A Compromised Machine
Why don't you just build a gaming PC?
Your video card is slow.
There's some quick follow-up about, guess what, the Mac Pro.
Well, come on.
We did a whole episode on it.
There's not going to be zero follow-up.
I know.
No, that's fine.
After we recorded last episode, somebody took it apart.
I think it was first OWC, and then everyone else jumped on the reporting of it.
But basically, they discovered that the Mac Pro CPU is socketed, and it's the regular...
standard Intel CPU with the heat spreader on top so you can easily take it out and replace it.
And so everyone told me, hey, you can buy the CPUs you wanted.
And more usefully to everyone else, hey, you can upgrade your Mac Pro CPU in the future.
Now, in all my history of building my own computers back when I was a PC guy and then ever since then owning Macs,
I have never once upgraded a CPU.
And the main reason why is because usually the CPU is not the only problem in a computer once it starts getting old and slow.
And secondarily to that, which is more limiting, usually you can't really upgrade the CPU very far.
Usually by the time there are CPUs that are substantially faster than what you have,
They either need a new socket, or they need a different chipset on the motherboard, or they need to use a faster bus, more than what your board can do.
Something like that.
Usually, within the socket that you have on your board, and within what your board will support CPU-wise, usually it's not really worth any upgrades that are available within that little narrow range.
So, upgrading a CPU in this case is not going to be that...
common of a thing.
It also was pretty hard to get to.
It requires pretty substantial disassembly of the whole thing, including fiddling with some very, very small, precise ribbon cables and stuff that connect all the big boards together.
So it's not like replacing RAM.
It's not like you pop the slot and that's it.
So I don't really think it's really going to be a thing that anybody does.
What makes it a little bit different in this case is...
There is a pretty vast difference in core counts that are available for this socket.
So if you start with the 4-core, and then in two years you buy the 8-core, that'll be a big difference in parallel performance.
But even then, single-thread performance, you're probably not really going anywhere.
So it's probably not going to be worth it for almost anybody to actually do this.
let's not forget the uh the psychological trauma of opening up your beautiful trash can and carefully prying it apart especially especially the things that you're pulling heat from like i know you don't have to take off the integrated heat spreader and everything but anything involving like you have to make sure when you put it back together that all the correct contact is made between all the right parts to keep things cool because bad things can happen if it's not and
It's the type of thing you get good at if you do it a lot, but most of us don't do this for a living, don't build computers for a living, don't upgrade computers for a living.
So how many computers do you even own throughout your life, even if you upgrade the CPU in every single one of them?
It's not a skill that I count among the things that I'm confident I can do.
I'm, you know, I've, I've replaced heat sinks on graphics cards and stuff, but I've done it a handful of times in my life.
And I certainly don't want to crack open this five, seven, $10,000 trash can cylinder, yank out the CPU and put it in another one.
Maybe when the thing is like five years old and I feel like it's depreciated, but it's not as bad as opening a laptop, but that's kind of part of the Apple experiences.
You don't have to do that stuff.
You just buy it.
It comes out of the box.
It's pretty.
Everything's in it.
It works and you use it.
Also, there is a lot of value in keeping your computer with the stock Apple parts.
Anyone who's been around Apple long enough has heard stories about how people, say, send in their laptops for service from Apple and they get rejected because it has third-party RAM in it.
or Apple takes a third-party RAM out and doesn't return it, or something like that.
Having third-party RAM is always a little bit questionable whenever you need Apple service.
And having a non-standard or upgraded CPU in there, they probably wouldn't notice.
But if they did notice, that would make it pretty hard to get service.
Even if something broke that they should cover and otherwise would cover, that might cause problems for you.
And so...
And also, what if things go a little bit wrong?
What if your computers are just being a little bit unstable?
Is it because you didn't apply the right amount or pattern of thermal paste on the CPU or you didn't remount the heatsink properly?
You never know.
And so you have all these things that can become your problem.
And for what gain?
And if the gain is maybe you saved a couple hundred dollars on a $5,000 computer or by putting in some third-party thing...
Or the gain is maybe you extend the life by a little bit longer.
I don't know.
In most cases, it's not worth it.
Especially now, in the RAM example, Apple's RAM pricing in the last few years has actually gotten pretty competitive.
It's not the cheapest.
But the price difference between Apple and anybody else of actual good quality, like OWC or Crucial, the price difference between those is not that big for most configurations for RAM.
So it actually is pretty plausible for the few remaining Macs that even have RAM slots.
It's pretty plausible to just pay Apple's price and be set for a while with that.
Okay.
Any other follow-up before we move on to some other things?
You mean before we talk about the Mac Pro even more?
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I don't know.
I think you should be apologizing to the listeners because now they have to type in your name instead of ATP, which is the best coupon code that you could possibly enter.
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This is really exciting stuff.
Is this the show?
That's what people tune in for.
Okay.
Are we really going straight to Mac Pro Talk?
We're not going to do anything else?
I guess that probably makes sense.
What else is there?
Well, I threw something in there because of reviewing Apple's 2013 because I did a blog post about it because this is the first show of the new year.
So, you know, why not talk about last year, how Apple did last year?
I am all for that, John.
Thank you for providing at least a small reprieve.
A brief oasis of non-macro talk.
All right, so John, tell me about how Apple did in 2013.
Well, did either one of you remember my Apple 2013 to-do list post from early in 2013?
Nope, I did, because I'm a huge fanboy.
There you go.
Well, when I...
I was thinking of ways to look at Apple.
I didn't want to do a like wish list, you know, those ones like here.
Here are the things that I really want or like the things that are wrong with their current products.
There's lots of different angles that tech sites take at the, you know, what should Apple do?
What should they do next?
What should they do this year or whatever?
And the angle I took at the beginning of last year was let me make a to-do list.
Like if I was to give Tim Cook this list and say, here's what you got to do this year.
And you're not going to put crazy stuff on it, but like make me a hoverboard or, you know, stuff like that.
Cause that's not actionable.
Right.
And I'm not trying to predict what will Apple do like a rumor site.
Here's what we think Apple will do in the next year.
Cause that's a totally different exercise.
I was trying to make a list of things that I think are feasible and
reasonable not crazy they're going to be pretty boring but that apple should do it's a it's a to-do list for them they should just go down and during the year make sure you do all this stuff check check check check check uh and i totally planned you know by the end of the year to go back and see how they did and so that's what i did i just looked at the items there were 10 items and i went through each one of them and it's not surprising that they did pretty well because again these are not predictions rumors or wish lists it's very straightforward stuff so uh
I guess we'll just go through them because they're pretty quick.
Ship OS X 10.9 and iOS 7.
Duh.
Keep doing that stuff that you're doing.
They did that stuff.
That was really going out on a limb there, John.
It's got to be on the to-do list because think of it this way.
Going out on a limb, iOS 7
You're pretty sure that's going to happen.
But 10.9, you know, well, they could get thrown off, or iOS 7 could turn out to be more of a problem than they expected, and they could delay 10.9.
So it's conceivable they could have missed one of those, or they could have done them really badly, like if one of them was a disaster, right?
I also gave these items letter grades.
So if one of those things was a disaster, it's like, yeah, you did that.
You shipped those two OSs, but one of them was terrible.
But, you know, they weren't, so that's fine.
Yeah, and I have a bone to pick.
I think you're suffering a little bit from grade inflation here.
I think some of these grades are too high.
And lots of people think they're too low.
And so, you know, I should have thought harder before doing the grades because it's kind of like ratings on game reviews.
If you just review a game, people will leave you comments like, you know, that they disagree or agree with someone.
But as soon as you attach a number or a letter grade or a number of stars, people are like, this is totally not a 9.753.
It's a 9.755 easily.
And they'll just argue forever about like the same way you argue about grades.
This is not an A minus.
It's definitely an A or whatever.
And
I'm kind of regretting putting those grades in there because now that's all people can see, even you.
So we'll get to your disagreements as we get to each individual item, but do you think the A- is unwarranted for 10.9 and iOS 7?
No, I think that's actually... I would have even given that an A. I put the minus in there just because... I've linked to your thing about the button shapes and all the options they're adding, and that's a sign, as you wrote in your post, as we talked about on the show, once you start having to add options and stuff, that's a sign that maybe you didn't nail it quite the first time, and a lot of the times, no...
no series of options will fix the fundamental flaw in the philosophy of your design like you might have to go back options are kind of a quick fix but it's you kind of push something one thing in over here and something else pops out over there and then you push the other thing in and it's kind of you don't end up with a nicely shaped sort of product in the end you end up with some lots of lumps and so ios 7's ui has a couple of those minor warts that's why i throw in the minus you know
Next item was diversify the iPhone product line.
That's a vague item.
I didn't want to be particularly specific.
I said, yeah, just got to do something.
It's got to be more than one iPhone, more than one new iPhone, not just last year's model and the new one.
You have to diversify.
And I've been talking about that for years and years.
They did it with 5C.
I gave it a B+, only because...
The 5C is a little bit disappointing in that it's not more different.
My whole thing was that if you make a purpose-built, cheaper phone, you can do it better than simply offering last year's model.
And they kind of did that, I guess, by going with plastic and stuff and maybe putting a little bit bigger battery.
But otherwise, it's basically just an iPhone 5 in there.
And I feel like there's an untapped potential in a purpose-built, second-tier iPhone.
So maybe the next run at it, they'll do a little bit better, but we'll see.
Are we getting the impression that the 5C isn't actually selling that well?
I don't even know if Apple is going to break that down.
We'll have to wait for their earnings calls.
But it seems like since the iPhone is a high end product that I mean, well, like the lines, all the people lining up the early adopters, obviously, they're going to want the fancy phone.
And it seems like the people in line when they had people going through and surveying them were there for the 5S, not the 5C.
But everyone has said, okay, well, that's fine for the people who'd line up in the first week or whatever.
What about over the long term, people who just wander into the store and want to replace their iPhone or want to try an iPhone for the first time?
Maybe they're all buying 5Cs.
I don't even know if Apple will give us that breakdown.
This to-do item is not predicated on the particular success of that model, merely that it has to exist.
I'm sure Apple will tweak the pricing, the power, and the mix.
I think they can diversify further.
In fact, I haven't made a 2014 to-do list for them, but...
uh it's hard for us to know and i'm not even sure apple's going to tell us so i think we just have to wait on that can i create a 2014 to-do list for you that includes one item of creating the 2014 list for apple you can create it but you have to wait a year to rate me on how well i did how well i accomplished that i can be patient yeah wait can you
I already gave up.
I already bought the Mac Pro, for God's sake.
Yeah, seriously.
So for the next item was keep the iPad on track, which is a boring one, but it's something you have to do, and it's on the to-do list.
You can't, because if that's not on the to-do list, you go through the year, hey, I did everything I needed to do this year, right, guys?
And Tim Cook says to me, he said, no, you forgot to...
Put out iPad updates.
So the iPad Air is pretty great.
The iPad Mini went Retina.
I gave it an A-, because the iPad 2 is still there, and it's kind of creaky that they're still selling it for that price, even though there are customers for it.
Again, I think a purpose-built model for that market would be better.
uh and the ipad air really really needs more ram like that's the one thing keeping me from not the one thing keeping me from buying the ipad air but one of the many things keeping me from buying the ipad air is it's kind of a shame they didn't bump the ram up uh over the ipad 4 and i think even the ipad 3 all just have a gigabyte and with the power that's in the a7 and everything that it deserves more ram so a minus there
introduce more better better retina max kind of the the ones i was kind of talking about were the portables where they did finally put the you know the iris pro graphics in the macbook pro to give the integrated gpu enough power to handle the screen and more things can go on the integrated gpu they don't have to go to the discreet
And actually, the screen is only on the high-end model, but it's still there.
So that's all good.
But the Air and the iMac, no retina at all.
And the worst part, as we'll probably talk about later, the Mac Pro's retina abilities are, at this point, extremely limited, and that's disappointing.
So we already talked about giving up on retina, giving up on the retina dream for last year and maybe next year.
Yeah.
This turned out to be a particularly controversial one.
Make messages work correctly.
And I wrote messages, but then I referenced iMessage.
I was mostly talking about the application messages that's on the Mac.
I think it's probably called messages on the phone, too.
But iMessage is what people think of it when they use it on iOS.
Anyway.
What I was saying is like, it's an instant message service.
You type text and it appears in someone else's screen.
You have little conversations with little bubbles.
