That’s Where the Magic Happens
There's no pre-show anywhere.
I can't make anything out of this.
Why?
No, you absolutely can.
I think you're just revealing that your ferry service is just slightly more distant.
It's funny of a pre-show because I have no idea about that and I'm just angry at how worried I was for you trapped.
So much hardship has been stolen.
All right, let's move on.
Let's start with some follow-up.
And it's everyone, who knows what the pre-show was?
We don't, and we just recorded it extensively.
But we're going to start with some follow-up.
Andrew Wade said, hey, Marco said the nice thing about the iPad Pro versus the Air was that the Pro had stereo speakers, while the Air did not.
I thought he was right.
But that changed when the Air had its square sides upgrade.
And from the spec sheet, you can see that it clearly labels speakers on the top, or speakers, I think speakers on the top and on the bottom.
Yeah, I was totally wrong about this.
Yeah, the iPad Air used to have just one speaker.
The only way to get like if so what I want out of an iPad is when you hold it in landscape, which I think is really the default iPad orientation for most people.
When you hold it in landscape, you want a speaker on the left and speaker on the right.
And I thought only the iPad Pro line offered that because it used to only be the Pro line that offered that.
But yeah, turns out I was wrong.
Thanks, Andrew Wade, for pointing out that the Air, when it went to USB-C and the square sides, it switched over to a speaker on top and speaker on bottom.
Now, the Pro has four speakers.
It basically has like, you know, kind of one per corner, although they're on the short sides only.
But so that way, like the Pro can do stereo left-right sound
No matter what orientation you're holding it in, whereas the air can only do left right separation in landscape.
But either way, you know, when you when you compare the specs and I did this a little bit on last show, but like so it came time to to choose like, you know, what what should our next iPad for our kid be?
I went through everything and.
went with the ipad pro actually the 11 inch ipad pro because when you you know when you compare i mean everyone's doing this because the i think the air embargo dropped this morning or something but um you know you look at the the new air the distance between the air and the pro is very very small there is there is very little difference between them right now and maybe that'll change you know the pro is probably due for an update like later this year maybe so you know maybe that'll change when the pro gets updated but for right now
the gap between them in both you know specs and features and price uh is very small you know because because we're not going to get just the 64 gig like you know there's a lot of um video capture going on you know so capturing videos and photos and recording games stuff like that so like we we get them you know you i think we usually go with 256 for our configurations for for him um recently um
And so when you compare the prices of 256 versus Air and Pro, the difference is not big.
It's like $150.
And so what you do get with the Pro, again, it's not significant anymore, depending on what you're doing.
But what you get, in short, Thunderbolt instead of USB-C.
So, you know, connectivity for certain types of peripherals and monitors.
That's probably never going to be used here, but, you know, just worth putting out.
You get four speakers instead of two.
okay a little bit better um you get the wide angle camera and the lidar sensor so it's a two camera array with lidar and and a flash whereas the air i believe has no flash and it's just the one camera um and then the big one i think or the big two are our face id and 120 hertz promotion
And that's about it.
Like there's not a lot of other differences, but Face ID also brings, you know, more advanced front camera stuff.
You could do like the portrait mode on the front camera and stuff.
So there's that kind of stuff.
So it's not what you get between the Pro and Air is not nothing, but it's not a lot.
but the price difference is also not a lot when you compare spec for spec so went with pro uh we'll see if i regret that i probably won't um oh and the other downside is the pro only comes in boring colors whereas the air comes in colors that were interesting before they were diluted so much to be more muted and tame to fit the aluminum uh john tell me about the max studio hdmi port
It's still 2.0.
Surprise.
I mean, it should have been expected because if you squint at the Mac Studio, it's like a MacBook Pro in a much bigger case.
And that one also has HDMI 2.0 and I think the same UHS-II SD card slot.
So there's another potential upgrade opportunity for the next revision of this machine as well.
It would be nice if it's going to have an HDMI port that eventually it'll get upgraded to HDMI 2.1, which is admittedly
uh quite a leap considering all the features that are included in hdmi 2.1 if they try to support them all but hey for you know four thousand slash eight thousand dollars uh hdmi 2.1 would be nice so what does 2.1 bring just what are a couple of highlights uh variable refresh rate higher frame rates um is it uh
Better bit depth, maybe, as well.
A bunch more video output options.
There's like a laundry list of them, and you don't have to support them all to get HDMI 2.1.
In fact, I think the HDMI consortium changed it so that you can say HDMI 2.1, even if you only support the 2.0 subset of it.
I think they learned by watching USB, right?
If USB can make their names meaningless, we can do that too, right?
