Emotional-Support Mac Pro
Marco:
So I've never gotten a chance to ask this before.
Marco:
John, what computer are you using?
Casey:
Well, my Mac Pro.
Casey:
How old is that Mac Pro?
Casey:
Old enough to be in middle school or brand new?
Casey:
It's not yet old enough to vote.
Marco:
Well, but that doesn't narrow it down.
Casey:
fair so you're on the old and busted it's not busted you know it's busted skype is busted well join the club so i presume we will talk about your mac pro and if you follow john wait is john's mac pro older than skype maybe no way no way when did skype come at the end oh no no uh
Casey:
uh 2003 16 years ago there you go the fact that we didn't know and it was close yeah that's a real real sad it's only five years off oh man all right so what's your computer situation if we don't follow you on twitter would you mind giving us a quick update please
John:
My Mac Pro was delivered.
John:
My monitor and stand have not yet shipped.
Marco:
Have you connected any other displays to your Mac Pro in the meantime?
Marco:
I have not.
Casey:
Have you opened the box yet?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
To be clear, I don't mean the brown shipping box.
Casey:
I mean the actual box.
John:
I did.
John:
I need to make sure there was a Mac in there and not just a bunch of cinder blocks.
Marco:
Have you installed it onto the stand or the little end table or whatever it is that you intend to put it on?
John:
No, no, I like I've figured I have a bunch more podcasts to do.
John:
I have this one.
John:
I have a Star Wars one tomorrow.
John:
Like I need a break in podcasting because there will be some instability in my podcasting situation when I'm dealing with this.
John:
And so.
John:
A couple of reasons.
John:
One, you know, one that I didn't want to introduce energy stability.
John:
I don't know how long the transfer will make it to.
John:
I decided to change my data migration strategy, trying to minimize the size of the window.
John:
Like I decided I want to like get this thing installed in the place where it's going to be and get everything set up and take out all the old stuff.
John:
And then I don't want there to be like a three day data transfer thing.
John:
And a lot of people are telling me that doing it over Ethernet with another computer hooked up takes a long time and is troublesome or whatever, despite the supposed transfer speeds.
John:
So I'm going to try just taking a drive out of my old Mac Pro and attaching it to my new one.
John:
And I have a couple things coming in the mail to help me with that, so I don't have to cannibalize any of their hardware.
John:
So all that combines to say that I am not ripping out the old until probably Sunday at the earliest.
Casey:
But you have removed it from both the packing box, the actual box.
Casey:
You have fondled it.
Casey:
You have cuddled with it over one evening.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
No to what?
John:
To all the above?
John:
I didn't take any of that.
John:
I didn't take it out of the box.
John:
I have not cuddled with it.
Marco:
Oh, John.
Marco:
So you just opened the box, looked at it, and put the box back on?
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
You have – if I had gone 11 years without getting a new computer –
John:
i would have significantly less self-control than this but it's not it's not self-control it's not like i want to get it i want it to be nice and contained in the box awaiting the time when i can disrupt everything and really what i really need to do is when the time comes i need to get that box farther away and then tear out the old and you know get all that stuff situated and swap in all my new infrastructure and
Marco:
Now normally I would not suggest anything like this because it's kind of abuse of the retail system but if this were me in this context I would probably buy the LG 5k just for the 15 days and then return it just to have a span of having a monitor so I could use this as my computer after 10 or 11 years like I I don't know how you could wait that long.
John:
I don't know what I'm going to do because the problem is like as we've already established the only monitor I have that I can attach it to is my gaming monitor but
John:
I use my gaming monitor for gaming.
John:
So maybe like when I have to podcast.
Casey:
What's more important?
John:
Oh, Destiny is more important.
Casey:
Oh, God, I vomited my mouth a little bit.
Casey:
How can Destiny be more important than a computer you've been waiting for?
John:
Because Destiny is a more frequent activity than podcasting.
John:
Oh, Sean.
Casey:
Especially on vacation.
John:
This is like...
John:
John Charles?
Casey:
Who the hell is that?
Casey:
I always get it wrong.
Casey:
John Craig.
Casey:
John Craig.
Casey:
I've got about one sip of my holiday party.
Casey:
Literally one sip.
John:
You've already forgotten my name.
John:
That's fine.
Casey:
I do that every time, too.
Casey:
I do it every time.
John:
So maybe I'm going to be carrying that monitor back and forth.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But it remains to be seen.
John:
Anyway, I've got the box right next to me right now.
John:
I'm within arm's reach.
John:
I'm putting my hand on it right now.
John:
it's sitting there it's in the room it's my uh emotional support mac pro i just have to have it with me at all times and i feel better how much of the room does that box take up it's not actually that big like i was actually trying to eyeball measure it from the unboxing videos to see if i could at one point i was uh listen to the most recent rec diffs to hear the saga but at one point i was considering going to the ups uh warehouse thing to pick it up myself in my car and i'm like
John:
is this is there gonna be a problem getting this into my trunk like is the trunk opening big enough because i couldn't tell like how big is that box you just you see it on youtube and you're trying to estimate the height of the people and whatever and it's not of course there's the outer box and the inner box but it's actually not that big it's you know it's bigger than my old mac pro box i think but it would easily fit in any car any reasonable trunk um
John:
Very heavy, but not all that big.
Casey:
You know, the advantage, John, of having a big-ass car is that you don't have to worry about whether or not the box will fit.
John:
I probably have more trunk space in my Accord than you do in that behemoth SUV thing.
Casey:
That is patently untrue, and I am too lazy to look up the actual measurements.
Casey:
But I can assure you...
Casey:
That is not true.
Casey:
Now, I need to back up a half step.
Casey:
You had casually mentioned the most recent episode of your other podcast, one of your 17 other podcasts, Reconcilable Differences, episode 120, Where the Packages Sleep.
Casey:
It is too soon and too aggressive to say that this rivals the Preparing the Way episode.
Casey:
But, oh, it's in the spirit of it, and it was amazing.
Casey:
And what made it even more amazing...
Casey:
is that i knew how this story ended before this story even began and oh my goodness hearing you fret over the things you fretted over is that the right word it doesn't matter hearing the hearing you fret and worry about the things you frat over anyway hearing you worry about all that and knowing the eventual outcome was both depressing and delicious now
Casey:
Would you like to briefly recap the story?
Casey:
Would you like me to briefly recap the story?
Casey:
And would you like to, one way or another, update the listeners, even if they have heard rec diffs, as to what the final resolution was?
John:
I don't want to recap the whole thing, but it was a long saga of me expecting to get the package and it not arriving during a very frustrating day.
John:
And then the next day, basically having no new information about when it might arrive and giving up on it entirely and rescheduling it.
John:
I don't think maybe that didn't make it into the thing.
John:
But anyway, eventually it did show up.
John:
It, you know, all's well that ends well, but I had one frustrating day and I podcasted about that frustrating day.
John:
You can hear that on rec diffs, but then the, you know, the next day it actually arrived unannounced.
Casey:
This is after you trying to schedule it for the following day because you thought that it just kind of never made it back on the truck the day after it was actually supposed to arrive.
John:
Yeah, like, you know, UPS does not do a good job of keeping track of where their things are.
Casey:
Yeah, seemingly not, which is not at all alarming.
Marco:
Well, and this is also like, this is one of the inherent risks of ordering something very expensive to be shipped to you and depending on it getting there on time the week before Christmas.
Marco:
every shipping carrier is a mess at that point and the only one that is remotely reliable I have found in high demand time or anytime is the purple version of FedEx because FedEx has the green home version which is basically a different company the regular express service that FedEx offers with the purple and white trucks
Marco:
That is the only one I've found to be reliable.
Marco:
All the time, it's always reliable.
Marco:
They always come when they say they will.
Marco:
They might be late by a half hour during their 10.30 window, if you're not that important.
Marco:
Otherwise, they're there every day, whereas everyone else, UPS, the other FedEx, of course, the postal service is a mess.
Marco:
Anything else is very unreliable much of the year, especially during busy days like the week before Christmas or iPhone day.
Yeah.
Casey:
Now, you were stressed about the situation with regard to the box, and you were in the midst of an ice storm, as you briefly mentioned moments ago.
Casey:
You were shoveling your front walk seemingly every hour on the hour, and you were very concerned that the box would be left in a puddle.
Casey:
Was the box left in a puddle?
John:
Well, because it came the next day, uh, and you know, winter being winter, like the, you know, and it had gotten colder, like all the moisture had evaporated and the thing had been shoveled.
John:
So the, my walk was bone dry when they actually arrived.
John:
Two people carried it from the truck to me, which is great.
John:
There was no hand truck involved, no scraping of my stairs.
John:
Uh, and even though they came unannounced, I was attuned enough to the sound of the UPS truck engine that I did actually have time to, uh,
John:
chuck the dog in a room and open the door for them open wide they're walking down my walk my door is already open to them here i am here's my big package and what do they do they walked it over to me and i was like i was like here you go like i was ushering them into the already open giant doorway uh and they just put it down on the walkway
John:
They put it down in the walkway, they turned around, and they walked back to the truck.
John:
Wonderful.
John:
They left.
Marco:
No signature.
Marco:
Well, they probably have rules against going into your house.
Marco:
Maybe they do.
Marco:
They could have got it up onto the porch.
Marco:
Now, are you friendly with your usual UPS driver?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I don't get as many packages as you do.
Marco:
Yeah, this is the advantage of both working at home and ordering a crap ton of stuff from Amazon.
Marco:
Our UPS driver, we give them a Christmas card every year.
Marco:
We do holiday tips, including all the garbage men, the UPS driver.
Marco:
We tip everybody and the UPS driver is on that list when we can find them.
Marco:
The only problem is that it's hard to find your usual UPS driver during the holiday season because they hire a bunch of temp workers to take all the extra load.
Marco:
And a lot of times you won't see your usual person because their route has gotten narrowed
John:
during that time i don't know if i have a usual person because i see ups people come to the house all the time and i can't say that i've seen i don't even know if like i'm a little bit more familiar with our mail carriers but even our mail carriers have changed a lot over the years like there's not a lot of consistency but ups or fedex i got i could not pick any of them out of a lineup
Marco:
You're missing out on a valuable relationship.
Marco:
Once you get to know them, not only is it just nice to be a human being, but also they'll carry it into your mudroom for you if you really want.
Marco:
They'll bring it into your door.
Marco:
If your hands are full, you're holding a dog in one hand maybe.
Marco:
They'll bring treats for your dog.
Marco:
Now, the UPS and the FedEx people, if they leave a package on our doorstep, they will leave a little dog treat on top of it because they know we have a dog who appreciates those.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
Isn't that cute?
Marco:
That is adorable.
Marco:
So then Hobbs can bring in his package and I bring in mine.
John:
It's adorable.
John:
Our current mail carrier is terrified of our dog.
John:
Won't even put the mail through the mail slot.
Casey:
Oh, that's too bad.
John:
So much for a treat.
John:
My dog does sound savage.
John:
She's not, but she does bark a lot at the mail carrier.
John:
he won't even but you know but i'm not here when the package people usually arrive that's why i wouldn't recognize them the only time i'm ever here is when i'm signing for an apple thing for me like once every couple of years right and i expected to have to sign for this but i did not yeah that's also mildly alarming but you know a little bit it's like here's this like 15 000 or i guess like a 10 000 package 80 pounds and very bulky so it's hard to steal i suppose
Marco:
I guess, but it's also big and obvious.
Marco:
You can't really hide that behind a bush or anything.
Marco:
It's not TV-shaped.
John:
That's true.
John:
It's strangely shaped.
John:
It looks like a big suitcase or something.
Casey:
What was the status of the inside box, John?
Casey:
Was it unscathed as you had hoped?
John:
It was not unscathed.
John:
The outside looked beat to hell, as you would imagine.
Casey:
No!
John:
the outside box i mean it was incredibly dirty not wet which is good was my main concern not wet but very very dirty when you say the outside one you're you're talking about the brown brown yeah the brown thing was incredibly dirty but serving its function but it was also kind of dented in and various things and on the inside you could see the white box had some creases where they probably dropped it on a corner or something and squished in but like you know
John:
That's one of the reasons I opened it up, to make sure the computer inside there looked like it was fine.
John:
And, you know, I think everything's fine.
John:
Anyway, that's why you get AppleCare.
John:
So if it's screwed up in some way, you know.
Casey:
So are you going to take your box to the Apple store and ask for a refreshment replacement?
Casey:
No, no.
John:
I mean, all of my boxes have some damage.
John:
They used to just ship them with no outer box.
John:
And so I have a bunch of boxes upstairs that are fairly beat up.
John:
And that's part of the reason I have those extra G5 boxes that I'm getting rid of.
John:
Because I got some G5 boxes that were in better condition.
John:
Then my personal G5 box, I'm like, well, it's better to have a box in ice condition, but it'll be fine.
Marco:
I just realized that I see my UPS delivery guy more often than I see most of my friends.
Marco:
That's kind of sad.
Casey:
I think your UPS delivery person might be your best friend.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, I am all kidding aside.
