever, whatever happened in, in the intervening time, I had switched to Apple's magic mouse and I liked that it had that inertial scrolling process.
Marco:
without any of the BS.
Marco:
And I also like now, as a podcaster and once I edit a video, I like being able to scroll horizontally because the editing programs use horizontal timelines and so it's nice to be able to scroll horizontally with that same inertial feeling.
Marco:
All the stuff you can do on a trackpad on a laptop, I can do that on my desktop with either the trackpad or the magic mouse with just one little finger across the top.
Marco:
So I like it a lot and
Marco:
all the additional features of the big bulbous mice like the you know like 10 different buttons and gaming features I don't use any of that stuff so losing that wasn't a big deal for me I used to back when I was a gamer but that was long long long time ago so you know now the magic mouse is perfectly fine for me and it's one of those many ways where like
Marco:
If you are okay going with Apple's default setup or Apple's ideal setup, a lot of things just become easier for you.
Marco:
And so that's how this is for me.
Marco:
I don't want to seek out any other mice or anything because this one works just fine and it solves my needs very well and I'm used to it.
Marco:
And going to anything else would require giving up some of that inertial stuff or making it more complicated in ways I don't want.
Marco:
a real-time follow-up from the chat room uh expressly points out a photograph of the back of a mac pro and depending on video card you might actually have hdmi out on that video card itself yeah yeah i forgot about that yeah because because all the video cards i think every mpx video card has the same port arrangement i think they all have the four usbc thunderbolt 3 ports and the uh i think it's hdmi yeah that's hdmi
John:
That's nice.
John:
Yeah, so there you go.
John:
I don't even need an adapter for it.
John:
There you go.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
Problem solved.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Speaking of follow-up, we should probably start the show and do some follow-up.
Marco:
Actually, you know, before we leave the topic, it is kind of cool, though, that with the new Mac Pro, the way they've designed the Thunderbolt architecture for it, each video card you add also adds four USB-C ports, or four Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Marco:
And so if you want more ports, you can just add a video card.
Marco:
so i i wonder like i wonder like the the market for people like john who buy it with the base card and then later throw it away and get a better card i like i would buy a couple of those secondhand cards just to get the base gpu with four more ports just for the ports i wouldn't even use the gpu like just give me the ports well we won't actually be leaving this topic as you'll see in a minute but we'll more on that in a bit all right all right goodness see marco you're convincing yourself to buy a mac pro just like no not yet give me at least another week
Casey:
I'm waiting for one of these episodes of ATP.
Casey:
You're just going to say, hey, I got a new computer and I'm talking to you right now.
Casey:
It's the Mac Pro.
Marco:
No, it's going to be like the contest.
Marco:
I'm going to walk in like Kramer and just smack my $10 on the table.
Marco:
I'm out.
Marco:
I'm out.
Goodness.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It's not like they're running a temporary sale and they're going to raise the prices later.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They're such a fantastic web host.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for running all my servers and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, I would like to spend a quick moment and just say a genuine thank you to the many, many, many listeners who wrote in to say nice things about last week's episode.
Casey:
If you think about it on paper, it was two hours of a man taking us on a tour of the...
Casey:
unbelievably obnoxiously overpriced computer that he just bought.
Casey:
And yet somehow, because that man is John Syracuse, the episode was riveting for me.
Casey:
And certainly it sounded like a lot of listeners thought the same thing.
Casey:
And I just genuinely wanted to say thank you to all the people who reached out and said such nice things.
Casey:
It made me feel really, really good.
Casey:
And I'm sure I speak for the other two as well in saying it made us all feel extremely good, and I wanted to thank everyone for that.
John:
Yes, you're all very strange people in exactly the way that we like.
Casey:
Perfectly said.
Casey:
In exactly the way that we adore.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I meant to talk about last episode, but it was such an exhilarating ride that I just completely forgot.
Casey:
After the episode before last, when I had said, oh, you know, I've got this iMac Pro coming, and I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with the iMac, I think I'm just going to
Casey:
sell it to Apple for a gift card or what have you.
Casey:
And I said, I don't really want to give it to anyone or sell it to anyone because it's clearly haunted.
Casey:
I got between 10 and 15 different offers from people saying, I am aware that your iMac is haunted.
Casey:
I would like it either for a challenge or because I have some need where somebody doesn't want to spend a whole pile of money on what this would probably be worth if it wasn't haunted or
Casey:
or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
Sitting here right now, my plan is to just give it to Apple because even though all of these people have said they're aware of the issues, I don't know, it just seems wrong to take somebody's money and give them something broken.
John:
My favorite were the ones who thought they could fix it.
John:
It's like people want to get into bad relationships where they can change the person, right?
John:
It's like, yeah, I know, but I think I'm going to figure it out.
John:
I'm going to fix whatever is wrong.
Yeah.
John:
Wow.
John:
I'm saving you from yourself by not giving you this haunted mech.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Take the gift card.
Casey:
There is a slim chance.
Casey:
There's somebody that was local that I think is well aware of the issues, and I was contemplating that because I wouldn't have to ship it or anything, but we'll see what happens.
Casey:
In all likelihood, I will just take the gift card and walk away and not curse anyone else with this computer.
Casey:
I also wanted to quickly talk about last episode.
Casey:
You guys, rightfully so, were trying very strongly to convince me not to install Catalina and...
Casey:
During the show, I received a text message from Kyle's the Gray wherein there was a bit of emoji that I could not decode on my old and busted Mojave-based computer.
Casey:
I'm out.
Casey:
And ooh, you guys know how I like my emoji.
Casey:
So I have not upgraded yet, but ooh, I'm sweating.
Casey:
I'm sweating.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
I'm sweating real bad.
Casey:
So that might be – the weakest link is me and my emoji.
Okay.
Marco:
uh speaking of important follow-up uh marco tell me about your lamp i have very important lamp follow-up yes please so a few episodes back i was discussing my lighting situation in my office wanting more light and the solution i come up with uh was to get like a four-way bulb splitter and install four light bulbs sideways in my ikea not lamp uh it's like it's ikea's like ten dollar floor lamp that you've seen everywhere
Marco:
And I had mentioned that I had bought a second Knot lamp to go on the other side of my desk and that in the intervening years between when I bought my first one probably in 2006 and today, they had actually revised the design of the Knot lamp to make the shade – like the big bowl that points up towards the ceiling – to make that big bowl shorter.
Marco:
And so the same arrangement of four bulbs that's in my old lamp that rests comfortably below the lip of the dome such that you don't see them and they don't look harsh or bad.
Marco:
That same arrangement of bulbs in the new lamp stuck out the top a little bit.
Marco:
Listener Dan Engler wrote in to say, if the knot lamp fits the old shade, I recently took apart an old knot lamp for parts and I'll ship you the shade.
Yeah.
Marco:
and sure i took him up on the offer thank you dan and then sure enough i put the old shade on the new lamp it fits just fine and it is indeed you know taller and so i now have my same four bulbs set up on each side uh and you can't see the bulbs from the room so they don't look harsh and ugly and so now i have uh 800 watt equivalent led light bulbs and
Marco:
in my two not lamps on either side of my desk and it's wonderful so thank you very much to listen to dan engler for shipping me an ikea i love this like this entire lamp from ikea costs ten dollars at regular price and he shipped the giant plastic dome that goes on the top of it across the country you know it had to cost probably at least seven or eight bucks to ship it
Marco:
But it is a hilarious solution, but an amazingly effective one.
Marco:
So thank you again to listener Dan Engler.
Marco:
I'm keeping GameCube controllers, and somebody's keeping not lampshades.
John:
No, he didn't keep it.
John:
He sent it to me for reuse.
John:
Oh, well, now he's got five more to sell to you later, just like I have all those Apple Extended Keyboard 2s that I'm going to sell to Gruber.
Casey:
So do you feel your – what is it?
Casey:
Seasonal affected disorder?
Casey:
Say it.
Casey:
Seasonal affected disorder?
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
Do you feel that that's better now that you're being radiated by all of the LEDs known to man?
Casey:
It helps.
Marco:
I got to say it actually does help to have a truly ridiculous amount of light in my office most of the time.
Casey:
I feel like I want to see a picture of the brightness level of your office, but I don't know what we would use as like a control.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like, yeah, I'm sure if you took a picture, it wouldn't be that remarkable because it would just look like a bright room.
Casey:
But I wonder if you could like stick a regular like floor lamp in there and take a control shot and then, you know, use your not lamps and take the the experimental shot, if you will, and share those if you're willing sometime, because I bet you it would be shocking how bright it is.
Marco:
Yeah, and I still have to put up my white acoustic foam panels, and I was thinking maybe also changing my desktop surface to white if I can find some giant white board.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
So, yeah, we'll see.
Casey:
How does your office mate feel about this overabundance of illumination?
Marco:
My office mate is extremely tolerant of my additions of light, and I'm very thankful about it.
Casey:
I think you could have stopped with extremely tolerant.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
John, do you tell me why you – even if you tried, you are not actually dodging taxes?
Casey:
We got a very interesting and fairly punchy email about this, and I assume you would like to defend your honor.
John:
Lots of people are telling us about the implications of buying something in a tax-free state that you don't actually happen to live in.
John:
Just to be clear, I didn't actually do this as one of the items I didn't do, mostly because it was too much of a hassle, but also because if you do that, if you go to a neighboring state where there's no sales tax and buy something and then bring it back to your state where you live and use it, there is a thing called a use tax, which conveniently is exactly the same as your state's sales tax.
John:
So you are, in fact, supposed to pay tax on it in your state if that's where you take it back and use it.
John:
you can always move to that state and then you don't have that problem.
John:
But if you already live in that state, then, you know, you don't have to pay tax at all.
John:
So anyway, I did pay the tax of the state that I live in on this particular computer.
John:
But if you're thinking about doing it, I mean, either buy it in another state and don't tell anybody.
Casey:
But if the IRS finds out... Certainly not on a podcast.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If the IRS finds out, they are going to make you pay the use tax for that item.
Casey:
What is even the mechanism for doing that?
Casey:
Like let's say I go to – I don't even know what state around me doesn't have sales tax.
Casey:
But for the sake of discussion, I go to another state.
Casey:
It does not have sales tax.
Casey:
I don't even know where I would go within Virginia's world to pay a use tax.
Casey:
Like what would you do in Massachusetts?
Casey:
When you file your taxes, you do it.
Marco:
so in new york new york is very very strict about that kind of thing because they really want their sales tax and over the years like like new york was the state that first you know started giving crap to amazon about not charging sales tax and everything anyway so new york on the state income tax that you have to file every year the state return they have like i think they have a line for like you know purchases you've made out of state and you're supposed to put all of your internet purchases that were made from places that don't charge sales tax you're supposed to account for all of them on that line and
Marco:
I don't know anybody who does, but that's increasingly becoming a moot point as so many online retailers are charging tax in New York anyway for other pressure that they've gotten.
Casey:
Interesting.
Casey:
I did not know that.
Marco:
But the answer is probably you put it on your state tax return.
Marco:
And the federal IRS probably doesn't give a crap about this.
Marco:
They're not the ones who would catch you.
Marco:
The ones who would probably catch you would be when you go to file your state taxes and they see on your business you've deducted some amount for equipment.
Marco:
And they're like, wait a minute.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Actually, I guess they don't really have any way to know whether you paid sales tax on it or not.
Marco:
When you buy it at the store, they don't know who you are.
John:
It just depends on if you don't get audited or if no one is paying attention, you slide by.
Marco:
Either way, not paying taxes you owed has a certain legal and moral implication.
Marco:
Some people have a problem with that.
Marco:
If you have a problem with that, pay your taxes.
Casey:
John, are you worried about buying a first-generation Apple product?
John:
Yeah, a lot of people are asking about that.
John:
We've discussed it in the past, and I'll just reiterate.
John:
Yeah, the normal amount that I'm concerned.
John:
I bought a first-generation Power Mac G5 for similar reasons, because I had a G3, and I had been waiting and waiting and waiting, and the G5 came out, and it was amazing, but it was also a very, very first-gen product.
John:
That is probably the first-gen product that I quote-unquote regret the most.
John:
I don't really regret it, but it certainly was idiosyncratic and had all sorts of issues.
John:
It was a little bit weird.
Yeah.
John:
But, yeah, that's what happens if you wait a really long time between buying computers when the new fancy one comes out that is the generational leap that you were looking for, in this case, the, you know, a return to a form factor that you like.
John:
you could wait another two three years and however long it takes uh but that starts to be ridiculous so i bought first gen product and i'm just going to deal with the first gen problems i'm hoping there aren't many but i am definitely aware of it i'm going in with eyes open so yeah i'm a little bit worried about it but what can you do i really i really back myself into this corner
Marco:
One really encouraging thing here is that if you look at Apple's products, the version ones usually aren't bad.
Marco:
Like the ones that are bad, we remember them.
Marco:
They stick out and we kind of use them as like horror stories forever or like morning signs.
Marco:
But the reality is that especially in recent times, most of the version ones have actually been pretty solid.
Marco:
I mean, if you look at the most obvious examples here are the most recent Macs they've made.
Marco:
The Mac Mini, which wasn't a version 1 technically, but it was a pretty big redesign from the one before it.