It's basically the replacement for iChat.
And it was pretty crappy in beta.
And it was pretty crappy when it came out for real.
And I said, you got to fix this.
Because it's an instant message client.
It's got to work.
And as I said in the report card here, is it fixed now?
It's hard for me to tell because I don't have a representative survey of every single person who's using messages in the entire world.
But in my own personal experience and in the experience of the people who send me emails, tweet at me, and in people who I know, there are still routinely really embarrassing dumb problems with messages.
Like...
messages being in the wrong order or clicking on a conversation and messages and the right hand pane showing you a different conversation and those types of fundamental areas oh what's the big deal it's a small little bug right you can't you just can't trust an instant message program that does that like it's it's it's kind of a degree of difficulty type of situation where okay so in some crazy obscure situation with 20 different devices maybe does this weird thing fine but this is like
Just from one person to another, one Mac to another, having a simple conversation where you type something and it appears and they type something and it appears and it can't even handle that correctly.
And that's why I gave them a D because their task was make messages work correctly.
And I think they still haven't done it.
I still routinely see reports from people and routinely experience myself.
really basic bugs with messages and it's not that they're the end of the world it's not deleting all my data it's not it's not you know hosing my hard drive or causing kernel panics but it's failing to be a competent instant message client if that happens to you once a month once a year is that okay what if you if you you clicked on a conversation and start typing and don't realize until you know a minute or two later that you're actually typing in a totally different conversation you said something you didn't want to say in that window
Or things being in the wrong order and not being able to make sense of old conversations or messages like inserting themselves up into your history or losing your entire scroll back.
That's unacceptable.
It's acceptable in a beta.
It's maybe acceptable in a 1.0.
But at this point, the basics should be sorted out.
Now, I've used, like, every IM client.
You can, you know, high-profile one.
Yahoo Instant Messenger, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, you know –
custom Jabber servers, you name it, I've used them.
And I'm not dinging Apple for not getting the really hard stuff right.
I'm dinging them for not getting the basics right.
And some people say, oh, it works fine for me.
I send messages all the time.
It works perfectly.
Well, that's great.
But there's still enough people for whom it doesn't work correctly that I gave them a D on the task of make messages work correctly.
See, I disagree there.
Well, I shouldn't say I disagree.
I just don't see any of those issues.
So if I saw those issues, I would rate it the same way.
But I actually – I am going to ruin things for myself by saying this out loud.
But I almost never have problems with iMessage and I almost never have problems with the Messages app.
I don't ask a lot of iMessage.
I don't ask a lot of my IM client on the Mac questions.
But I very rarely – in fact, I can't even remember the last time I've had an issue with either.
And so I'm stunned that not only are you saying – well, I shouldn't say stunned, but I'm surprised that not only are you saying that you're experiencing all these issues, but you've clearly collected a lot of feedback from regular people saying – other people saying that they're also experiencing the issues.
I mean, what I was getting on Twitter was one person was objecting that says this never happens to them and it's an unfair grade or whatever.
And then a few other of my random followers saw that.
And one guy said, like, I just took a survey of 10 iPhone users in this room and all 10 have seen problems like these recently.
And, you know, there's other people who I follow who are just having, you know.
a months long years long battle with messages and constantly post the screenshots of the screw ups or whatever and people send me email it doesn't happen to everybody it's not widespread it's not an epidemic it's not it's not a big deal but it's a big enough deal like casey you said it's never happened to you say it happened once just once where you clicked the conversation started typing and didn't realize it was the wrong conversation
After that, you're going to look at messages a little bit differently.
And say it happened maybe not just once, maybe like once two years ago, and then once six months later, and then once a couple months after that.
Eventually, you start to say, look, this program, it's not terrible.
It works fine most of the time, but I have to constantly be watching it.
And other programs, you don't have to constantly be watching.
Hell, even Skype, for crying out loud.
you type a message and it appears.
It doesn't misdeliver.
It doesn't deliver it twice.
It doesn't send it to the wrong person.
The messages are sorted correctly in the scroll back.
You know, all those things that we just take for granted.
I mean, for crying out loud, if Skype is doing it correctly and Apple can't, it's, you know, it's not, it's not because this is a big deal, but this was a to-do item, which was,
Apple, bring your instant message client.
Help.
Bring it up to the reliability standard established by iChat, even.
Using AOL's servers.
Right.
And they haven't even.
They haven't even got up to... There were fewer problems with iChat.
So I give that one a D. Well, and the most interesting thing to me about this is that
To me, these are the kinds of problems that Apple doesn't from the outside seem to care about at all.
They'll care about an antenna gate, which actually wasn't a problem, but they'll care about something that everyone's screaming and yelling about.
But when it's an intermittent thing, it seems like it never, ever, ever gets fixed.
Or if it does, it's just a happy accident riding along with some other bug fix that was unrelated.
I feel like these are the sorts of things that they ignore constantly.
Well, it's so hard to debug this, though, because people file radars on it.
It's like, this one time I launched messages and it did this crazy thing.
And here's a screenshot of the crazy thing.
How can they debug that?
They have no idea.
It's a client, it's a server issue, there's data involved, all of which is gone by that point.
I understand it would be difficult for them to debug it.
It's not like, well, there's some obvious fix they're not doing.
But it's their job to just make something that works.
Many people have made instant message clients that work.
Again, ICQ, AIM, using the native clients, using Adium for them, Jabber, Google Talk.
Google Talk has a web component.
Google Talk I have fewer problems with.
That does a thing in the web browser, plus I'm using Adium at the same time.
They have to figure out what's going on here and fix it.
And I didn't give this one an F because I think they did make messages work better.
They just didn't make it work better enough.
Like I should no longer be experiencing the type like just someone asked me, what did this happen to you?
And as a matter of fact, it just happened yesterday.
My parents were here and I was trying to demonstrate something with messages and sending a message from one computer to another to show.
I wanted to show how like when you don't have messages launched, you can still get the notifications and stuff.
And I was just demonstrating messages from one Mac to another.
And I couldn't get a message to go from one Mac to another.
Both of them using messages, both signed in with two different Apple IDs and two different computers.
And I would send messages and they wouldn't appear.
And I would send messages and they wouldn't appear.
And I quit and relaunched the programs and did this, did that.
And all of a sudden they started working.
But the messages that I sent that didn't appear, never appeared.
Maybe they'll appear next month out of order or somewhere.
And I don't know, but that's, that's, that's inexcusable.
We're coming to the end here.
Make iCloud better?
I actually gave this one a C, because I think they have made iCloud better.
I wrote about it in Mavericks, where the iCloud Core Data team got a chance to regroup.
Maybe it's too late for them to win back the hearts and minds of people, but they are at least trying to fix the problems that they had.
But in general, I don't think iCloud still has a good reputation, mostly because...
Like what they provide, the kind of control they provide to you is like go into a preference pane and check a checkbox or, you know, something simple like that.
And when it doesn't work, you just kind of have to stare at it until it does.
Like, oh, just wait, maybe it'll appear.
You know, just launch iPhoto and let it sit there.
Maybe stuff in PhotoStream will appear eventually.
If it doesn't, I don't know what to do.
Like there's no visibility.
So if you're not going to provide any visibility or any sort of way to debug, which is fine, I'm all for not letting people see all the gears and touch all that stuff, but you've just got to make it work all the time, and iCode still doesn't.
I still also disagree that the iCloud, and the word iCloud applies to lots of different things.
Talking specifically about the files and documents and data storage within apps and syncing all that,
I still disagree that that's even a well-designed system.
That I think conceptually, the whole idea of each app being its own silo and having this iCloud container in it that's pretty much opaque to everything else, or completely opaque to everything else.
On iOS, it almost makes sense.
On the Mac, it's really confusing and really clunky.
And I would even say on the Mac, it's badly designed conceptually.
And I still don't see this really taking off or going anywhere in the future.
Yeah, they haven't really made another run at that.
I think they're still in the deep think stage.
Well, there are two stages.
One is make the existing stuff work correctly and reliably, which is a totally separate issue.
And the second is let's think about how we can deal with the whole silo thing.
And I don't think they're going to –
i'm hoping eventually they'll come back and say we've thought about this and here's our solution to that and it will be kind of a big picture solution not just like some kind of weird band-aid or hack that enhances the silo system so there's like this little straw being drawn between silos where you can send things i don't know uh so i hope they're considering that but that that wasn't what i was getting at with to do item i was mostly just saying mostly going for reliability and uh and speed and stuff
Maybe next year's list was something like that.
We'll see.
I wouldn't hold my breath.
Yeah.
If there is a list.
Next one was Resurrect, iLife, and iWork.
And they did that, but they kind of did it Pet Sematary style.
Well, I don't know if either one of you read that book or saw the movie.
But anyway, iLife and iWork are back, but they're not really the applications we thought they would be.
Like...
they're new they're different but sometimes they have fewer features and it's not kind of like wow this makes the old versions like crap it's more like boy i hope i can still get my work done with these new versions because they removed a lot of features and they changed the file format and all this other stuff so it's not really not really what i was looking for but they did resurrect it right they're back although not the not the names but the individual apps and hey they're free why not
Yeah, I don't know.
I actually use the iWork apps.
I don't use Microsoft Office.
I don't even have it installed.
I use the iWork apps for work.
And granted, my kind of work does not require frequent use of them.
At least numbers I do use frequently, actually, for accounting stuff and the occasional graph.
But...
I have not found anything in the new versions that I think is better than the old versions.
And I want to like these so much, and I just can't.
I'm having a really hard time having any faith in Apple to do right by their application software anymore.
Their OS is doing great.
Both OSs are doing great.
Their hardware is doing great, as I've said in the past.
Their application software is really suffering.
And I looked at the...
at the Apps by Apple page on the Mac App Store to see, oh, let me get a list of all their major application software.
And it's not a very long list.
It's basically iLife, iWork, Final Cut, Logic, Aperture, and a couple of little administrative things.
There's really not a lot there.
And it seems like every major update they've done recently has been either mediocre or downright destructive to their applications.
And I really question what's going on there.
Is it that they don't have enough time to do this right?
Are they in too much of a crunch every year and they want to hit this release cycle?
Is it a problem of one of the leaders of one of the groups in the company?
Is it a problem of priorities?
Is it a problem of design?
What...
What is causing them to... Like, now I'm scared.
Any Apple app I use, iLife, iWork, Pro, I am actually scared to see what Apple does to it next.
It's reached that point.
And that's really bad.
I think they're in the same corner as Microsoft found itself in.
The...
The barrier to entry, the price of being part of this market is now higher and different in ways they're not prepared for.
And what I mean by that is when Microsoft kept revising Office, or Windows for that matter, and the internet aged on, their reaction was, I guess this means we have to add internet crap to Microsoft Word or something, I think, guys?
Is that what we have to do?
And the next thing is like, all right, well...
i think it means we have to make like a web version of office or something i don't know and i think of this and i think of google back there kind of smiling and gloating like we have one version of you know google docs or a spreadsheet or whatever and it's not a fancy version it's not amazing but we just have one and we can put all our resources behind that but now apple has to make the ios version and the os 10 version and the stupid web version so
have to make three versions of their programs and this release seemed to be about synchronizing them feature wise and file format because it was embarrassing when you had like oh the web version can use the you can edit the file you can just view the files or edit the ones you made on your mac but when you put them on ios some features don't work and it was that was embarrassing when they had the three versions and they weren't in sync
And some of them you could create some things that couldn't be viewed in others and vice versa.
And so this release is more about we have to synchronize.
But look what they're doing.
They're synchronizing what's basically three entirely different applications.
God knows how much code they share, if anything, between iOS and the Mac, maybe some there.
But like the web version, who knows?
And that's what they've got.
And they've got to be feeling like, but we must be doing something wrong here because I know native software is great and everything, but Google just has to make one version of these and we have to make three and that feels wrong and we're spread too thin and we have trouble hiring and this is not a big priority.
And so, and we need to hit our deadlines and talk about the yearly deadline.
Like I work, the latest version was 09, right?
And iLife, it was like 11.
Yeah, iLife was like a mix of like 10 and 11.
I looked everything up when I made that post, and it's like, it's really, it basically, the iPad came out, and then all development on Mac applications stopped.
Because all the teams, seriously, because all the teams were like, then, oh my god, rushed to create iPad version, and then, oh, iPhone version.
And, you know, it's very clear that Apple is using very small teams.
And we know that from talking to people there.