Casey:
I am very excited that your Mac Pro is in your house.
Casey:
I am a little distraught with your priority system that destiny is more important than playing with this new toy you've been waiting 10 years for.
Marco:
More than that, almost 12.
Marco:
Like when did you get your 08?
Marco:
Because the 08 Mac Pro came out like in February of 08.
John:
I tried to do the math, but I didn't have the date that my 2008 Mac Pro arrived at my house.
John:
I only had my order date.
John:
So Casey asked us on Twitter and I did the math and it's like,
John:
A little bit over 4,100 days.
Marco:
Because if you ordered it right when it came out, it was like February 08.
Marco:
So you would have gotten it like in March maybe.
John:
I don't think I ordered it right when it came out.
John:
I remember someone found some old tweets for me because they were looking back at what I was doing in 2008.
John:
And apparently I was waiting around to see if a...
John:
Yeah.
John:
came with hardware discounts, either just one or multiple.
John:
And so me and a bunch of my coworkers slash friends would chip in and buy the $500 a year ADC Select membership.
John:
Each of five of us would pay $100.
John:
And then every year, one of the group would get to use the hardware discount, whose value would be vastly in excess of $100 if you bought a really expensive Mac.
John:
So I had that discount.
John:
I had to use it before the year expired, but I wanted to wait a little bit longer.
John:
So anyway, I do have the receipt from when I actually ordered it.
John:
So the math on that is about 4,100 days.
Marco:
Real-time follow-up, my Mac Pro in 2008 shipped on February 7th.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Obviously, you're buying yours earlier than mine.
John:
Surprise.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And by the way, real-time follow-up on trunk space, you will be very disappointed to learn that the Accord, my year Accord, and your Volvo XC90 have exactly the same number of cubic feet of trunk space, 15.8.
Casey:
Wait, but hold on a second.
Casey:
Is that how many of the three rows of seats in Aaron's car?
John:
Not with the seats down, with the seats up.
John:
That's what I'm talking about with SUVs.
John:
They have dinky trunks with seats up.
Casey:
Yeah, my seats go down, too.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
Of the three rows in our car...
Casey:
The backmost row is almost never up.
Casey:
So that's got to be double your trunk space right there.
Casey:
If the back row is never up, why did you get a car with three rows of seats?
Casey:
Because there are occasions.
Casey:
For your seven other children?
Casey:
There are occasions when we want to put more than four people in the car.
Casey:
And in fact, if I'm not mistaken, you were in that very car in an instance.
John:
I sit in the front seat.
John:
I got long legs.
Casey:
Yes, I know.
Casey:
But you were in Aaron's car.
John:
Unless I help her navigate.
John:
It's a very important job.
Casey:
That is a very important job, even though she's very good with navigation.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I didn't help at all.
Casey:
I can't tell if that's sarcasm.
John:
I did.
John:
I did look at the weird touch screen a lot, though.
Casey:
Is that count for something?
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
But anyway, but the point is we do on occasion put extra people in the back.
Casey:
And I believe you were in the car when there were people in the back, back, back.
John:
I think it is fair to judge the car in its normal thing with none of the seats folded.
John:
But that isn't normal for me.
John:
Even your vast SUV that's like two of my cars stacked on top of each other has the same trunk space as mine.
Marco:
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Casey:
Hey, you know what, John?
Casey:
Your Mac Pro feet are removable.
Casey:
That's exciting.
John:
Yeah, so between the last show and now, there have been more unboxing videos.
John:
There's been iFixit teardown.
John:
There have been teardown videos, which were cool.
John:
I mean, iFixit does those as well.
John:
iFixit did rub soft cheese up against the front of their computer, which was very upsetting and honestly not a great idea.
John:
The best part about them doing that gag, you know, I mean, whatever, they did it, get some views, haha, right, was that the first step in their, like, teardown video was them carefully removing all the cheese with one of their little spudger tools, you know?
John:
Like, because that's what you're thinking when you see them do it, you're like, oh, God.
John:
Someone, if that's an expensive computer, someone is going to have the job of going there with like a Q-tip or like scraping out all the little cheddar cheese or whatever it was from every little nook and cranny.
John:
Because you can probably get it 100% clean, but what a tedious job.
John:
So anyway, that's what they did.
John:
And so as part of the teardown, we'll put a link in the show notes to this particular step.
John:
They did take off the feet.
John:
Apparently, there are hex screws that come from the top, like because the sort of...
John:
what would you call it the the tubes there are tubes at the four corners of the mac pro frame but the tubes don't go straight from top to bottom once they enter when you know they go straight in and once they enter they they kink to you know the side and in that kink there's like a little hollow so you can go directly sort of if you drew a straight line through the center of the foot that line would come up through uh where the kink is and that's where the hex screw goes in so you can just take a
John:
an allen key and stick it down in there and unscrew uh the little feet the little feet do have rubber on the bottom of them as predicted and the little stainless steel feet also have two little cute pins so that when you're screwing the screw into them or unscrewing it that the foot doesn't start rotating if you've ever screwed into a foot from the back
John:
or anything like that you know sometimes when you're trying to loosen it or tighten it you may turn the little screw and instead of it unscrewing you will just turn the foot on the bottom but it's got those two little pins to keep it still good attention to detail which also means that it will be very possible to buy aftermarket wheels or first party wheels if apple ever sells them and you want to pay 400 bucks or whatever and remove the feet and add wheels so if i ever do need to add wheels i'm really hoping that either apple will sell it or there'll be like some third party replacement wheels that do not cost a hundred dollars a piece
John:
Oh, John, you can always be my Dixie chicken.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anyway, the 580X has two HDMI ports on the back.
Casey:
That's exciting, right?
John:
that is i mean it shouldn't have been surprising this information was sitting on the website but it just never occurred to me right so i got the base graphics card uh and seeing people do these teardowns you know you're not really paying too much attention because they're taking it apart you know whatever and a lot of the unsurprisingly a lot of the teardowns had the base graphics card as well because they got like the cheapest one that they could take apart right uh and if you look at the back of the graphics card
John:
There's no ports that can connect to, you know, Pro Display XDR there.
John:
Just two HDMI ports on the 580X.
John:
Those are the only ports on the back of the video card.
John:
And so you're like, well, wait a second.
John:
Can I not attach the base video card to the Pro Display XDR?
John:
But you can.
John:
because that video card that 580x is an mpx module and i'm still trying to parse exactly what mpx module means in apple's parlance but as far as i can tell it means it's got a connector like a video card that connects in a pci slot but it's got the second big connector and i think that big connector
John:
essentially connects to like a thunderbolt 3 bus inside the computer or something i don't know it's not entirely clear to me um but anyway here's how it works you the video card sits there and it's got us two hdmi ports on the back of it but when you get your pro display xdr you connect the thunderbolt 3 cable to the back of the display and then you connect the other end of it to the thunderbolt 3 port
John:
on your mac pro in the io card thing that little io card at the top that has two usba and two thunderbolt 3 that's where you connect the display and you're like well how the display isn't even connected to the video card how does it work mpx modules and this card in particular i imagine this card actually has like a thunderbolt controller on it no one did a teardown of that but i bet if you tore the 580x mpx module apart and looked at what's inside there you would see a regular you know the amd gpu and the vram and then another chip for a thunderbolt controller
John:
And that card connects to the Thunderbolt bus, and those ports are part of the Thunderbolt bus.
John:
And as we discussed last show, there's just enough bandwidth in Thunderbolt 3 to carry, without display screen compression, 6K at 60Hz to 10 bits per pixel, the maximum bandwidth you need to display the highest color depth that the display can support.
John:
plus a little bit left over in the low speed lanes for the usb 2 hub slash firmware updates slash brightness control or whatever so that's how it works in theory obviously i don't have a display to test that but uh i had a moment of panic where i had to look at apple's website and be assured that yes the 580x can drive the thunderbolt display just not from the video card itself and i suppose you could plug in another monitor to the hdmi ports maybe two more monitors i mean
John:
I don't know.
John:
I suppose I could test that, but I really don't want to have three monitors.
John:
But I'll try it.
John:
It's an interesting experiment.
Casey:
This reminds me.
Casey:
I know we've brought this up several times on the show in the last six or seven years.
Casey:
But back in the day when the – what was it?
Casey:
The voodoo cards?
Casey:
You know what I'm thinking of, right, Marco?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, 3DFX, Vudu.
Marco:
Yeah, this was like the very first 3D accelerators because they were separate cards.
Marco:
Like you would have your 2D card that came with your computer probably.
Marco:
And then if you wanted to add 3D acceleration to it, you would add like this 3D second, the second card that was just 3D processing.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But the best part was there was this little stubby VGA cable that you would connect on the exterior of your computer, and there would be a VGA in on the 3D accelerator and a VGA out.
Casey:
And so you would go the output from your stock video card into the input of the 3D accelerator, and then you would plug your monitor into the output of the 3D accelerator.
Casey:
It was such a hack job, but it worked beautifully.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Yeah, because like the 2D card would render in whatever portion of the screen would be the 3D accelerator part.
Marco:
It would just render like a blue square or something.
Marco:
And then the 3D card would then overlay just that section of the video signal with its accelerated part.
Casey:
It was so wild.
Casey:
I remember, you know, first time we got a Sound Blaster, like Sound Blaster 32.
Casey:
Oh, those were the days.
Casey:
God, I'm so old.
Marco:
Sound Blaster 16, man.
Marco:
What are you doing with the AWE 32?
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, no, I had that first, but then I was excited to get the 32, man.
Casey:
That was my jam.
Marco:
The funny thing is the AWE 32, I don't think was 32-bit.
Marco:
I think it was just like 32 voice or something.
Marco:
It was some other metric.
Casey:
Oh, man, we're so old.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Why don't you tell me about Blackmagic eGPUs, please?
John:
This is actually relevant to what you were just discussing.
John:
So Andy Asera wrote in to say, I think it's instructive to look at Blackmagic GPUs as they are the only non-Apple devices listed as compatible with the Pro Display XDR.
John:
Again, we discussed that last week.
John:
You've got this big display with a lot of pixels, and also it has other ports on it.
John:
And also, you want to have some kind of software control and firmware update or whatever.
John:
How do you connect anything to it that allows enough bandwidth to get a picture plus a bunch of other signal for the other ports?
John:
There are limited options, as we discussed.
John:
So these eGPUs are like a box that connects to, you know, a MacBook Pro they always show with or whatever, like a big, powerful GPU inside an external box that connects via Thunderbolt.
John:
And then out of that box comes usually another Thunderbolt that connects to a display in the case of the XDR.
John:
So how does that work?
John:
How do you drive that monitor from the GPU?
John:
So what Andy says is how they do it is they take two DisplayPort outputs from the GPU.
John:
So this is the GPU that's inside the little box, two DisplayPort cables.
John:
feed them into an intel titan rich thunderbolt controller again like i said a thunderbolt controller in there with the gpu maybe not on the same card but in the box which then combines the two display port outputs and transmits them to display over a thunderbolt 3 connection so we'll have a link in the show notes to a sort of i fix it like teardown of the black magic that shows how it works and he says that hobbyists replicate this functionality with their own gpus by using a thunderbolt 3 add-in card and we'll put a link to that in the show notes and a link to an example setup and
John:
it's a quite a frankenstein monster so it's like if you want to do this as a hobbyist you get some gpu that's like not supported you know you know you can't put it inside your macbook pro whatever so you get this big gpu and then you get this other card that's that's filling the role that that uh titan ridge thunderbolt controller and you connect those two to each other and then you connect from this thunderbolt card out to the monitor and from and and to your mac right it's not something that i want to try to do my own
John:
Like it's close to being a Hackintosh, but it shows you essentially what you need.
John:
You need somehow to make this video card render all those pixels and somehow get that information onto a Thunderbolt 3 bus, the same bus that your computer is connected to that also tunnels through the USB from your computer.
John:
So that is quite a feat.
John:
I imagine you could do the exact same setup that these people are doing externally for their Mac minis and their MacBook Pros.
John:
I imagine you do that same setup inside a Mac Pro.
John:
I mean, you know surely it would work the same and there's plenty of room inside that box But it would be gross and I would worry about cooling and obviously the more elegant solution is to have an MPX module Which is exactly what I have in the 580, but it's just a crappy GPU, right?
John:
So if I can get a better GPU
John:
in an mpx module which will doesn't have any other weird power cables or anything it's got the two connectors one to the pci bus and one to the thunderbolt and power or whatever all in a nice sleek passively cooled black thing uh that's that's what i'm looking for uh if i have to hack something up it's good to know there are a lot of options though
Marco:
I think this whole thing between this and the last follow-up point, it kind of underlines quite how complicated it is these days in computers that we have these USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports, and we can plug in...
Marco:
...are monitors to any of them... ...on the laptops that have USB-C... ...on any Mac that has USB-C... ...they just kind of all... ...do all the same things... ...and you've got to figure... ...the complexity of how that's routed... ...internally between the GPU... ...the Thunderbolt controller... ...and all the various lanes... ...and things that go to all these ports...
Marco:
that's got to be really complicated.