So like literally you can have just the 2.0 subset of features, but still say HDMI 2.1 because technically that's part of the spec.
Anyway, it's silly, but I feel like the higher refresh rate if Apple, you know, well, hey, you can get a gaming monitor in theory, right?
And maybe it's a gaming monitor, then HDMI port is HDMI 2.1 gaming monitor, which are more common these days now that the game console support it.
If you hook that up to your Mac, you can't play games at 120 hertz or whatever.
All right, moving right along.
I need a hug because apparently there's a 27-inch Studio Display Pro coming, if we're to believe these rumors.
I can't handle this, guys.
This rollercoaster of emotion.
I am trapped in a glass cage that is sitting on a rollercoaster of emotion.
But display analyst Ross Young.
That's precarious.
Yes.
27-inch Studio Display Pro with mini-LED and ProMotion could launch in June.
uh ross young says still expecting 27 inch mini led display from apple in june guests it might be a studio display pro have confirmed it with multiple companies in their supply chain if i have this damn studio display for like four months i'm gonna be real upset
Well, so think of it this way.
First of all, this is just a rumor.
I don't know how.
I just threw this in there because the rumor landed immediately after the event.
It was like, oh, and by the way, there's a mini-LED promo.
I was just like, wait, what?
Just after your event, you're saying it's coming in June?
June is not that far from now.
But the way to think about this, if this actually does come true, is...
Imagine the event had come and Apple had launched two 27-inch monitors, one that's like the one we got and then one that has the fancy features, high refresh, HDR, mini-LED, right?
Obviously, the high refresh HDR, mini-LED one would be more expensive.
You know, again, looking at...
the 6k display uh scale that down to 5k because it's basically the same feature set they're saying it would be mini led which is more or less what the xdr is and high refresh well the xdr doesn't even have high refresh it would be better than it in some ways right um it would be more expensive um and if they put both of those out at the same time would you have chosen to spend an extra probably thousand dollars for these features or would you have still gotten the apple studio display that you ordered now
Uh, I would, I would really think about it because I really would love high refresh.
And, uh, was it you, John, that convinced me that, uh, that HDR may have been maybe something I would be interested in just so I could see like, you know, pictures of my iPhone.
Obviously you want the features, but for an extra, probably thousand, maybe $1,500, I think you would have thought twice about it.
Ah.
I don't think there's any chance in hell you would have paid the premium because, again, we don't know how big this premium is or will be when this thing comes out.
Also, I mean, for whatever it's worth, there has been some back and forth with the rumorologists about this that make it sound like it's either coming in June or next year.
Rumors are very vague.
This thing, if it comes out, you know, who knows when it's going to come out.
But I think if it's going to be offering a, you know, similar, assuming it's the same size, you know, 27 inch 5K, but also adds, you know, some kind of micro LED and variable refresh.
I don't see how it's under $3,000 and it's probably more.
And so I don't think there's any chance.
If both these options would have been released on the same day, I don't think you would have bought the other one, Casey.
I really don't.
I think you would have stuck with the one you got.
It's still an open question of how inexpensive they can make this because we thought maybe this would be the time where we would show that like, oh, because, you know, because the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro displays are apparently reasonably priced enough to be unreasonably priced laptops, that maybe
The previously established baseline for what does it cost to have a big Retina Res HDR display, that baseline is no longer valid and actually we could do it much cheaper.
So far, that's not true.
The baseline we have is as it ever was, that if you want to have...
fancy features at a large size at high DPI, it costs an arm and a leg.
Because you can buy these monitors in the PC world, not 5K ones, but even just 4K ones, and they cost a ton of money, like thousands, $3,000, $5,000, $6,000.
They're like XDR-type prices for XDR-type technology.
By the time this comes out, if it comes out next year, maybe that will have changed by then.
But the real thing that is making me doubt this rumor is,
would apple launch two such similar products one in march and one in june that just seems like unless there was some reason that it was accidentally delayed and they just couldn't get it out of time or one of them comes late i don't see them having a planned release to release after whatever five years six years or whatever finally release a monitor everybody buys it and then by the time the last person gets their shipment that they ordered on launch day or something you you release a new one that's better that just seems too tight of a timeline
for me i mean it would be like it would be like apple introducing the new macbook pros and then three months later introducing a totally revised better version of the same products it just doesn't seem like an apple thing to do
Yeah, I would suspect that if this is a thing, which I'm really skeptical, and admittedly it's in my own self and best interest to believe it's skeptical, but if this is real at all, I don't see it happening this year.
I think it would be next year at the earliest, but we shall see.
John, I know you have been dying to tell us about the origins of 5-Head.