We know that they use very small teams on stuff like this.
And
It's clear that this is like they were distracted by having to make iOS versions and then having to update the iOS versions.
And now all of a sudden, now they're back to the Mac having to make something because it's been almost four years without having made anything really.
They have to make some kind of update.
But it's not like they've been working for four years on the Mac version straight.
They've been working on the Mac version for maybe a year.
And on top of all this stuff, having to cram all this in, it's very clear that they're not handling their size well at all.
I know we're not talking about software methodologies right now, but this gets me back to one thing about software development that I've always believed, and I find it frustrating when it's not the case, is that
I'm a big proponent of leaving developers on a product.
So if you have a team that builds some application, when the application is done and it ships, don't take those people off and assign them to a new product and repeat that process.
It doesn't mean that people can't work on different products or whatever, but in general, there must always be a team working on X. That's the cost of having a product.
The cost of having a product is the team that builds it, and you've got to have a team there that supports that product and makes the next version.
And that team's only job should be to make that product as awesome as it can.
Now, maybe that product becomes irrelevant, and then you've got to move them.
Maybe that product has to change in a certain way.
But you can't just shift them like, oh, hey, we did that, yay.
It seems like from the outside that...
that uh apple has like these a players and like wherever the fire is or wherever the most important thing is the a players get swooped off to there it's exciting it's fun like hey now we're doing ios but it's a secret project so pull off all the best coco guys and bring them over to ios right and hey now we're doing the amazing holographic watch levitating hoverboard everybody pull them over to that secret project right like
that's that's not a good way to support your products you have to you have to leave a team in place like well but if we do that everything have these teams in place they're like stuck there with those development resources are basically dead to us they're not dead they're there making a new version a new version to make them better and better and we all see the point where that kind of stopped like iPhoto got better and better up to about two versions ago and then it just got worse and worse
And, you know, same deal with many other products that we're talking about where we could tell when there was teams actively working on them and each new version was a big thing.
For example, iOS has teams actively working on it and each new version is like, wow, look at what they've done, right?
Or the compiler team.
They didn't take those guys off.
The compiler team was, hey, we did this.
We're done.
No, every year they have new stuff.
That team, it's probably a small team, and that's fine or whatever.
I'm not saying you need Microsoft-sized teams with hundreds of people, but every year there is a compiler team.
It's probably good that you can't take the compiler guys and make them do the next version of numbers for iOS or something because they're just compiler guys, and what else are they going to do?
It might work better.
Yeah, well...
But every year, they make the programming language, Objective-C runtime, the compilers.
They make that better every year.
And the Xcode team, I'm assuming, just does Xcode year after year, and that gets revised.
But you're right.
It seems like the guys who were doing iLife was like, oh, no, but now we've got to make all these for iOS.
And maybe it's not the same guys or whatever.
Oh, no, we have to make these things.
And so who's left on the iPhoto team?
Well, your job is to use a couple of the new controls to make it look more like iOS and iOS.
keep it running on the new version of the operating system and take away keywords under photos because you want to drive john syracuse crazy and do you think that's like there's like one guy at apple somewhere whose job it is to just drive you crazy i want to find the person who took keywords out from underneath photos and find the person who's keeping them away because maybe you steve jobs that took them away fine now he's gone we can put them back i will give you one word that will solve your problem
Lightroom.
It's too late for me.
It's not.
It's never too late.
It's too late.
Look, I used iPhoto for years.
I then used Aperture for years.
Lightroom.
Trust me.
It is night and day.
I mean, this is ultimately what I'm doing here is I'm replacing Apple software.
With Adobe software.
Look what you're doing to yourself.
I know.
That's an improvement.
To be fair, Lightroom is, I would say, possibly Adobe's best product.
It's a really good product.
It's nothing like their other ones.
It's really good.
All right.
So that's...
I made, it's my own fault for not being clear in the to-do item.
Resurrect, I'll have to not work.
And what I meant was like they hadn't been updated in so long and now they've been updated.
And like I said in the post, I got to be careful what I wish for.
They did resurrect them.
Yeah, I think B- was optimistic on that grade.
I just said resurrect.
They did resurrect them, right?
I didn't say resurrect them and make them.
I should have been more specific.
So they get a B-.
Because I am glad that at least... What if there was no new version of iWork?
Or what if it was just that web thing that no one cares about?
That would be a lower grade.
Next item was to reassure Mac Pro lovers.
I give that one an A because you've got a dramatic intro video at WWDC.
Remember that thing with all the deep bass in that room and the cool video and like...
You know, that's it's reassuring.
Apple is totally in the Mac Pro business again.
But, you know, the whole nine yards and the factory in the U.S.
And yep, definitely an A there.
I'm going to choose to just be quiet here.
Better get used to it.
I'm kidding.
I'm totally kidding.
I'm totally kidding.
And my final item was do something about TV, which was conceivable last year.
They could have done something about TV.
And what I meant by that, if you look back at the original item, I have specific examples of what I was talking about.
It's like do something, something different than what you've been doing instead of just having a little Apple TV box, you know, make it make a TV set by Netflix, make an app store on the TV, something that we all recognize as
A big move in the television world because Apple has been hinting that they're interested in television.
They want to do something there.
They see lots of potential, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I thought it was time for them to actually do something, but they didn't.
We don't know why.
Maybe we'll find it next year.
That's the only one I gave an F because they totally didn't do that.
But that was kind of a stretch anyway, and it was kind of vague.
That was the closest thing to a wish list item.
uh so but overall i'd say give this a pretty good rating it was a pretty good year for them they did they did pretty much most of the things they were supposed to do to varying degrees of success but i would give them check marks like yep we did this did this did this they did all the things they had to do no big stumbles just a few minor ones here and there that mostly only nerds care about so good year for them
Now, do you want to give any hints on if you made the 2014 list, what that might include?
I think it might be harder for me because last year I was trying to look for a way into this other than speculating about what they might do or doing a wish list.
And to-do seemed appropriate at the time because it seemed like they had a lot of work cut out for them.
You know, that was kind of at the beginning of the, you know, Tim Cook's run.
And it's like, well, what do you got to do?
What do you got to do if you want our Apple?
You've got a lot of product lines and you have to sort of hit all of them.
And, you know, a couple of them are in various states of crisis.
Other ones hadn't been updated in a while.
So you got to X, Y and Z going into next year.
I don't know if a to-do list is the right format.
Maybe now it's time to start thinking of a different angle on this.
So I'm not sure what I'm going to do for that, if anything.
But I want to think about it some more.
Because if I was going to make a to-do list, I think it would be kind of boring.
And I think I would have to start to go into the speculation type stuff of new product categories and TV mumbo-jumbo.
So I don't know if this is the right format for next year.
I mean, the funny thing is you can copy and paste this list with very few changes and just say, all right, do this again.
Yeah, well, there's the things they have to do every year.
But, like, for example, I would gladly not put OS X 10.10.10 on there to say, like, look, I don't think you need 10.10 next year.
You could do 10.9s and march your way up through the single digits there and do 10.10 in 18 months.
The world would not end.
If that gives you enough time to do a new file system, I'm all for it.
You know what I mean?
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Of course.
And iOS 7, you can imagine an iOS 8 that is a lot like iOS 7, but with a few new frameworks and features and some minor UI tweaks.
That's what iOS 8 is going to be.
They're going to call that iOS 8, but it's not...
I think that's fine.
And all the rest of the stuff about diversifying the iPhone, if they go another year with just two phones, I think that's fine.
You don't have to do that.
Keeping the iPad on track, I think there's room for an iPad Pro in there, but maybe not next year.
You're right.
It's a lot of the same stuff.
They have certain product lines they have to keep up, but I tried to be specific about what I was expecting.
What are they going to do with the Mac line?
You've got to bring more Retina out.
That's going to be repeated next year, too.
And messages in iCloud, I don't even know what to say about those things anymore.
Yeah.
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Yeah.
But here's the thing about OmniGraph on a lot of the Omni applications.
They look kind of like Keynote, where it doesn't seem like there's a lot of features there.
But believe me, there are a ton of features.
I liken it to the days when I used to use, I think it was AutoCAD way back in the day, with a command line.
I don't know if you ever use AutoCAD, where you'd sort of type in commands to do sort of...
It's not obvious.
Like, you'd look at the tools that were on the screen.
It didn't seem like you could do a lot.
But if you knew what type of the little prompt, you could do amazing things, right?
Well, if you just look at Omnigrap, well, it just looks like a palette of tools and a bunch of stuff or whatever.
But there are so many keyboard commands, keyboard shortcuts, weird tools where you can copy and paste subsets of styles from one place to another and duplicate items aligned and rotate them and reconnect things to magnets.
It is amazing.
Like, if you've ever seen someone who's really good using OmniGraffle, it is amazingly impressive.
And I feel like I can barely scratch the surface of what this program can do.
And I keep buying the upgrades, like to stay in the upgrade Pyswagon, even though I almost never use it.
I use it like maybe once or twice a year.
I just love the program.
I just love having it on my computer.
Yeah, I mean, their stuff is really, these are pro apps.
You know, everything you described about having this deep potential for learning new shortcuts, learning new features, that's how pro apps are.
And these are really, truly pro apps.
And they're really great.
So thanks a lot to the Omni Group for sponsoring.
All right, so we should probably get to an Antex Mac Pro review.
Well, if you insist that you would like to talk about this.
I would love, I would like nothing more than to talk about the Mac Pro.
Did you read it, Casey?
I did.
Wasn't it good?
the review was very good i know you're i know you're saying that half seriously half joking the review was very good and all his reviews are really good you know as a quick aside it made me think i i feel like he's a much better and uh perhaps more apple friendly version of tom from tom's hardware do you did you guys read that back in the day well yep i remember i remember it's still there isn't it yeah it's still there yeah does anyone ever read it anymore
I mean, it looks radically different now.
But yeah, I'll occasionally land there from Google searches about processors.
And yeah, it's still around.
Well, anyway, so yeah, an Antec, and I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, and I'm sorry.
But an Antec seems like a modern, you know, 2010s era Tom's hardware.
And the review was very good.
And I've come to really enjoy their hardware reviews.
They're not quite to Syracusian level, but they're very, very good.
And the Mac Pro review was good.
It's just about something that I'm not terribly interested in.
But with that said, I know that you guys and many of the listeners are anxious to talk about this.
So let me have it.
So first, John, I'm curious.
When you read it, what did it make you think about a potential Mac Pro purchase for yourself?
It probably pushed me more towards not getting one.
Although, it pushed me more towards not getting one for a lot of reasons, but at the same time, it made me think that the big reason is still how much it costs.
Because that's what it always comes down to.
Because I would love to have a Mac Pro.
Who wouldn't want one, right?
Well, I can think of one of us.
Maybe Casey wouldn't want one.
Like if someone gave it to you for free or for some really cheap price or whatever, you take it, right?
Because it's awesome.
It's an amazing thing.
But since it costs so much, I constantly have to be weighing it against my other options for similar or less money.
And learning more about this machine made me – pushed me more towards I have to find some alternative.
Both in looking at the performance figures, both CPU and GPU, mostly GPU, and also just thinking about like –
yeah it does this look like is this a compromise machine and i think it is a compromise machine like uh the one thing that's really pushing me towards getting it is like well you had the first power mac g5 uh and like don't you want the first one like the the first cheese grater the first trash can like it's in my mac collecting type things pushing towards that but on the other side i'm looking at what's inside this thing and there are lots of weird compromises inside there i mean
He talked about them in review and, you know, the ones we've always known about the server CPUs being off cadence.
But just the way the thing is built internally and the decisions they had to make, it makes me think I'm going to spend all this money and I'm going to accept these compromises and performance and stuff that doesn't really matter.
Like, but that just seems awkward to me.
Like, you know, not having USB 3.0 in the chipset, which I didn't realize until I had read the review.
Is that going to be the end of the world?
No, but it's a compromise.
And in this case, it actually is a compromise for real-world consequences, which we'll talk about in a bit, I think.
But it's pushing me away, I think.
Let's assume that it's a year from now.
To make it safe, let's say it's two years from now, and we have available a 27-inch Retina iMac with the screen resolution we want, or a Mac Pro with an external Retina monitor with the same resolution.
We can get Retina on both, so that's now no longer a factor.
At that point, I would have a hard time not choosing the iMac.
And I think for you, it would be no question you should get the iMac for what you actually want.