Marco:
And I think that's one of the reasons why we didn't have external 5K monitors for so long because that's just complex and requires a lot of craziness.
Marco:
And we had 5K iMacs for long before that because they didn't need to deal with that because the original 5K iMac, it couldn't output to another 5K display.
Marco:
So it only had to deal with itself internally.
Marco:
It had the whole custom T-Con thing going on.
Marco:
But I actually have no concept of how...
Marco:
modern architecture of thunderbolt and display port and video cards and everything how that handles this internally of like you have a gpu in your mac pro and you have these usb holes on the io card that's like on the other side of the computer basically and you can plug your monitor into that and it somehow figures out to correctly route this massive high bandwidth display signal over some bus over to that like that's crazy to me
John:
Yeah, well, that's what it is.
John:
It's a bus.
John:
And if you can get on the bus, you can get the data through like, you know, part of the reason we didn't have these larger displays is because we were at bandwidth limits.
John:
So until Thunderbolt 3, there just wasn't enough headroom to do that without having multiple cables, which is very inelegant.
John:
You know, it was done.
John:
You know, that's what the Mac has, essentially.
John:
The other factor in this is rendering a 6K frame buffer on a video card.
John:
A lot of video cards, it's not that they were too wimpy to do it.
John:
It's that they just were not designed with the idea that this would be a thing that you would do, especially gaming cards, because no one was gaming at those resolutions when these cards were designed many years ago.
John:
So some of them, to drive a 6K display, would tile it and render multiple frame buffers and then recombine them, which is also what I think the 5K is.
John:
iMac did at least with the first set of gpus uh these days the modern gpus especially the ones that apple is using um assuming don't have to tile to display you would never know it's tiling it's not like a thing that's visible to you it's just like an internal implementation detail just showing that sort of the assumptions of like what how big is our maximum frame buffer that we we rendered to um
John:
those sometimes have to change in a world with 6k displays and eventually 8k displays will keep pushing that limit as the the bus bandwidth goes up but yeah it's complicated it's very high bandwidth um but it's i think it's also cool in that you don't have to have like this dedicated miniature computer where the only possible place you can connect the display is directly to the card because that's you know
John:
That's just the way it works.
John:
Having sort of an adding card that's more like the 3DFX model where there's a GPU that does a particular job and it renders the frame, but when it comes time to get that signal from your computer to the display, it just sticks it on the bus with all the rest of the stuff, and it's one unified, very high-speed bus that you could use for storage and for any high-speed peripherals and also for your display.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Now, John, I hear you're looking to run VR off of your Mac Pro.
John:
I am not, and nobody probably should.
John:
I was.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Marco was looking, you know, because Tiff is interested in playing the new VR Half-Life game, which looks really cool.
John:
And, you know, Marco's looking for an excuse to perhaps buy a Mac Pro.
Marco:
Well, I was thinking, like, all right, so, you know, we were watching these videos about the new Alex game, the upcoming Alex game, and, you know, we figured we'd get the Valve VR thing and plug it into something.
Marco:
And like TIFF has a gaming laptop, but I'm guessing you want desktop performance to run a high end VR headset.
Marco:
Just just throwing out a guess there.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Is that John?
Marco:
Is that a safe bet?
John:
I don't know what her laptop is like.
John:
There are actually powerful laptop CPUs.
John:
And I also don't know what the Valve VR system is like and if there's any processing on board it.
John:
But yeah, in general, you would want a powerful desktop to do VR stuff.
Marco:
Yeah, she has some kind of Razer thing, but it's still, like, a 15-inch mid-weight laptop, so I don't think it's got some, like, massive, beefy GPU.
Marco:
Like, it has, like, a good... I think it has a good GPU for a laptop, but that's kind of grading on a curve, isn't it?
Marco:
So I figured, like, we would probably want something on a desktop.
Marco:
Now there's eGPU support in things.
Marco:
I don't know if this laptop supports it.
Marco:
I don't know if maybe our iMac Pros would do it.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But...
Marco:
That seems like probably too much trouble.
Marco:
And so I thought, well, maybe I should get a Mac Pro because then I could put in a PC video card just like what you were talking about last week.
Marco:
And by the way, could you just do all of your PC gaming in a VR headset?
Marco:
Would that solve your monitor problem?
Marco:
i've never done vr and i assume i would get motion sick but uh most likely yeah but yeah you could do what you're saying but that's like the most expensive way to get into vr well anyway so yeah so i so i was like all right so i i went over and and fortunately the eight terabyte option became available since we last recorded so i was able to see what my proposed true cost would be to the configuration i would want and i think before a pro display xdr it was something like 12 000
Marco:
and and ideally i don't think i'd even want the base video card i think i'd want the one that's one model up that isn't out yet the the 9700 5700 or whatever it is yeah well what would you you said you're gonna add a pc video card so it would be twelve thousand dollars for the computer that's gonna hold the video card and 350 350 for a very fast gaming video card
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And then I realized like, well, how much does a gaming PC cost?
Marco:
And I went and looked and apparently a really good gaming PC is like $2,000, $2,500.
Marco:
Not even.
John:
You can make your own gaming PC for like $1,800 and it would do VR fine.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
right and so i realized like okay this is like five to ten times the cost of just building a gaming pc so yeah i think i think when the time comes when this half-life game comes out uh and we want to play it i think what we're going to do is just either either build or buy a regular you know nice gaming pc for a
John:
an eighth of the cost of a mac pro but we'll see and you can get a lot smaller too like it won't have to be behemoth the size of the mac because you just you know what you're going to have in it so it could be a much smaller thing and i mean we might want to just try it on tiff's laptop first although honestly i don't think it would go well like again tiff's laptop gpu is even as powerful as the one that's in the imac because her laptop is might be able to support the cooling of the ones that's in the uh
John:
you know the the current imac pro the current imac pro as we said in the last show has a more powerful a significantly more powerful gpu than the base gpu on the mac pro so it's no slouch and maybe you could cool it in a giant gaming pc but anyway i think that could handle vr i i honestly don't know what the demands of the alex game are i looked at it but i don't i don't know what the if it's a high resolution of the vr games is it really going to tax your system or is it would you be fine with anything
John:
all right real-time follow-up tiff's laptop is a razor blade 15 the gpu is the nvidia geforce rtx 2080 max dash q i don't know what most of that means i do not i do not know the specs of that but it sounds relatively recent and yes it's from this past summer and you know could be kind of beefy i just i'm not familiar with nvidia's model numbers to be able to tell you you know how powerful that is compared to the vega 64 that's in the imac pro
Marco:
oh and the reality is like i don't think the iMac pro is going to be a contender here knowing apple and knowing how old these things are you don't have the good gpus in your iMac pros anyway right you've got older ones than you don't and they have done gpu upgrades and you didn't you got the base gpu both times right i have the vega 56 i think i got tiff the bigger one the 64 but i'm not positive anyway regardless i i don't think this would be going on the iMacs i think this would be this would be going on either her current gaming pc or a theoretically new gaming pc with a bigger gpu
John:
You might want to clear out the big glass table thing and let her have the free reign of the middle of that room so she doesn't bump into things.
John:
Oh, yeah, right.
John:
You need like a space for VR, don't you?
John:
Well, I don't know.
John:
Again, I don't know how much movement this game asks of you, but it's nice to have.
John:
I assume you probably want to do VR in a room that doesn't have a lot of stuff around that you care about, right?
John:
I don't think she's going to be running around, but the Valve VR thing has things you hold in your hand, right?
John:
I think she's going to be, at the very least, waving her hands around and rotating and looking up and down and all that stuff.
Marco:
Yeah, I think this needs a dedicated room.
Marco:
All right, so first we've got to buy a new house.
Marco:
Then we have to buy a new gaming PC.
John:
That's always the first step in any product purchase.
Casey:
It's still going to be cheaper than the Mac Pro.
Casey:
So anyway, we're not playing any VR on the Mac Pro, but let's say you wanted to, John.
Casey:
How would you do that?
John:
Stetson Gafford had a little bit of a follow-up on connecting monitors to your computer while carrying something other than just video.
John:
And apparently there is a newish standard for PCs called Virtual Link, all one word, capital L, which basically involves adding USB-C ports with both DisplayPort and USB data to PC graphics cards and laptops that
John:
The primary purpose of this is to support VR headsets over a single cable, because as you can imagine, a VR headset needs video signal, but also there's all the controls and the accelerometers and position sensors in the headset.
John:
And then if you have little things in your hands, a lot of the early VR stuff had this sort of
John:
you know, huge rat's nest of cables that would come off of the headsets.
John:
They make wireless ones too, but they're usually not as good.
John:
Like the big beefy ones, they would have wires and you know, fewer wires is better.
John:
So virtual link is a standard to put picture plus a bunch of other stuff over a single nice small cable.
John:
Um,
John:
he goes on to say i'm not sure if this connection will be fully supported by the pro display xdr but it does support both displayport and usbc 3.1 over a single usbc style connector i don't think it's thunderbolt he doesn't say i didn't look into it uh we will put a link in the show notes to a longer story about this that i obviously didn't read entirely um the catch is that as far as i can tell it's only nvidia rtx series cards that are currently included in this port
John:
But AMD is on the list of supported suppliers, so there's a possibility there'll be support by other people.
John:
So Virtual Link, as the name suggests, seems like it's mostly aimed at VR headsets, but really it's a general purpose way to put a bunch more data over a single cable.
John:
And VR, notoriously, is low resolution as compared to displays, and certainly low resolution as compared to a 6K display.
John:
So I don't think this probably has aspirations to be a solution for something like Apple.
John:
Uh, but it's good to know that they're making some progress here because I think this is going to be the trend that setting aside Apple's displays that always have some kind of like hub inside them or whatever, uh, putting, having a display, having a cable that only carries video is such a throwback.
John:
Like even HDMI, you know, carries ethernet and audio and all that other stuff over it.
John:
And so Thunderbolt three carries anything you want over it.
John:
And virtual link carries USB, uh, and display port.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
Kyle Stay has some information about Apple Thunderbolt adapters.
Casey:
And I guess this is within the context of connecting your cinema display to the new Mac Pro.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Yeah, so there's two contexts in which we were talking about a series of dongles and adapters to try to get from my 2008 computer to my 2019 computer.
John:
One of them involved going from Thunderbolt 3 to 2.
John:
Stephen Hackett assured me that if you want to do that for FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3, that that chain works because he's done it.
John:
But many people, including Kyle, said if you are trying to get...
John:
your mini DisplayPort monitor to connect to your Mac Pro via Thunderbolt thing, even though you can physically make a chain of wires that will do it, it will not work because Apple's Thunderbolt 322 adapter cannot carry DisplayPort.
John:
He says he learned this after he purchased one in an open box deal from Best Buy for that very purpose and had to return it, and he assumes the person who originally purchased it also returned it for the same reason.
John:
And there are adapters that do it, by the way, like Marco mentioned, you know, the various...
John:
dongles that have hdmi out that go from thunderbolt and there there are dedicated ones that just have either usbc or thunderbolt 3 and that have mini display port at work i have a little dock for my uh macbook pro that you know connects with a single thunderbolt cable well it's not actually thunderbolt it's a usbc dock anyway it's so confusing
John:
I hate talking about this because when everybody else talks about it, half the time they say if it's that little oval connector that works both ways, it's USB-C, whether it's Thunderbolt or not.
John:
Because people think of the physical form factor as the defining characteristic.
John:
But as we all know, you can't usually look at the end of a cable and know...
John:
exactly what that cable is carrying or what it's being asked to do and anyway um so there are adapters but they cost money and i don't have any of them and i'm not going to buy them for the hopefully short period of time when i will be without my big fat display
Casey:
So hold on.
Casey:
So you put or somebody provided to you and you put in the show notes a link to USB-C to mini DisplayPort adapter.
Casey:
And then there's like another 300 characters in this name because it's Amazon.
Casey:
And the very first bullet is this adapter will not work with the Apple Thunderbolt Cinema display.
Casey:
Isn't that what we're talking about?
John:
no they're saying it won't work with a there are there are apple thunderbolt displays in the thunderbolt 2 era that have connected remember do you remember thunderbolt used to use the same connector as many display port yes do you remember that that's what they're talking about if you have a monitor that has a thunderbolt 2 looking cable coming from it and you're like i'm going to connect that up to my thunderbolt 3 supported laptop and drive it no you're not
John:
You're not going to do that, right?
Marco:
Wait, what about the one that came right before that that has the exact same connector but is not Thunderbolt, it's mini display port?
Marco:
Right, that one will work.
John:
And which one do you have?
John:
I have an ancient one way before Thunderbolt even existed.
John:
Thunderbolt did not exist when my monitor came out so there's no Thunderbolt issues whatsoever.
John:
It's plain old mini display port and that would work with this connector because this connector connects to your Thunderbolt 3 port or USB-C port and outputs plain old mini display port.
Marco:
which uses the same physical connector as thunderbolt too so if you had one of these you could plug your ancient absolutely yeah i believe what you the one you need is the led display not the thunderbolt display right uh the 24 inch led display that's the one no no the 27 uh they're all 24 but they're no 20 is a 24 inch led display i have it at work
Marco:
But there was a 27-inch LED display that came right before the Thunderbolt 1 that looked the same, I think.