Marco:
They have the iMac Pro, which was a complete redesign from any iMac that came before it.
Marco:
So it definitely qualifies as a V1, I would say.
Marco:
And they have... The MacBook Pro 16 is not quite a V1, but it's still a very recent Pro Mac they've made.
Marco:
And if you look at all of those...
Marco:
They really haven't had any major problems.
Marco:
You know, look at the last year's iPad Pros.
Marco:
Same thing.
Marco:
Totally new designs.
Marco:
No real problems, as far as I'm aware.
Marco:
You know, most of the time, it's pretty rock-solid stuff.
Marco:
You know, the iPhone X. That was a whole new design of the iPhone.
Marco:
Not really any problems as far as I'm aware.
Marco:
They really are quite good most of the time.
Marco:
And especially when you look at the iMac Pro, I think that brings up another side of this, which is, as we mentioned before, we don't know if the iMac Pro is ever going to be updated again.
Marco:
It might not.
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me at all if it wasn't.
Marco:
I hope it is because I really still want to keep buying them.
Marco:
But it might never be updated again.
Marco:
And so if you're trying to avoid version one of a product, A, you can look at the iMac Pro and say, well, version one of that has been totally solid.
Marco:
I mean, not only do I have two of these at my house, but I think I know way more people than the average person would who own these also themselves.
Marco:
As far as I know, I have heard of zero problems with the iMac Pro in the two years it's been out so far.
Marco:
I have never heard of anyone having a problem with it.
Marco:
And again, I probably know people... I can probably, you know, hear from about 10 of their owners.
Marco:
And I have no problems with them.
Marco:
And so, you know, the Mac Pro...
Marco:
It has a pretty good track record behind it so far.
Marco:
So far, it seems like the team doing this seems like they're on the ball these days.
Marco:
The stuff they're making seems pretty rock solid.
Marco:
The first reviews of the Mac Pro are out so far from people who've had it for a few weeks, like various YouTubers and stuff.
Marco:
They've reported zero problems so far.
Marco:
And this might be the only Mac Pro ever made.
Marco:
And the price isn't likely to change much over time.
Marco:
So if you're going to buy it, you might as well buy it now.
Casey:
You know, on a slight tangent, I had the occasion to transcode something for the first time earlier today.
Casey:
The way my house is arranged, there's like a little hallway leading up to the office.
Casey:
And generally speaking, when the old iMac, the not pro iMac, was transcoding something, within a pace or two of getting to the guest room slash office, you could hear those fans screaming, absolutely screaming.
Casey:
I had my face within six inches of the iMac Pro.
Casey:
And mind you, all 10 cores are firing on all 10 cylinders, if you will.
Casey:
And I could not hear this thing at all.
Casey:
Now, unlike you two, I actually don't really care about fans.
Casey:
I mean, I obviously don't like it, but, you know, it doesn't have, I don't have that visceral reaction that it seems the two of you do.
Marco:
You don't care whether your computer stays on by itself or not.
Casey:
Well.
Casey:
That's true, too.
Casey:
But anyway, the point is, I'm not nearly as offended by fan noises.
Casey:
Either of you guys are.
Casey:
But I was stupefied that I had all of these cores just absolutely screaming and the fan was not audible at all.
Casey:
And I even are the exhaust vents on the bottom on this or are they on the back?
Marco:
I believe the – I think the intake is on the bottom and I think it shoots it out the back.
Casey:
Okay, that's what it is.
Casey:
Okay, I was going to say because I felt the bottom and it didn't occur to me until I was just talking a moment ago that it might be coming out the back.
Casey:
But I felt the bottom and I didn't feel anything warm.
Casey:
But that makes sense if that's intake rather than exhaust.
Casey:
But anyways, I tweeted a screenshot of iStatMenus, which is John Syracuse's favorite application of all time.
Casey:
And you can see that this thing is just getting absolutely hammered.
Casey:
And I can assure you that I could not hear a thing.
Casey:
And that was pretty cool.
Marco:
Welcome to the iMac Pro world, Casey.
Marco:
It's really nice here.
Casey:
It is pretty nice until they update in like three weeks.
Casey:
But right now it's really nice.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by ExpressVPN, the fastest and most reliable VPN service.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And so it's important that we have a different level of encryption and security built in for a lot of different reasons.
Marco:
Now, I use VPNs myself for when I'm traveling because I don't trust people's Wi-Fi, and honestly, you shouldn't either.
Marco:
If you have access to a Wi-Fi network you can provide to other people, there's all sorts of exploits and creepy things you can do to invade their privacy or decrypt some of their data if it's not perfectly encrypted all the way or they have no flaws or whatever else.
Marco:
VPNs offer a different level of security that I like to use when I'm on someone's public Wi-Fi because I don't trust public Wi-Fi.
Marco:
And ExpressVPN is rated the fastest, most reliable, number one rated VPN provider by review sites like TechRadar and CNET.
Marco:
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Marco:
You can also do other things with it, like if you want to appear as though you're coming from a different place, you can do things like stream video content from other countries.
Marco:
It's fast enough to do this.
Marco:
There's never any buffering or lag.
Marco:
You can stream in HD, no problem.
Marco:
You can also do things like I was once on a trip and I was somewhere where their Wi-Fi blocked SSH connections outbound.
Marco:
So I couldn't do any work on my servers, which I kind of needed to do.
Marco:
And so I turned on ExpressVPN and that got me around the port block.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
What is bad about the new Mac Pro that you expect?
Casey:
Is there anything that's yucking your yum at the moment?
John:
I don't like that phrase.
John:
But anyway, this is another thing that's been mentioned in the past, but it's been top of my mind again as this machine is about to arrive at my home.
John:
Getting at the inside of this computer while it looks real cool and Apple shows the demo with the little latch thingy and it comes off.
John:
It is actually less convenient than the old side panel coming off.
John:
For a long time, Apple had a series of tower computers where the side either opened up or came off where you could get the stuff.
John:
And that was convenient because, in general, you didn't have to move your tower computer from wherever it was.
John:
If it was on the floor or on the desk, you could...
John:
especially when you take the side off but even if you couldn't if you could you know move it down just sort of shift stuff out of the way and they would you know fold down you can get it all the stuff this thing comes off the top so if your tower is under your desk you can't get at the internals while it sits under your desk because you can't get the top off you have to lift vertically that's why you have wheels john yeah so anyway
John:
mine is if mine's on the side table in theory i could take the thing off but it might be kind of awkward to lift it up and so i understand why they did the design it's be able it's great to be able to get it all sides not just one side but i think i might kind of miss the door for that uh internal accessibility um occasionally what i usually find myself doing is peeking in there to remind myself which drive mechanism is hooked up to which or to look for like warning lights on the things or to see if fans are spinning and you know
John:
that's not going to be as frequent an occurrence with this whole new thing.
John:
And also, as we discussed WWDC, a thing that I used to do with all my computers that had sides that open up, which is open them up while they're turned on, that will not happen with this one.
John:
To get the case off, everything shuts off hardware-wise.
John:
It cannot be on with the case off, as far as I'm aware, unless you defeated that mechanism.
John:
So a slight downgrade in terms of internals accessibility.
John:
I'm so sorry.
Marco:
And I would imagine that probably for thermal reasons to make sure the airflow is going correctly and everything.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Electric shock.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know what's going on inside there.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Why don't you tell me about what was it?
Casey:
The Belkin aux power cable kit that we saw an image of a of a GPU within the Mac Pro.
Casey:
And we apparently have some follow up about that.
John:
Yeah, Logan Hall tells us that that is actually the Radeon 5700 XT reference card that's pictured in there.
John:
And I'll take his word for it because I can't identify GPUs just from the side view like that.
John:
But yeah, Marco found that image.
John:
On a product shot for just like the power cable that provides power to that type of card, it's saying, hey, if you buy, essentially, I keep calling them PC graphics cards, but if you just buy a graphics card that has nothing to do with the Mac...
John:
And you stick it in there and it needs power, use this Belkin cable to get the power in a nice, cool, exactly the right length black type of thing.
John:
And in the product shot, they show the Radeon 5700 XT, which is a card that I was actually interested in as a sort of fairly cheap gaming card.
John:
Which brings us to the next topic, which is what I spent a lot of this week thinking about.
John:
I don't even have this computer in my house yet, and already I'm plotting on what I'm going to shove inside it because there's so much room in there.
John:
And I listened back to last week's episode, and I'm like, I'm not going to upgrade the GPU right away.
John:
But let me tell you, PC GPUs are really cheap.
John:
I can get a good gaming card for, like, good, you know,
John:
a fine perfectly fine will do everything i needed to do gaming card that is way faster than the sort of base gpu that the thing comes with for like 300 bucks like it's peanuts right it costs less than like that bracket with a hard drive in it that you can buy from the inside of this thing costs less than the wheels um so that led me down the alley of what can i buy to stick inside this computer what kind of video card what are my video card options
John:
And this, like so many things having to do with this Mac, is made much more complicated by my stupid choice of monitor, which is the Pro Display XDR.
John:
Now, let's, you know, the Pro Display XDR is a 6K monitor.
John:
And on the back of it, it just has power that goes into the wall.
John:
And then it has a bunch of little tiny USB-C-shaped holes.
John:
And that's it.
John:
There's no other holes on the back of this monitor.
John:
So, if you're going to connect this monitor to a computer,
John:
You've got to get 6K worth of pixels at 60 Hz at either 8 or 10 bits per component from your computer into this monitor, and it has to somehow end up coming out of a cable that fits into a little USB-C-shaped, Thunderbolt 3-shaped, you know, whatever, connector.
John:
If you look at any quote-unquote PC video card, all these inexpensive cards for a couple hundred bucks,
John:
they tend not to have any USB-C shaped connectors on the back of them.
John:
So the question is, if you buy a PC graphics card and you stick it in your Mac Pro, which you certainly can do, can you connect it to your Pro Display XDR and drive it at its native resolution?
John:
that is it turns out to be quite a tall order right so here's the deal with driving this monitor and this is reminding me of our discussions back when the trash can came out and we were like oh can that run like a retina 5k display uh you know does it have enough bandwidth and thunderbolt and we kept going around in circles about this so i did i
John:
A lot of research on this.
John:
I know I'm not supposed to, but I did.
John:
So here's what I've been able to determine so far.
John:
All right.
John:
So 6K pixels at 60 hertz at 10 bits per component for like the, you know, the best picture quality.
John:
That, if you do all the math on that, that barely fits into Thunderbolt 3's 40 gigabits per second bandwidth without the use of display stream compression.
John:
So if you have an uncompressed stream, you want to do 6K at 60 at 10 bits, and you have a Thunderbolt 3 connection, you can make that work.
John:
all usbc cables of any kind have one set of low speed lanes that's used for usb2 speeds regardless of whatever protocol the high speed lanes are carrying so that's not just thunderbolt cables but all just usbc shaped cable holes that aren't just power cables or whatever right charging cables only have that low speed usbc thing plus power and ground like so the quote-unquote high speed lanes aren't there just use for power and ground full featured usbc cables have four high speed lanes and then the low speed and then power and ground
John:
active thunderbolt cables the ones with the little chips in the in the in the connectors those are the ones you referring to before they have the little thunderbolt symbol on them the connectors are bigger because they actually have chips inside there that's why they're active those have the four high speed lanes uh and then the you know the chips and then the uh the low speed usb two things right so in the case where you have a thunderbolt 3 connection
John:
without display stream compression to your 6k pro display xdr you're only going to get usb 2 on the ports in the back because that's all there is left you're using all of the high speed lanes just to carry the video signal all you've got left is that that's low speed lanes for usb 2 and that connects to your
John:
pro display xdr and it uses it as a hub and you get your usb2 ports on the back of it right because remember you're not just sending a video signal to this monitor ideally it has ports on the back of it if you want to use any of those ports you also have to send some kind of usbc usb type signal for it to be a hub right and also for things like software brightness control or firmware updates or other things like that if you just send it video and
John:
If you can get that to work at all, those other features don't work, right?
John:
So if you had a plain old DisplayPort cable, not Thunderbolt, but just DisplayPort, if you buy a PC video card, a lot of them come with multiple DisplayPort, not mini DisplayPort, but big DisplayPort, either way, like just DisplayPort.
John:
It's not Thunderbolt.
John:
It's not USB.
John:
It doesn't know anything about Thunderbolt.
John:
It doesn't know anything about USB.
John:
It is DisplayPort.
Marco:
Maxi DisplayPort.
John:
Yeah.
Yeah.
John:
you can't drive more than 5k at 60 hertz eight bits per pixel without display stream compression because display port doesn't have enough bandwidth right so you if you have a pc video card with with display port on the back you cannot drive the xdr without display stream compression display stream compression which i'm not going to say over and over again a dsc uh is an essential feature for driving the 6k display so with dsc
John:
If you had plain old DisplayPort cable, you can drive the XDR at 6K at 60Hz at 10 bits per pixel, right?
John:
But for display stream compression to work, sort of the OS and the card and the drivers, everything needs to know that that's there to make it work.