After copious amounts of research, which, by the way, you're not supposed to be doing, what have you discovered?
Yeah.
Yeah, I thought it was a Seinfeld episode because it sounds like a Seinfeld.
I mean, there's even the one with the Elaine.
Elaine's got the big head, you know, the bird flew right into her head.
It's like you couldn't avoid it.
It reminded me of a Seinfeld episode, but it wasn't apparently.
And after the show, many people sent me suggestions of what I thought it might be.
Someone pointed out that it was probably the Flophouse and dug out the actual episode.
And now I will put in the link so you can hear it.
It is in a Flophouse episode 94, which was a long time ago in 2012.
uh, around 29 minutes and 46 seconds.
We will put a timestamp link in the show notes.
You can hear Stuart Wellington, uh, I'm not going to say inventing five head, but that's probably where I heard it.
Cause I've listened to the flop house and that's probably where I got it from.
And I think it comes up in subsequent years on the flop house as well.
Other people pointed out Victor Borg.
Is that how you pronounce his name?
Victor Borg.
This is just like, I don't know.
Um, uh,
inflationary language where he just takes any common English phrases with numbers and increments them by one.
And he also says five head and we'll put a link.
That's obviously much older than the flop house.
So maybe Stuart got it from this thing that he watched when he was a kid or something.
So both of those links will be in the show notes with timestamps.
I feel so much better now.
You should.
And now five head is part of your life.
And now when you go to London, you can talk about the five head building, the one that melted cars and stuff.
You know that one?
What?
Was it like the curve reflection thing?
Yeah, there's a building in London that looks like it's got a five head because it gets bigger at the top.
It looks like it has a big bulging forehead.
And the sun reflected off it in such a way that it was melting things that were in front of it during a certain time of day.
So they fixed it by putting a giant sunshade inside it.
All right, moving right along.
Tell us about your Marco Christmas present.
Alex Polianis says that the a7 III does have animal eye detection.
You just need to update the firmware.
Many other people sent this in to me, but Alex was the first one.
And so I was excited by this, and I went and looked at the camera.
And the latest firmware from Sony for those cameras version 4.0.1.
And what was installed on it was 2.0.
So I did update the firmware.
You should send it back for a refund.
Yeah, I did.
I did update the firmware.
I went to the Sony website.
Sony software is so awful.
I mean, their iOS software is not great, but at least it works.
But their Mac software is just next level bad.
I downloaded a thing for a Mac that was ostensibly supposed to be a thing that lets you update the firmware on your Sony camera.
Yeah, just flat out did not work.
Like it was the most confusing Byzantine interface.
I thought I must not be understanding what it wants me to do or why, because it would be like unplug the camera, don't have your camera plugged in, plug it in, then turn it on and do it.
It just absolutely did not work.
It might be because, like, macOS has clamped down security since it was written and they never updated it.
Who the heck knows?
So Windows to the rescue, I booted into Windows, and the Windows version of the software is also awful, but actually works when you follow the instructions.
So I booted into Windows, updated my firmware, and now my A7 III can do pet eye detection, and I took many doggy pictures.
So just to add insult to injury with your Mac Pro being truly terrible by any reasonable measure at this point, right?
Uh, apparently the base model Mac Pro has gotten a spec bump just to make yours feel even more inadequate.
New.
Well, mine's already, uh, mine already surpasses the spec bump, but it's interesting that they are like, I, whenever you see a spec bump like this, what did, what do they do?
They, they, um, they're
did they bump the storage from 128 to 512 like kind of hard hard for me to believe that it was 128 was it 256 256 yeah it's all they're doing is making the base level configuration have what used to be add-on options uh and the kind of bumping everything down like one step so it isn't that there's like new hardware available you just get more in the base model than you got before of the same choices that were already available
Oh, yeah.
It was 256.
Sorry.
It's hard to believe that you'd buy this $6,000 computer and have a 256 gigabyte SSD in it.
It's just ridiculous, right?
And when they do things like this, especially when they bump the graphics card from the Radeon Pro 580X, which was a terrible graphics card,
to the w550x which is considerably better um it makes me think they can't get the 580x anymore because it's so old right it's like yeah like since when does apple like apple doesn't have a reputation for uh essentially reducing the price of configurations of computers as they age they just don't like i mean they're still selling the apple tv hd for some obscene price they like
Just because the computer has been around, look at the iMac Pro.
Did that price ever go down in its third year of life or whatever because it was ancient stuff?
No, it didn't.
So I always think they're running out of parts when they do this.
But it's nice that they're still revising it.
This is not an exciting update, but there you have it.
But hey, if you need to boot into Windows to update your Sony camera, it's good to have one of those Intel Macs.