I think it would be an easier time two years from now for me to not get the iMac because...
i i'm all about i'm all about the gpu marco and that's the only reason the only reason i'm looking at this thing is because i need to have a fast gpu and in fact i'm saying well this for this amount of money this gpu better be like the fastest possible and it's not and well yeah one of the things pushing me away right so the imac is never going to have the fastest possible gpu the mac pro is always going to have more gpu i'm just hoping you know again because the gpus are one revision back from amd's current chips right so even there it's a compromise where they selected them before the the new revision of the you know
What do you call it?
The GCN cores or whatever they are came out.
So they have an UltraVision there.
It's... I don't know.
I mean, again, it's just because it costs so much money.
If it was two grand, I'd get one in a heartbeat, right?
Like, who wouldn't?
Right.
And that's the thing.
I think...
For your purposes, for your expressed interest in Windows gaming, I mean, first of all, you can look at this and you can say, oh, great, well, it has, like, the dual card, whatever it's called for ATI.
Crossfire X. Right.
So, according to the Inantech review, the Mac Pro is configured to do that for Windows, but OS X does not support that.
And...
That's not really that big of a problem.
OS X really doesn't care much about game use, and that's mostly used for games as far as I know.
I don't think pro apps really support that very much.
So I could be wrong.
I don't know.
But the point is, I still think that for your purposes, you would be much better served buying a new iMac every two years than buying a Mac Pro every four or five.
Well, the other thing that I'm still thinking about is enhancing my ancient Mac Pro in various ways that it's able to be enhanced and pricing those out.
Yeah, but I don't know.
That kind of feels like putting a brand new transmission into a 10-year-old car.
It is, but wait to see.
Should I get a new car?
Should I continue to soup up this one?
Anyway, let's talk about some of the compromises here.
One of them that I was surprised about that it seems like NM was surprised about as well was that there's ECC RAM on the video cards, but that the ECC is disabled when you run under OS X?
Yeah.
Yeah, there were actually some interesting comments on the article.
I don't know anything about pro-GPU stuff, but the comments basically indicated one guy seemed to know quite a lot, and he was saying how ECC, unlike when it's supported in the main memory chips, ECC on workstation video cards is actually just a software implementation of it, basically.
It's not like a hardware difference, and it basically just...
uses the RAM a little bit like a RAID 5 array which is like there's like a parity area and then a regular area so you lose some of the space in the memory in exchange for getting this benefit and so it's all done in software and you know it apparently is not universally praised because
the loss of the RAM is a factor.
Yeah, I think that would still be an issue because, again, with the ECC RAM, and another reason I like the Mac Pros is they come with ECC RAM.
It's like, well, who cares about that?
Well, as the amount of RAM that you get, that you have installed increases, it becomes a factor.
It's kind of like, you know, BitRot.
Maybe it's not that big a deal when you have a 2-megabyte hard disk, but once you have a 3-terabyte hard disk, that same percentage of BitRot, assuming it's the same and not, you know, worse...
It's an issue.
So when you have 512 megabytes, 1 gig of VRAM, who cares?
But when you have 12 gigs of VRAM, you're like, well, for the same reason I would like to have ECC on my main RAM, wouldn't I also have it on my VRAM?
But if it's a software-only thing and there's other compromises, I can understand why Apple disabled it.
So that's a little bit disappointing.
I think the most disappointing thing is that the four USB 3.0 ports are all connected up to a single PCI Express 2.0 lane.
So you have 500 megabytes a second for all four of those ports combined, which is not great.
Right.
The PCI Express layout I thought was one of the most interesting parts about this because I had heard a while ago, like back when they announced the thing, somebody told me that they had heard from somebody and somebody and somebody that the reason why there was only one
SSD in there because the SSD mounts to the back of one of the graphics cards and so the obvious question is well can't they just put a second slot on the other graphics card and give you two SSDs inside which give you a lot more capacity potential and the reason that I was told back then was that they're out of PCI Express lanes and that's why there's only one SSD that they're using all the PCI Express lanes possible by that CPU and chipset for
for other purposes.
And looking at this diagram, that looks correct.
Yeah, but the SSD has four lanes, and so it's two gigabytes per second.
And it seems like the current SSDs they're using are maybe pushing about a gigabyte a second.
Maybe two gigs gives it headroom for faster flash going forward, right?
But the main reason the USB...
is a problem.
A lot of the notions before this review were like, well, if you get a Mac Pro, I know Thunderbolt hardware is really expensive, but remember, it's got USB 3.0, and USB 3.0 is a great way to get cheap storage, so just hang all your storage off your USB ports.
You're not going to do that.
You get one fast SSD, you've saturated all your entire USB 3.0 bus, right?
Because it's just one, and they're out of lanes.
Where are they going to pull lanes from?
If they pulled, like, one lane from the internal SSD and brought it down to 1.5 and then gave you, like...
and what what's taking up most of those lanes these honking video cards they each have 16 lanes i think i don't have the diagram in front of me so yeah and and why you know it's interesting also how they're sort of multiplexing the pci express uh where they have like well it's pci express 3.0 to the cpu but it's 2.0 to the devices and there's a multiplexer so that even though it looks like you don't have enough bandwidth to support it because you're multiplexing down more than one connection into a fewer number the
The fewer number of connection is 3.0, so that's how you're able to do it.
Lots of weird stuff going on.
And again, because USB 3.0 is not in the chipset for the server chips because they're a generation behind.
There's lots of weird stuff going on inside that box or that cylinder.
Well, and I think the reason why, the PCI Express diagram tells you everything you need to know.
It tells you that this machine is made for OpenCL.
That's what this is.
It's made for extremely high bandwidth between the CPU and the two GPUs, and everything else is... Oh, and I should point, and Thunderbolt.
They're pretty generous with the Thunderbolt bandwidth.
And everything else is secondary.
So they're telling you USB 3.0 is a legacy concern, basically.
It's like all of the USB 3.0 ports together...
share the same amount of bandwidth as the Wi-Fi chip.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
But the thing is, they have to do that.
They have gig Ethernet, and so those have one lane each because they have dual interfaces.
That makes sense.
And they have the Wi-Fi because Wi-Fi is getting up to gig Ethernet standards in ideal conditions these days, minus overhead, I suppose.
And they threw a whole bunch of the SSD, assuming storage is always going to matter, and someday we may have an SSD that can saturate 2 gigs a second.
And then whatever the hell we have left, hang four USB ports off of it.
Well, and I think it's a safe assumption that...
Most people's USB devices, all taken together, don't really push 500 megabytes a second most of the time.
Usually you're talking about external platter hard drives and various other much slower devices, things like keyboards, mice, card readers, stuff like that.
But the fast bandwidth use things over USB are usually just platter hard drives, but you're not going to get anywhere near that speed.
So I wouldn't be that concerned about that.
You have a USB 3 RAID, and I would imagine the things that get attached to USB, like the quick throwaway things, but a little bus-powered SSD, that's conceivable.
You could saturate that with a high-quality bus-powered SSD.
Well, but they want you to use Thunderbolt for that, though.
The thing about the Thunderbolt market is, even in the pro market, I guess they have those Pegasus RAID things and stuff, but I would be more expecting to see them...
I don't know.
Are people buying Thunderbolt storage?
It doesn't seem like it's a burgeoning market for Thunderbolt peripherals, even in the Pro space.
Well, but until today, Thunderbolt was not even available on the Mac Pro.
So all of Thunderbolt's best potential customers, all these people with high-end computing needs that used Macs, were all using computers that didn't even have Thunderbolt ports.
So I think even though you've had Thunderbolt ports on every other Mac for a while, I don't think we can really judge Thunderbolt's maturity or widespreadness yet because it just came to the Mac Pro.
Yeah, and even on the Thunderbolt front, that's the part that's doing the multiplexing where they've got these Thunderbolt 2 things connected.
to what seems like an inadequate number of pipes back to the CPU, but actually it is adequate because the CPU talks to that bridge through PCI Express 3.0, and then the Thunderbolt 2s are each on 2.0 buses, and they have this multiplexer chip in the middle.
When I looked at all this stuff and saw all the extra crap they had to add in there, like it's not just a stock Intel server motherboard cleverly arranged, but they had to add these extra multiplexers for the Thunderbolt crap and the USB chip and all that other stuff, it's a pretty amazing packaging job inside that cylinder because there's a lot of,
a lot of extra stuff in there it's not like it's not like the gamecube motherboard where everything is so neat and tidy and you've got your you know cpu gpu and ram and it just is this beautiful little square there's stuff all over the place and and uh connected with ribbon cables and circle shaped boards and it's it's a very it is very g4 cube like people have made that comparison before but now having seen the guts and everything and how it's put together that's pretty apt
Yeah, you know, I will say that the thing that fascinated me the most about... Who the hell are you?
Who the hell is Casey?
Exactly.
I just woke up.
The thing that fascinated me the most about the Edentech review was the talk about the multiplexers and all the stuff they had to do to get all these PCI Express liens squared away.
It was really fascinating.
And even if you're like me and don't really care that much about the Mac Pro, I would encourage you to read at least that part of the review.
It is really, really, really interesting.
Well, you know, and what they're... You know, you could tell by this layout.
What they are emphasizing here is high-speed, modern, and future throughput.
You know, you have Thunderbolt being connected directly to the CPU.
So, you know, as Ann pointed out in the review, that's pretty amazing that you have, like, this external cable interface, six ports in the back that basically plug directly into the CPU.
That's pretty awesome.
And so you have that crazy interface...
Plus you have these workstation-class GPUs being able to run OpenCL stuff over these incredibly fast buses.
Because one of the big challenges with general-purpose computing on GPUs is just getting the data back and forth in a way that doesn't make the whole thing take more time.
If you can just do something quickly on the CPU, that's going to be faster than shifting it over to the graphics card, doing something there, and shifting it back.
So in order to make graphics card computing better and more useful in practice, you have to keep making those transfer pipes bigger and faster.
And clearly this machine is made specifically and primarily for that, which is something that none of us are going to use probably.
You know, the three of us, none of us are really going to use that.
It makes perfect sense in light of the demo they gave at WWDC for the Mac Pro was the lunchtime session.
I don't know if either one or you went to it, but it's available in video.
I believe we sat with you.
Well, there's a lot of nerds there.
Many nerds look alike, so check your nerds to make sure they're yours.
But yeah, so it was someone demonstrating...
doing painting on a 3D model.
Someone from Pixar doing some stuff from Monsters University.
I think you can download it from the Apple's developer site, I think.
I'm not sure.
But anyway, what they were showing there, and they had to take pains to point out, was, oh, it just looks like you're drawing on a 3D model.
Big deal.
But they're drawing with, like...
humongous textures using all 12 gigs of VRAM, things that are just, you know, not possible on a regular computer just because of the sheer volume of data.
You know, we're not just doing like, oh, this just needs to be good enough quality to display, you know, in a video game or something.
This is artwork that's going to be rendered at high res, you know, 4K or whatever for movie purposes.
And the assets that go into it alone are just gigantic.
And so it's amazing that it can do it at all, right?
But that's not what most people are doing.
Most people are not dealing with that huge volume of data.
But that's what this machine is designed to do.
Be a small little cylinder thing that amazing, kind of like the old SGI, like the octane machines or whatever.
Be this little tiny thing that can do these amazing things with a huge volume of data that other machines can't do.
So for that purposes and for, you know, if you work at Pixar, it seems like this is a great machine for that purpose compared to what you would have had to buy before to do the same thing.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, after I read it, I was a little sour on the idea of keeping my order and not canceling it.
I thought about canceling my order because...
It looks, from all accounts, it looks like this is a machine with power that I'm paying for that I'm probably not going to use.
And I keep thinking, you know, what if... One of the things I frequently do is convert videos that we're going to watch somewhere or rip Blu-ray so we can watch them on the Apple TV without their stupid menus and all, you know, stuff like that.
And...
Or I'll have a giant folder of images that we shot that I want to convert, and I'll run ImageMagick from the command line in parallel, maxing out all the cores to do that.
And I think, what if ImageMagick, what if their OpenCL support improves and it starts becoming five or ten times faster on this computer?
I would love that.
What if Logic starts using OpenCL for something?
That would save me tons of time when I'm editing this show.
What if Lightroom
improves its OpenCL support.
And imports don't take as long.
Conversions to DNG don't take as long.
All this stuff that I do fairly frequently that is highly parallelized, I'm not going to see savings every day that are going to be noticeable.