Marco:
Might have been.
John:
I mean, this is so confusing.
John:
The 24-inch does look very similar to the 27-inch.
John:
Anyway, my thing is so ancient.
John:
I'm not going to buy it.
John:
This adapter is $14.
John:
It's not an expensive adapter, but I'm not going to buy it.
John:
I don't need it.
John:
Why not?
John:
Because my display is going to come within a week or two.
John:
Well, what about that week or two?
John:
I'll be carrying my gaming monitor back and forth between two desks and connecting it with HDMI.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
You're a monster.
Casey:
What are the odds that hardware and software would support connecting two cables, dedicating one to video and the other from different internal lanes to fold bandwidth Thunderbolt or USB?
Casey:
It seems super unlikely, but also totally Apple.
Casey:
This is from David Schwitz.
John:
This is kind of what I was getting at earlier, that multi-cable solutions.
John:
Apple has always wanted multifunctional solutions to connecting quote-unquote displays.
John:
There's a long history of Apple displays ever since the very first one that did something other than just show a picture.
John:
of connecting them to apple computers and making all the proper electrical connections they had uh monitors with adb ports in them they had monitors with speakers in them uh you know eventually monitors with usb hubs inside them all sorts of other stuff and at various times there have been these sometimes comical hydras of you know plastic and rubber connectors
John:
that start as one big fat cable and break out into these little tendrils that you have to plug into all the right places to get your thing to work even the monitor i'm sitting in front of today this 23 inch apple cinema display which connects with quote unquote mini display port if you follow the wire out of the back of the computer there's a power connector that goes directly into power then there's another cable that goes to i believe a big white breakout box the size of like a mac mini and
John:
And out of that comes a USB connector, I think maybe an audio connector, I forget.
John:
And maybe another power connector to power the brick and then the mini display port.
John:
Like there's lots more wires down there than you think, because on the back of my monitor, I do have a bunch of USB ports.
John:
In fact, I connect...
John:
my phone charging, my lighting cable to that thing, right?
John:
Because it is also a USB, I don't even know what it is, USB 1.1 hub, whatever the hell it is.
John:
Maybe it's USB 2.0, I don't remember.
John:
And that's not a very Apple-like solution.
John:
Apple doesn't like solutions like that.
John:
Do you remember the display?
John:
I think Marco was just talking about it.
John:
The first one, they came out with sort of the rat tail MagSafe connector on it.
John:
It was one cable coming down, and then there was a MagSafe little dongle, and then there was a USB connector, and then there was whatever the actual display connector was.
John:
i have that's what my 24 inch apple led cinema display has at work and i don't have anything to connect the magsafe to obviously because i don't i've never had a magsafe capable computer work i went from a mac pro tower no magsafe to a 2017 macbook pro no magsafe so i always have to find something to do with that magsafe thing and it's magnetic so i don't want it like leaning against a wire like it's
John:
It's fairly powerfully magnetic.
John:
I don't want it leaning against some other little delicate cable that's going, you know, so I'm always like tucking it under.
John:
It's very awkward, right?
John:
Apple doesn't like those solutions.
John:
The sort of coolest and worst simultaneous solution that Apple's ever done in recent memory for that is another ADC, not Apple developer connection, but Apple display connector.
John:
um and i have one of those up in the attic it was i have the 23 inch apple cinema display one of apple's i think apple's first 23 inch lcd display it followed the 22 inch version of it it was the one with the the clear feet do you remember that it was like a an easel where it had like a little kickstand that went out the back and then in the front were two big beefy clear feet it was in the sort of clear plastic around the pinstripe white plastic uh era of apple design um
Marco:
um and that that huge monitor huge for the time 23 inch can you even imagine people used to come over to my house and be like what is that is that a tv i'm like it's a computer monitor like no that was amazing because like that was the era that like one of my friends and i would go to micro center to buy pc components in the late 90s that was the those were like what was what was like in the mac room and you'd like sneak over to the macro micro center and you'd be like whoa look at that giant monitor and
Marco:
Yeah, it blew us away.
John:
Not only was it giant, because there was 21-inch CRTs, but 21-inch CRTs were huge.
John:
They just took up the whole room.
John:
They were deeper than they were wide, and they were 4x3.
John:
And here was this more letterbox, I don't know if it was exactly 16x9, but more letterbox-oriented thing that was...
John:
It looked much bigger than it was.
John:
And of course it was a flat screen, which wasn't a thing in really, it wasn't particularly popular in TVs either.
John:
So people just didn't even believe that you had the thing hooked up to your computer.
John:
It was amazing.
John:
And coming out of the back of that monitor was a single cable.
John:
That connected to your computer.
John:
And that's it.
John:
There was no power cable.
John:
There was just one cable to connect from the display into your computer, into my Power Mac G3.
John:
And that was like a miracle.
John:
It's like, how does that even work?
John:
How are you powering the monitor?
John:
And the monitor had like, you know, whatever...
John:
I didn't have USB ports on it.
John:
I don't remember what other bus features it had.
John:
But anyway, it was basically it was an Apple proprietary connector that carried power and essentially DVI and whatever other things they were tunneling over.
John:
I forget what they were.
John:
I don't know if it was a microphone or my memory so bad.
John:
Someone just pull up the web page to find out what else is in there.
John:
But the important part is that it was power and DVI.
John:
over a single connector but that's definitely like old apple like it's super cool like nobody else had a computer like that it was like a miracle but you can never find anything with an adc connector right it was apple proprietary uh and if you wanted to get another video card
John:
to connect your awesome monitor, you need to have them with an ADC connector.
John:
And if you didn't, it was a series of adapters and you could plug it into a box that plugged into power and that had DVI coming out of it.
John:
But that ruins the whole thing.
John:
That ruins the elegant solution.
John:
So the Pro Display XDR is in the era of the new Apple that is much more hesitant to make up its own weird proprietary connectors.
John:
But they're also pushing the limits of...
John:
displays connected to regular people computers and that's why you don't find lots of quote-unquote pc video cards with thunderbolt 3 ports in the back and in fact even the ones that apple is shipping do not have thunderbolt 3 ports in the back there instead in these mpx modules that connect that have multiple connectors one for pci and one for everything else they connect into your thunderbolt 3 port that lets you connect
John:
your monitor to a port that's not even on the video card so i get a little bit of a whiff of that old thing but you know this is again on brand for me since i did buy that computer and did use it with a single cable connecting it to my power mac g3 for years and years i went from a power mac g3 to a uh power mac g5 so again on brand for waiting a long time between computers and before the power mac g3 it was an se 30 so there's some big gaps in there
Casey:
Goodness.
Casey:
Any other follow-up?
John:
No.
John:
I mean, I suppose, you know, I hate to drag this Mac Pro stuff on, but I don't have all the components.
John:
It isn't set up yet.
John:
When I take it out of the box and find out it doesn't work or it's broken on the inside or something, you know, like the saga will continue.
Casey:
Oh, no.
John:
Right now, it's Schrodinger's Mac Pro.
John:
I have no idea what state it is inside that box.
John:
I'm assuming everything's fine.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It can fit your lifestyle.
Marco:
So whatever your needs are with time-wise, you can add extra meals to your weekly order really easily.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It was really fun.
Marco:
The recipes were great.
Marco:
The menus were really clear.
Marco:
I loved having the pre-measured ingredients, and
Marco:
They had really good recipe cards to kind of explain and show you what to do.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to HelloFresh for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I would like to add one actual piece of follow-up.
Casey:
I am personally deeply upset at you, John.
Casey:
And I am deeply upset because you did not mention to me that one of the characters in Watchmen drives a Grand National.
Marco:
What's a Grand National?
John:
You said that, and now I'm trying to think, who are you talking about?
John:
Marco.
Casey:
Marco, you're killing me.
John:
Who are you talking about?
John:
Is that a band?
John:
I know what a Grand National is.
Casey:
I know what it looks like, but I'm thinking back to the show.
Casey:
It's in the very first episode, for goodness sakes.
Casey:
Is it a boat?
John:
no no not looking glass the um woman that's doing all the investigating oh angela yes whatever uh sister knight or whatever her name is she drives a grand national yeah she doesn't spend a lot of time driving in the series so it's not didn't stand out to me but okay it sounds like a van or something
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So if you're not aware, the Grand National is this like – it's not a halo car, but it is – it's like this mythical beast.
Casey:
And what it was, it was a V6, not an inline-six, right?
Casey:
It was some sort of six-cylinder Buick with –
Marco:
a tremendous turbocharger on a buick by the way if you search for grand national the first result from the siri knowledge is the 2019 grand national was the 172nd annual running of the grand national horse race at entry race course near liverpool england that is so i'm guessing that's not what you're talking about you're not talking about a horse race or both no uh so it's a buick then it's a buick regal um why does anybody care then
Marco:
because it was amazing they care because it was it was an ugly american car that actually had a big engine in it and it looked like just a plain old ugly american car and it's like but but actually it was cool oh my god i'm looking at pictures of this thing but actually it's not that cool it wasn't it wasn't actually that cool it's not at all cool anyway i'm pretty sure my grandparents had something like this when i was a child and even they didn't think it was cool at the time but they didn't have a grand national they probably had a plain old buick regal which was
Casey:
Crap.
Casey:
We'll put the Doug DeMuro review in the show notes.
Casey:
And I have watched it, although I don't recall it because I think I watched it many moons ago when it came out.
Casey:
But the short, short version is it was this extreme... Well, I believe it to be extremely rare Buick, a two-door coupe Buick that was extremely fast for the day.
Casey:
And it is...
Casey:
one of those cars that like, like the STI or the WRX was for people of our generation before they, or the skyline, perhaps even better.
Casey:
One of those cars that like everyone heard of, but nobody had ever seen.
Casey:
And like the Neo Geo, right?
Casey:
Yeah, actually.
Casey:
Yes.
Marco:
My cousin has one.
Marco:
Yeah, sure.
Marco:
Yeah, sure he does.
Casey:
So anyway, so it was kind of like that.
Casey:
It was a six-cylinder car with a tremendous turbocharger on it, always automatic, which is unfortunate, but they were considered to be, and actually a K-Ham in the chat have summarized it really well.
Casey:
It's one of the first from the factory sleeper cars.
Casey:
So it doesn't look fast, but it was really fast.
Casey:
And it's extremely rare, and most normal gearheads slash petrolheads really have a special place in their hearts for them.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I was expecting somebody would have told me that Sister Knight, whatever her name is, drives a Grand National.
Casey:
And of all people, John, you should have told me.
Casey:
And no.
Casey:
I didn't think you needed to be notified.
Marco:
It does seem like these are very rare because it's like looking at listings, it looks like they were all 1987.
Casey:
They were only a couple of years, I believe.
Marco:
And it seems like the going rate for them is like 30 grand still for a Buick from 1987.
Marco:
So that must be desirable to somebody.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think I'd rather have a boat.
Casey:
This one's 86 that regular car reviews did.
Casey:
Fair warning, regular car reviews is interesting, to say the least, which we've talked about in the past, I believe.
Casey:
I haven't decided if it's a shtick or not that the dude is terrible.
Casey:
But anyways, you can, if you're interested, watch these videos in the show notes.
Casey:
But really, I want to stop talking to you two so I can keep watching Watchmen.
Casey:
Who watches the Watchmen?
Marco:
Also, a real-time follow-up.
Marco:
When you guys were talking about a car, I don't understand.
Marco:
I figured out that apparently the RTX 2080 mobile Max-Q GPU in TIFF's laptop apparently is actually pretty good.
John:
Who knew?
John:
No, it's a modern... The RTX line is... NVIDIA's current
John:
with the supposed ray tracing hardware and yada yada.
John:
So I'm assuming it's a laptop variant of that.
John:
I just don't know how strong it is compared to the quote-unquote real RTX desktop things.
Marco:
Yeah, it seems from a very quick search that it's just basically an underclocked version of the desktop one that seems to manage something like half to two-thirds its performance, which might be okay.
Marco:
If we're going to do VR for a game that we've been waiting 15 years for,
Marco:
it's totally fine like i i want to i want to make it good i want to have like i want to be able to run it at good settings you haven't been waiting 15 years for this alex vr thing you've been waiting 15 years for half-life 3 this is not half-life 3 well it's kind of half-life 3 i i think it basically is half-life 3 well i'm gonna call it roughly that anyway what's interesting is that the last pc i built was the pc i built to play half-life 2
Marco:
And so the next PCI build might be one to play this.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Project Connected Home over IP.
Casey:
Not a very exciting name.
Casey:
I guess if you skip the over, then it becomes chip, which is kind of funny.
Casey:
So Amazon, Apple, Google, the Zigbee Alliance, and other people are forming a working group to develop an open standard for smart home devices.
Casey:
I have not taken very much time to look into this, but the brief amount of time that I've looked into it
Casey:
I think this is actually good.
Casey:
Am I allowed to say that in 2019, that something good happened?