Real-time follow-up, Marco, that new comment went right over my head, but that was a much better joke than I gave you credit for, so well done.
Thank you.
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uh moving right along uh oh we should probably spend a minute talking about masquerade um the launch went well ish like it went fine um sales have been okay uh i'm going to forever blame the two of you for your just incredible sales pitch a couple episodes back and that's why it happened um
I feel so bad.
I'm so sorry.
First, you invite me to beta test this app for like three months and I do almost no testing.
Well, today it makes you feel better.
So I haven't watched what you sent me.
So Marco sent me like a 20 or 30 minute video.
So in your defense, I have not had the time yet to watch what you've sent me.
So I have saved it.
It exists.
It is on the to do list, but I haven't done it yet.
Yeah.
So then we did our launch show and I kind of crapped all over your schedule for doing it, which I didn't mean to be a jerk about it.
And I'm very sorry about that.
So then I did.
I'm like, you know what?
I feel so bad.
Let me help out my friend or at least like try to, you know.
by telling him all the other things that are wrong with zap so i yeah so i i set up like i set up my phone like i set up one phone like on like shooting video of another phone you and i did a whole walkthrough of the app like i'm like here's from from launch first launch going through here's the purchase here's everything else here's what i think of every single every single part of this app one by one like it's so it's so i my present to you was a 24 minute video which is i'm it's basically giving somebody a problem it's like here i'm gonna as a gift to you i'm gonna give you this giant time commitment you might as well have given me a puppy
yeah right no puppies are better um but yeah so anyway so i'm sorry both for the lack of testing and for breezing over it too much when you when you announced it and then also for giving you a big time commitment as as my makeup gift for those first two anti-gifts
You too could have a friend like Marco Armi.
I'm a great friend to have.
So I honestly do want to hear how's it going.
The only reason we didn't talk about it last week was because it was an event week.
But I was very surprised and in a way I was humbled for my lack of imagination.
There were just so many people who wrote in to Casey to say...
hey, I have this use case and it's great for that.
And there were so many of those that I just could not think of at all at first.
Because I thought it was just like, here's an app for people who want to do what Casey does.
That's it, period.
Like an app for people who want to put emoji on their kids' faces on Instagram.
And there's so many more use cases for it than that.
And everyone's been telling you all about that.
And that's pretty great.
Yeah, it's been surprising for me, too.
I'd love to be all smug and be like, oh, of course, Marco, I knew this all along.
But no, I did not.
And so a lot of very interesting use cases have come up.
Some of the more popular ones I've seen is foster parents.
And this is not a world that I'm a part of, but I'm slightly embarrassed that I didn't think about this.
But foster parents, in most places, my limited understanding is they are legally...
I guess, obligated to obscure the faces of the children that they're fostering because most states don't seem to think it's their right to post photographs of the faces of the children that they're fostering.
And so they have to obscure them.
And so, yeah, so foster parents have been really, really enthusiastic about this.
And boudoir photographers who want to keep things safe for work apparently are interested in putting maybe some eggplants all over the photographs or something along those lines, which was something I was...
very surprised to read, but I mean, hey, it makes sense.
And it actually got even more risque from there, but I'll leave that for another time.
Coming back to the less risque options, teachers, which is something I did think about, and certainly I've told friends of Aaron's and mine that are teachers, you know, if you want to post a picture of your classroom, you may have social media releases for your kids.
Some school districts do that, some don't.
Um, but nevertheless, it's easier perhaps to just obscure their faces.
And so teachers, uh, any of them that I've spoken to about it seem really enthusiastic about it.
Um, amusement park ride photos, uh, somebody tweeted, I think I retweeted a picture of like Splash Mountain or something like that at Disney World where they put like little screamy or smiley faces or whatever on, on all of the, uh, ride participants except them and their family, or maybe it was just that the single individual, which I, I got quite a kick out of.
protesters or perhaps even military personnel.
Again, we stand with Ukraine, but obviously there's a lot of really awful and terrible things going on over there.
And there are plenty of reasons why you might want to obscure faces or something like that.
So that's an example of
There's just plenty of different things.
A few people have taken to putting pig noses on the nose of their dog.
So they have a little pig snout, snoot, whatever, which is quite funny to see.
I saw a few of those fly by.
I think I retweeted one or two of those, which were very, very, very good.
And I like those quite a bit.
So, yeah, there are a lot more use cases here.
than I expected.
And as much as I... When we were recording a couple episodes ago, I felt like both of you guys were being a little tunnel-visioned about it, but certainly this is more eye-opening than I would have expected even.
So I can't entirely fault you for it.
In general, a couple of other observations.