But I'm going to see maybe once or twice a week potentially big savings by having lots of parallel CPU power.
But the GPU side...
is still a big question mark and i think mostly still like half done or not done by most big software packages and i wonder is that going to change in the lifetime of this machine or you know maybe maybe we'll be looking at buying a mac pro with tons of gpu power in three to five years when tons of stuff takes advantage of that maybe that would be a better idea than buying one now
You need to buy one now just to replace your current Mac Pro.
Think of it this way.
You should think of it as what you're doing is you're getting a smaller, quieter version of what you already have that also happens to be faster.
That is another thing that pushes me towards finding a way to buy this thing is...
Will it be better than my current Mac?
Yes.
And it won't just be better in ways like performance-wise and spec-wise and number-wise.
It'll be better in the touchy-feely ways of being nicer to look at, taking up less room, making less noise, using less power, producing less heat, maybe.
Yeah, it's got to be producing less heat.
All those advantages are there.
Maybe you didn't need to get the D700.
You could get away with less GPU, but you're just, you know, and plus, you have to buy the expensive things that we can't afford.
It's your job.
Yeah.
You should not cancel your order.
I guess somebody has to do it.
One thing I've thought about is because I ordered the 8-core with the D700 because the 8-core is really great.
One thing I thought about was what if I just downgrade to the stock 6-core config plus the terabyte basically.
But
Once you add the terabyte and the RAM that I want, I want the 32 gigs of RAM, once you add those, it's not... It's all price relativism.
Yeah, it's like a $1,500 difference, which is a lot of money, but it's like, well, if I'm going to spend $4,500, I might as well spend $6,000.
It's like...
I want this computer to last.
And if you look, one of the great things about the Inantech article is that it shows you how much value Mac Pros hold over time because the ceiling of performance really does not move very quickly.
And the rest of the Mac lineup...
is actually hitting a similar wall, which he talks about, which is the thing about how single-threaded CPU gains have really hit a wall and are really slowing down dramatically across the industry in desktop.
In mobile, they still have a while to go, but in the desktop, we have maxed out
single-threaded potential.
And the only ways we can realistically make gains are by shrinking the process down and making a few little instruction efficiency gains here and there.
But the gains are coming very slowly in single-threaded performance.
What Intel did, and what everyone else is doing, is let's just throw more cores in the die.
We can make the process small enough that we can make that work.
So you threw a whole bunch more cores in the die.
So now we have these... Now you can get a quad-core laptop.
That's crazy.
Imagine telling somebody that 10 years ago.
That would have sounded nuts.
But that's normal now.
You can get a four-core laptop.
That's crazy.
And...
So on the desktop, you're basically just maxing out power.
Like how much heat can you dissipate in this enclosure?
That's basically it.
And so you have these 130-watt chips, and that's your limit there.
So you're limited basically just by, well, you've maxed out single-threaded performance.
You've put as many cores on there as you can while still staying under the power envelope.
So now you've just got to basically wait for minor improvements to efficiency in instruction-level stuff and process shrinks to be able to cram more on there or make it run faster.
And so the era of having these giant jumps is gone.
So the CPU I have in mind was released in 2010.
And the new one I get for nearly $7,000 CPU-wise is only going to be about 50% faster.
Well, 100% faster roughly in multithreaded, but single-threaded only about 50% faster.
And I kind of expected more for a 2010 CPU going to a 2013 CPU.
Well, I think what you would feel more is the storage speed.
I don't know what speed your SSD is or whatever, but these SSDs do seem reasonably fast, and that would probably give you a more day-to-day experience.
And Apple, to its credit, as Adam points out, is trying to walk the walk with its software, heavily optimizing Final Cut, which is the application they keep showing.
in their own advertising for like hey buy a mac pro get final cut you know uh with the 4k video support they're trying to use all that gpu with final cut they're using the cpu and the gpu it's not just a gpu it's not they're trying to use all the hardware that they've built so if there's if you're not talking about maya or something if there's a piece of software that apple makes that's trying to to be tailored for the mac pro it seems like final cut is the flagship there but
Other software, less so.
But even in the case of other software, it's like, well, at least you won't have any, you know, it's got fast memory.
It's got a lot of it.
Processes won't be waiting out of core.
If you buy one of the models with lots of cores and hyperthreading and everything, it should still feel significantly snabbier and in a smaller package that makes less noise and everything like that.
And the GPU...
It's not bad in terms of, like, just, like, normal, you know, what do you want to use GPU for or what do I want to use for just gaming or boring stuff like that.
It's fine.
It does pretty well.
Like, it's up there with the big boy GPUs.
It's not at the top of the stack of the big boy GPUs.
But it's okay.
But, you know, for the price of a Mac Pro, you could buy, like...
seven high-end PCs with the same video card in them, and that's kind of depressing.
Which is what I keep telling you to do.
Well, I don't want a PC, and... Well, you don't need seven.
You can just buy one.
Well, see, the thing is, looking at it in terms of GPU performance or gaming, it's great that it has Crossfire and Windows and stuff like that, but...
I'm comparing it to upgrading my thing.
I'm not comparing it to an iMac because the D700 still stomps all over the iMac.
I keep looking at an iMac, pricing it out, and it ends up being like, we did it before, like $3,000 and not really great for my purposes.
So I keep just looking at, can I hold out another year?
Can I put stuff on my Mac Pro to hold out another year?
And, like, what am I expecting another year?
The new CPUs might not even be out, but maybe they'll be able to rev the GPUs because then they'll have, you know, it's like the GPU rev, fine, just swap in the new GPU.
It shouldn't be that big a deal.
Maybe lower the price a little bit because the CPUs aren't updated and you're kind of offering the same machine, so maybe you can bring the price down.
I don't know.
I don't know what I'm waiting for.
I haven't decided yet, but...
like half of me looks at these gpu benchmarks and goes like if your current mac was on there it wouldn't show up on the diagram it would be like one pixel like a one pixel wide line or it did not finish like isn't why do i care that okay so it's not as fast as the very fastest gpu can buy in any computer ever right now but it's in the ballpark right and then the other half of me is like why not just get as many people suggested a high-end gpu and jam it into my current mac pro
I don't know.
So what you should care about, or what we should all care about, ignoring this gaming stuff, is what is the retina situation like on the Mac Pro?
And we already discussed how it can't drive the big quad 27-inch display that doesn't exist because of, what do you call it, display port limitations and stuff.
Right.
I mean, we don't even know that it can't do that.
There isn't a display out there of that resolution to test with.
Right.
And maybe you could with dual-length or whatever.
But the question was, all right, so say you buy one of these 4K displays that Apple offers you from Sharp or whatever.
Can you run it in retina mode?
And the answer seems to be... Wait!
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So, Retina.
Yeah, not so much.
Moving on.
This is a part that has me a little bit worried.
So, what Anand found was that the monitor that comes with it, yeah, it works fine, but it's... And for the same reason that I didn't order one, and I think, John, you probably wouldn't either, that...
4K at 32 inches is too many pixels for its size to be useful at 1x, but not really enough to be useful at 2x.
It's basically useful for 4K video editors to see an output of their 4K video, but as a general-purpose display, this clearly is not a great solution.
And what's interesting, so Dell recently released... There's a few other companies that do this, but I think the most popular ones for a while are going to be these ones from Dell.
It's like the UP24Q something.
They have the worst product names.
It's Dell's 24-inch 4K display, and it's only like $1,200.
So we've talked about it before.
I'm not going to get too into it.
But that apparently, he got one of those from Dell for the review and he plugged it into the Mac Pro and it was just garbled and didn't work right.
And so it appears as though, you know, there's all these standards that we talked about to like multiplex two signals into either one cable or into two cables that go into one monitor and have the OS see it as two different monitors and then merge it in software so it behaves properly to overcome various limitations and stuff like that to be able to get these super high resolutions on one monitor.
And it sounds like Apple kind of made special support for the Sharp one to work that they're selling and didn't make any support for this Dell one.
And that's worrying because that means... Well, it's worrying in that...
This is now going to be a question.
You can't just buy any 4K monitor and plug it in and expect it to work right.
So that's a problem right there.
This also rules out these particular monitors, which if you wanted dual 24s or a single 24 instead of a big 27 or 30, you could have Retina today if this monitor worked.
But it doesn't, so you can't, and there's no saying whether it will in the future.
Did you say that even on the sharp one, you couldn't put it into high DPI mode, though, at 2x?
I think he said he hacked it, but it would only do one-to-one high DPI mode.
So it was 1920 by 1080.
Or whatever it is.
I thought what he said that it wouldn't even do that one.
It wouldn't do that mode.
No, it did that, but everything was too big, of course.
And the problem was he couldn't get any of the scaling modes to work, the ones where it renders it higher and then scales it to the native pixels the way the MacBook Pro does.
He couldn't get any of those working.
So basically for retina use, the current sharp 32 inches is not what really anybody's looking for.
And the Dell, which is what a lot of people are looking for, doesn't work.
And it might never work.
It might work next week.
Who knows?
We don't know.
Yeah, there could be driver issues to sort that out.
So I don't think it's hopeless on this front.
But what it's using to support these 4K displays through a single cable is the multi-stream support, which seems like it was originally designed so you could daisy-chain monitors together.
So you'd have a Thunderbolt display go into one monitor and then add that monitor into a second monitor.
So you'd have to send two monitors worth of signal down this one Thunderbolt display.
How would you do it?
You'd do this multi-stream thing.
So they make a single monitor that consumes two streams and displays them in the right place, and that's why you might need some kind of driver support to correctly talk to the monitor using multiple streams and say, I know I'm sending them in the multi-stream protocol, but both of these images are for you, and here's how you should arrange them and display them.
synchronize them and all that stuff so it's again talking about a compromised machine it are the standards out there ready now for for even just existing 4k displays let alone a quad 27 size thing and the answer is no they're not like displayport 1.2 can't handle those those types of resolutions and even at plain old 4k it's kind of a hack on top of the multi-stream support to get this resolution into a monitor and it's monitor dependent so again it looks like a compromised machine not sort of we waited until we could do it all cleanly and elegantly and here it is
they didn't.
And they did it however they... They did what they had to do, but all these areas we see, we're just that close, just so close to getting everything the way it's supposed to be, but we're not quite there yet.
Exactly.
And so, you know, the big question is, will Apple release the display we want anytime soon, first of all?
And if they do, will it even be compatible with this Mac Pro?
And we don't really know that yet.
I still think you should buy one, though.
Maybe two.
Send me one.
And I did keep my order because looking at this, assuming that nothing comes out that's going to make something really incompatible, you can look at his CPU charts to see the progress of Mac Pros over the years, how slow it really is.
The side effect of that, one thing is...
You should almost never buy two Mac Pros in a row.
You should almost always skip generations.
But the upside is that you buy one and it lasts a long time.
And when you're ready to sell it, it's still worth something.
Which is true of all Macs, usually.
But in particular, the Mac Pros really hold their value very well.
And
So I want to buy this computer that's going to last me at least two years of being top of the line and probably four or five years of usability of still being a high-performance computer relative to new software for at least four or five years if I still choose to use it for that long, which I might not.
Maybe I'd sell it before then because it's a joke.
I sell everything.
Ha, ha, ha.
Ha, ha, ha.
If I choose to use it for a long time, I can.
John, you're using your 2008 Mac Pro, and it's fine.
It seems like it's going to go even longer, yeah.
But I would say if you're buying this machine, buy it for what it can do for you today.
Don't buy it with the expectation that you're going to be doing a 5,000 by something screen, because maybe you never will.
But if you want a small, quiet, powerful computer that's faster than your existing Mac Pro that drives your existing monitors in non-retina resolution...
and that you could use for years and years and not feel like you have a slow machine, this is it.
But if you're buying it with the expectation, then in a short time, I'll be able to connect up this amazing new display and do all these.
Maybe you won't, maybe you will, but don't buy it for that purpose.
This 2008 Mac Pro, I don't know what I was thinking in terms of what it would do, but what it's doing now is the same thing it was doing on day one.
It's running the same monitor, it's running similar software with similar features.
It doesn't do anything amazing, and it just keeps doing what it always did very well
and is amazingly problem-free and is very expandable and all the other good things going for it.
So maybe it will just be under my desk here for another year.
On this topic, we got a good question from a person who gave their name as A. Gaines, and he or she said, can you talk about why you guys would never use an iMac for work development, etc.?