John:
so you need some minimal level of os support to say a i bought a card that has display screen compression and b the os knows about that card and knows about the compression and then they can talk to each other right but if you did that like i said the usb ports on the monitor won't work because all it's getting is the the image being displayed right so those usb uh things are totally inert uh
John:
None of the software features like software brightness control would work, and you can't do any firmware updates.
John:
And this is assuming you can get it to work at all.
John:
I don't even know if the XDR will even accept just a video signal, right?
John:
But if you wanted to have that, you have to have display stream compression, right?
John:
That's one of the reasons, by the way, that I think that the iMac Pro can't drive it, because if it treats it as a DisplayPort thing, you can only drive that at 5K without display stream compression.
John:
Anyway, so Thunderbolt 3 with display stream compression...
John:
So now you've got Thunderbolt 3, but instead of using every ounce of its 40 gigabits per second to fit your video signal over, just leaving that little side lane for USB 2, if you have Thunderbolt 3 with display stream compression, you can get 6K at 60 hertz at 10 bits per component, plus USB 3.1 speeds.
John:
And at that point, the USB ports in the back of the XDR become USB 3.1 ports.
John:
So for example, if you have a 16-inch MacBook Pro, that GPU has DSC.
John:
So if you connect that to the Pro Display XDR, you get USB 3.1 speeds on the back.
John:
whoa really of the monitor yes that's right straight from apple's website now wait with does display stream compression god does dsc um does it introduce noticeable quality loss like it seems like it would right or it could at least i i am told that uh that it is that any losses that it introduces are imperceptible that's what i'm told
Marco:
It's probably one of those things like, what if it displays the static HBO intro?
Marco:
There's probably some pattern where you would possibly be able to notice something.
John:
I'm told that it's imperceptible.
John:
I can imagine that even just with lossless compression, you can get some savings out of it.
John:
But I'm told that...
John:
that it meets apple's rigorous standard like it's not apple's not making up dsc dsc is a thing in the industry so i'm assuming it is it's kind of like texture compression on consoles where it's a thing people don't know it exists because it is literally imperceptible like it's anyway now wait but so the macbook pro 16 uses compression and therefore has fast usb ports on if they if it uses this monitor that's right but the mac pro doesn't
John:
Well, that's the thing.
John:
It depends on what GPU you buy.
John:
So I'm getting the base GPU.
John:
The 580X GPU, that MPX module, it's an MPX module.
John:
So it talks to the XDR using Thunderbolt 3, but the 580X does not have DSC.
John:
It's such an old GPU that doesn't support DSC at all.
John:
So the 580X, when it talks over Thunderbolt 3, uses all Thunderbolt 3's band was just for the video signal and just the side band, a little low speed USB 2 thing, right?
John:
So when I connect my XDR to my Mac Pro with the base GPU, I'm getting USB 2 speeds in the ports, right?
John:
Now, the thing about buying those cheap cards from sort of those PC cards is in general, there's probably not going to be a big market for PC video cards with Thunderbolt 3 ports on the back of them.
John:
with display screen compression and drivers for the Mac.
John:
Because gamers don't want a 6K monitor.
John:
It's too big.
John:
Like, you don't want to run your game with that resolution.
John:
That native res is too many pixels.
John:
And gamers want more than 60 hertz.
John:
What gamers want is, like, 4K at 144 hertz or whatever, right?
John:
And if you're going to do that...
John:
You can do that, first of all, with DisplayPort.
John:
And second of all, DisplayStream compression is probably not even needed at that resolution.
John:
And there's no reason to invest in this sort of... I mean, this is the thing Apple's monitors have done for a long time, which is don't just send video to the monitor.
John:
Also send a bunch of other crap because the monitor is also a hub and it has some weird software control.
John:
From Apple Display Connector, ADC, remember that back in the day where it was a single cable that had a bunch of stuff over it, to my current thing?
John:
Earlier in the show, I said, oh, my monitor has a mini DisplayPort.
John:
yeah it has many display port but it also has this weird cable that splits into this rat tail of multiple things because it also has usb hub and the way they did it with my monitor is they just ran multiple cables and then wrap them up in one big fat cable and when it comes to the computer it splits off into one thing that connects to usb a port and one thing's an extra mini display port i think there might even be another one in there and then like the power thing right
John:
With the Pro Display XDR, power is its own separate cable, and everything else has to come in through that one cable.
John:
So your only options are DisplayPort somehow natively shoving into the monitor and working in the degenerate mode where none of the ports work and none of the software features work and none of the firmware stuff works.
John:
Or...
John:
thunderbolt 3 which gives you usb either the low speed lane for two or with display screen compression enough room for high speed usb and the number of video cards out there from anybody other than apple that speak thunderbolt i don't even know if there are any right so i my market for for aftermarket gpus that actually drive the xdr and native res may be down to just whatever apple decides to offer
John:
So far, they have a bunch of options, but all of them are quote-unquote workstation options, as we discussed last show.
John:
And even the other one they were thinking of rolling out, I looked more closely at the specs than that.
John:
It's not that great.
John:
And as many people point out, the 580X, like the base GPU that I'm getting in my thing, it's slower than the GPU in the iMac Pro.
John:
It is a really old GPU.
John:
It is the basest of base GPU, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's not slower than the 16-inch, but at least the 16-inch MacBook Pro supports display stream compression.
John:
So anyway, the good thing, of course, about the Mac Pro is I can get a gaming card that just supports DisplayPort and hook it up to a gaming monitor.
John:
I can have two, three video cards in there.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
I can have one hooked up to the XDR and another video card in my computer at the same time connected to 144 hertz gaming monitor.
John:
I'm not sure I'll do that, but I have that option.
John:
It's not like I'm boxed out of the $300 good gaming card market.
John:
I could buy a $300 gaming card, shove it in there, connect it to my gaming monitor, and I'm good to go.
John:
Obviously, ideally, I would rather not have multiple GPUs for different purposes as I have my computer.
John:
Ideally, I could buy one GPU and a cool black MPX module that speaks Thunderbolt 3 and also is good GPU, but I don't know if such a card is forthcoming.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's what I've got my eye on, and having delved even further into this world of cables that all look exactly the same but do very different things in mysterious ways.
John:
I feel like some of the mystery has been removed.
John:
Now I know what to look for.
John:
Other than just looking for little Thunderbolt 3-shaped holes, I have to know if things support DSC.
John:
I have to know if the OS supports them.
John:
And now it's more explicable to me how and why the other ports on the back of the XDR work the way they do.
John:
I had no idea.
Casey:
I have never been more excited to have an all-in-one computer than I am right now.
Casey:
My goodness.
John:
Well, I mean, it is exciting that, you know, desk space is my main problem.
John:
It is exciting because I can buy a $300 gaming card right now, slam it in there, and get high frame rate, good game performance over a DisplayPort connector to a gaming monitor.
John:
which is exactly if I was planning on playing Destiny on my Mac, that's what I should do.
John:
I shouldn't be playing it on my 6K XDR, because people don't game at 6K unless you're making some sort of over-the-top gaming PC where you just want to go to the max everything.
John:
It's just too much resolution, right?
John:
You want to go with the 4K and then get higher frame rates.
John:
So...
John:
The fact that I have that option is cool, but I'm still out there searching for... And this is part of what I enjoy about these computers.
John:
Stephen Hackett was just sending me some more stuff about things inside of computers that he's getting, like what kind of storage can I put in there?
John:
How many different cards can I put in?
John:
Not just those cards.
John:
If there's a card with a... To your point earlier, Marco, if there's a card that comes out with a bunch more USB ports, I might shove that in there.
John:
I've got a lot of card slots to fill and a lot of interesting things that could possibly go in there, so...
John:
I know I shouldn't be spending any more money on this computer, but that's what I'm thinking about now.
John:
This is, this is like a giant, a giant green field for me to fill with stuff over the next many years, which is exactly what no one wants to hear that now this thing gives me an opportunity to spend more money.
John:
But that is really true.
John:
Um,
John:
And that's the main advantage and attraction to this computer for me and my sort of hobbyist stuff.
John:
It certainly isn't the performance, because another thing I pointed out in the last show, and I'll reiterate again, this computer is not the fastest Mac that they sell in terms of single-core performance.
John:
The phone is faster than in single-core.
John:
Most of the other top-end Macs are faster than in single-core.
John:
Even in multi-core, people are doing tests and saying...
John:
It's not even as fast.
John:
Like, the 8-core Mac Pro is not as fast as the 8-core iMac Pro in a couple of benchmarks.
John:
Like, it's close, but it's not exactly there.
John:
Like, these are old CPUs.
John:
And their single-core performance is fairly bad.
John:
Their clocks are low.
John:
It's not the speed demon you think it is.
John:
It's all about the slots and everything else.
John:
So...
John:
Keep that in mind and I'll try not to get too depressed when the ARM computers come out and trounce it in every possible way in like a 10-inch laptop.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Why don't you tell me about the only other thing we haven't talked about putting in your computer, RAM.
John:
Yeah, we're trying to figure out – this was just a theory, but it sounded right to me.
John:
So I was trying to figure out why they didn't offer a 64 gig option.
John:
And maybe it's because they have to be either – you have to either fill in six slots or 12 slots.
John:
And so you can't get 64 because they don't sell 10.66 gigabyte sticks of RAM.
John:
So it will divide evenly by six or 12.
John:
I suppose I'll launch that cool, like –
John:
what was it like the card slot configurator there's like a there's like a software app on the mac pro that shows what you have installed and what you can upgrade to but that makes sense to me that maybe you have to install things in in match sets and you can only do threes or sixes um i'll find out but i think 96 96 gigs will hold me over for a while so that's one thing i'm not actually looking into upgrading
Casey:
Oh, good.
Casey:
You're not looking into upgrading one component of your $17,000 computer.
John:
Not until the second five years.
John:
Yeah, the second five years.
John:
I'll put more RAM in it, maybe.
Casey:
Wonderful.
Casey:
And then why don't you tell me about thermodynamics, if you don't mind.
John:
Popular Mechanics magazine, somehow.
John:
An article on the Mac Pro, because why not?
John:
I mean, I guess, I don't know.
John:
I don't know how these things work.
John:
Somehow Apple's connecting with popular mechanics.
John:
And they talked to Chris Leitenberg, the Senior Director of Product Design, about the Mac Pro.
John:
And in particular, they were talking about the fans and the whole cooling system, which is interesting to me.
John:
And they said all the right things.
John:
They're talking about...
John:
dynamically balancing the blades so they're actually randomized so that they they sort of resonated different frequencies to sort of produce a over the broad spectrum to produce noise instead of just in a particular frequency so it gets annoying and to avoid harmonics and everything we saw that at first i think the first time that apple talked about that was the uh the original retina 15 inch
John:
uh, that made more of a whooshing noise instead of a whining noise.
John:
And I like that.
John:
And they're doing the same thing with these much, much larger fans, obviously.
John:
Um, and they also said they borrowed the solution from automobile tires, but that apparently prove something similar.
John:
So you don't get drones when going over the highway where the tread patterns are randomized a little bit to sort of distribute the noise across the spectrum spectrum.
John:
Um,
John:
The article says that one advantage of having noisy fans is that noisy, you know, regular fans can handle resistance caused by filtration systems.
John:
So if you have some kind of mesh or filter or something that makes it harder to suck the air through, if you have just a plain old regular noisy fan, it can handle that.
John:
But these very delicate, beautiful, sort of gentle, quiet fans don't like having their airflow impeded.
John:
So both the Mac Pro and the Pro display don't have any kind of filters.
John:
This was noted by a couple of YouTubers.
John:
Like, you look through those giant gaping holes, they're the fan blades.
John:
Like, you could stick your finger through there.
John:
You know, cat hair, dust, anything, it's going in there, right?
John:
And this is Ternus.
John:
What's his name?
John:
John Ternus.
John:
John Ternus, speaking here, he says, speaking of the filters, he says, we don't have a need for that.
John:
We create geometries that can deal with a certain amount of material getting on them.
John:
and you know that may sound a little bit silly it's like so you know you're gonna get crap in your computer be like yeah we make it so the crap finds its way out but honestly that is incredibly refreshing in uh coming from the company that made the butterfly keyboard where it can't get out this thing is made that i mean i don't think you can shove buckets of sand into it but the whole point is the holes are so big on the entrance and exit yeah some stuff's gonna get in some stuff's gonna go out
John:
We designed it so that, you know, it's easy for stuff to get through it.
John:
Hopefully there's no little place where it all catches.
John:
Hopefully it'll just be, you know, large airflow going through.
John:
And in practice, like I'm sitting here with a cheese grater that has many more tiny holes, but it also has no filters or anything on it.
John:
Stuff goes in, stuff comes out.
John:
This has been running for 10 years.
John:
It's dusty inside.
John:
But I have seen way worse.
John:
Even on Macs, I've seen way worse on a previous Tower Macs.
John:
I've seen way worse on desktop Macs for a much shorter period of time.
John:
Having a huge amount of airflow into it and also a huge amount of airflow out the back, like the whole front and the whole back are open to the air, is actually a good system.
John:
for keeping things moving and for not allowing stuff to build up so i'm not too worried about debris um i wouldn't you know run your mac pro while you're putting a new drywall as they say in the article like obviously within reason and it would be cool if there was like a hepa filter or something inside there but honestly i'd rather have the quieter fans than the hepa filter because again 10 years running this other mac pro with no filter whatsoever and it's been fine so i'm convinced that uh this is a reasonable solution
Marco:
I think it's interesting.