I got a lot of generally friendly flack, but flack nevertheless...
about the fact that the app doesn't prompt for permission before opening a photo.
And a lot of people were like, hey, what are you doing?
This doesn't seem right at all.
And at first I was like, what are you talking about?
This is an API.
And it occurred to me that for better or worse, the nerds at least have been trained to only trust when they see a permissions prompt.
And honestly, that's probably for the best.
That being said, as of last year, no, two years ago.
God, what year is it?
Times of Flat Circle.
WWDC 2020.
In 2020, they released a new API, and it is the phpicker view controller.
And the advantage of the phpicker view controller is that it allows you to load images without having to have any sort of prompt.
And so basically, by calling into Apple's code using this specific view controller...
I can ask for one or more photos and it will handle what it needs to handle on its end.
I don't have to ask for permission or anything.
It'll just do it.
And then it will come back to me with the results.
And so the only thing I have access to are the specific images that the user, or in my case, image that the user has selected.
They don't give me any sort of access to anything else.
And that's really cool.
And for me, it was perfect.
It was exactly what I wanted.
But it was funny and interesting to me that a lot of people were like, hey, man, what you doing?
Because this doesn't seem right at all.
But that was very fascinating.
In terms of sales, it's okay.
It hasn't lit my financial world on fire.
It's not bad, but it's not spectacular.
So there's that.
But
I'm having fun with it, which is good.
I've already released one release, and earlier today I sent TestFlight for review, but it hasn't been approved as far as I know.
Another release.
One of the things that people asked for the most was a way to get a photo from other apps into Masquerade, which is a completely reasonable thing to ask for, and something I was planning on.
I tell you what, maybe I'm just a dummy, but the namespace for things that interact with the share sheet has been so polluted with generic terms like action extension, which you can find in a billion different computer science-related contexts.
There are so many different ways to skin this cat.
And it took a lot of help from random people on Twitter to get me to the exact point I wanted to.
But I think I have a version of that working that should be out in another week or so where you can be in photos, you can open the share sheet, it'll appear in the second row, you know, where you will like peer to messages and things of that nature.
Well, if you add it, you know, because you have to first add it as one of the options that are available there.
But in the second row beneath Contacts, you'll see a Masquerade icon.
And then it will prompt you, hey, do you want to edit this in Masquerade?
And then it will pop over to Masquerade and it'll let you edit it right there.
uh the testers assuming the testers think that it works okay then uh hopefully like i said i'll have that out in a week or two you know if you uh watch my 24 minute video there's a couple there's a bunch of like you know really quick hit kind of things in there that you could do pretty quickly in the next no and i do all kidding aside i do need to the problem is is i have this like that bug about the selection rectangle i found that bug during the video and i've told you how to fix it i reproduce it 100 of the time
Oh, good.
Well, I was briefly looking at that earlier today, so I guess I should stop procrastinating on the video.
I can tell you exactly how to fix it.
In SwiftUI?
Oh, no.
Screw that.
Yeah.
See?
See?
Because remember, that app up until this update with... So for the update for the share sheet, I had to write Objective-C.
That's how much I'm going through for you, the purchaser.
Why did you have to do that?
Okay, so I think this is worth talking about.
Honestly, because they both interoperate and it's a Swift application.
And why?
What did you have to do that for?
So I don't want to make this long and I don't want to be super specific because I'm doing something that's not shady, but not entirely on the up and up.
Are you swizzling something?
No, I'm not swizzling.
No, no, no, no.
But I needed to, let's just say I needed to walk the responder chain.
And that is something that's considerably easier to do in the way in which I was trying to do it with some of the other things that were happening around it in Objective-C than it was in Swift.
And you can do this in Swift.
It's fine.
Please don't write me.
It's totally fine.
I'm not upset, really, that it happened, but it was funny because
you know, having to write Objective-C for the first time in a long time and remembering that like, oh, semicolons are a thing.
I forgot about that, you know?
And so, so yeah, so anyway, but all in all, like I'm pleased with the app.
There's definitely problems with it.
Apparently 25 minutes worth of problems with it if you're Marco Arment, but there's definitely problems with it.
It, I think it is getting, I think it's good and I think it's getting better and that pleases me, but sales have been meh and that's pretty disheartening.
So you take, you win some, you lose some.
I still don't know how to find exactly the people who use this app for you.
That's the crux of the issue, isn't it?
Right.
What's good is that you have a lot more groups that you can target here.
This is something that I've had to learn so many times.
I really don't know how to reach people I'm not already reaching.
I never have been good at this with my own apps.
If you look at the things I've made, the things that have succeeded are things that appeal to the audience I already have.