I think it has many advantages to the pros in a MacBook.
So...
This fits right in here with why we buy Mac Pros and why we like Mac Pros and why John refuses to buy an iMac, even though it actually surfers and eats way better and be way cheaper over time.
Not that I'm bitter, but I think if you have never used a Mac Pro, you're fine.
Keep not using them.
It's like using a giant monitor.
Once you use one, you're ruined and you will keep wanting to buy those big expensive things.
But
An iMac or a laptop, they're fine.
If I had to use those things, I would use those things.
The Mac Pro is just better in a few pretty key ways for what I do.
And...
People always say, do I need X or Y for development?
Most development, especially if you're doing web development, you're just typing into a text editor.
There's very few IDEs that are really going to stress the computer for any modern hardware.
If you're doing web development, you can do it on pretty much anything.
You can do it on an 11-inch MacBook Air if you want to.
You can do it on anything.
It doesn't matter.
Screen space is always nice to have.
But performance-wise...
It doesn't really matter what you're using for web development.
For iOS development, you can do it on everything else.
Again, you need a lot of screen space, especially for iPad development.
And for iOS stuff, Xcode is a bit of a hog.
So there's a lot of smart things that it'll do.
And I don't know if this applies to the other big IDEs in the market like Eclipse or all the Windows crap.
I don't know if it applies to that stuff, but...
But IDEs can be very heavy and slow.
Also, just the compilation process is not quick if you have a major project or if you're using big libraries in it.
So you can start hitting performance bottlenecks when doing iOS development, but...
Even then, if you're doing it on a modern MacBook Pro or a Mac, you're fine.
You're not going to see massive gains in most cases for most projects by going to a Mac Pro.
I think you can do iOS or Mac development very easily if you just get a Mac Mini with an SSD and stuff it full of RAM.
Like, is it going to be the fastest?
No, it's not going to be the fastest.
You're going to wait a little bit longer.
But if you don't have another Mac to compare it to, you don't know how long that compile would take on a Mac Pro.
You're just like, it's fine.
SSD, lots of RAM, big screen, and you can get away with a Mac Mini.
I know plenty of iOS developers who made amazing, great apps, and their first Mac was a Mac Mini, and that's what they did all their development on.
Once you get a faster Mac, then you realize, okay, I can't go back to developing on that Mac Mini.
But you can get it done.
That's the amazing thing about development these days is the bottom of the bottom of the line Mac can, physically speaking, do development.
Whereas it used to be like you needed to have the super high – you needed a Lisa to develop for the Mac because you need more RAM and, you know, so –
It's like when they say, can you do development on iMac?
Of course you can.
Of course you can do development on iMac.
In fact, most people probably should do development on iMac because you don't need a Mac Pro for that.
You definitely don't need a Mac Pro to compile stuff.
The compiler is not using your GPU.
Not yet, anyway.
Not yet.
Also consider that in the new versions of Xcode, what is the...
I forget what they call it, but they basically have this system by which you can compile regularly on a completely different computer, which I believe was basically – they never came out and said it, but it was basically designed for Mac Mini.
Do you guys know what I'm thinking of?
Yeah, the continuous integration thing, it's the Jenkins – it's not Jenkins.
Yeah, yes.
You're talking about distributed builds, which they used to have.
Yes, distributed builds.
I'm sorry.
I don't know if they still do.
Yeah, but there's ways to farm out.
That's one of the reasons why a lot of Mac development shops can get away with giving their developers less powerful computers, because if you have a bunch of spare hardware and you can set it up as this continuous integration farm and have it doing your builds and everything.
Basically, to answer this guy's question, there's...
iMacs can do everything they can do everything you would want to do and in many cases they can do it extremely well the only thing the only few things that you would suffer for having an iMac for is if you're a gamer you will suffer because the GPU is not and if you care about super duper fast the best 3D games and full res and blah blah you're not going to get that out of an iMac buy a PC at that point
Yeah, well, or a game console or whatever.
And if you're doing something that requires this big, massive GPUs for non-gaming purposes, like you're doing Maya or Final Cut with 4K video or any other application that takes advantage of all that GPU power, that's when you need a Mac Pro.
But iMac CPUs are faster in single-thread than the Mac Pros for the most part.
if you buy the super high-end one so there's like the iMacs are really are amazing machines and just because i don't want to get one because i don't want to have a wimpy gpu that's like the edgiest of edge cases like the iMac is a is a great desktop machine for anybody and it's getting better all the time now that you know once it goes completely ssd like the fusion drive seems to be great uh
Although I did see some reports on the web about it having trouble with audio recording, which gave me some pause.
But anyway, in a couple of years, the spinning disks will be gone from the iMac.
It'll probably be even thinner.
It'll just be amazing fantasy future computer type thing.
That's the machine that everyone should look at.
When you go into the Apple store, don't look at the Mac Pros.
They're way too expensive.
Look at the iMacs if you want a desktop machine.
That said, though, there's a few... So I wrote in some post this week, a couple days ago, I forget which one, that in our household we've had an iMac, we've had multiple laptops, and we've had a few Mac Pros over the years.
And I've regretted buying almost all of them except the Mac Pros.
I've never regretted a Mac Pro purchase.
And...
One of the reasons is how these things age, and what happens at the end of their life, and how soon at the end of their useful life comes.
The laptops and the iMacs are, and the Mac Mini, but... Oh, I did have one of those.
I sold it after a year to Dan Benjamin.
I tried to have this closet computer to do accessory tasks, and it turns out that sucks.
And it's really a pain in the butt, so I didn't want to do it anymore.
But...
It's very clear when using these computers that these are consumer grade parts and that they're made to be used by one household for a few years and then they're basically worthless and they're made to be discarded, donated, or recycled.
And
So certain things don't age very well.
I've had with iMacs... Our iMac had a couple of screen issues, especially by the time it was like three years old.
It had some various screen issues that it was out of warranty.
Right after it went out of warranty, part of the screen had a deadline and stuff like that.
There was weird stuff.
And...
And there was this big, giant pile of hard drives hanging out the back of it because we couldn't get to the internal one easily enough to upgrade it and needed more performance out of the disk I.O.
And the RAM was maxed out and we wanted more RAM and we couldn't do it.
And whenever it would get under load, the fan would spin up and you'd hear it.
So, and most of that applies to laptops as well.
And so, some of those needs are removed or minimized now.
Disk.io is a great example.
Disk.io used to suck, now it's great because SSDs are everywhere.
And so...
You know, there's less of a difference.
SSDs close the gap tremendously between the kind of performance you can get out of a big desktop and what you can get everywhere else, especially in laptops, close the gap tremendously.
So that's great.
But all those other limitations are still there.
If a screen goes bad in an iMac or a MacBook Pro, you're screwed.
You better hope it's under warranty.
You're screwed.
If you want to change the screen size or upgrade it two years in, you're screwed.
You can't do it.
If you had to buy a computer today and you want a Retina monitor, well, tough luck.
You better buy a Retina MacBook Pro, but even then, the current Retina MacBook Pro probably won't be able to drive the panel that we're talking about over Thunderbolt 2 unless it was made for it.
They never mentioned it, but
There's special stuff in the Mac Pro to enable this, and I don't think the Retina MacBook Pro has that, at least not at 60 hertz.
So if you want to buy a computer today that will last you very happily for the next two to four years, the Mac Pro is it.
The iMac might, but you're taking a lot of risk there, and at the end, you can sell a three- or four-year-old Mac Pro for over $1,000 easily.
And the three-year-old iMac, maybe a few hundred.
You're not talking a whole lot there.
And the iMac might have more problems that you can't get to.
And again, some of that is minimized now from the reduction of hard drives and stuff like that.
But there's still a lot of those cases where, over time, you might come to regret having chosen the iMac if you have high-end needs.
Yeah, I almost think that the high-end iMacs are kind of a sucker's bet because they cost so much money.
You can push an iMac up towards $4,000.
Oh, you can go right past $4,000.
If you configure the iMac with the same hardware as the cheapest Mac Pro or as close as you can get to the same hardware, it's not that different in price.
I think I said it on my site somewhere.
I think it's like $500 difference at that point.
Of course, you get the free monitor mix.
Right, but the Mac Pro gives you dual GPUs, and the higher-end Thunderbolt, more Thunderbolt ports, the dual network ports, if you'll ever use that.
There's a lot more advantages to the Mac Pro that partially offset that screen thing.
And if you have those kind of needs and if you find yourself like I was, you find yourself in the iMac configurator cranking everything up, then it's probably time to look at another machine.
I think the sweet spot of the iMac is kind of in the middle range where what you're getting is you're getting a computer that you're going to run iLife apps on and browse the web.
You're getting a really nice looking big screen and you're getting like a sealed little thing that just looks like a monitor with like a wireless keyboard and mouse attached.
And that's all it's ever going to be, and you're going to use it like that until the day it dies.
And that's where I think regular people can easily get four or five years out of an iMac, because they're never going to attach anything else to it.
Maybe they're never going to have anything connected to any of the ports, except for maybe some USB dongles.
It's just going to be this...
sleek sealed silver panel with a nice screen on it they look at and they do their computer stuff and it's got more than enough storage in there to last them forever you get a fusion drive of three terabytes they're never going to fill that it's reasonably priced it seems nice and snappy for the three apps they use all the time they're never going to upgrade they're never going to care about the gpu they're never going to attach anything to it that's your good deal once you start cranking that stuff up and you've got a four grand machine like it's obvious that you want more you're like oh but i gotta have more better and
That's not a more better machine because you will start to get the itch a couple years down the line of wanting to do more.
And, well, I've already maxed out the RAM.
I can't have any more.
Well, now I can't have Retina and everyone else has it.
And the people who just have their iMac sitting on their desk as their little home computer don't care about those things.
And for them, it's a great machine.
Or if you just, you know, you don't have the kind of money to upgrade, if you're just going to do development on iMac, I think you could get five years out of an iMac, a mid-range one.
You'd be perfectly happy with it.
Again, it depends on what you're doing.
I know myself well enough to know that if I bought an iMac instead of a Mac Pro, first of all, as soon as there was a Retina monitor, I would feel like an idiot.
For me, the value option would be to just wait until there's a Retina iMac and buy that.
But I'm not sure we're getting that this year.
I don't know.
I mean, if you look at where the technology is, where the pricing is for these panels and GPU driving them and stuff like that, I wouldn't necessarily say a Retina iMac in 2014 is a sure thing.
I don't think so either.
I mean, probably 2015's iMac.
I bet we'll have it then.
But 2014, I don't know.
I would give it maybe a 50% chance of happening.
Can I ask a really stupid question?
Why is retina so important?
And before you answer, what I mean by that is... Hi.
What?
Nothing.
Oh.
Oh.
Took me a second.
That's what you're doing.
Anyway, sorry.
Moving on.
So the reason I ask is because the obvious trump card answer is you just want more real estate for developing retina apps.
What?
That's not it at all.
It's because it looks good.
See, and maybe it's just because I have terrible eyes, but at a distance in which I sit from, say, take my high-res anti-glare pre-retina MacBook Pro.
I can tell the difference between a Retina MacBook Pro and a not Retina MacBook Pro, but it is not night and day different.
And I don't find it to be as egregious and as frustrating as you do.
And it doesn't make you wrong and it doesn't make me right.
It's just, to me, it seems like an odd thing that you're so obsessed over.
I don't know if maybe that's a statement rather than a question.
It's that good.
I mean, so I work a lot with text, which looks awesome on retina, and I work a lot with images.
When you see a photo, like, it's so funny.
So I take my laptop, and we go on trips, of course, and I'll take a little camera, and
I'll import the photos while I'm still on the trip into Lightroom to see how they turn out and maybe play with them and maybe post one and I see these photos on my retina screen on the laptop and I'm like wow these photos are amazing I can't believe how good this is look at how great this looks and then I get home and I import them to my desktop and they just look so drab
and disappointing and part of it's because my monitor is drab and disappointing but part of it's also that massive resolution difference and oh man it makes such a difference browsing the web like i i was redesigning my site this weekend just giving it like a new font and a few minor updates and uh and like looking just looking at text that closely for a while uh
text looks like such crap on non-retina once you've seen it on retina.
It's just one of those things.
It really is a very big difference when you're doing certain things.
If you look at the iPads, we talked before about how a lot of people don't see the difference with the retina iPads versus the old ones, or they don't care, or they can vaguely be like, well, I guess the text is sharper or something, but they don't really care.