Casey:
Somebody explain to me why this is bad.
Marco:
To be fair, it's almost 2020.
Marco:
Well, true.
Marco:
What's going on?
Marco:
It's one of those things.
Marco:
So they've formed this working group.
Marco:
They've announced this partnership or whatever.
Marco:
And it's the kind of thing that
Marco:
often would result in an industry standard like Bluetooth or USB.
Marco:
So in theory, if all works out, this could be the unification of home standards, like HomeKit plus Amazon's whatever, and Z-Wave and all these other weirdo things.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of things out there.
Marco:
This could be the unified standard.
Marco:
This could be the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi of home stuff, which would be great.
Marco:
But that's a big if, like if this all works out, if they actually go forward with this.
Marco:
This is the very first step towards that.
Marco:
There's no guarantee that this will ever become anything.
Marco:
They might, you know, this spec working group might fall apart before they ever develop a spec.
Marco:
They might develop a spec and then no one implements it.
Marco:
They might develop a spec, and then people implement it, but not for very long, and there aren't that many products in the market that do it.
Marco:
Or one of the big players, like Apple or Amazon, one of them drops out, or something like that.
Marco:
There's a lot that can still fall apart and make this not very useful.
Marco:
But if everything goes to plan, if they actually do develop a coherent spec that they all agree on, that everyone starts shipping products for, and that that can kind of replace or supersede the existing things like HomeKit that are out there now...
Marco:
then that would be awesome for consumers.
Marco:
But that's a lot of ifs.
Marco:
And so I think it's too soon to really get your hopes up on this.
John:
If someone's going to drop out, it probably shouldn't be Apple.
John:
It's kind of amazing that all these companies agree to this, especially the ones that are doing well in the home market.
John:
It just goes to show that when it comes to doing stuff in your home, even the most powerful top players in this market feel the pressure of basically, if you've got something in your home, a light switch, a smart light bulb, a talking cylinder, anything like that that becomes part of your home,
John:
There's a barrier to entry of you buying something that doesn't work with it.
John:
And they all feel that.
John:
Like, no one is so dominant.
John:
They're like, we don't have to worry about interoperability.
John:
We dominate, right?
John:
Even if you have a house that's like 99% one thing and then 1% some other thing, that's annoying.
John:
It's annoying to get them to work together and to sort of harmonize it and...
John:
A lot of these sort of, you know, proprietary systems from non-tech companies will come in and, you know, like home improvement things like, oh, we'll install a system that will run everything in your house, but you got to keep using this brand of thing.
John:
Like nobody likes that.
John:
Like no one wants, Amazon doesn't want to be locked out because you have like Lutron everything.
John:
And, you know, all the big companies are trying to do deals with everybody like, you know, implement our standard, work with Google Nest, work with whatever the Amazon's automation stuff.
John:
And Apple's trying to get everyone to work with HomeKit.
John:
And a lot of these devices, like I did that thing about my smart outlets, try to work with all of them.
John:
Because if you're selling hardware, you're like, well, I don't want people to feel like they're locked in.
John:
Now we have to implement HomeKit and the Amazon thing and the Google thing or whatever the hell Zigbee is.
John:
Like we got to implement all this.
John:
It makes the product so much more complicated and expensive.
John:
And even though they say they support all these things, what version of all the things do they support?
John:
Which one do they support the most?
John:
If 90% of their customers use like Amazon's home automation, but they say they have the other one says bullet point features, are they going to keep those up to date?
John:
Are they going to be buggy?
John:
It's a bad situation for everybody.
John:
And
John:
Despite us being a few years into this battle, I guess nobody feels comfortable saying, if we just wait it out, we'll come out on top.
John:
We'll leave our competitors in the dust and we will dominate Microsoft style and be the one true home automation standard.
John:
We'll be our standard.
John:
We'll be Google Nest.
John:
We'll be Amazon's thing.
John:
We'll be HomeKit, right?
John:
home kit is far behind the leaders in this camp for a variety of reasons the first one that they rolled out was very expensive and very restrictive in terms of security which is good for the user but bad for integration and apple's been backing off that saying you don't have to implement all these securities not implement them yourself but you can do an open source one and we don't have to give you the chips for it and now they have an open source thing we'll put a link to that in the show notes the
John:
uh home kit accessory development kit which is the home kit adk that's now open source like this is this is from back when you used to have to sort of get apple's permission to even make one of these things and now it's open source and you can implement it yourself right so they've come a long way but they're so far behind that apple is like boy i really hope this works because this is our way to get into the market whereas i think amazon and google are like
John:
They don't want to fight against each other.
John:
Google doesn't want to have to displace Amazon in your house.
John:
Amazon doesn't want to have to displace Google.
John:
And they're both battling with the hardware makers.
John:
They all have to go to them and say, support our thing.
John:
And support our thing is the best support.
John:
You can support Amazon's things, but give us the good support.
John:
and it makes all the it makes all the devices more expensive and because it costs more to develop them and everything so i'm glad to see this it's kind of miraculous that it's happening like we had all these years of fighting with each other and we have some dominant players but everybody looks around and says this kind of sucks and you know marco just cited the success stories if we had 20 different wireless standards for wireless networking
John:
It would be worse for everybody, right?
John:
Same thing with Bluetooth.
John:
Even going far back as physical media, we had these media format wars, but everyone likes it better when you settle on, even if you settle on the worst standard like VHS or whatever, settling on the CD standard, Blu-ray as opposed to, what was it?
John:
HD DVD.
John:
HD DVD.
John:
The ones that we forgot, like Super Audio CD.
John:
Anyway, having a standard does eventually help everybody.
John:
And even though everyone wants to be sort of the winner, I guess the remaining battleground is who has the patents on what.
John:
But even that in this day and age, these big players won't
John:
not won't go into alliance, but are hesitant to enter into an alliance that is tied down by patents.
John:
Just look at the Qualcomm stuff with them licensing their patents to anybody who asks for a very expensive price and that whole mess.
John:
And then I guess the CD was like Philips and Sony.
John:
Anyway, open standards are better for everybody.
John:
It just took many years of war for them all to agree to that.
John:
So here's hoping that this means that the devices that we buy will be cheaper.
John:
and that eventually they will whatever support they have for the standard if this is the only thing they have to support then they will support it well and be able to introduce new products over the years and you know i mean i suppose the worst it can be is like wi-fi where eventually your router doesn't work anymore because wi-fi standards have moved on but those at least move more slowly than you know the differences between home kit and google nest and all that other stuff so
John:
My fingers are crossed for this too.
John:
I'm hoping all these, I don't know, Vipers.
John:
I'm hoping they can all stay in the same basket without killing each other for the greater good.
John:
I give it a better than 50% chance, I think.
John:
My fingers are crossed.
Casey:
I give it one chance in three.
Casey:
I also would like to point out to all the people that have already emailed us, we are aware of XKCD number 927.
Casey:
We will put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
If for some reason you haven't seen it, but thank you to everyone who's already emailed us to remind us of that thing that we already knew existed.
Marco:
I assume it's the one new standard thing.
Marco:
I didn't even have to look to know.
John:
The thing about all of these things is this is trying to make a standard, but unlike what that comic is about, there aren't that many...
John:
open standards like you could say home kit is a standard but is it a standard it's just an app it's an apple proprietary thing that other people can implement and it has become much more open of a standard now you can download this you know this open source thing and do it but it's not like i feel like a standard is like more than just apple has to agree that this is the way things should work right if only apple agrees and apple entirely controls how that standard develops it's not really a standard in that sense the the xcd comic is more like
John:
you know web standards where there's 20 different versions of html and xml and in theory no one company controls them but there's so many different standards that it's kind of a pain anyway uh yeah one more standard might not be the solution but the current situation if you were to leave it as is definitely isn't the solution because ask anybody who's tried to get their home full of home automation devices from 20 different vendors to all work together it's not great
Casey:
So a week or two ago, Marco put in a Slack that the three of us are in the following.
Casey:
I'm going to quote Marco to Marco.
Casey:
But I thought it was really interesting, and I wanted to spend a couple of minutes talking about it.
Casey:
Marco wrote, the Tim Cook era of Apple doesn't seem to have good intuition on what products should be, so they rely heavily on external input.
Casey:
But they only seem to listen to such input through select narrow channels like the Pro Workflow Group.
Casey:
So the focus of their high-end products seems to be getting narrower.
Casey:
I think I wholeheartedly agree with you on that.
Casey:
And one of the things that struck me about the Mac Pro, and we talked about this a bit last episode, and about how people like Steve Trouton-Smith or Paul Haddad are clinging to the idea, perhaps justifiably, that the Mac Pro should be for them, but isn't.
Casey:
And we don't necessarily need to rehash last week's conversation, but...
Casey:
What had occurred to me listening to the three of us talk about it last week and seeing this comment from Marco was that it seems like Apple has started to listen and listen well to some people, which is exactly what Marco said.
Casey:
But there are other people like me, like developers, that maybe they're not listening to as much.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
That isn't necessarily a problem, but it does bum me out.
Casey:
Because maybe in a perfect world where I can design whatever magical Mac I want, maybe I would want a reasonably priced mini tower or something like that.
Casey:
Do mini towers even exist in the PC world anymore?
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It seems like Apple's definitely listening to the film editors and people in the film industry.
Casey:
They're listening to YouTubers and certainly trying to get on YouTubers good side.
Casey:
But what about developers, man?
Casey:
Do we not count anymore?
Casey:
So let's let's start with Marco.
Casey:
Marco, do you want to add any color to this?
Casey:
Do you want to elaborate any or do you have any other thoughts that you'd like to share?
John:
Yeah, some currency exchange headwinds is what Marco sees.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Yeah, I think just kind of some elaboration on what I meant by this.
Marco:
We heard about this Pro Workflow Group being created back, I think they announced that right after the Mac Pro Roundtable or whenever they announced that that was a thing.
Marco:
It seems like what they have made since then...
Marco:
The marketing for it... And this is mostly about the Mac Pro.
Marco:
I think if you look at the laptop lineup, I think the 16-inch shows... The 16-inch is basically the Mac Pro developer.
Marco:
It's exactly what developers want.
Marco:
It's a laptop, which most developers use.
Marco:
It has the biggest screen in the laptop lineup, which most developers want, and the most horsepower.
Marco:
And they give it a very developer-friendly keyboard, finally.
Marco:
So that, I think...
Marco:
And it's very clear that the computer that most developers use, which is the largest MacBook Pro, Apple is doing well to attract them on that.
Marco:
And it is designed in such a way that besides the high entry price, which is unchanged from the last few years, so that's not really a new thing, besides the high entry price to the 15-inch or now 16-inch model,
Marco:
that is a fairly generalist computer again.
Marco:
Now that it's gotten rid of the controversial keyboard and it's listed some of the limits that were there in 2016 that have been listed over time, it's a much more generalist, versatile computer.
Marco:
So I think in the laptop line, they're doing okay so far.
Marco:
We'll see how that trickles down, if that trickles down below the highest-end models.
Marco:
But they've done a good job of making a kind of generalist 16-inch top-of-the-line model again.
Marco:
Again, there are nitpicks.
Marco:
I would love to have different ports, SD card, things like that.
Marco:
But we'll take what we can get here.
Marco:
But when you look at the high end of the desktop line, it's always been this very narrow set of these hyper-focused products.
Marco:
So you have things like the Mac Mini, which...
Marco:
is really good for what it is, but what it is doesn't satisfy everyone's needs.
Marco:
And by the way, it's super expensive for what it is.
Marco:
And then you have the iMac and the iMac Pro, both of which totally nail what they're going for,
Marco:
which is the mid-range desktop market.
Marco:
At the low end, you have the cheap appliance ones that you stick in real estate offices to look pretty.
Marco:
Then at the high end, you have the iMac Pro that is this awesome workhorse that I love.
Marco:
But it has limitations.
Marco:
It's a little bit narrower.
Marco:
And if you want to break out of that, or if this isn't the kind of computer you want...
Marco:
then you have to go to the Mac Pro.
Marco:
And the Mac Pro in 2006, when it came out, and all the towers that John talked about that came before it that were the PowerPC towers, they were much more generalist machines.
Marco:
They appealed to a wide range of possible uses, possible customers.
Marco:
They spanned a wide range of possible price points that started out fairly accessible.
Marco:
They were always at the high end of accessible, like $2,000 maybe, but they were still in the accessible range.
Marco:
And then that crept up over time.
Marco:
And now this new Mac Pro, in the 2013 Mac Pro, the trash can Mac Pro, seemed to be very narrow in its appeal.
Marco:
That was like, if you happen to need Xeons and no expansion and very little upgradability, and if you were willing to pay for two workstation-class GPUs and all this, that was such a narrow product that it failed in the marketplace for lots of reasons, but it failed.
Marco:
The new Mac Pro that they've made now, the 2019-2020 Mac Pro, it seems like they made it to appeal mostly just to the needs of high-end video professionals.
Marco:
And that's not to say that they shouldn't appeal to those needs, but it seems like that was pretty much most of what they were going for and not really trying to appeal to a much wider market.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of use cases where...