Marco:
It's an interesting design trade-off that whether a filter is better to try to keep everything out.
Marco:
Because for me, in my experience having desktops for years and years and years, usually that I built myself with these fancy high-end enthusiast cases and all these cool fans and everything, is that usually by having a filter in there,
Marco:
You just give all the dust and everything one place to collect that you couldn't ignore and never clean.
Marco:
And I would imagine in most cases, people aren't cleaning their filters.
Marco:
And so in most cases, you just have less airflow very quickly after ownership of one of its computers.
Marco:
and so like i'm sure they probably had to do some kind of risk analysis of like what's worse in practice having a dirty filter plugging up airflow or having dust go through the computer and because the thing is like even computers with filters in every case i've ever seen there is still a ton of dust inside like i
Marco:
I don't know if it's coming in through other paths or what happens, or if the filters just aren't very good, or if they don't cover the whole opening enough, who knows.
Marco:
But I've never seen a filter that stayed clean for very long.
Marco:
I've never seen anybody change or clean a filter themselves.
Marco:
And I've never seen a computer with a filter that didn't have a whole bunch of dust inside it anyway.
Marco:
So maybe this is kind of just like admitting, like, yeah, okay, in practice...
Marco:
The way to do a desktop is to just make it handle the amount of dust and crap that's going to be sucked through it anyway.
John:
And that argues for making the holes bigger, not smaller, because you want everything to pass through.
John:
Like the thing with filters is once they get clogged, the reason you see dust inside is the air will flow through the place that has the least resistance.
John:
And a clogged filter puts up a lot of resistance.
John:
So the cracks around the filter, that's where the air will start going.
John:
And then the dust will go through there.
John:
It's much better to have...
John:
it passed through um so i mean obviously the cheese gritter has a ton of holes but they're actually kind of small and you can get some dust collecting on them same thing with heat sink fins if you have the heat sink fins very close together dust will get between them if they're more widely spaced the air will pass through um but you know i spent like 10 years with i've not been nice to this computer it's on the floor where all the dust is in a house that has had a dog for
John:
many years during that in two different dogs during, during that period of time.
John:
And, and it's fine.
John:
Like occasionally I open up in there and I see some dust and maybe blow it out, but you know, it hasn't been an issue.
John:
So I'm not particularly worried about it.
John:
If, if they ever made something that was meant to be used in like a high dust environment,
John:
You'd probably need to do something because you could get like conductive bits in there that can screw stuff up.
John:
But that's not what this is made for.
John:
It's made to be indoors in an office like environment.
John:
And I think it'll it'll do just fine.
John:
But mostly I'm happy that they spent so much time trying to make the fans very quiet and pleasant sounding when they make any noise at all.
John:
And the YouTube reviews have said it is dead silent.
John:
You know, we'll see.
John:
Same thing with the monitor.
John:
I'm glad to see people have said they literally cannot hear anything inside the monitor.
John:
So when I get them, I will give you my judgment, and hopefully my old man hearing has gotten bad enough that I will also find them silent.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And on this long journey through follow-up, why don't you tell me about the LG Ultrafine 5K and how it may or may not be good for everyone?
John:
It might not be fine.
John:
It was their slogan in the ads, fine, period.
John:
This is from Mark Grambau, and he has had some experience with these monitors.
John:
He's using them with 5K iMacs, and they're hooking up the LG 5K displays.
John:
And he's working – he's a designer and illustrator, and they're working in an environment where –
John:
it's kind of important that the monitors all kind of agree.
John:
So when they would hook up the LG, they'd notice that it didn't match the IMAX internal display, even if they, you know, accounted for night shift and true tone and all that other stuff, just like turning that off or even when it wasn't even supported on the models.
John:
So they bought a hardware calibrator and tried to get them to match each other and can never quite get them to match, which is kind of frustrating, right?
John:
Even though in theory, they use the same panel.
John:
And then they bought another LG and the two LGs that they had didn't match each other.
John:
Cool.
John:
This is frustrating.
John:
This is another one of the advantages that you, in theory, get with Apple monitors.
John:
They always say they're all carefully calibrated and so on and so forth.
John:
In my experience, that's been true.
John:
Having purchased Apple monitors since they were CRTs and then LCDs,
John:
They tend to be consistent and also look like each other.
John:
So Mark says in his experience with five of these LG displays that they fall short of Apple standards for factory calibration and consistency.
John:
So I think if you get 5K iMacs, the displays will match each other.
John:
But apparently if you do that with LG 5Ks, they will not, and you might not even be able to calibrate them to match the Apple displays.
Yeah.
John:
Yet another reason that if you care about that type of thing at all, there is reason, A, to buy Apple, and B, for Apple to make its own display.
John:
If you don't care, then fine.
John:
You save a lot of money, but it's nice to, you know...
John:
it's nice to know that you're paying for something when you buy these apple displays someone was mentioning on uh on twitter that they thought it was silly that that apple could never mark up like uh an lg panel and put it into their own case and charge hundreds more it's like that's all they've ever done like all of their monitor has always been somebody else's panel uh that they calibrate they put it in an expensive case and charge you tons of money for it and we would we bought them we bought them when they were crts and they were sony trinitrons inside an apple branded case and they cost
John:
hugely more than competing monitors we bought them when they were multi-scan you know multi-sync crt things even after the turn turn error we bought them when they're lcd panels and we would keep buying them uh if they would only make another one today so
John:
I still think there is a place in the market for that, especially if it's only 100 or two more.
John:
And I think that 100 or two, depending on who you are, may be worth it to you if you care about your monitors matching each other or the colors being, you know, calibrated to what you want them to be.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing that Apple puts a lot of time and attention and money into things like that.
Marco:
Things like proper calibration.
Marco:
Even with the iPhone displays.
Marco:
They go throughout the whole product line and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's the kind of thing that the market typically does not reward.
Marco:
The market does not generally notice or care.
Marco:
Apple occasionally tries to explain it to us and we mostly gloss over because the market largely doesn't care.
Marco:
But
Marco:
When you do care, they're the only option for a lot of these things.
Marco:
Or when you do have a need like that, like you might not realize if you only ever buy one of these monitors, for instance, you might not realize, hey, the colors are a little bit weird.
Marco:
But then when you put it next to something that doesn't have that problem or when you buy two of them and they don't match,
Marco:
It's exactly that little kind of detail that Apple really cares a lot more than almost anyone else in the industry about in almost every case.
Marco:
Or they do care more than anyone else in the industry in a lot of these cases.
Marco:
And I feel like
Marco:
They're never going to get the credit that they deserve for that.
Marco:
But that's the kind of thing that when we want an Apple monitor, that's the kind of thing we're looking for is that level of quality, that level of attention to detail, that level of caring about things that most of the market will not reward, but doing it anyway.
John:
yeah and as the chat room was pointing out it's not as if they have some kind of magic like if it's the same panel it's the same panel well how should how can apples be any better it's about quality standards they will reject panels that don't meet their criteria they have some sort of standard that they measure them to they measure the panel and it has to be within these values of these colors and these ranges and if it's not they they don't take that one and that's that's why there's things cost more like it's just been it's like bidding on chips so you find the ones that happen to run faster they cost more money because there's fewer of them um
John:
Apple, they've always done this with all of their monitors, even their really crappy monitors.
John:
They are remarkably consistent with each other.
John:
If you buy five of them and line them all up and put them all on 100% red screen and look at them, they will all look more or less the same, right?
John:
And that's...
John:
And even just Apple pushing like the, you know, 1% of P3 and now they cover 100% of P3 and like that whole effort.
John:
It's because they want the monitors to display as much of the color range as possible.
John:
And they wanted to display that stuff consistently.
John:
yeah also even on the phones and i bet they do the same thing by rejecting the the uh oled or lcd panels that don't meet their standards and thus driving up the price that's part of what we pay for and they try to be clear they charge a premium for it like they make they make plenty of money like it's part of the profit margin but you know that is that is a thing that you're paying for even though especially in phones nobody notices because most people like the
John:
completely over boosted super duper vibrant color scheme of samsung phones they've always judged that to be better but uh if i guess if they try to watch a movie or tv show might look a little bit cartoonish but then again people have their tvs calibrated that way so i don't even know but in this area i'm glad that apple's taste still aligns with mine and uh creative professionals who need to see the colors as they actually are um so they're sort of
John:
working off a common understanding of what it is that they're doing.
John:
Because if everybody's monitor was calibrated to their own personal tastes, it's very difficult to get work done in a collaborative environment.
Marco:
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Casey:
So we have in the show notes expandable Macs in the history of Mac Towers.
Casey:
So I know that there's been cheese graters for a long time and I know that you could expand them.
Casey:
And now, you know, the entirety of my knowledge of the history of Mac Towers.
Casey:
So, John, educate me if you don't mind, since apparently there's some sort of shtick you have here.
Casey:
What's the history of Mac Towers and how do you expand them?
John:
I put this in the notes inspired by some back and forth on Twitter between a bunch of people we know, in particular with the shipping of the Mac Pro, people who are disappointed that if you want a Macintosh computer,
John:
with expandable insides where you can replace RAM and hard drives and GPUs and do all the stuff that we've been talking about, that your only choice is this extremely expensive, super high-end thing.
John:
And I've mostly been...
John:
uh you know not concerned with this issue because uh in in the short term because the whole deal was and you know has been my deal since before the trash can mac pro which is that apple should make a mac pro as its halo car type computer and
John:
it should be the best of the best it should be fast because fast computers are cool it should be everything you know more capable more expandable uh more powerful than anything else and yes also more expensive scout out that top end and it was important for you know to me that they do this i think it's important for the company uh
John:
i think the trash can was a very interesting take on that turned out to be the wrong solution but it was you can't say that they weren't bold uh you know can't innovate more of my ass we make fun of that but honestly that was an innovative computer it was just innovating in the wrong direction unfortunately and had some design flaws but it was daring and bold and like a lot of halo cars some of those end up being maybe not as practical as you thought and maybe not particularly successful and then so they were taking a second shot at it here right
John:
So that's mostly why I've been like, well, yeah, I'm not going to complain about the Mac Pro to say, you know, it's too expensive or too high end because that's the whole point of this is to put this, plant this flag, put a stake in the ground, whatever your metaphor is, like, you know, put the flag on the top of the mountain.
John:
This is go big or go home.
John:
All the platitudes you can think of.
John:
That's the point of this computer.
John:
But now that that is there and it's out there and we understand what it's for and who's going to buy it and everything, this is the question and the thing that people are complaining about.
John:
Now, they're blaming the Mac Pro for it, but honestly, I think that's misdirected anger.
John:
The Mac Pro has to be the thing that it is.
John:
The question is, is there something between the highest of the very high end and the other Macs in Apple's lineup?
John:
And most of the people complaining about this remember a time when Apple either had a single model that spanned more of a range or multiple models where you could pay Apple far less money to get a computer that was expandable, that either you could swap out different kinds of internal storage or swap out the GPU or maybe put two GPUs in it.
John:
Sometimes they had one or two CPUs, right?
John:
And a lot of those people say, I'm never going to need four GPUs in my thing.
John:
I'm never going to need 28 cores.
John:
I don't even care about ECC RAM.
John:
I don't even care if it's a Xeon.
John:
But the only choices right now are, you know, you have the iMac Pro and then a huge Gulf and then the very, very high end.
John:
And, you know, the people are angry about that.
John:
They say, you know, Apple is not serving my needs.
John:
Apple doesn't make a computer.
John:
That's exactly what I want.
John:
I don't want the high-end, and I also don't want the iMac.
John:
Why doesn't Apple make something for me?
John:
At various times, that Mac has been described as the XMac, where it's an inexpensive Mac made with consumer desktop parts.
John:
It's expandable.
John:
Apple has never really made that computer.
John:
But as people who are around for the Power Mac G5 and the early Mac Pros can attest,
John:
Apple used to make its high-end line of computers extend pretty far down.
John:
Like, yeah, you could always spec them up to be these big monster machines, but the quote-unquote same computer, like it was called a Mac Pro or it was called a Power Mac, right, a Power Mac G5, you could take that same computer and spec it way down.
John:
And it still had ECC RAM and it still has Xeons in it, but you could spec it way down to the point where you could pay like $1,600 for the base config.
John:
And what you would get is a gigantic tower, cheese grater tower, with ECC RAM and a Xeon in it.
John:
But everything would be small.
John:
It would have the wimpy CPU.
John:
It would have fewer RAM slots.
John:
It would just have one CPU instead of two back when that was a thing they were doing.
John:
It would have a crappy video card.
John:
But you'd still be getting the whole big thing.
John:
And you could take out the GPU and put a different one.
John:
And you could add more RAM later.
John:
And you could even, if you were daring, take out the CPU and upgrade it, right?
John:
That is the world that a lot of people are pining for.
John:
And like I said, I think their anger at the Mac Pro is misdirected because that's a very important product for Apple to have.
John:
What they're complaining about is, what about the gap?
John:
So my question to the two of you is,
John:
is this a product Apple should ever make again?
John:
Like, why did they ever make it before?