The things that have not succeeded are when I try to appeal to other groups.
When I make stuff that is not really that useful to a lot of tech nerds, I tend not to succeed.
I don't know how to reach out to this audience.
I have no idea.
I've tried a couple of ads and things here and there, but never at a large scale and never to a super targeted group, never doing things like going on Facebook or Google and buying really targeted demographic kind of stuff.
I've never done any of that stuff.
But that is...
Probably something to look at.
How you might feel about that, that's a different story, and I certainly have my feelings about that kind of stuff, and that's one of the reasons I haven't done it.
But I've also benefited from my businesses mostly targeting the audience that I already have and that I can already reach.
I'm really good at making tools for nerds.
you know ultimately and you know this is isn't going to help you with this particular problem um but ultimately like i think if you want to like really blow out your indie app career start making tools for nerds like you yeah look i mean look at this stuff people ask you all the time make a front end for ffmpeg to do a bunch of common stuff
There's so many apps that are basically that.
That's the kind of thing you could do.
Make something that makes people's synologies more useful.
Make something that is really good that integrates with Plex.
The things that you're already a big nerd about, I feel like you would at least have a better chance of selling your existing audience on that kind of stuff and you get more people that way because...
When you're making an app that's trying to reach out to parents with certain needs, that's some of the people who listen to our show.
That's some of your existing audience.
That's some of your blog audience.
But it's not going to be as much of that audience as something that appeals to nerds who run FFMPEG.
It's a very, very different market.
And again, I'm only speaking from experience here.
I've only succeeded when I've targeted nerds in a broad way.
And I have not succeeded when I've tried to step out of that.
I take what you're saying.
And honestly, there have been a couple either FFmpeg or FFmpeg adjacent things that I've been really, really kind of thinking about.
Part of the reason that I haven't done it is because I don't have anything against being a Mac developer.
But I have no interest in learning AppKit, which I know is like blasphemy for many of our friends.
But I just don't have any interest in it.
And going Catalyst is an option, but it's got its own challenges.
Doing SwiftUI is an option, but it's got its own challenges.
And then the other thing...
Again, I take your point, but if you're a nerd who knows enough to know what FFmpeg is, are you going to pay $20, $30, $40, $50 for what is effectively just a GUI in front of FFmpeg?
You know what I mean?
I have.
People do.
I have.
There's like 20 different apps out there that are that.
I just used one recently.
I was using, what was I using?
I think Permute is just an fmpeg frontend.
A lot of my, I think a lot of my player apps are fmpeg frontends.
I find out when you look in the packages and you see they bundle their own copy of fmpeg.
Some of them have in the preferences window.
I ask you to locate your copy of fmpeg and then you realize how many of these apps are just frontends or fmpeg.
Yeah, and I use them because I don't want to have to Google for the command line every time.
I just want to use a GUI app.
Fair.
I don't know.
It's worth thinking about.
I think for now, my intention is to get rid of some of the things that bother me about Masquerade, which is, generally speaking, things that bother other people about Masquerade, like, for example, not having a share extension.
But I'd like to spend another month or two, you know, trying to get through those.
And I feel like I've been making pretty quick progress of a lot of them.
And then once that's done, I think I might spend a little time spit polishing peak of you.
We should talk about that in another episode because I don't know if it's worth my time or not, but I feel like a little spit shine would be nice.
And then I'm not sure what's coming next, to be honest with you.
I've really thought about doing just my own spin on an FFMPEG front end, like you've described.
I really, really, really want to make a nicer way to put chapters into videos, which is like an esoteric book.
part of an esoteric market, but the options that exist today I'm not in love with.
And so I'm really considering doing something like that.
For all I know, maybe both of these things could be the same app.
I don't know.
But one way or another, I don't know what's coming after Masquerade.
But, oh, and to go back a step, I have thought very hard, and I don't know if I'm going to do it, but I've thought very hard about taking the meager earnings that Masquerade has already got and pumping a lot of that into advertising for it.
And I don't know exactly what that would look like.
I don't know.
Honestly, I don't know really anything about how to pay for people to pay for advertising that will hopefully get people to not only install your app, but convert and purchase the IP.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
I think I'm going to try it at least a little bit.
I don't know if that means Instagram.
I don't know if that means Facebook.
If I'm smart, it probably means Facebook, as gross as that is.
But I think I'm going to at least give it a shot.
Honestly, I would go Instagram.
Because you figure that's where people are.
You could show a picture with the emoji already on it as the ad.
But at that point, I'm asking you to do something that Instagram already does.
To pay for something that Instagram already does.
I don't know.
Again...
I'm happy to talk about this in a general sense.