Marco:
the market just is not going to pay that.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of pro market segments that are just going to, are just going to say either I can't or no thanks because of various, like, you know, mostly about pricing or, you know, part selection.
Marco:
Um, there is a whole separate issue that I don't, I don't think we're going to do tonight about NVIDIA and CUDA support.
Marco:
That's a whole separate issue that I think they've already lost that entire battle and they're, they're never going to go back there.
Marco:
I don't think, but,
Marco:
So they've lost a lot of the scientific arena to the CUDA machines.
Marco:
But unless Apple makes up with NVIDIA, that's never going to be fixed.
Marco:
But within the realm they targeted here, it seems like they made this pro workflow group.
Marco:
which is which seems to consist mostly of video editors and people who do really big projects in logic like it seems like this is like people who use apple's two remaining pro software software apps basically logic and final cut it's like people who use logic and final cut they are designing computers pretty much for them
John:
And 3D.
John:
Think of what was in that room at WWC.
John:
They had the person with the Crazy Logic project.
John:
They had a photographer, to be fair.
John:
They had photo editing or whatever.
John:
Final Cut video editing.
John:
And then they had the Pixar folks, which are running non-Apple.
Marco:
3d program right so these are these are three industries and they're only showing very very high end users of this as well so like you don't have like the the kind of like mid-range music producer is not using this they're not making this like thousand instrument track like the the kind of mid-range 3d animator it cannot afford this the you know the mid-range film editor or animation studio probably isn't buying these because they're it's too expensive for them probably as well um
Marco:
So they are making this product only for very, very high-end use that also has very high budgets and doesn't really care about what they're spending.
Marco:
And it's just like – it seems like they can enter a dangerous feedback loop here where they defined –
Marco:
what this should be by seemingly the feedback from the group that they created that works for them.
Marco:
Like the ProWorkflow group are Apple employees.
Marco:
So they've created this group of people, they pay them to do high-end work, and then they use their feedback, presumably, to then inform the development of these products.
Marco:
But it's kind of like... It's an artificial, closed feedback loop.
Marco:
And I worry that...
Marco:
It does seem like as the company has gotten bigger under the Tim Cook era, they've expanded, they've matured, they've grown, whatever else.
Marco:
It does seem like the lack of having that Steve Jobs-like visionary means that they're designing products less on intuition and more on data, but they're collecting data only from a seemingly very small amount of sources.
Marco:
And I think this is one of the reasons why many Apple product releases over the last five years seem like they've misread the room.
Marco:
Like the way the HomePod kind of fell out.
Marco:
I remember how awful the launch was and how weirdly targeted of a product it ended up being.
Marco:
Certainly the butterfly keyboard laptops definitely suffer from this problem.
Marco:
It just seems like they...
Marco:
They're designing products for somebody, and many of the products succeed in just being generalist and being fine.
Marco:
But you have these outliers, like the HomePod or the Mac Pro, where it just seems like you have to ask, if they would have designed this a little bit differently or had a little bit different priorities in mind, this could have been a much broader appeal product.
Marco:
And instead, they designed this very, very narrow thing that seems to almost purposely exclude massive swaths of the market.
John:
So I think my personal narrative for the Mac Pro is kind of Apple's narrative, again, like implicitly by what they show to WWDC and who they show in the videos using the thing.
John:
But it makes sense is that the Mac Pro is the highest of the high end.
John:
And we talked about this last show, like that leaves a big gap.
John:
There is actually a big gap between the iMac Pro, their next most powerful computer, next most capable computer, and the Mac Pro.
John:
But they're sort of defining an end point.
John:
And I think it's fine and probably the correct approach to do that.
John:
And I think, you know, for now and what they did it with by going to the highest of the hand, I think they took a much better approach than the 2013 in that they designed for the highest of the high end and they have these customers in mind, but they also...
John:
tried to make a machine structured in a way that it can support use cases that they didn't think of also at the high end like it's not saying that it suddenly is able to extend downward to all those things that you're just talking about marco right but within the high end they're not they didn't like they didn't you know put a bunch of uh unchangeable gpus in there and make you take two of them or whatever it's a huge box with a huge number of slots and lots of actual physical empty space and with you know thunderbolt and presumed updates to this thing or whatever
John:
I think it can address a lot more high-end needs than just the ones that they talk to people about.
John:
Kind of the same thing with the Afterburner card, where there's particular use cases in the high-end that they knew about from the Pro Workflow Group.
John:
And rather than make a thing that Apple has done in the past, sometimes with third-party help, like dedicated accelerators, like the...
John:
It's dating myself again, but the Quadra AV line, the Quadra 840 AV, and they had all sorts of AV accelerators inside them.
John:
There was the Philips TriMedia card, all sorts of sort of proprietary burned-in silicon accelerator cards for a particular use case.
John:
All of those ended up being cool for the use case that they were made for, but then rapidly out of date and useless going forward.
John:
And the afterburner is...
John:
a more pragmatic approach.
John:
It's like, we're going to give you this dedicated $2,000 card that does these amazing things that we're not possible before by taking work away from the CPU and the GPU.
John:
But since it's an FPGA, you can change this functionality in the future.
John:
So maybe this card won't just be a useless relic three years later.
John:
Maybe you can change it to do something else, right?
John:
So all that speaks to, yes, addressing the highest of the high end, seeing exactly how high you can go, but doing it in a way that leaves as many doors open as possible.
John:
The one door that's not open is, yeah, but do you have something cheaper?
John:
Like, I don't need all that.
John:
I need some of that.
John:
And this is what we talked about last week.
John:
What is in between that and the iMac Pro?
John:
Because the iMac Pro gives me very few options once I buy the thing.
John:
And the Mac Pro gives me so many options that it's awesome, but it's way too much money, right?
John:
So is there a way you can address that middle market?
John:
And the Pro workflow group is, you know, like you said, A, they're Apple employees, albeit they're from industry.
John:
So presumably the people are hiring, like actually know what they're talking about are not just random Apple employees.
John:
But B, it's a limited set of people that they probably just have.
John:
video audio photographers and like the expected folks that you would imagine the main constituent for apple's quote-unquote pro product line as apple tells us is developers well guess what apple has access to a large group of developers if apple actually ever is interested in saying what kind of machine should we make for developers they have apple opportunity to ask that question i would argue that developers who work for apple are still maybe
John:
You know, biased in various ways in terms of how they work and what they work on, as opposed to developers, you know, out there in the industry.
John:
In particular, I would imagine that if you talk to Apple developers to try to figure out what game developers want, it would not be useful because game developers in the real world think...
John:
Not only do I not just target Apple platforms, I'm not even going to target Apple platforms unless something big changes.
John:
I need to use, you know, Unity or whatever to do things cross-platform.
John:
Or I work for the big console vendors.
John:
Anyway, that aside, talking to just Apple developers could get... And I assume they do this.
John:
Like, I'm not saying this is the thing they should do.
John:
They should have thought of this.
John:
I assume they do do this.
John:
And that produces machines like the MacBook Pro and the iMac Pro, which I think are...
John:
Now that they fixed the keyboard, good developer machines.
John:
It's this in-between place where people look at the Mac Pro and say, I want some of that, some of that flexibility, but not as much price.
John:
And again, refer people to last week's episode.
John:
i think there is space for them to come down there but i'm not sure the market is big enough for them to design an entirely new computer if they could just you know again i was attributing last week to saying when they go with arm and have a cheaper cpu inside there can you what's what's the cheapest you can make uh something inside that case put half the number of pci slots in uh
John:
put an ARM CPU in there, put some cheaper video cards.
John:
Maybe when USB 4 rolls around, it will simplify and make the bus deal less expensive because USB 4, in theory, will subsume Thunderbolt.
John:
You could have the same cavernous case with less stuff inside it, and maybe that could serve the market of people who want an expandable computer for less money.
John:
But for now, I think Apple's logic, and it makes sense to me, is we need to stake out the high end because our problem for years was we had essentially abandoned the high end.
John:
We weren't addressing their needs at all, and we didn't even have any computers they would even want.
John:
Let's make the highest of the high end.
John:
Let's make the most capable Mac ever.
John:
Let's make sure it's able to serve the most possible use cases for the people who have the most demand of their computers.
John:
And that's a good place to start.
John:
I'm hoping that in the years to come, they will evolve that strategy, but it's more important to me personally.
John:
And I think also more important to Apple as a company to keep fighting on the high end, because if Apple just made the iMac pro and then like a tower that you could spec up a little bit, but never could get powerful enough to serve these, you know, these ridiculous needs that they're showing all these videos and these pro workflow teams, that would be bad because I think that would make more pros abandon Apple.
John:
Like it's the halo car thing all over again, or the,
John:
you know racing car team for a car manufacturer you need to have that aspirational thing that you know represents the pinnacle of performance and you learn things from it and that trickles down to the rest of the line you just hope that in the case of apple the gap between that and the rest of their line is not the same as the gap between an f1 car and a ford escort
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
What is the most effective way to get developer input then?
Casey:
Because I agree with you that it seems like sucking developers into Apple and to be Apple employees may or may not be the right answer.
Casey:
So what do you do?
Casey:
What is in it for me or for a game developer to be invited to Apple and donate my time to Apple, one of the richest companies in the world, just so I get better computers out the other end?
John:
Well, I mean, I don't think that's like Marco was saying in the jobs era that the myth is that we tell them for free.
John:
Exactly.
John:
The myth of the jobs era was that Apple just know instinctively like what people want.
John:
So they wouldn't don't bother asking anybody.
John:
Focus groups are stupid.
John:
Customers don't know what they want.
John:
We'll tell them what they want.
John:
Like, you know, they'll just ask for a faster horse.
John:
Yada, yada, yada.
John:
There's a million business.
John:
But there is some truth to that.
John:
Obviously, it's part of the myth, but it's also there's some truth in there that rings true to us as customers.
John:
based on what apple has has rolled out and in general you probably just don't want to ask people what they want but you do need to like if you're at the point where you're asking people like there was this is link in the show notes from ages ago that i don't think we ever talked about where apple was sending out surveys to imac pro owners saying what do you like about not just imac pro i got one on my old imac way back when yeah and marco got the imac pro survey i think yeah filled it out and every time i get a survey from apple i fill it out every time
John:
Yeah, and so they're just asking people, but it's like, you fill that out, and I imagine Marco was probably thinking the same thing.
John:
Like he said before, it's, you know, read the room being the phrase of the day to describe this.
John:
If you have to be asking, like, if you have to ask people, what do you like about the computer?
John:
What do you like?
John:
I know it's not, of course they have to ask.
John:
Like, the point is, you shouldn't just assume, right?
John:
But it seems...
John:
Like if they send out a survey, it's like, how do you feel about the keyboards on your laptops?
John:
Like it's been three years, Apple, like at a certain point, you should you should not have to ask us how we feel about the keyboards.
John:
It's clear that it should be clear to everybody that these keyboards are not a good solution for you.
John:
So fix them.
John:
Right.
John:
You don't need a survey to tell you that in the same way.
John:
I don't think you would need a survey to ask people, would you prefer a computer that costs less money but is more capable than... There's a gap in the lineup.
John:
You see it.
John:
Would you prefer a computer that instead of having to replace every few years, you could instead upgrade parts of it?
John:
they know there's a segment of the population of the customer population that would like that right would you prefer more flexibility in configuring computers so you could spend more money on the parts that you care about and less money on the parts you'd like no i wouldn't like of course like some people prefer that like of course everyone's going to say yes to that and that's not true and that's where apple should take their judgment to say like well people will always answer yes to that but in reality
John:
Most people don't want all those choices.
John:
There's too many choices.
John:
They, you know, like that's where Apple's judgment comes in.
John:
But I just feel like at this point from the outside, it's so easy for us to see sort of the blind spots and the gaps in the lineup.
John:
But anytime you talk to someone inside Apple about that on or off the record, you get the feeling that of course they see those exact spots in the lineup.
John:
Like they're more familiar with their products than even than we are on the outside, but they have sort of accepted justifications for Apple not being in those markets.
John:
Yeah.
John:
and trying to convince them that they're accepted justification of, like, well, that market's not big enough, or those people would actually be happier if they bought a MacBook Pro, or, you know, our data shows that the iMac Pro serves their needs better, or we think it's better to just concentrate on making compile times faster on the iMac Pro rather than giving developers this machine that they think they want, because in reality, they are more efficient on this thing.
John:
And, you know, it's like...
John:
All of that is true.
John:
Those justifications make sense, but as I've said to many people who are asking me about why I have this ridiculous computer that's sitting next to me now, the heart wants what it wants.
John:
There is some segment of the population that just wants a little bit of that hobbyist tinkerer experience of having the hot rod that you get to change yourself in various ways.
John:
And Apple will say, yeah, we know they're out there, but they're too small in the market and we don't care about them.
John:
That's exactly what they used to say about the super high end.
John:
It's like,
John:
What are we doing here?
John:
Why are we bothering to make this pro computer?
John:
The iMac does pretty much everything that most of our customers need.
John:
And that tiny sliver of people who want to give us huge amounts of money for a super powerful computer, we don't even need them.