John:
Why aren't they making it now?
John:
And then the third one is, can this current computer ever extend downward to, you know, to that range?
John:
Can you ever sell something that looks and is essentially like the Mac Pro, as we know it today, that you could sell for $2,000 or less?
Casey:
I just, I don't know who is buying this.
Casey:
Like, yes, I understand that there are friends of ours that want that.
Casey:
And maybe, maybe I would want that.
Casey:
But honestly, my perception of my computer, or at least a desktop computer at the very least, has changed significantly since I started buying Macs.
Casey:
And maybe that's because Apple told me to believe this, and now I'm just...
Casey:
I'm one of the sheeple that's just marching to whatever Apple tells me to do.
Casey:
But I think of these computers, both the iMac and the laptop, as a single unit, much like a phone.
Casey:
I don't view my computers as though I'm going to be upgrading the RAM in the future and the hard drive later.
Casey:
I don't even know what else I've upgraded in the past in computers.
Casey:
When I had my original Polybook, I had put more RAM in that, I believe.
Casey:
And it was reasonably easy to do that.
Casey:
I think I'd put a bigger hard drive in that.
Casey:
It was reasonably easy to do that.
Casey:
But nowadays, I'm buying computers where, like, even my Adorable has 16 gigs of RAM, if I'm not mistaken, and it has a half terabyte for my needs.
Casey:
And I'm only talking about me.
Casey:
I'm not saying this is universal to everyone.
Casey:
But for my needs, that's fine.
Casey:
I mean, I'd like more, but I don't need more.
Casey:
And, you know, this iMac Pro is spec'd way better than I need today.
Casey:
And the reason I did that is because I want it to last for a few years.
Casey:
I don't know what it is I think I would upgrade in this.
Casey:
I guess an SSD, maybe, but at that point, presumably I'd want a new CPU.
Casey:
maybe more ram maybe but i have what do i have in this thing 64 gigs of ram like i'm not going to need more ram anytime soon so i view my computers as i'm not expendable that's way too aggressive a term but i i view them as a single unit that i will use for several years and then they will move on to either someone else or get recycled or what have you and i
Casey:
I personally don't really see the need for an expandable Mac in the same way that the Mac Pro exists.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
What is the meme with the Galaxy Brain and Universe Brain and all that stuff?
Casey:
Maybe I'm on the smallest one of those.
Casey:
So, Marco, use your Galaxy Brain and make me feel dumb for a minute.
Casey:
Why do you need or why do I need an expandable Mac?
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, the reality is there's a lot of really good reasons why this thing doesn't exist or rather why Apple won't make it.
Marco:
But I don't think – they're not going to satisfy people.
Marco:
So one of the biggest reasons –
Marco:
is that we're already talking about a very small portion of the market by not talking about laptops.
Marco:
We're talking about desktops.
Marco:
In the time when expandable desktops were the default kind of computer, that if you said, I bought a computer, most people would picture a desktop of some kind.
Marco:
That time was the 90s or 80s, up until maybe 2002, 2004, at which point the default started becoming a laptop for almost everybody.
Marco:
It never went back the other way.
Marco:
Laptops came in as LCD panels got cheaper and batteries got better, and especially in the era of SSDs when the performance between laptops and desktops really closed the gap big time.
Marco:
The reality is most people, for most of their computer needs, buy laptops now.
Marco:
you're already talking about a very small part of the market that even wants a desktop at all.
Marco:
And then when you look at the people who do want a desktop, a lot of those sales are kind of like, you know, appliances.
Marco:
They're like, you need like a computer to be at a desk in an office where
Marco:
or to be displaying something as some kind of stationary appliance.
Marco:
A lot of those are not high-end desktops, and they don't need to be very good.
Marco:
You wonder why Apple still sells such incredibly crappy configurations of the low-end iMacs.
Marco:
It's for that market.
Marco:
They sell a whole ton of them.
Marco:
Most office workers are not buying a ton of these anymore.
Marco:
Most office workers are going on laptops for their staff and everything.
Marco:
There's not a lot of people buying desktops.
Marco:
And of the people buying desktops, many of them just want them to be as cheap as possible for various reasons.
Marco:
So the market for enthusiasts and high-end desktops is really quite small.
Marco:
Of that market, a huge portion of it are gamers.
Marco:
And Apple doesn't do well with gamers for lots of good reasons that neither side is likely to ever compromise on.
Marco:
You know, what gamers want is a very different kind of system than the kind of system Apple wants to make and sell.
Marco:
They usually aren't even interested in or running macOS, so why does Apple even need to bother?
Marco:
You know, Apple's not probably very interested in making everybody's gaming PCs.
Marco:
That's not really a market they care to be in or need to be in, because quite frankly, the gamers don't like Apple very much usually, and Apple doesn't like them very much and doesn't want to do what they want, so they kind of, you know, stay out of each other's way.
Marco:
And so what people usually want who are asking for the, you know, quote, XMac, the cheap Mac tower, they're usually basically asking for gaming PCs.
Marco:
Like if you look at like the kind of thing they're looking for, okay, so you want a tower computer using standard consumer parts that aren't very expensive that you can put a gaming GPU in and expand it later.
Marco:
That's basically a gaming PC.
Yeah.
Marco:
And part of the reason why I think the likelihood of this has eroded even further over time is that gaming PC parts got very cheap.
Marco:
It's such a commodity.
Marco:
There's no room for Apple to make much profit there.
Marco:
If Apple wants to try to sell their gaming PC for $3,000 instead of $6,000, they're still way out of the market.
Marco:
They're still way above it.
Marco:
Not to mention the fact that many gamers have also gone to laptops these days, which is a whole other thing.
Marco:
And Apple's not going to make a gaming laptop for all the various things that it needs.
Marco:
So we're talking about such a narrow part of the market that still wants a desktop in this day and age, doesn't want it to be just like the bargain basement cheap thing, actually wants it to be like, you know, a powerful tower that can be expanded and
Marco:
Isn't the pro side of the market that is like pro video editors who want to buy a crazy workstation like a Mac Pro also probably isn't hardcore gamers because they're probably going to want PC hardware that they can have even more control over and get even cheaper and run Windows on.
Marco:
So what's left?
Marco:
It's basically me, John, and Steve Trout and Smith.
Marco:
It's a pretty small market.
Marco:
And me and John will eventually just buy the Mac Pro.
Marco:
And I'm not saying that there aren't things that we wish we had here.
Marco:
I'm not saying that there aren't ways.
Marco:
For instance, I have an iMac.
Marco:
I've been using an iMac since 2014.
Marco:
I would love so much to be able to expand it somehow.
Casey:
To what end, though?
Casey:
What would you be expanding?
Casey:
And I'm not trying to be a jerk.
Casey:
I genuinely don't know what I would do to my computer.
Casey:
What is it your iMac Pro either doesn't do today or you think won't do tomorrow that you would like to rectify?
Marco:
Well, I have bought my way out of this problem.
Marco:
The reason why the iMacs that I've had since 2014 and forward, why I haven't really outgrown their basic specs during their useful lifetime...
Marco:
is because I had the money to buy a really good configuration up front.
Marco:
But that wasn't always the case with the Macs I've bought.
Marco:
Like, when I bought my first Mac Pro in 2008, which was the first time I could ever afford a Mac Tower, I bought a pretty modest configuration, very similar to what John bought his with, actually.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I upgraded over time.
Marco:
I didn't go as far as John did.
Marco:
I didn't own it for 10 years.
Marco:
But over time, I upgraded the RAM.
Marco:
I upgraded the hard drives on day one.
Marco:
There's a huge market of people who can afford the entry price of something like this.
Marco:
but don't want to or can't pay Apple's upgrade prices.
Marco:
Casey, you did.
Marco:
You didn't want to pay the upgrade price for the RAM, so you bought it with base RAM and used third-party RAM to upgrade your Mac.
Marco:
That's a huge market.
Marco:
I used to do that to every Mac I owned.
Marco:
Usually, I'd get the base specs from Apple.
Marco:
I would then go to, you know, OWC and get their RAM and I'd go get whatever hard drive that I'd research was like the fastest hard drive and get that.
Marco:
And I'd put them in myself because they were way cheaper than Apple's or sometimes they would be like larger configurations that Apple would offer or something like that.
Marco:
And so it allowed me to get a better computer than I could otherwise afford.
Marco:
Or it allowed me to get a computer that I could afford first that was lower end and then over time, as I got more money, make it higher end with upgrades.
Marco:
And that side of the market is huge and totally underserved by all of Apple's product lines now.
Marco:
Because you can't really upgrade anything on any of them anymore, basically.
Marco:
There's almost nothing upgradable about almost any computer or device Apple sells anymore.
Marco:
And so there is a huge market there to be had for people who don't want to or can't pay Apple's high spec fees
Marco:
to get the full resources that they might want up front, but that maybe two years in, they would.
Marco:
And that has bitten me.
Marco:
I have occasionally, a couple of laptops ago, I replaced the laptop mostly because I just kept running out of space.
Marco:
You can kind of look cynically then, like, well, Apple's selling more computers and upgrades because people can't upgrade the ones they have.
Marco:
And that's kind of crappy.
Marco:
The same thing applies to the phone, the iPad.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
So there is a big market there, but the main part of that market is not creating computers that can't exist otherwise, now that we have the Mac Pro at least.
Marco:
The main part of that market is people who need to save some money or who want to save some money.
Marco:
And I don't think Apple gives two craps about that market whatsoever.
Marco:
And I'm not saying that's right, but...
Marco:
But they are a really rich company and they got there somehow.
Marco:
They're doing what works for them.
Marco:
And what works for them is typically giving you most of what you want and making you pay two to three times what you feel comfortable paying for it if that's what you want.
Marco:
So the new Mac Pro continues that.
Marco:
And I think it's partially excused by this is a very, very narrow market.
Marco:
That the people who still want expandable desktops is a very narrow market.
Marco:
Among that market, a lot of that market is pros or enthusiasts like us who are much more willing on average to pay high Apple prices.
Marco:
So they are serving a good chunk of that market by what they're doing.
Marco:
And they're really making us, like, ooh, really cringe and really, you know, sacrifice some of the stuff we want or, you know, have to save up for a couple more years to get this thing.
Marco:
You know, they're really making it hurt, but it is probably going to work in the sense that we are probably going to buy it or buy something else they make and be happy enough with that, like the iMac Pro.
Marco:
So it works for them.
Marco:
I don't see the strategy costing them a lot of sales that A, they would actually want, and B, would actually happen.
John:
Yeah, I think the XMac desire, they've never made anything that really fits this bill, as in not using the Xeons and ECC RAM I keep using as a stand-in.
John:
So basically a consumer desktop parts, but in an expandable case.
John:
So I'm putting that aside as sort of the market they don't want to serve because it's price conscious or it's gamers, like you said, and the desktop market is small, and they just...
John:
If they didn't address that in the past, the chances of them addressing it now was even smaller.
John:
So let's just set that aside.
John:
But I think the main thing that people are pining for is a thing they had for a fairly long period of time, which is that the top end, the Xeon ECC, dual CPU, whatever, a multi-core, big giant tower thing, that product line extended downward into way cheaper prices.
John:
And so Apple could justify it by saying,
John:
Well, we're still just basically making one high-end thing.
John:
Like, this is our top-end computer.
John:
You can spec it out like crazy and make it cost, you know, huge amounts of money.
John:
But essentially, that very same computer, you can spec down to the point where at, you know, sort of the peak of this strategy, they had models that had entirely different motherboards, like, inside the same case.
John:
But, like, the cheap one was basically a different computer.
John:
They even did that in the G4 era where, like, there was the sawtooth and the, God, I'm too old one.
John:
what does chat room help me out what the other one was sawtooth g4 and the i can't remember um they would sell computers that look like they were in the same case but there was like the good one and the bad one uh one of them had the the agp and one of them didn't yeah the chat room will get it for me eventually anyway same thing with the with the power max with the different motherboards and the single cpu versus dual cpu um
John:
And that was an interesting strategy because they were all, especially in the Mac Pro eras and the Intel eras, they were all Xeons.
John:
There was none of them that had the cheaper consumer CPUs with higher single-core speeds.
John:
They were all Xeons, but they went way down market.
John:
You could get the stripper model that had almost all the expandability, sometimes not all the expandability, but almost all the expandability, and that on the outside looked like
John:
the same as the other ones, you know, it was in the same case, right?
John:
So you felt like you were getting, you know, you didn't feel like you were getting the lesser thing, but it was considerably less expensive.
John:
And I think, uh, given their current design, it is actually possible for Apple to offer a Mac pro like computer for far less money than
John:
Once they get rid of Intel, because by far the most expensive component that Apple has to pay somebody else for in the Mac Pro is the CPU, especially when you get them to the big core counts.
John:
Intel charges a huge amount of money for those.
John:
Everything else, like take out the CPU and just say, okay, what's left?
John:
What's left in the Mac Pro?
John:
The case is obviously expensive with all the machining and everything, but honestly, Apple is really good at machining aluminum.
John:
And as expensive as it is, it's not as much as you might think, especially given Apple's expertise in this area, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
That is probably the most complicated to manufacture thing.
John:
Everything else, it's a fairly straightforward motherboard with nothing particularly exotic on it.