I think in the interest of time, since we have a lot more to cover, I think we should put it in the parking lot for now.
But we can put it in the parking lot and circle back later.
But I don't know what I'm going to do about this.
But if there's interest both with you two and with the listener for me talking through this as I work through it over a month or two from now...
then I'm certainly happy to bring it to the show and talk it over.
But I feel like my gut sitting here tonight is that I think a little bit of Facebook and maybe Instagram advertising is worth exploring.
And maybe I put 10% of what I've earned from Masquerade into it, which is frustratingly not $30 million, which is what I was hoping for, but certainly did not expect.
But put 10% of what I've earned into it and see if I can get any traction from it.
And I don't know.
We'll see what happens.
But
I appreciate anyone who has bought it, for sure.
I appreciate anyone who has told friends or family about it, doubly sure.
And if you haven't checked it out, I would encourage it.
I think it's pretty good today, and it's certainly going to get better.
And after I weep from all the feedback that Marco's given me, I will be making presumably many of the changes that he suggested, and hopefully it'll get better still.
I will ruin slightly that it's going to be a lot of removal of some text.
Well, that is not surprising.
A little less text than you have.
But not a lot less.
Still Casey.
Still very Casey.
Got to get that file size down.
Got to remove those characters.
Yeah, I actually am blowing out the file size ever so slightly.
I think it's only like two or three megs to download right now.
But I'm adding a photo of me, a small photo of me in it.
Because one of the features I'm adding in the forthcoming version is you can have like a...
sort of effectively a multiplier on how big the emoji is once it's put on a face.
So if you think about the way this works is, you know, I get from an API, oh, the face is at such and such rectangle.
Well, you have the option coming up, you will have the option of saying, well, make that rectangle 120% bigger than it normally is, you know, of the size that the API gave me.
So you have a
In order to do that, I put a picture of me in there, and then you can slide left and right to make the emoji bigger or smaller over my face.
I don't know if you can get it in Test Flight right this minute, but as soon as Apple gets around to testing the Test Flight version, you can get it because it's pending.
It's waiting on Apple.
And so I added a picture of me, and that was like a meg in total across all three sizes.
And then the welcome screen, the image, the icon, the masquerade icon at the top, annoyingly, even for the 13 Pro Max, the biggest icon that Apple packages within the bundle of their own volition is like 72 by 72 at 2X or something like that.
It's like an iPad size at 2X.
And I felt guilty adding another copy of the same thing to the bundle in order to get a more retina-friendly version of the icon.
And I've been called on it enough times that I've decided, you know, what's the real difference between like a 4-meg app and a 5-meg app or whatever?
So I've added...
I've added another copy of the masquerade icon so it looks a little cleaner on the landing page.
So it's getting a little bit bigger, I'm sad to say.
But I guess Marco is going to help me offset that.
That's what it is.
I'm offsetting it.
You know, just like you offset caloric intake by exercise.
Well, Marco's giving me my exercise, if you will, so I can offset the bloat of my app.
There you go.
So it's a team effort.
I'll save you tens of bytes.
Tens of bites, I tell you.
All right.
Well, again, I mean, I'm not trying to shut down the conversation on a general level.
I think we should move on for today.
But if listeners or if you two are interested in anything that's going on, I'm happy to talk about it in future episodes.
I am.
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And now, this is the part where I go to sleep for a little while.
Let's talk about the Mac Pro.
A little bit of an emotional rollercoaster after the event.
I mean, I talked through this in the last episode, but the things they said in the event could lead to various futures that would not make me particularly happy or that don't make a lot of even sense to me.
So in one of my emotional low points since last week, I was thinking about a future ARM-based Mac Pro.
That would be in keeping with everything Apple has said and everything that we know.
And it would also be extremely confusing and disappointing.
And it's this.
And I mentioned some of this in the last show, but putting it all together after the show is like, they could do this and it would fit with what they said.
So first is that it would just have the M1 Ultra in it.
that would fit with what they said because what they said is this is the last you know m1 chip right uh and they also seem to be saying that their transition is going to complete more or less on schedule and it seems kind of unlikely that there's going to be a gigantic 40 core m2 based chip ready during that schedule again who knows but it just seems unlikely at this point so yeah you could just have the m1 ultra why is that disappointing well we've already got a computer with the m1 ultra and it's called the mac studio
uh and you're going to release a mac pro and it's got the exact same chip in it that's not very pro it's like okay well then maybe so let's flesh out the rest of this machine i would have pci slots uh but in keeping with marco's pessimism you have pci slots but you can't put gpus in them
So the PCI slots would just be there for other things.