John:
And they had a change of heart about that.
John:
And that change of heart was, like, I don't think the facts on the ground changed.
John:
It's just they, like, their thinking about it changed.
John:
It's like, all this, the math is as it was before.
John:
We might not even make any money on this computer.
Yeah.
John:
But they eventually became convinced we have to do it anyway.
John:
Like, it doesn't make sense that we have to do it, but we have to do it anyway, even if we lose money, because it's part of Apple being Apple, right?
John:
I think there is less of a push for them to fill that middle tier, and they may never actually fill it.
John:
But I do have some confidence that they will drag the Mac Pro down market a little bit if they can, especially if and when there's an ARM transition.
Yeah.
John:
At least that's my hope, because I feel like although I am perfectly fine with the Mac Pro doing what it did, it's untenable long term to have this big a gap in the lineup.
Marco:
Well, I think an ARM transition could potentially totally throw out everything about their current lineup, like why things are differentiated the way they are, the families that are defined the way they are, because that can change everything.
Marco:
Because so much of the current lineup is based on what Intel offers, various thermal classes, performance classes, how Intel segments its own lineup to get certain high-end or low-end features and needs and everything.
Marco:
An ARM transition doesn't just change the performance per watt, potentially.
Marco:
It changes everything about what these platforms are.
Marco:
The Mac Pro tower might not be able to exist anymore in a world of ARM because maybe Apple will figure out that it's no longer worth the engineering effort of having PCI being in the computer that's exposed to users.
Marco:
Maybe Thunderbolt doesn't come along for the ride.
Marco:
because of the various complexities in implementing it, and maybe Apple doesn't want to implement it, or can't for various economic or technical reasons.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
There are so many assumptions we have now about the lineup go totally out the window if they switch over to ARM, which I think is one of the reasons why we haven't seen that happen yet, because it's a big deal, and one of the reasons why the high-end desktop might be one of the very last models to make that switch.
Marco:
that like you know if an arm switch happens we all assume that it'll happen across the whole product line but it might just be like a small laptop first and then eventually the bigger laptops and then maybe someday the the desktops but that might take like five years ten years who knows because it's it's so complicated so if an arm transition is on the horizon which i i think and hope it is
Marco:
Everything we know has to be questioned, every assumption.
Marco:
And maybe the Mac Pro they've made now is intended to just temporarily bridge that gap.
Marco:
Maybe they realize, like, we're only going to need this thing for five years, 10 years.
Marco:
And, you know, and maybe they figure, like, we don't need to address this market, this lower end market during that time, because if they're just patient, eventually we will solve their needs in a totally different way.
Yeah.
Casey:
You know, as you're talking about the ARM transition, it got me thinking that – and we're actually going to talk about this in Ask ATP in a minute.
Casey:
But it got me thinking that if you look at Apple's main and core products over the last few years, their laptops, their – let me try that again –
Casey:
They're main and core computer products, not, you know, phones and pads.
Casey:
But they're MacBook Pros, they're MacBook Airs, they're iMacs.
Casey:
With the exception of the Mac Pro, everything has been on a pretty steady evolutionary series, if you will, for several years now.
Casey:
And yeah, the 16, it is a departure in some ways.
Casey:
We got our inverted T back.
Casey:
We got our escape key back.
Casey:
And yeah, the touch bar was new a few years ago.
Casey:
But mostly it's not that revolutionary over the last, I don't know, five, ten years, something like that.
Casey:
And for the most part, I feel like it's been relatively predictable.
Casey:
Very easy for me to say that in hindsight.
Casey:
But, you know, there have been.
Marco:
I was going to say, our predictions suck at the time.
Casey:
Well, at the time, yeah.
Marco:
I think if it was more predictable, we'd have a much better record of our predictions being true.
Casey:
But you know what I mean, right?
Casey:
I feel like the three of us, and we were not the only ones, but the three of us mostly nailed the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And again, that's not unique.
Casey:
I'm not trying to get a gold star or anything.
Casey:
I'm just saying that was evolutionary and relatively predictable.
Casey:
But I feel like if there is, if there really and truly is an ARM transition, that's going to throw, as you just said, Marco, that's going to throw everything on its head.
Casey:
It's going to turn everything upside down.
Casey:
And what a fun and probably terrible and stressful time that will be to be an Apple enthusiast, right?
Casey:
Because so many things could get thrown away.
Casey:
Like to your point, Marco, does Thunderbolt get thrown away?
Casey:
Does USB-C get thrown away?
Casey:
I doubt it, but you never know.
Casey:
So much of our computing worlds may turn upside down, and I'm sure there will be some growing pains and some angst and some terror involved with that.
Casey:
But how fun would that be, especially as spectators?
Casey:
Because Marco swears he's not buying a Mac Pro.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
John just did buy a Mac Pro.
Marco:
Haven't bought one yet.
Marco:
Still a master of my domain.
Casey:
Yeah, well, have another beer and we'll see what happens over the next few hours.
Casey:
But anyway, you know, I obviously just spent a tremendous amount of money, in my opinion, on the iMac Pro, and I don't plan to replace it anytime soon.
Casey:
So if...
Casey:
If this arm transition happens, it is possible that the three of us, probably two of us, will be mostly spectators on the initial transition.
Casey:
And I'm actually really excited about that thought.
Casey:
I think that could be a lot of fun to watch.
Casey:
And again, I'm sure the three of us will have something to complain about.
Casey:
Did you know, gentlemen, that nothing is so perfect that it cannot be complained about?
Casey:
But I think it could be really fun to watch.
Casey:
And, you know, just as I was thinking about this, you know, before I started talking, imagine if the iPhone, I'm making this up, but the iPhone 15 comes out and they say, okay, we've got the A, I don't even know what that would be, the A20, let's say, you know, the Apple A20 processor.
Casey:
Oh, and by the way, the A20 actually powers our brand new MacBook.
Casey:
And again, I doubt that would happen, but how freaking cool would that be if the exact same processor in the iPhone is in like a full-on traditional computer?
Casey:
So many cool things could happen.
Casey:
I feel like we're on the precipice of so many cool things.
Casey:
And sitting here today, not knowing all the gotchas that come with all these ideas, it just seems like it'd be really, really fun.
Casey:
And I'm really enthusiastic and excited about the thought of it.
John:
As someone who lived through the past two CPU architecture transitions on the Mac, I can tell you that every one of those transitions was really cool.
John:
Like my memories of the PowerPC transition and the Intel transition were both positive.
John:
So my memories of the PowerPC transition was that all of a sudden Macs are getting way faster.
John:
Like I remember going to the computer store.
John:
and playing with the power pc max and just being like i can't believe like it looks like a mac on the outside but it is so much faster it was like bigger than like the ssd upgrade um you know perceptually because silly things like drawing a menu or using the graph and calculator app which was you know an amazing demo of the of the power of this thing or using like quick draw 3d or whatever you know any sort of power pc accelerate thing because remember during the transition like it
John:
huge swaths of the os were still in 68k including 68k assembler like it was not a smooth transition but even then i'm being like power pc like that's the future and there was all sorts of pie in the sky stuff about oh and by the way power pc is going to have this you know speaking of chip chirp common hardware reference platform where you're going to be able to make
John:
macs out of pc like hardware and so macs will be cheaper and more capable and it's a common platform that other companies are going to use too and it's all these fantasies that never came true about the power pc downless industry but it was it was exciting and the overall impression was macs are getting better then the internet transition which you two may remember similar thing it was scary because like
John:
intel isn't that the enemy what about the snail pentium 2 power pc altavac isn't you know there was the angst about it but as soon as people got those first like whatever they were core 2 duo you know machines in their hands like the core duo core duo yeah the pentium 4 uh dev machines were crap because pentium 4 was crap but yeah but the core duo ones and especially the laptops everybody shot up real quick about intel once we got the magnet like god they were so fast and so much cheaper
John:
And so much faster than the Macs they replaced, especially the laptops.
John:
It was like, all right, no one – I remember – and on this, you know, it's a different memory of this.
John:
It's a strange memory.
John:
I remember doing stuff in the terminal on an Intel Mac and going, I can't believe how fast GCC is compiling Perl.
John:
Like, I can't –
John:
it is so much faster how is this even possible like you know just like quote unquote the same mac the model before you know like the the amazing power mac g5 dual two gigahertz g5 cpus we couldn't even believe how much power we had at that time and you get like the base model crappy single cpu uh intel mac pro and compile pearl and it's like well that machine is dead to me now power pc forget it right like
Marco:
My white plastic MacBook loaded the Newegg page so much better than my PowerPC one did.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I'm hoping the ARM transition overall, despite all the pain and agony that's going to come with it, is going to be like those two.
John:
And the basic impression is going to be...
John:
max just got a lot better and it will you know like that that will be the overriding memory in hindsight of the transition that's that's that's what i hope and i think you know of all the companies that have ever done this apple is sort of the best in the industry at it so i'm hoping uh they will go well i'm optimistic about an arm transition can't happen soon enough he says as he sits next to his way too expensive intel computer
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Wes asks, what is the obsession with running your MacBook's adorable Pros and Airs in clamshell mode?
Casey:
It seems like a waste to have a 13 or 16 inch or somewhere in between display area go to waste, as well as the flakiness of the system when operated in that mode.
Casey:
This is actually a reasonable question, and let me speak only for me.
Casey:
I never ran in clamshell until at my jobby job a year or two, what, a year and a half ago.
Casey:
I ended up with two 4K monitors, and I had sat them on one of those...
Casey:
not a standing desk i forget the name of it now but the thing where it was like a tray that you put your monitors on you could make that whole tray stand up you know a foot or two and so your your quote-unquote desk was standing it's it's in every tech startup now i forget the name of the company but if i remember i'll put it in the show notes but anyways uh veridesk thank you my name is t in the chat room veridesk that's exactly right
Casey:
So anyway, so the point is the Veridesk thing that I had only had but so much space on it.
Casey:
And it basically only had the room for two 22 or 24 inch monitors.
Casey:
And because of that, and because these were two matching monitors, I didn't see any need to have a non-matching third panel off to the side.
Casey:
And so that's why I ran in clamshell mode.
Casey:
And truth be told, it mostly worked okay.
Casey:
It was not flawless by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
But it was mostly okay.
Casey:
And that's why I ran in clamshell mode.
Casey:
John, you do run in clamshell mode at work.
Casey:
Is that correct?
Casey:
And if so, what's the situation there?
Casey:
Remind me.
John:
So my situation is a little weird.
John:
Remember, my whole deal was I didn't want anything moving my windows around.
John:
And I have that 24 inch 1920 by 1200 display.
John:
So I've run my 15 inch MacBook Pro at 1920 by 1200 scale resolution.
John:
And then I mirror it to my display so that, you know, it's exactly the same point size on both displays.
John:
One is right and one is not, but exactly the same point size.
John:
And since it's mirrored,
John:
not only is it not useful to have the monitor open, but I find it distracting.
John:
Like if you're moving, like your mouse and your windows and you see them moving on another screen, it's just in your peripheral vision, right?
John:
So I close it because it's just distracting.
John:
And I think most people, the people who do running Clanshell, I would imagine the most common reason is that they don't... The whole reason you have it connected to another display is that display is bigger.
John:
And then ergonomically speaking, if you don't have a laptop stand, it's awkward to have...
John:
your other screen in such a different position right so that's why laptop stands are so popular they put they essentially hoist that laptop display up to normal ergonomic display height for you so if you don't have a laptop stand you're probably running in clamshell just because it's weird to look down into the left or right at your screen or down in front of you if you have it like that um
John:
And people who do have laptop stands, this is something I haven't seen.
John:
I've never seen anyone with a laptop stand run in clamshell mode.
John:
Because it's like, well, then why is it up on a pedestal like that?
John:
Like, there's no point in having it up on that pedestal if you're not going to open it and look at the screen.
Marco:
I think one issue for me, I used to run...
Marco:
laptop open on a stand as a second monitor.
Marco:
And I've only tried clamshell mode for a few brief periods in my computing life because it worked so poorly.
Marco:
The reason why I don't do it anymore, well, since I got a desktop at least, but the reason I don't do it anymore is that
Marco:
back when i did it the pixel density of laptops and desktop monitors was about the same and so you could put a laptop next to an external monitor and they would be about the same density so like if you'd move a window between the two it would be about the same size nowadays that's totally thrown off nowadays laptops are way higher density um and so it's harder to match that unless i guess you change settings and everything but um so it doesn't look as good and also like
Marco:
Never underestimate the value of just having like a nice clean looking desktop.
Marco:
You know, a lot of people have the space to have multiple monitors, but just choose not to because maybe they don't work that way.
Marco:
I prefer a single monitor.
Marco:
I don't really have a good spot on my desk to put.
Marco:
a giant 16-inch laptop open on a stand next to my monitor somewhere nearby.
Marco:
It would mess up the symmetry of my desk.
Marco:
I'd have more wires all over my desk.
Marco:
I'd have to move other stuff like speakers.
Marco:
It's a stupid reason, logically, that I don't want to mess up my disk arrangement.