John:
It's got a bunch of slots.
John:
There's some nice fans.
John:
Obviously, they're custom Apple fans we just talked about in the Popular Mechanics article.
John:
They're not off-the-shelf fans, but in the end, they're plastic fans, right?
John:
There's a power supply that's probably a good power supply, but, you know,
John:
Like, add up the parts that are in there.
John:
There's nothing particularly expensive.
John:
There's no reason you couldn't get, like, take out the Xeon, right?
John:
Take the Mac Pro, the base Mac Pro with no Xeon in it.
John:
They could sell that computer with no CPU for, like, $1,500, right?
John:
And then you add, you know, a $1,500 CPU and it's $3,000 and then you add profit margins, you know, but like imagine now that you have that same thing, but now Apple switched to ARM, right?
John:
And they make their own ARM system on a chip type thing in there that is faster than the Xeon ever was.
John:
And you know it's not going to cost Apple and nor will they charge like thousands and thousands of dollars for that.
John:
Because they'll be making the chip themselves.
John:
Like, how much does the system on a chip in the iPhone cost, right?
John:
The one that's faster than the one that's currently in the Mac Pro in single core, right?
John:
There's nothing about that tower that says Apple cannot offer this product for anything less than $4,000 or $5,000.
John:
They can absolutely offer that tower for $2,000.
John:
They could probably offer that tower for $2,000 with the lowest end Xeon in it and just barely scrape by.
John:
But Xeons have gotten much more expensive over the years as the core counts have increased.
John:
Like,
John:
getting the cheapest cpu like how much did it cost apple for the cheapest cpu it used to be a lot less right and so i think when they transition to arm it will open up the possibility not of them making an x mac or a smaller mini tower or a thing full of consumer parts is upgradable because i think the market is not big enough
John:
but they should be able to take their quote unquote top end line of tower computers, which will probably honestly, if they keep making them be in the same looking case, even though the insides will be entirely different and sell that sell a cheaper model for far less money.
John:
Will they want to do that?
John:
Is that like, what is the advantage of doing that?
John:
The advantage I suppose is it makes your consumers happy.
John:
Um,
John:
The disadvantages, Marcus pointed out, people would buy computers less often.
John:
Maybe it would eat into your iMac Pro sales, and depending if your margins are better on the iMac Pro versus the other one.
John:
I see it going either way.
John:
There is definitely consumer demand for that type of computer.
John:
But the total demand of this entire like the desktop Mac demand thing may be so small that it's like, why are we trying to slice and dice this thing?
John:
Like, you know, the total addressable Mac desktop market is X amount.
John:
And we say you're only getting half of that market if you just go high end only.
John:
the half that's left and that you know how much of that is is taken up by the mac mini now you've got an even smaller sliver i don't know like i think it's a computer they probably should make just as sort of an economies of scale and that like you're already making you already got the tooling for the tower and the motherboard and the chips and when you add up the the materials list without having to pay intel for the xeon and all the other stuff and with thunderbolt being royalty free and you know all the other stuff
John:
It ends up that you can actually sell this computer for less money.
John:
I think Apple will sell it for less money.
John:
I just don't know if they'll cross the 2000 barrier, right?
John:
Once they don't have to pay Intel, the base price for the Mac Pro should not be $6,000.
John:
It'll be $4,000, right?
John:
And that's good.
John:
That's a trend in the right direction.
John:
Will they ever get it down to $3,000 or $2,000?
John:
They absolutely could, but I don't know if their motivation is sufficient for that.
John:
So I feel people's pain.
John:
Believe me, I feel your pain.
John:
I feel it perhaps more acutely than you might imagine because you didn't just order one of these things and don't fully understand exactly how poorly it fares against contemporary Macs and phones and iPads and how short its reign might be as a...
John:
computer that makes any sense whatsoever uh that's all on me but i don't you know a i don't blame the computer because you wanted high-end and you got high-end right i just feel like there is there is a donut hole there is there is a gap there to be filled and there is sort of a as opposite of price umbrella obviously there's no competitors coming in to fill that role other than hackintoshes or whatever
John:
Uh, but I mean, I've seen a couple of stories to this effect and I'm not sure how much I, how much steak I put in them, but like people who are keeping cheese graters, like mega upgraded cheese graters, we've seen all these stories where it's like, I'm not getting that stinking Mac pro.
John:
I've got my 2012, uh, you know, uh, cheese grater Mac pro and I've stuffed into the gills with third party video cards that from Nvidia that happens to still have drivers and all these fast SSDs and, you know, look how cheap it is.
John:
And I've been using it for all these years.
John:
Uh,
John:
Those are people who would buy a $2,000 Mac Pro and, you know, soup it up themselves or buy third-party stuff, and they're keeping that other stuff.
John:
So, again, I think that market still is there.
John:
I'm just not sure how big it is.
John:
So, yeah, I feel those people's pain.
John:
I'm not entirely willing to close the door on it, though.
John:
I think once we get rid of these Xeons, we may see cheaper Mac Pro towers.
Marco:
See, I think you might be overvaluing the cost of the Xeon itself.
Marco:
I mean, certainly in the higher configurations, it becomes more apparent.
Marco:
But if you look at the iMac Pro, which doesn't have exactly the same series of Xeons in them, but it's at least in the ballpark, look at what the iMac Pro gives you for...
Marco:
$1,000 less, but also if you spec match the one terabyte SSD between the two of them, because the MacBook comes with it, then it's $1,400 less, and it comes with the monitor built in and a webcam.
Marco:
So you figure if you value the monitor based on the LG costing $1,200, maybe value the monitor at like $800, what it actually might cost Apple, you're at over $2,000 of
Marco:
price difference here compared to the iMac Pro with very similar parts.
Marco:
It's also a Xeon.
Marco:
It's also, you know, same amount of RAM, you know, spec matched to the SSD.
Marco:
You know, if you look at that, you have a pretty wide gap here.
Marco:
And I think the lowest the Mac Pro could ever go price-wise if Apple really cared, but while keeping most of the essentials of the current design is nowhere near $2,000 because
Marco:
Just the case and the big steel frame, all the precise machine that goes into that, all the metal.
Marco:
That case alone is probably at least $500 to make.
John:
When you see the third-party cases, how much the third-party ones cost and how much worse are they than apples?
John:
That's a good judge because the third-party cases, they're retail price.
John:
So there's profit margin built into them.
John:
You assume they're not as good at quality as apples, but they're not.
John:
Too terrible.
John:
And also Apple, like I said, is really good at machining aluminum and there are economies of scale involved here.
John:
I think that case costs a lot less than we think it does.
John:
A couple hundred bucks.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
But so, so suppose the case is like three or 400 bucks, which I think is probably low.
Marco:
You also have this tremendous 1400 watt power supply.
John:
Yeah, well, that's why the iMac, to your point about the iMac pricing, that's why it's cheaper.
John:
Because when you make something like the iMac, you know exactly what you have to power.
John:
You don't need anything unnecessary.
John:
You don't need to account for anything, both in terms of space, size, slots, traces, plugs.
John:
You know exactly what it's going to be.
John:
You know all the ports.
John:
You know all the stuff that's ever going to be inside the thing.
John:
And so that's how you can save a lot of money.
John:
And even like the monitor, you're not buying a monitor, you're buying just a panel.
John:
I think the panel costs less than $800 in that thing.
John:
You get a lot of savings and a lot of extra margin by making an all-in-one that can only do those things.
John:
But the reason I'm willing to believe that maybe $2,000 is optimistic because I'm using like...
John:
you know, $2,005.
John:
Right.
John:
But like, remember Apple got those, Apple got those towers down to, to 1600 bucks in.
John:
So I got to do the calculator, $1,600 in like the early two thousands, whatever the equivalent of that is now.
John:
I think it's still, I think that's, that's still possible.
Yeah.
Marco:
But, I mean, even, you know, you look at, like, you got, like, four or five hundred bucks for the case, at least.
Marco:
You probably got another few hundred bucks for the power supply, plus all the fans.
Marco:
It's probably at least a hundred bucks for the fans in there, because, you know... Power supply is 80 bucks.
Marco:
For that large of one with those great... I mean, come on.
Marco:
Like, that's...
Marco:
that's not retail price that's the price that apple pays no i know all right and then and then you have the motherboard which for that's probably a thousand dollar motherboard no no look at what server boards cost look look up the price of serve of like xeon server boards that have all that that have that many ram slots that many card slots maybe with the number of slots but the
John:
but that's what i'm getting at like remember they made different boards that went inside their towers like they didn't all have the 12 slots or whatever so you make one of those that has half the number of slots in the cheap machine like that's the thing that they used to do is it would be in the same case but there was you know dual socket versus single socket and then how many ram slots and then how many expansion slots and those are the things those are levers you can turn to uh to get it cheaper i mean you know i i'd
John:
I always forget about inflation.
John:
A lot of people in the Twitter said, no one was even taking inflation into account because they didn't realize how old these old computers were.
John:
But $1,600 in 2002 is not $1,600 in 2020.
John:
You want it to feel like $1,600, but it's not.
John:
But anyway, let's put it this way.
John:
There is plenty of room for the base price to go down from $6,000.
John:
And I think there's even more room once the CPU costs Apple $80 instead of $800.
Marco:
Yeah, but I would ballpark that at more like a $4,000 target, not a $2,000 target.
Marco:
We'll compromise and say three.
John:
We figured it out for you, Tim.
John:
$3,499 for the base Mac Pro with an ARM CPU in 2024.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And quickly, Yonatron in the chat brings up a good point.
Marco:
They say they can make a lower-end case, too.
Marco:
And that's true.
Marco:
A lot of these expenses that Apple has taken on are optional.
Marco:
And some of it is stuff we were talking about earlier, like display calibration, where some of it is stuff that really matters to us.
Marco:
Some of it is stuff that they just are kind of indulging themselves in nice design for the sake of nice design.
Marco:
You know, a lot of the case design is that for sure.
Marco:
A lot of that is like, you know, we know that we can charge a lot of money for this, and so we are going to design it with a much larger budget for industrial design and physical aspects than some of the other models maybe.
Marco:
Like, you know, when they're designing the case for the MacBook Air,
Marco:
they have to actually be concerned about all the little details of the costs of that case because that's a low-end product that has to sell for a value price.
Marco:
The margins are much slimmer in general, and it's really a value-conscious audience and everything, and they sell way more of them.
Marco:
The Mac Pro, they can be like, you know, F it.
Marco:
Put whatever you want in the case.
Marco:
Make the case out of gold.
Marco:
They probably give the industrial designers of that product a much larger amount of free reign to...
Marco:
do whatever they want to make something really nice because they aren't even trying to bother hitting a price point with this product.
John:
I do wonder about those because I feel like the quality of the Mac Mini's case, maybe that's not a great example because the Mac Mini is so expensive now, but I don't see any particular difference in the quality of the Mac Mini's case and the quality of the Air's case and the quality of the cheese grater or the current Mac Pro.
John:
There is the materials cost and the exact number of machined holes.
John:
Like there is sort of the labor cost where it's obviously more labor intensive and therefore expensive and time consuming to drill all those holes.
John:
But the tolerances, I bet, on the Mac Mini are the same as the tolerances on the Mac Pro.
John:
Like that's just the Apple thing that they do with these particular materials.
John:
And if anything, the old strategy of...
John:
making all of the mac pros to be in that cheese grater case it's like the stupid keyboard thing again it's actually cheaper for apple to never make a smaller tower it's part of the reason the x mac has never come because that market's small and it's like do we really want to make a smaller tower can't we just take our existing tower case and put less stuff in it and that's always what they did they just took their existing towers that they had already designed and they they sometimes you'd open them up you're like there's a lot of empty space in this one it's like yeah you got the cheap one um they you know
John:
This thing is made to hold twice as many CPUs and twice as many RAM slots and a bigger power supply.
John:
And, you know, it's just cheaper.
John:
Like, I just don't feel like they're ever going to make the mini tower because that would be like a whole new dedicated computer.
John:
Even the iMac Pro, they didn't want to make a new case.
John:
They just, you know, in the inside, it's all different from the outside.
John:
It's the same proportions.
John:
Right.
John:
So, yeah, I think you could make that case.
John:
$10 less expensive by making a mini tower, but the, you'd incur so much more cost by making an entirely new computer that the, this is what I'm saying.
John:
The only, the only thing I can see Apple ever doing is when they change to arm, take whatever the current high end cases and put less and cheaper things inside that exact same case.
John:
Because there is plenty of room in there to, you know, sort of play around and leave some empty space.
John:
You know, have eight RAM slots instead of 12.
John:
Have four PCI slots instead of eight.
John:
Have the same stupid case with a bunch of like when you buy cars where there's the little blank panels where you didn't buy the options.
John:
That's what's on the back of this lower end computer in 2024.
John:
What did I say?
John:
$3,499 in 2024 with an ARM CPU.
John:
There you go.
John:
I've planted my flag.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Zach wants to know, and this is actually something that I've been thinking about as well, do I still need to use my Apple TV if I've got a smart TV with AirPlay 2.0 support?
Casey:
I'm trying to understand the value of the hardware when it seems like the TV can do it all now.