For a lot of people, that's going to be true forever, and they won't care.
I'm one of the people that cares, shockingly.
And I'm sure John is similarly observant and picky.
And so I care.
And if you don't care, that's great.
You're going to save a bunch of money over the next few years by not caring.
Or by switching to Geico.
It's not that I don't care.
I think maybe it's just that because I've never used a retina computer for any duration of time more than like 10 minutes, maybe it's just ignorance and maybe I just don't realize what I'm missing.
And again, I can absolutely recognize that –
That it is better.
It's not that I don't recognize it.
To me, it didn't make a big difference.
I think that's because I'm not sitting with this display between 4 and 12 inches from my face like I do with my iPad or my iPhone.
But, I mean, whenever I get another computer, it will surely be some sort of Retina MacBook Pro.
And ask me again after a month with that, and maybe I'll tell you that me asking that question was the dumbest thing I've ever done.
But sitting here now not knowing any better, I just don't see why it's that big a deal.
Here's how I think about it.
If you're into technology, like I am, and I think like how we all are, technology kind of advances in fits and starts.
And there's these little discontinuities.
And if you're a technology nerd, you never want to be caught on the other side of the discontinuity.
You want to be using whatever the new thing is on the other side of the next little leap.
You want to be there living in the future.
So monitor resolution size is one example where
monitors were you know got color and that was a big discontinuity like oh you have a monochrome display you wanted a color if you knew color displays existed you clearly knew that a every display was going to be colored pretty soon right and so that's like it's going to happen color monitors are coming it's not like this forever there will be black you know
and b that you wanted to have one of those and you want you want to be living in the future now if someone's out there has got a color monitor for a year enjoying color monitor type games and you're still in black and white you feel bad you want it you want to see that new thing and then the monitors got bigger and the pixels got smaller and they that's kind of incrementally getting bigger and bigger and smaller and flatter and bigger flatness is another thing
Flat panels are out.
Do you want to have that gigantic 21-inch CRT on your desk taking up all that room?
If flat ones exist, that was another discontinuity.
You wanted to be on the other side of that.
And you wanted to get there as soon as possible.
When can I change my life from a person who has gigantic CRTs to a person who has no gigantic CRTs?
You know everyone's going to be like that.
You know CRTs are going away.
You want to be on the other side of it.
Well, retina is the next one of those things.
So the flat panel monitors get bigger and better and bigger and better.
and then all of a sudden there's this discontinuity 4x the number of pixels it's not just like a little bit bigger that's just a total change like a qualitative change and you know they're all everything's going to be written you just know it like it's going to happen right and you're like well let me i want to be living in the future with everybody else i don't want to wait i don't want to be the last person to get to get a color tv i don't want to be the last person to get a flat panel tv
I want to be among the first.
I want to live in the future and with this amazing new thing.
And you have to balance that with layout.
Maybe the first flat panels TVs are bad or the first high-definite televisions are still CRTs or whatever your problem is there.
But that's the thing that's driving me.
And I...
you know, I want to, that's another reason I get a Mac pro.
I want to see what is it like to be on the cutting edge of technology to have the fastest, best, you know, most amazing thing, but tempering that with like, when is the right time to buy?
When do I want the compromise machine?
Do they want it when I want to wait until they have it all sorted out?
You know, that's, that's the balance I'm going for.
And yeah, like my eyesight is good enough to see the difference in retina.
I would never go back to a non retina iOS device.
Cause that would be crazy.
And I think Casey would agree with that.
Now you can't,
hold a non-retina phone up to your face anymore and be like oh no you can't forget it and even an ipad i would not use a mini when it was in retina i don't like the mini anyway but yeah and with the monitors it's am i suffering but i not have any retina one no but if i know that other people are out there it pains me even the people laptops to get to look at a retina screen all day and i don't like that's the way everything is going and i want to be there with them and so that's i think that's the big driving factor and it has to do with not whether you can tell the difference between retina
not whether you find it more comfortable or you can appreciate retina or whatever.
I think it mostly has to do with being interested in technology and wanting to sort of like live in the future with your jet pack, you know?
And if other people are doing it and you're not, you feel like you're missing out because having futuristic things is cool and exciting to people who like technology, right?
Yeah.
And that genuinely does make sense.
I guess I'm struggling to find a way to properly explain.
But to me, it makes sense to want Retina, Marco's dying urgency to get it now, now, now.
I don't share that.
But again, it doesn't mean I'm right.
It doesn't mean he's wrong.
I just don't see what the urgent need is to have it yesterday.
Other than that, it's new and shiny.
Well, there's a hierarchy of things that you need in your life.
And Marco's at the point in the hierarchy where Retina is actually really near the top of the stack.
Well, I also, you know, because I have the Retina MacBook Pro for travel, every time I travel and then come back, I'm like, oh, I go back to my old monitor.
It's terrible.
Yeah, you're lowering half.
It's like if, you know, if you had a bunch of flat panel displays, but also one giant CRT monitor.
And every time you come back to the CRT, you just want to be like, oh, this thing again.
Yeah.
I mean, granted, this is not a severe problem in life, relatively speaking.
But John's right.
We've come past all of these major changes in computing.
And I think SSDs and high DPI are kind of happening at the same time, with SSDs being a couple years ahead.
And I've crossed the SSD point.
I've chopped down my storage needs.
on my desktop so that I can have all SSD storage.
I don't need to use Fusion Drive, which is good because I tried Fusion Drive and it was inconsistent, which is a problem.
And that's probably why it's a problem for audio recording is that it's inconsistent.
And so...
You know, high DPI is just, you're right, it's the next big thing.
And after that, I'm not seeing any obvious next big thing that's going to change computer hardware for a while.
I mean, I'm not saying there's never going to be one.
That would be short-sighted.
But there isn't an obvious one coming up shortly.
Memory unification.
You think?
Well, yeah, sure.
That's the, that's the next obvious move.
I mean, it's not going to be anytime soon, but like if you look at the way a modern computer is made and you squint your eyes a little bit, you're like, this is ridiculous.
Let's squish those diagrams together.
Hey, there you go.
And then everything's better.
I mean, the way we're doing it now, so to be clear, you're talking about similar to how the Xbox One was designed, the first Xbox One.
No, nothing about it will be similar to the first Xbox.
The CPU and GPU both shared one giant fast bank of VRAM, and so there was no separate video RAM and main RAM.
It was just one big bank of fast RAM that everything had high-speed access to.
Is that what you're talking about?
Game consoles have been like that.
And the PlayStation is the same way.
It's all one shared.
But I'm talking more about, like, memory unification across, you know, disk, quote-unquote disk, and RAM storage.
So maybe you're right.
Maybe it'll come first as, like, the stuff that the PlayStation and all the other game consoles do is, like, having a single pool of memory.
uh between the cpu and gpu because that's kind of silly you're going to put 32 gigs of ram in your mac pro and then 12 gigs are hanging off the gpu and there are important technical reasons for it now but it would be nice if you had virtualized uh uh you know video memory and once uh video memory is virtualized well then why do you have two separate pools of virtualized memory wouldn't be nice if you could combine them and then
God knows what the process size will be.
And we could have, you know, we already have integrated GPUs and they keep getting bigger.
So eventually you end up with a situation where you have your compute and your big pool of RAM.
And then the next one is you have your compute, your big pool of RAM and your storage all unified into a single memory space.
Uh,
And that you can make, especially if process sizes continue to shrink, you can make some very interesting computing devices where everything is addressable as a 64-bit address somewhere in some big virtualized pool of RAM.
And that's your disk, and that's your VRAM, and that's your main memory, and that's your everything.
I would never have assumed that that would be a thing that would happen just because of the economies.
That's like saying that eventually everything is going to be L2 cash or everything is going to be a register taken to the extreme.
It's like, no, that's never really going to happen because of various economies.
Nope, it'll happen.
We will live to see what I just described, I think, of it.
I mean, like, half of it we already see in video game consoles, so that's not fantasy.
It's like, go buy a PlayStation 4.
And GDDR5, quote-unquote, VRAM is the entire RAM for the system.
Like, it's one big thing, right?
The hardest one is bridging the disk RAM barrier with the storage thing.
But if we all live long enough, that will inevitably happen, too, because certainly we all agree that spinning disks are gone goodbye, right?
Yeah.
And so now we just have a series of chips with addressable memory using different technologies.
That's fine.
You're going to have a hierarchy.
There's always going to be registers L1, L2, L3, Flash, DRAM.
Whatever the technologies are in the hierarchy, that will all be there.
But I'm talking distant future stuff.
As we're on our deathbeds, the unified single chip everything addressable as RAM machine will probably be out.
And we'll be complaining that it doesn't support some new retina display.
No, we'll be complaining because you can't make a tech size big enough for us to see.
And with that, thanks a lot to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Omnigroup, and Hover, and we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
So long.
Why do they have to make everything so small?
Can't see a thing on these things.
That's all we'll care about is accessibility features from our old.
God.
Hey, you kid about the accessibility zoom, but when I don't have my contact lenses in, that's the only way I can see a computer from any reasonable distance.
And I'm not trying to be funny at all.
Just got to wait until you get a little bit older, because as you get older, your vision starts to get worse in the other direction.
And suddenly you can start to see close up a little bit better.
Well, the way I'm headed, I'm looking at corneal transplants in my future.
So any time I can buy until I can just get some dead guy's eyeballs is a positive improvement.
Get the ones with lasers.
I'll get right on that.
Got to think about the options that the person selected.
It's like going to the BMW dealer.
Hmm.
The cold weather package.
Head-up display.
I'm getting that, definitely.
That's part of the premium package, though, so you're going to have to get a spoiler on your butt.
Oh my goodness.
You guys are going to make great old men.
I really hope I still know you and talk to you regularly when we're all ancient, because it's going to be hilarious.
And by that time, nobody else will care to listen, but it'll be funny.
Oh, I genuinely... I'm not trying to be funny, not trying to be snarky.
I genuinely...
I cannot wait until I'm old because then I can – then I have an excuse.
That's such an old man thing to say.
Well, I have an excuse for going to bed early.
I have an excuse for eating early.
I can be the curmudgeon bastard that I really want to be and get away with it instead of just getting yelled at for ruining the fun about the Mac Pro.
Oh, it's going to be fantastic.
I can't wait.
So what you're saying is you look forward to getting old so it justifies all of your existing behavior.
Basically, yes.
That's awesome.
Also, I plan on buying a 1960s-era Buick and just driving into people that don't use their signals.
Because 1960s-era Buicks are invincible.
I mean, what could possibly harm a 1960s Buick?
They weigh 85 tons.
But they crumble up like a house of cards.
They're death traps.
There's going to be some, like, 1,500-pound smart car that's going to crush your BMW.
Don't ruin my moment, John.
Yeah.
You know what actual car crashes are like there.
I know.
I know.
All right.
Do we want to do titles?
oh wayne dixon pet cemetery style what did wayne dixon do wrong wayne dixon look at your chat your title suggestion uh cemetery yeah kyle cronin's got it it's got to be an s i clearly don't know what you're talking about it's a steven can't forget it guys just forget it
Oh, because was the movie title itself at a custom spelling?
Yes, yes.
I guess neither one of you has read that book or seen that movie.
Nope.
All right, here's a quick primer.
If Lex Friedman hasn't seen the movie, I probably haven't either.
But this is also a book I thought maybe you might have read.
Stephen King is a well-known author you may have heard of.
He's written some books people might have read.
I have heard of him.
Okay.
I can tell you that.
Mark, you don't read novels, do you?
No, I don't read anything anymore.
I barely have time to read Instapaper.
Yeah, that'll be our next podcast.
It's like a big cultural intervention for Marco primarily, but I feel like there's probably big gaps in Casey's life as well.
Oh, there are.
There absolutely are.
Well, look, I spent my entire youth digging around with computers.
Oh, like I didn't?
Clearly you took some breaks.
I took fewer breaks, I think is what it comes down to.
I don't like any of these titles.
How about Compromise Machine?
Did anyone suggest that?
That's pretty good.
We could do that.
Yeah, I can do that.
Either Compromised or Compromise Machine.
Compromised, right?
I would say with the D. I would say without, but I've just been overruled, so that's fine.
What are the reasons for without?
I'm willing to hear.
Just because it's as though it's its name rather than its state of being.
It's a machine that produces compromises.
It's a compromise machine.
You turn it on, it pumps up compromises one after the other.