Marco:
It isn't a good reason, logically, but...
Marco:
I like things to look nice, by my definition of nice.
Marco:
And if this breaks that, then I won't want to do it.
Marco:
You should just prepare the way.
Casey:
Hans Schneider writes, How do you deal with the noise of external backup drives?
Casey:
I have an iMac Pro I very much love, but I hate the noisy 8-terabyte hard drive next to it that I use for Time Machine.
Casey:
It's incredibly annoying.
Casey:
One of the many things that does not afflict me that I'm very thankful for is that I don't really care about fans the way that most people and probably certainly the two of you do.
Casey:
I don't like it, as I think we spoke about last week.
Casey:
Not my favorite, but it doesn't deeply offend me like it does the two of you.
Casey:
So if it were me, I'd probably just live with it.
Casey:
But I
Casey:
Let's start with Marco, who doesn't like fan noise, and then end with John, who is approximately allergic to fan noise.
Casey:
What would you do here?
Marco:
So I can tell you what I have done, because I've always cared about fan noise.
Marco:
I used to, back in my PC days, not be able to do much about it for most of the time, because I couldn't afford to try out different components, see what was loud.
Marco:
And for years, I had this high-pitched hard drive noise constantly in my bedroom, because the drive I bought just had...
Marco:
you know a bearing that got noisy and i've just stuck with it just have it whirring high pitched loudly for you know four years or so uh but anyway you know i i got into the like pc case modding scene and and put like dynamat on my pc case and got all these quiet fans and and uh you know all these major quiet heat sinks and these like quiet drive enclosures that would wrap the hard drive and basically like an enclosure with sound insulation inside of it it was a mess this whole scene but
Marco:
So I care a lot, and once I got to the point where computers were having only SSDs in them in the last X years, I have banned spinning hard drives from my office.
Marco:
And you can too.
Marco:
Now, the way I first did this was I had a big drive enclosure that was attached to a Mac mini server that I would put in my office closet.
Marco:
It's a medium-sized closet.
Marco:
There's no, like, real ventilation in there, but it's, like, enough space that it wouldn't really overheat.
Marco:
And then after that, I switched my large storage needs to a Synology, which is in my garage.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I basically moved the noise.
Marco:
And so that's one option you can do.
Marco:
If you have any kind of network, either network attack storage device or just like another computer you can use with external drives on it or whatever, you can move them outside of your office if you have anywhere else that you can put them that would be out of the way and wouldn't spread the noise.
Marco:
But more recently, SSDs are so cheap now.
Marco:
that it's almost to the point, or it might already be to the point, where for many people, their mass storage needs can be solved by just going all SSD, just plugging in external SSDs to your desktop.
Marco:
And once you go that route, you can put them pretty much anywhere because they're tiny and silent.
Marco:
You can tape them to the back of your iMac or stick them under the desktop surface so it's just kind of adhered to the bottom of your desk or whatever.
Marco:
Going all SSD for your...
Marco:
like external drives for various backup time machine, whatever.
Marco:
It did seem like this ridiculous indulgence until about maybe a year ago.
Marco:
But if I was starting from scratch today and I didn't already have my garage Synology running all my big hard drives in them,
Marco:
I think I would just buy a couple of big four to eight terabyte external SSDs and plug them into my computer and call it a day.
Marco:
At no point would I buy a hard drive after this because I just don't have big enough storage needs where going all SSD would be that ridiculous.
John:
So I've actually been thinking not about the noise issue, but about spinning versus SSDs for backup purposes.
John:
Because, you know, if you get a computer with a big SSD like I just did, then you're like, oh, how do I back that up?
John:
Like it multiplies out if you have multiple backups of the thing.
John:
i don't you know and four terabyte ssds are expensive right and you might need more than that if you want to have multiple versions of files right so spinning disks are still in the picture um obviously as we've noted many times this program i am a big fan of network attached storage for this purpose because that means i have a box with eight spinning disks that is noisy and has a terrible buzzing fan it's in my basement
John:
I can't hear it.
John:
It's not in the room.
John:
That is ideal.
John:
So I have lots of large, cheap storage far away.
John:
That said, I also have super-duper backups and, you know, Time Machine, and that's where internal storage comes in.
John:
I know this is not an option for you because you didn't waste a huge amount of money on a computer with internal storage, but...
John:
I just did, and guess what?
John:
You can put spinning hard drives in here.
John:
Oh, please don't.
John:
As I've discussed with my current computer, the secret to doing that and not driving yourself nuts is unmounting them, and then they'll spin down, and then they become silent.
John:
And good backup programs will mount them, spin them up, back up to them, and then unmount them, and then they'll be silent again.
John:
And if you schedule that to happen, say at 3 a.m., you can schedule a computer to wake up at 3 a.m.
John:
Mount its spinning hard drives, back up to them, unmount them, and go back to sleep.
John:
You never have to hear them.
John:
So this is basically my solution to having spinning disks.
John:
If you have to have them, have them be internal.
John:
And if you have to have them and they're internal, make them not spinning most of the time.
John:
And when they do have to spin, don't be there.
John:
The Karate Kid 2 technique.
Yeah.
John:
don't be there or just have them spend it briefly.
John:
And so I've had four, you know, I've had the maximum number of internal spinning disks in all of my tower computers used to be two.
John:
Then eventually it was four.
John:
I've got four drives sitting in my computer right now.
John:
One of them is an SSD.
John:
It's a terabyte SSD and I boot from it and all the other drives are unmounted and spun down.
John:
So I don't have to hear them.
John:
So,
John:
that doesn't really help with you know if you really need to have an online all the time and spinning well i don't know what to tell you like they're noisy uh you know and and if you have external drives the power bricks are a pain and the enclosures are a pain and i have a bunch of external drives here they're just not actually plugged into anything so they're also silent um but yeah um keep them spun down most of the time is the answer or keep them far far away
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And finally, Kiel asks, hey, guys, I'm thoroughly enjoying your Mac Pro 7,1 coverage, and I was wondering if you could see its looks as a departure for a new Pro Mac design language.
Casey:
For example, do you see an iMac Pro with machine drilled holes in its back and or using a 45 or 90 degree edges?
Casey:
I hope not because I just spent a whole pile of money on an iMac Pro.
Casey:
I think, if anything, iMacs are going to lose a lot of their bezels slash bezels.
Casey:
I don't think I see this design language trickling down, but I am not confident in that.
Casey:
John, what do you think?
John:
I think an iMac Pro that looks like the Pro Display XDR and has a 6K screen would be amazing.
Casey:
Oh, agreed.
John:
We talked about this on many past shows that the iMac, that's sort of the external case design that's been with us since the 5K iMac, maybe even before, but basically since the 5K iMac.
John:
No, even before that, it was the same, right?
Marco:
No, since the 27-inch iMac.
John:
Yeah, the 27-inch iMac wasn't 5K.
John:
It was non-Retina, right?
John:
That external case design, it's fine, and there's nothing particularly wrong with it, and it has served us well.
John:
But at a certain point, kind of like cars, you redesign just for the sake of redesigning.
John:
And hopefully you redesign adding enough room for a face ID, sensor array, or maybe making one or two things more user-accessible or expandable.
John:
There's lots of things that you can do.
John:
I would love it if the Mac Pro design language...
John:
whether you consider it the Swiss cheese holes or just the sort of rectilinear edges.
John:
Like if that, you know, came to the iMac line, probably the machining is too expensive for that line and not actually useful.
John:
Cause you don't need like, look at what the iMac pro gets away with.
John:
It is, you know, silent and cool and has, you know, if you don't know where to look, you don't even see where the air comes in and out of the thing.
John:
Right.
John:
So it does not need that many holes and,
John:
Uh, but I do hope that they're redesigned and if they can make some kind of family resemblance, even if it's just the straight edges, uh, I am all for that.
John:
So I think, I think it does make sense for, for there to be a new design and for it to look more related to the Mac pro, but I'm not willing to predict that it's literally going to look like the, uh, the pro display XDR.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Burrow, and HelloFresh.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
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-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't.
Casey:
mean to Accidental Tech Podcast.
So long.
Casey:
John, is your son learning how to drive yet?
Casey:
And regardless of if the answer is yes or no, what is your approach going to be for that?
John:
He's just 15, so he can't be learning to drive yet, but he does.
John:
He's going to soon have to, I think it's like whatever written test you have to take for your permit when he's 16.
John:
And so he'll be preparing for that soon enough.
John:
We're probably going to sign him up for an instructional driving course over the summer.
John:
And beyond that,
John:
I mean, it really depends.
John:
Like I can't tell how motivated he is to actually care about driving.
Casey:
That was my next question.
John:
The thing with the kids these days is they are far less motivated to drive in general than, than previous generations.
John:
Uh, especially if you live somewhere where there's reasonable public transportation, which not by world standards, we do not have reasonable public transportation where I live, but by us standards, we have semi-reasonable public transportation where I live.
John:
Um, but,
John:
So, we'll see what his motivation is.
John:
But if he is motivated, I am willing to teach him how to drive stick on a car that is not mine.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
How are you going to do that, tough guy?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Also, both of the cars in your family are stick, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, there is one car that is not mine.
Marco:
So, he has to learn stick and it has to be not on your car.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Exactly.
John:
Good luck with that.
John:
Enjoy.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Maybe he doesn't want to learn stick.
John:
If he doesn't want to learn stick, fine.
John:
You're never going to learn how to drive just by taking a driver education instructional course.
John:
You have to actually have time to practice elsewhere or whatever.
John:
We could find ourselves buying a used Honda Civic with an automatic transmission
John:
for it to be, like, quote-unquote, his car, if he thinks he even needs one at all and wants to learn how to drive.
John:
Like, I don't want him to end up like a lot of people that I know who are only a few years younger than me that, like, just made it deep into adulthood never knowing how to drive, just because I feel like it's a useful skill that you should have, even if you don't use it, even if you just take public transportation everywhere.
John:
It's good to know how to drive and to become comfortable with it because, like so many things, I think,
John:
you know driving well uh there's no substitute for experience uh and as you get old it becomes harder to learn new things so don't wait until you're 57 to start learning how to drive uh maybe get that over with like when you're young and spry and more likely to involve to survive the inevitable accidents you're going to get into
John:
um and maybe like young enough that your parents will help pay for the damage you do to yourself and society you know just the traditional american path of learning to drive is that you learn when you're a teenager you are a terrible driver you cause havoc you hopefully don't kill yourself or others and you make it through to adulthood being a competent enough driver to as we all know not let them touch
Marco:
doesn't this kind of apply to everything you learn when you're a teenager like you learn a crappy version of everything when you're a teenager you're reckless you try not to die most people succeed in that and then eventually they become an adult who is slightly better at things
John:
Yeah.
John:
And arguably it'd be better to learn when you are like 26 or something, but it's like, it depends on what time do you have in life to do this?
John:
Like if you're, if you actually do need a car, you probably want to be able to drive one and have a license before you
John:
you turn 26 and are entering the job market?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
For a lot of people, you need a car to get to a job, and most people start having jobs well before they're 26.
Marco:
So that I think is probably one of the reasons why.
John:
If this generation of children is able to improve our country to the point where we have a less dire public transportation situation, there's no reason we should all have to have cars.
John:
We could fix this in other ways, but I'm not particularly optimistic that's going to happen.
John:
That's putting quite a lot on them.
John:
For a variety of reasons.
John:
As the saying goes, you can tell how advanced the country is by whether it has good public transportation.
John:
And the real thing is, do the rich and powerful also take public transportation?
John:
That is like the S-tier, top-level country development in whatever the tech tree is for civilization.
John:
Do all the rich people take public transportation?
John:
Now you're cooking with gas.
John:
The U.S., by the way, is nowhere near that phase.
John:
Public transportation isn't even available for huge responses of people because there's just no public transportation available to them without traveling for many miles.
John:
And then when it is available, it's bad and relatively expensive and yada yada.
Marco:
I think New York might be having that status.
John:
They take helicopters.
John:
When they want to go to the Hamptons, they take a helicopter.
Casey:
Well, how rich are we talking?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
I disagree.
Casey:
I think Marco is correct.
Casey:
The greater New York area does have functional and reasonably decent public transportation.
John:
Right.
John:
Maybe I should amend that.
John:
The wealthiest people take public transportation and don't hate it.
John:
Because I think if you are very wealthy and used to pampered life and you have to take a subway to get somewhere and the subway is like late and or flooded and or gross smelling, like it's not, you know.
John:
Well, that's just the subway.
John:
I know, but like elsewhere in the world, elsewhere in the world, it doesn't, we have better trains that go faster, are quieter and cleaner and are on time much more often and are taken by everybody.
John:
And often there aren't, they are the best option.
John:
That's what I'm getting is when they're the best option, not because they're taking it just to be like, oh, I'm taking public transportation.
John:
Aren't I good?
John:
Like it's literally the best option.
John:
Like you prefer it because why bother driving yourself when you can just go somewhere and have a comfortable experience and the thing will be on time and it won't be crowded and it'll be clean and silent and fast.
Marco:
yeah right you got me there