Casey:
I have had similar thoughts what with my new TV, and it has Disney Plus built in, it has a Plex app built in, it has Netflix and YouTube and so many other things that I tend to use my Apple TV for.
Casey:
And I have a 1080p Apple TV, and I have a 4K TV now, and so it seems like I should probably upgrade to the 4K Apple TV, but do I need to?
Casey:
And the conclusion I came to is that, yeah...
Casey:
You know, for the things that I use my Apple TV for, which is a lot of airplay, which my TV can do natively, but it's slightly more flaky than the Apple TV.
Casey:
For Plex, the app is way better than the Apple TV than it is on the TV itself.
Casey:
For so much of this stuff, it just seems like I personally would prefer to do that on Apple TV.
Casey:
But I don't know that I would say it's absolutely essential anymore for the most part.
Casey:
John, I have a feeling that you have the most strong opinion about this.
Casey:
What do you think?
John:
There is sometimes an advantage to using the apps that are built into your television.
John:
They have the possibility of having more of a direct line to your display, which you would think wouldn't make any difference because, you know, shouldn't it be the same thing?
John:
I have a device connected to an HDMI port versus the built-in ones, but sometimes there actually is a difference.
John:
whether that be in terms of input lag or in terms of getting the full capabilities of display in terms of color gamut and frame rates and everything.
John:
With the Apple TV, some of the limitations of third parties that are at war with Apple in various ways could mean that the YouTube app on Apple TV cannot display 4K HDR, but the built-in app on your television can.
John:
Those are the reasons you would use the built-in ones.
John:
For political or technological reasons,
John:
they perform better in terms of capabilities displaying video than third-party ones.
John:
Now, in all other ways, they tend to perform worse, as in the UI is slower, the CPU inside your television is slower than the one on the Apple TV.
John:
they're jankier the app is not updated as often you know it's buggy all those other reasons why you want to avoid the internal ones um but i do want to say that sometimes there is a reason to use the built-in one so it's worth checking out now if you buy a very expensive supposedly fancy 4k apple tv um
John:
In theory, what you're getting are a much wider selection of apps, way more responsive applications, sometimes more features.
John:
If this is the case, sometimes the third-party app is updated frequently and the Apple TV 4K supports HDR and Dolby Vision and all these other things, and maybe the built-in one doesn't.
John:
And if the built-in one doesn't, chances are it never will because it's not going to get updated that frequently, right?
John:
So...
John:
I think there's no great answer here.
John:
Obviously, if you're trying to save some money, just use all the built-in stuff.
John:
It will probably be fine.
John:
But it's not... There's no... You can't just go one direction and say, well, I'm just only going to use Apple TV or I'm only going to use the built-in ones.
John:
If you really want the best experience, you have to take it on a case-by-case, app-by-app basis, which is terrible, which nobody wants to deal with.
John:
But that's the unfortunate reality of television.
John:
I don't see that changing anytime soon because TV makers are not...
John:
They're not courting developers as hard as Apple is.
John:
But on the other hand, Apple is always on the outside looking in.
John:
They don't make the televisions, despite all those rumors in those years ago.
John:
They interface with it through an HDMI port, and they do the best they can.
John:
But for things like YouTube not supporting 4K, like...
John:
That's a political thing, not a technical thing.
John:
And it just so happens that Sony and LG have a better relationship with YouTube than Apple does.
John:
And there's no weird app store policies between them.
John:
And so your built-in app probably shows YouTube in 4K and your Apple one doesn't.
John:
And that's a bummer.
Marco:
I think this question becomes a lot easier in a theoretical world where the Apple TV is good.
Marco:
And unfortunately, the Apple TV is okay.
Marco:
And there are ways in which the Apple TV is bad.
Marco:
There are ways in which the built-in apps on your TV are bad.
Marco:
As John mentioned, they usually have worse UIs.
Marco:
They almost never get updated.
Marco:
They oftentimes have weird control schemes and everything.
Marco:
They will just feel kind of gross because they're going to feel just kind of like Android apps or whatever, or webOS apps, whatever that even is.
Marco:
And so there's a substantial difference in privacy risk between the two.
Marco:
TV manufacturers typically will do really creepy stuff with the data about what you're watching to make more money from you after the sale, which is one of the reasons why I recommend setting up your smart TV, giving it its software updates through Ethernet.
Marco:
and then unplugging it, and never connecting it to Wi-Fi, never giving it your Wi-Fi password, because then you control whether it has connectivity or not.
Marco:
But anyway, the Apple TV is way better on the privacy front, and sometimes better in the interface front, but worse with things like the remote, worse with...
Marco:
a lot of the reliability of the software, uh, certainly worse if you ever want to do things like, I don't know, buy TV series on Apple's products from Apple.
Marco:
For some reason, it seems like no one ever does this that designs these things.
Marco:
But anyway, uh, there's all sorts of weird bugs with tvOS that you still hit on a regular basis.
Marco:
Um, and the Apple TV hardware itself is,
Marco:
Doesn't seem particularly well made.
Marco:
I've had the Apple TV unit itself tend to last only about maybe two or three years before they die on average or start flaking out in really weird ways.
Marco:
So, and oh, and by the way, it's very expensive for what it is.
Marco:
They still do that stupid thing where they have 32 and 64 gig configurations of the Apple TV, which I think is getting to the point of unconscionable that they even make you make that choice and still charge more for the
Marco:
the 64 oh it's that's embarrassing uh but ultimately you know they're both mediocre in different ways and you got to pick which one is more which one is non-mediocre in the ways that matter most to you and pick from there
Casey:
Something that's worth noting on the LG apps is that some of them – let me back up a half step.
Casey:
The remote can be used kind of like a Wii remote, you know, so it has like almost a mouse cursor and you can wave it in the air.
Casey:
Oh, I hate that so much.
Casey:
I actually don't mind it on this, believe it or not.
Casey:
It's pretty well implemented, but nevertheless –
Casey:
Uh, some of the apps support like mouse mode and some of them don't.
Casey:
And some of them do like halfway, like Plex seems to support it, but you can tell it's not really designed for it.
Casey:
Disney plus does not support it at all.
Casey:
Uh, YouTube, I think supports it reasonably well, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
And so there's a lot, all of this to say, there's a lot of inconsistency between the different apps within the platform where you would not see that on an Apple TV.
Casey:
Uh,
Casey:
Yes, I understand that everyone hates the remote, but at least the interfaces are fairly consistent between apps.
Casey:
Yes, I know everyone's going to say, well, what about this?
Casey:
What about that?
Casey:
Just the point is, for the most part, they're fairly consistent.
Casey:
And so there is a lot to be said for living in that Apple world if you're the kind of person who would even consider an Apple TV.
Casey:
Adam Jaffrey writes, I'm confused how background app refresh is meant to work.
Casey:
I have it turned on for Overcast, but it doesn't fetch and auto-download podcast episodes overnight.
Casey:
Are there iOS limitations to doing this, Marco?
Marco:
Yes, and they are not well-documented, and the conditions change over time.
Marco:
So basically, background app refresh...
Marco:
It tells iOS to permit the app to update itself in the background under certain conditions sometimes.
Marco:
And many people don't understand this very well for good reason because it's not really explained.
Marco:
The system will decide how often to refresh your app.
Marco:
The way the API works is you basically register with the system and say...
Marco:
I want background time this often, or at most this often, and then you get called back, and you can perform a task for a short time, then you can go away.
Marco:
Now, the conditions for this are often opaque, but generally speaking, it will let apps background refresh more often when they are plugged into power, like when they're charging overnight, and it will let them background refresh more if the battery level is high.
Marco:
One of the things that will affect this is if you run in low power mode, background refresh, I think almost never or never happens in low power mode.
Marco:
Um, and a lot of people run their phone in low power mode all the time, just as a habit because they need the battery life or whatever.
Marco:
So if you're running low power mode, basically you're almost never going to get background refresh.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
Another thing that has changed over time is in some versions of iOS, if you would, quote, quit the app out of the multitasking switcher, it wouldn't background refresh anymore.
Marco:
To the best of my knowledge, that's no longer the case.
Marco:
I know that wasn't the case, I think, for most of iOS 12.
Marco:
I think before that it might have been.
Marco:
Anyway, it changed sometime in the last couple of years.
Marco:
But I think that doesn't matter anymore.
Marco:
Another thing that has changed dramatically is that in iOS 13,
Marco:
apps get way less time in the background than they used to.
Marco:
When you are called for background refresh or when you're doing background task completion in iOS 13, you get something like, I think, 90 seconds of maximum time, whereas before you could take up to 10 minutes most of the time.
Marco:
So there's all sorts of restrictions.
Marco:
And the thing is, these conditions change over time.
Marco:
They get more stringent usually over time, and you get fewer and fewer resources as Apple tries to crack down on abuse and tries to optimize for battery life.
Marco:
So, yeah, it's complicated is the answer.
Casey:
Combo Twist writes, I have about 150,000 messages in Gmail that I'd like to archive offline.
Casey:
Do you have any advice?
Casey:
The nominal value of old email being available online feels outweighed by the risk of a hack a la Sony and Google skeevy peeping.
Casey:
How does the developer community store old email?
John:
So one way to get your email out of Gmail is to use a non-Gmail client, like whatever your email client of choice is, and then use pop to get it out of Gmail.
John:
So then you will pull down that mail from Gmail into your other email client.
John:
But then all you've done is got it in a second proprietary format, depending on what format your email client uses.
John:
So if you're really interested in preserving your email, the best solution is to use...
John:
google's fairly good sort of export functionality where you can what you want to do is you want to get your email in a plain text format and they call it inbox format or whatever this like that's what you want you want essentially text files because although it's not particularly useful to you to have massive text files that format is the sort of
John:
best interchange format because if you get all the mail headers that are provided to you you're sort of preserving the maximum amount of information then in theory you can import that into any other future email client because an email client should understand plain text email because that is the format of email you got a bunch of headers in a body and everything else or whatever so that's what i would suggest either use a second email client if you don't mind having a second proprietary format or if you have an email client that itself uses a plain text format or
John:
Or maybe in addition to that, export your email from Gmail.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to Google's data export page.
John:
In general, most Google products give you a way to extract your data in a non-proprietary format.
John:
You should take advantage of those things and do it.
John:
Same thing with Twitter, by the way.
John:
Twitter will give you a dump of all your tweets in a weird sort of JSON format with a cool local web view thing.
John:
Take advantage of that.
John:
Do it on a periodic basis.
John:
Put it on your calendar to do it once a year or whatever.
Casey:
I just use Mail.app on everything, and some people find that to be barbaric.
Casey:
I don't care enough about email to have any problem with it.
John:
Are you using IMAP to Gmail with the Mail.app?
Casey:
Well, I was.
Casey:
Now I think it's all quote-unquote native.
Casey:
I'm sure under the hood it's IMAP, but when I sign into my Gmail account using system preferences, I tick the email checkbox, very a la iOS from day one, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
i tick the gmail checkbox and then mail.app just magically understands how to talk to gmail i think it's using i worry about those things where where it's like an online thing where like it's reflecting changes in gmail because then if you go into gmail and accidentally delete everything and then launch mail or mail is running it will reflect the deletion right that's why pop is sort of the disconnected thing it's like it's not really a backup if you accidentally delete it it gets deleted from all the places right so
Casey:
pop or a data export is the way to actually preserve your mail as opposed to the way you're using or reading your mail agreed but you should also note that most mail programs or applications when they connect to a server via pop they will default to i you know delete this once i've downloaded it because
Casey:
You know, POP, from my experience anyway, comes from an era of I have one single device that downloads email.
Casey:
And so it would connect to your email server via POP.
Casey:
It would get whatever the new email is, and it would immediately delete it off the server because that is your one computer.
Casey:
And that is the only place you ever check your email.
Casey:
You have no phone that is capable of checking email.
Casey:
There's no such thing as an iPad.
Casey:
You don't have a laptop or this is your laptop that we're talking about.
Casey:
And that's that.
Marco:
the email server was merely holding your mail temporarily while you, while it waited for you to come get it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It was like an answering machine, right?
Casey:
Which of course kids these days don't understand either, but nevertheless, um, that, that's the way that, that was my experience with pop, uh, up until I can remember.
John:
And then I map in college, but like you said, everyone has multiple devices.
John:
Now, anything that does pop, uh, I don't think it will default to that.
John:
And sometimes they don't even have the option to delete off the server anymore.
John:
So yes, obviously, you know, choose not to delete the message off the server when you pull it down from pop.
John:
Um,
John:
And then your, any decent pop client will keep track of what it's already fetched.
John:
You can also fetch date windows.
John:
Like there's a special pop address where you could fetch from Gmail that it only looks at a 30 day window for performance reasons.
John:
Um, yeah, do, do look for that setting, but I'm, I haven't, I don't even recall seeing a delete from server option in a lot of pop clients.
John:
So they just had a fault to leaving it on the server because they understand that we live in this sort of multi-tenant word world.
John:
Same thing with the inbox export.
John:
You won't, it won't delete all your mail when you export it.
John:
You'll just get a big dump.