Oh, gosh.
Compromised is what we're getting at, I think.
Yeah, it is.
The machine itself is compromised in some way.
I don't know.
Either one is fine.
But that covers the Mac Pro-iness of this thing.
One of us probably said it at some point, other than we have to anyway.
I'm kind of surprised that you picked the compromises that you did to complain about.
Like, the USB 3... Well, the reason that's relevant to me is because I'm trying to save money, and one way to save money is, hey, actually, a lot of my enclosures do have USB 3, even though I'm probably using the FireWire 800 interface at this point, because none of my Macs have...
or my Mac Pro doesn't anyway, right?
So one way to save money is, hey, you can reuse all that storage.
You don't have to buy a $300 Thunderbolt box.
You don't have to buy these $50 Thunderbolt cables.
Just put your stuff, hook it up to USB, and it's like, eh, they kind of screwed that part up.
Yeah, but you're not really going to be hitting those limits, though.
I have SSD with the USB 3.0 interface, and it's only going to use, like, you know...
i don't know what it's gonna 100 megs a second 200 megs a second from i don't know but like then i start how big is that ssd like 100 gigs what are we talking 256 how long do you think you're gonna be using that for in reality i don't know it was really expensive i used things for a long time yeah i have i when i got my first ssd it was it was one of the 160 gig intel x25 e's or m's and uh
that was a few hundred dollars when i got i think it was like three or four hundred bucks when i got it for a laptop and it's sitting in a drawer now because it's 160 gigs and that's useless you can make a fusion drive out of it well if fusion drive was really good and if i had a computer that had people everyone else says the fusion drive is really good i don't know why even nn says it he got an imac with fusion drive and he was amazed at how well it performed over time i mean maybe it's different when you get like the officially supported one as opposed to making one yourself i don't know
Compared to a hard drive, it's radically better.
Compared to a real SSD, it is noticeably worse.
Not doing everything, but you will notice the difference.
And if you have the option to go all SSD, do it.
A lot of people are complaining that when I do the iMac price comparisons to the Mac Pro, I spec out the terabyte SSD in both.
Because that's what I would buy, and that's what I would recommend people buying.
And people are like, oh, well, you have Fusion Drive in the iMac.
No, it's not the same.
You have i5s as possible CPUs in the iMac, too.
But I'm not picking those because they aren't comparable.
When I'm saying comparable, I mean comparable.
I haven't used one either, so I can't say it.
But my main drive is an SSD at work, and it's a big difference.
That's the thing that's hurting me the most is that for me to last another year on this Mac, I really just need to get an SSD for it.
But I have the size problem.
I have 1.5 gigs of stuff here, and I could probably pare that down too terribly, but that's a lot of money to dump in.
Why don't you buy my old one?
All right, well, that's what I'm thinking of doing.
So you get your new Mac Pro.
You want to get rid of that thing, I'll probably take it off your hands if you give me a good price on it.
and then i can squeeze myself into that in the last and then for the gpu i'm thinking i just won't upgrade it i'll just keep it i'll just not play not play pc games for a year but i'll be getting my playstation 4 this year and hopefully i'll be playing most of my gaming on the console or playing like old games that still actually run okay well you could buy this whole mac pro for me it has the ati video card and it's like the high-end one that will high-end for 20 yeah it's like a 5870 or something
uh i don't even know i'll try to look it up but yeah it's it was the high one that was available i guess like a quarter of the speed of the mac pro ones or something like that 58 70 yeah i got it uh yeah no we'll see like it's much easier for you to ship me just the the pci express card than to pay for shipping for the whole mac pro but you know that will make a bigger difference of course yeah when you when you get your yeah that's that's maybe the only thing that will make a big difference because maybe i wouldn't even notice the
the video card stuff depending on the games i'm playing so i'm i will think about my options there but i think i've and i'll the mac pro is still on the table if i can get some amazing hardware discount on which i'm still working on but we'll see yeah i mean i think yeah we talked enough about it for now what do you think casey i was not i was not gonna go on the show hand on heart i was just debating with myself if i should just hang up
Just to be funny.
I'm not actually angry, but just to be funny, I was genuinely thinking about hanging up and just going to bed and seeing what you two did by listening to the show.
Well, you can't.
Michael Lopp already did that on Unprofessional last week.
Yeah, that's true.
I forgot.
You can't do it for a while.
It looks like you're copying Lopp.
That's true.
Yeah, you're right.
Oh, well.
Be glad, Casey.
This will probably be more or less the end of the Mac Pro stuff until Marco gets his in February.
That's no way.
This is a hell that I am doomed to live in for at least another three episodes.
I bet we're going to have enough to fill up half of next episode, and then that'll pretty much be it.
And fortunately for you, Casey, the Mac Pro hardly ever changes.
Well, it transitions smoothly into complaining about the lack of updates.
Right, yeah, exactly.
And the monitor situation, whenever that moves at all.
Oh, God.
Or it doesn't.
What we just need to avoid, and what I was trying to avoid in failing here, is we need to stop talking about what we're going to buy for ourselves, because that's boring.
Even though that's what I'm obsessed about currently and what you're obsessing about and stuff or whatever.
And more talking about, you know, I think talking about the review and the state of the machine itself and the compromises in it, that's good.
Hemming and hawing about what I should get instead just makes people angry.
Like, why don't you just build a gaming PC?
Your video card is slow.
Which is just, yeah, not.
Well, but it is helpful.
So much of the feedback email that we get is stuff like this iMac question that we got, which is like, should I buy this?
Can I buy this?
What should I buy?
Stuff like that.
And I think by – it's one thing to hem and haw over –
Minor differences like, oh, do I need to get the D500 or the D700?
That's less important.
But big picture things, talking about do I get a Mac Pro every four years or an iMac every two, that I think is more useful to more people.
I love that one, Gobas.
You keep telling me I should buy an iMac every two years.
a that would be super expensive and b i would never have a good machine for gaming during that whole time i would always have it like just every few years i have a continuing mediocre to crappy game for machine for gaming whereas you know at least for a brief moment i want to be able to play high-end games at full res and then slowly let the machine age out and then for a brief moment be the top of the heap and then it's exactly what you do with cars i'm never at the top of the heap but i'm
For a brief moment, I have a brand new Accord.
It's exciting.
I guess my iMac idea of doing an iMac every two or two and a half years instead of a Mac Pro every four or five, that...
That depends on the iMac being like half the price of the Mac Pro, but it actually is much closer in price than that.
It's like, yeah, like when you spec it out, it's actually not that much cheaper.
It is cheaper, but not half as cheap.
Did she and the other people in the chat room saying, you already have a crappy game?
I know.
What do you think I'm thinking of replacing it for?
People have to remind me that the 800 GT is slow.
I know I have an old machine.
Do you realize this is from 2008, this computer?
Of course it's ancient.
Of course I know that.
it's not but it doesn't mean you just immediately need to buy whatever's out there to get rid of it i want to buy the right new thing to jump to i'm not just anything i buy will be faster mac minis probably have faster gps this thing like i understand that right i'm just looking for the right machine to buy by the way what the hell's up with the mac mini it hasn't been updated in like 10 years yeah you think mac pro people are long suffering the mac mini people's like why not upgrade it it's not advanced technology to shove the last cpu it's like such a simple machine
Does the Mac Mini, you think, still sell well, at least as well as it ever did, or do you think it's on its way down?
I'm thinking if you're in the market for a lower-priced Mac or if you want a second one for some purpose, the Mac Mini will always serve the role of something cheap to connect to a TV or be in a closet.
But for actual desktop use of it, I have to imagine the laptop lineup has to be eating the Mac Mini's lunch at this point.
Because laptops are... Oh, of course.
The Mac Mini is an obscure niche machine.
And the laptops keep getting cheaper.
So you have laptops which are way more useful and a way better value than Mac Minis for almost all circumstances.
Mac Minis are not that cheap.
Once you give it... Again, it's like everything else.
Once you give it reasonable options, it's not that... You're paying $900 or $1,000 for it.
And...
So, you know, it's not that much cheaper than the laptops.
Apple needs to keep the Mini around so that when we're 80 years old, that will be the form factor of the Mac Pro.
Some sort of like, you know, matter, antimatter, black hole technology to remove the heat.
Do you think the Mac Mini is going to get a redesign to look like maybe like the bottom third of the Mac Pro?
They should make it look like the stupid new Wi-Fi base station.
The Mac Mini has gotten taller.
Yeah.
Are you happy to see me, or is that a new Mac Mini in your pocket?
I keep forgetting that the Mac Mini got squished.
I forget where I saw the current model Mac Mini recently, but I'm always struck by how big and wide they are.
Yeah, they look a lot like the old Apple TV.
Yeah, but it's just massive.
I was kind of used to the original Mini form factor was so cute, and now it's thinner but wider, and I don't know if I like that better.
especially now that they don't need an optical disc like why is it so wide and flat squish that back together again i'll take another half an inch of height i don't see the mac mini being a very good deal for any actual like desktop use as a computer as opposed to closet or embedded or tv or whatever like so you know servers it's nice for it's what's the least amount of money i can buy to get into a computer and maybe let me reuse some other crap i might have from my previous computer
so the minis and you know and closet use and rack mounts and all those other type of weird things but i think it's worth keeping around just because like they the profit margins i gotta be pretty darn good because there is cheap stuff in there and they sell it for so much money and it hasn't been going down like i feel like the margins that product have been going up they're like fine you want us to keep you doing this mini 50 profit margins deal with it
Well, also, because there are so many people who want to get into Macs as cheaply as they can, the resale market for Mac minis is huge.
You can sell a Mac mini for almost what you paid for it.
Even if it's a few years old, you can sell it for a really good price.
Because to get a new one right now, you look...
The cheapest one is $600, but it kind of sucks.
The one that's actually good-ish starts at $800, and that's only four gigs of RAM.
It's like, well, you want more than that.
You add eight gigs of RAM, and if you want a Fusion Drive, say, to make it perform better, eight gigs of RAM and one terabyte Fusion Drive, $1,100 already.
So it's really... It's so easy to get you into a low-end iMac at that point.
Exactly.
Come on over.
Have you seen this big shiny color screen?
That mini has no screen.
And the only screen we sell is $1,000.
Right.
Or get into a MacBook Air at that point.
Or a 13-inch Pro.
Do they still sell the 24-inch?
They don't sell that anymore, do they?
No, they deleted the 24.
Now it's only 21 and 27, which is a comical difference.
Oh, that's right.
The crazy 21 thing.
No, no, no.
Not the iMac.
They sell a monitor.
They sell a 24-inch monitor.
Nope.
Not that either.
Only the 27.
Yeah.
It's a slippery slope that lands you into the popular models, the laptops.
Well, and that's, you know, these price points are very carefully designed and considered so that you can upsell yourself through the line.
So it's like you start out with like, oh, I want to get the cheapest Mac possible.
Only certain people can upsell themselves to a Mac Pro, though.
There's a limit.
Well, yeah, obviously that's ridiculous.
There's a canyon that you have to shoot yourself over with a rocket sled to get from that bank.
Yeah.
But you're right, though.
It's designed to get a lot of laptops and iMacs sold, basically.
And I think it does that very well.
Because really, Apple doesn't want everybody buying the Mini, not just because of lower profit margins, but because that's not really the full Mac experience.
They can't control very well what kind of monitor to use with that, whether you plug in a crappy keyboard or mouse from a PC or whether you use theirs, stuff like that.
If you get...
A laptop, an Apple laptop.
Everything is included for you.
You have the keyboard, you have the trackpad that supports all the gestures properly.
You have the nice big screen that Apple controls and knows about and can tweak.
You have everything integrated into this one nice package.
A Mac Mini is sloppy and messy and uncontrolled.
So it doesn't give as good, as integrated of an experience.
So if you're having somebody trying the Mac for the first time,
Apple should want to give them the best experience they can so they keep buying Macs in the future.
And to do that, you have to have a laptop, basically.
Yep, I agree.
But they keep selling it anyway.
Sort of.
Kind of.
How many CPU generations has the Mini skipped?
I think it skipped a couple of them now.
Yeah, I would say probably at least three or four.
It went a long time.
The current one, I think right before the current one, it went like three generations, something like that.
It has had pretty sporadic updates that have been noticeably slowing down over time.
The current CPU is a Core 2 Duo for your $1,100 Mac Mini.
Don't complain.
At least you can use your own monitor.