John:
i believe mail.app supports deleting from the server now i am not saying it's the default but i'm almost positive it certainly supports it so it has to it's part of pop like you might have a pop account of just some random you know whatever right but for gmail um in particular i'm not sure if i've ever seen a delete from gmail and popping i suppose if it follows the pop protocol it has to allow it but yeah you don't want to do that
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Linode, and we will talk to you next week.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
So the internet has told me or had told me over the last few months slash weeks that The Leftovers is a TV show worth watching.
John:
And I... Wait, over the last few months or weeks?
John:
Well, because sometimes... We were telling you on Rectifs years ago.
Casey:
Well, yeah, but... Fine, fine.
Casey:
Copyright 2011, John Syracuse, everyone.
John:
Anyway... Isn't that where you first heard about the show for me and Merlin?
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Honestly, yes, I'm sure it is where I first heard about it, because I've listened to every Rectives.
Casey:
But I don't think I paid much attention to it at that point.
Casey:
But it was when Merlin, I guess, did his 75th rewatch or something.
Casey:
And it came up a lot on Dubai Friday.
Casey:
And then I believe watching the pilot was a challenge recently on Dubai Friday.
Casey:
And that's when I started really paying attention to it.
Casey:
And so I watched the first episode and it is, again, I'm trying not to spoil anything.
Casey:
It is extremely intense from the moment the episode starts to the point that I almost turned it off in the first couple of minutes because I was like, wow, this is more than I realized I was bargaining for.
Casey:
I watched the entire show, which is what?
Casey:
three seasons.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
So it's like 25, 24, 25 episodes in total.
Casey:
I was absolutely riveted by it.
Casey:
I am not sure I enjoyed it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Did you say the same thing about The Wire?
Casey:
No, no.
John:
It was Marco saying he's watching the shows and he recognizes they're good, but it's making them sad.
John:
No, no, no, that wasn't The Wire.
Marco:
I love The Wire.
Marco:
No, no, I was talking about Breaking Bad.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, there you go.
Marco:
It was one of those things.
Marco:
Yeah, watching Breaking Bad, like I enjoyed Breaking Bad, but it was very stressful to watch and really was a downer.
John:
Sounds like Casey might have had a similar experience with The Leftovers.
Casey:
Well, I watched Breaking Bad and had a very similar experience.
Casey:
I was riveted by Breaking Bad.
Casey:
I loved Breaking Bad, but it was not an upper.
Casey:
It was a downer, to Marco's point.
Casey:
It definitely did not make me feel good about my life.
Casey:
Well, I guess it did by comparison.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
I wasn't feeling super chipper after I watched an episode of Breaking Bad, but I loved Breaking Bad.
Casey:
I loved it, loved it, loved it.
Casey:
So I watched all three seasons of Leftovers, and I...
Casey:
I definitely was mesmerized by it.
Casey:
I just really don't know if I liked it.
Casey:
And I don't know what to make of that.
Casey:
And also the ending, no spoilers, the ending, I felt like I got everything I wanted from it.
Casey:
And then I think I went back and listened to you and Merlin talking about the last season, like weeks after you had finished watching it.
Casey:
And you guys had a very different interpretation of the ending, and I felt like it ruined it, so now I hate you.
John:
It's made by Damon Lindelof, who also did Lost and also did Watchmen.
John:
I'm listening to the Watchmen podcast where he talks about that series.
John:
He's very self-aware, like...
John:
In the context of Watchmen, in the beginning of Watchmen, there's lots of confusing things that are happening.
John:
And the person who was on the podcast with him, I think it was Craig Mazin, the guy at Chernobyl.
John:
Anyway, he was like, lots of weird stuff going on.
John:
Is this all going to be explained in just this one season of television?
John:
And that's a question that people ask him a lot because a lot of stuff in Lost was presented and then not really paid off or not explained or not explained for a long period of time.
John:
So he kind of got the reputation for someone who throws weird stuff out there
John:
And then just it never gets paid off.
John:
And you're just like, well, what was that thing?
John:
Are we ever going to find out what the thing is?
John:
Do you not care?
John:
Is this all just meaningless stuff, right?
John:
And so Leftovers has a similar vibe where you might be forgiven for thinking like, oh, there's lots of weird stuff.
John:
Well, it's Lindelof.
John:
He's never going to explain any of this stuff or it's not going to make any sense.
John:
As he points out on the podcast, he has a reputation – not a reputation.
John:
His tolerance for endings, for ambiguity in endings, is perhaps higher than the average person's, I think is how he put it, right?
John:
So he said in the Watchmen thing, don't worry.
John:
By the end of this thing, I will have explained everything and have a satisfying ending.
John:
But then he amended that by saying, well, it'll be satisfying to me.
John:
But my experience has shown that what I consider to be a satisfying ending –
John:
is not necessarily the same thing as everybody else considers to be a satisfying ending right so i think leftovers falls into that like i'm mostly on the same page with him in terms of i think my estimation of a satisfying ending is similar to his but casey it sounds like you would like things to be a little bit more nailed down than either of us uh which is understandable uh and if that's the case maybe leftovers isn't the show for you but but
John:
Because the ending can support so many different interpretations, I feel like if you've got your interpretation that you like, then that's yours and just hang on to that.
John:
It's no more right or wrong than my interpretation or Merlin's interpretation.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
I think, without spoiling, the two kind of approaches are you can take the fairly direct read that what was presented to you is exactly what happened.
Casey:
And that's how I took it.
Casey:
Or you can take the...
Casey:
There's more to this than meets the I read.
Casey:
And again, I know that's very, very oblique.
Casey:
Hopefully, John, you're understanding what I'm... No, I know what you're talking about.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
I was very satisfied by the ending as it was presented.
Casey:
And if I took it at face value...
Casey:
And it reminded me a lot of my recollection of The Tale of Two Cities in high school.
Casey:
Now, hear me out for a second.
Casey:
I read The Tale of Two Cities in high school, as so many of us did.
Casey:
And that's the one with the best of times, worst of times, right?
Casey:
I'm thinking of the right thing.
Casey:
And it was in London or something like that.
Casey:
That's a reference.
Casey:
So anyway, I read that.
Casey:
And I didn't particularly enjoy the book until the very end.
Casey:
I don't even remember how it ended.
Casey:
But I remember thinking at the end of it, you know what?
Casey:
Actually, that was pretty good.
Casey:
And I felt like I got that from the take it as it's presented ending of The Leftovers.
Casey:
And then I listened to you and Merlin talking about it.
Casey:
And you guys, I think it's fair to say, took or at least you, John, took a different take on that ending.
Casey:
And you read deeper into that ending than I did.
Casey:
And I am dissatisfied by that ending and I don't want to believe in it.
Casey:
So, I don't know.
Casey:
It was a very interesting show.
John:
My interpretation fits very well, I think, with the rest of the show.
John:
I think you would agree.
John:
Which is, as you noted, kind of a downer.
John:
Yeah, for sure.
John:
And I will say for the Lindelof fans, if you go with the progression of Lost, The Leftovers, and then Watchmen...
John:
uh progressively each one has uh gotten sort of tighter in terms of more things are paid off more things make sense more things i mean in some respects are easier to uh sort of predict or understand right to the point where i would say don't like watchmen it's but only nine episodes and they've just done the one season of it they might do another season or whatever but like
John:
I think Watchmen pays off pretty much everything, right?
John:
So I think whatever reputation he had based on Lost is now unfair.
John:
And now I think he is, at least as demonstrated by Watchmen, making shows where all the pieces eventually fall into place.
John:
So if you're worried about that, you know, the problem with Watchmen is you do have to have read the comic first for it to really make sense.
John:
But assuming you've read the comic because it is kind of a sequel to that –
John:
Don't worry about all the weird stuff that's thrown in your face.
John:
It all makes sense and fits together by the end of the nine episodes.
John:
In The Leftovers, I think that it all makes sense at the end of three seasons and fits together.
John:
It's just that the...
John:
Once you've got all the pieces of that puzzle, once you see the picture the puzzle makes, that picture is a sad, unsatisfying picture.
John:
But that's leftovers, right?
Casey:
It's a ring endorsement.
John:
That's the point of the show.
John:
That's why I feel like it's not a show for a lot of people because if you're not –
John:
if you're not into that vibe, like there's two ways you can come with leftovers.
John:
One, you're sort of into that whole vibe of just, you know, I don't want to ruin it, but the general theme of the show.
John:
And two, if you're very into just sort of the, the inner turmoil of some interesting people, every, like all the people in leftovers have various problems that they're battling with.
John:
There are the external problems of the plot of the show, but there's always their own internal problems to varying degrees.
John:
And those degrees go up very, very high and,
John:
in terms of personal problems again not ruining anything but like some of the lead characters in that show have real serious problems like not kidding not funny base an entire season around the their problems uh and if you find that satisfying to sort of be in that world and you know struggle with those people leftovers delivers more of that than like any other series it's similar to breaking bad and like you know again
John:
The main character, Breaking Bad, has some real serious issues that only get worse as the series goes on.
Marco:
That's an understatement of the year right there.
John:
That crank up to a degree that you would never have predicted in the beginning because you're like, oh, it's right there in the title.
John:
Oh, Breaking Bad.
John:
But then they're like, no, you don't even know.
John:
You don't even understand where this is going to go.
John:
And as the show goes on, you're like, oh, my God.
John:
The Leftovers does that in a similar way with a different character.
John:
and different direction and only three seasons but uh but yeah that's that's the kind of show it is um i think it is incredibly well made and has some amazing performances and has some things and some scenes and plot developments that really stick with me and it's really like good uh
John:
television like movie quality television as we used to say back before television was was really very good in particular the opening episode of season two is one of the best openings to a second season of a show ever just because if you watch season one you're like where the hell can they go with this and then season two opens you're like what what the what and it's they eventually get it all hanging together amazing and brave and uh
John:
And interesting and great performances.
John:
And some of the same actors that were in Leftovers also appear in Watchmen.
John:
So it's part of the Lindelof averse.
Casey:
I will say that the pivots in season two and three, I'm trying not to spoil anything, but particularly the adventures that the main character goes on.
Casey:
the the the super special adventures hopefully you're picking up what i'm putting down john um i did not expect to buy into that at all but i ate it up like this is that that was the moment when he goes on these extraordinary adventures that was the moment where normally i'd be like yeah okay no i'm out but somehow it worked for me and this is because the whole the whole vibe of the thing is you know it's not too much of a spoiler to say that mental illness is a
John:
And once you have that, and that's your point of view character, you're willing to accept a lot of what would otherwise be BS because you're like, well, this person is having some issues right now.
John:
And if I'm seeing through their eyes, it kind of makes sense that things are a little bit messed up.
Casey:
It was good.
Casey:
I am glad I watched it.
Casey:
The difference between this and Breaking Bad to me was that Breaking Bad had that tangible, visceral stress and angst and concern in every single episode.
Casey:
How is it possible that these characters...
Casey:
who I both love and hate all at the same time, how are they going to get through this next thing?
Casey:
And then with each increasing episode, as both of you just said, with each increasing, with, with each new episode in breaking bad, it just got more, more stressful.
Casey:
And, and, uh, I don't know what's going to happen.
Casey:
And,
Casey:
I didn't get that from The Leftovers in the same way.
John:
The Leftovers is existential.
John:
It is like an undercurrent under everything.
John:
And so no matter what's going on, there is this existential dread that you can't get your hands on.
John:
And that's the whole show.
Casey:
So it was very good.
Casey:
I am...
Casey:
I am definitely glad I saw it.
Casey:
I don't know that I would rewatch it necessarily, or certainly not anytime soon.
Casey:
But having never seen Lost, and I don't think I've seen any of Lindelof's other stuff off the top of my head.
John:
Well, you're about to watch Watchmen, right?
Casey:
Well, yeah.
Casey:
So I was going to say, that's a perfect segue.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
That I have also been told by the entire internet, most especially Dubai Friday.
Casey:
Apparently I'm just a, I'm a cox's cock if there ever was one.
Casey:
Well, anyways, I've been told by the internet that I need to read and or watch The Watchmen.
Casey:
And so I just finished a graphic novel.
Casey:
This was the first time I read it.
Casey:
And I'm about halfway through the movie.
Casey:
I'm sorry, John, I'm doing it in Merlin style, like 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there, 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there.
John:
Why are you watching the movie at all?
Casey:
Because I feel like it's a piece of media in the universe that existed prior to this TV show.
John:
Yeah, but if you read the comic, I mean, what you're watching now is, hey, I wonder how someone adapted this comic to the movie, but it is immaterial to the television show.
John:
You could just jump straight from the comic to the TV show, skip the movie.
John:
I mean, it's fine to watch it, I suppose, but the television show follows the comic, not the movie.
John:
So every difference there is between the movie and the comic, discard the movie version.
John:
It's the comic that the television show follows.
Yeah.
Casey:
i mean so far i i feel like the movie is tracking pretty closely with the comic including the it's the end where it changes you'll see okay fair enough well including the like comic within the comic which which was fine in the in the graphic novel but no it's terrible in the movie i would have said to get the get the theatrical cut instead of the quote-unquote ultimate
Casey:
edition because it's too late now at least you know at least you know where that comic is coming from because you read the you know yeah it's just i don't think it fits at all in the movie personally it does not does not in any case i uh i am anxious to start watching the tv show because i've heard it's very good