You can do lots of stuff with PCI slots, but if you can't put GPUs in them, it's weird.
And of course, if it's got an M1 Ultra in it, that means the max RAM is 128 gigs because that's the max on the M1 Ultra.
And then if it's the Mac Pro and not the Mac Studio, it would probably be more expensive because it's the top end machine.
And that Mac Pro, M1 Ultra only, max 128 gigs of RAM, PCI slots with no GPU support, bigger and more expensive than a Mac Studio, that's not a good Mac Pro.
That's just kind of a sad Mac Pro.
And it's a nonsensical, confusing Mac Pro because how would Apple even advertise that Mac Pro?
Here's our new most powerful computer.
Buy this one for more money than this other one.
and do everything at exactly the same speed because it has the same system on the ship the same amount of ram no more gpu power but i guess you can put internal ssds and stuff and like or audio interface cards which people tell me they aren't even a thing anywhere but who knows
that would be super disappointing.
And yet it would fit with all available information.
And so I was thinking about that and thinking, God, I hope they don't do that.
And that led me down to, to dig myself out of that sort of pit of despair of this.
Just because what I'm basically describing is it's a Mac studio, but bigger and more expensive with card slots that are useless to everybody.
Almost every card slots that are almost useless, almost everybody, because honestly, what, what goes in the card slots?
Like after burner car, which you don't need anymore because they have that stuff on the system on a chip.
Um,
Tons of GPUs.
If you look at what does Apple sell you that you can put in those slots in the Mac Pro?
They sell tons of GPUs.
You can put four giant GPUs in there by doing two dual cards with the huge amounts of, like, that's what Apple sells you to put in there.
And you can put other stuff in there like PCIe SSD cards, cards with more USB slots in them, the aforementioned mythical audio interface cards.
There are other things you can put in there, but GPUs are one of the big ones.
So to get myself out of this funk, I said, that can't be it.
There's got to be something...
more there's got to be something more to the mac pro uh and i was trying to convince myself that maybe maybe like a big m2 will be ready because you know the the low-end m2s will come out around the middle of the year with the new macbook air and maybe maybe the new uh mac mini will have an m2 and then new macbook pros maybe so maybe by the end of the year maybe they will have an m i just couldn't convince myself i couldn't convince myself that by the end of this year there's going to be like a 40 core m2 base chip
I may be wrong.
Again, all of my expectations are trained based on public Intel roadmaps and history and stuff like that, but it just seems less likely to me.
So I was looking for something, anything to make me feel better about the possibility of a Mac Pro that isn't stupid.
And luckily I was saved by another good video from Max Tech.
It's a YouTube video, we'll put it in the show notes.
And it had a bunch of information.
Some of it was old that I thought was interesting and some of it was like...
possibly leading us to some scenario where we could have a better Mac Pro.
So the first bit of older info is a patent that we'll put a link to in the show notes.
I couldn't find a good link for the patents.
I'm sure there's like a .gov site that has patents on it, but I ended up going to patents.google.com because they had reasonable URLs and it was easy to search.
Surprise.
So this is a patent describing how the M1 Pro and Macs and Ultra work, like chips we already know about.
And if my slash max text understanding of this patent is correct, there's one wrinkle to what we have discussed in the past.
So there's a photo associated with the patent.
You'll be able to look at it if you follow the link.
And it's like a big silicon wafer, which is a circle.
And then it's got little squares cut out.
And each one of those squares is basically jade-c-dye, right?
And it shows how they'll print as many of those squares as they can fit in the circle, which is kind of a shame that silicon wafers are a circle.
I'm sure there's some important reason they are having to do with manufacturability, but the chips aren't circle, so there's lots of wasted space.
But anyway, you got all these little squares.
And what they do with them is the way they get an Ultra...
is the two jade c dies that are next to each other have to both be working so to get an ultra with all the stuff working it's not just that you need two maxes with all the stuff working you need two maxes that were next to each other on the wafer so apparently the interposer thing like they have to be next to each other wait so does the interposer is the interposer being printed between all of them
I don't know the details, but my understanding is what this is what they're saying in the patent that even if it's a second process or a second pass or a third pass or whatever, but they have they do actually have to be next to each other.
You can't just take these two random ones like the video shows these two little things coming together and being weaved together.
But that's not that's just fanciful graphics things.
They have to actually be next to it.
Maybe they do try to print it between all of them.
or maybe they just you know look at which ones are good and then print it on the ones that are good but either way that explains a little bit of why it's so much more expensive to get you know a an ultra with everything working on it because it's not just enough to have two maxes with all the parts working they have to be two maxes that happen to be next to each other and the odds of that are a lot lower you can look at this little diagram and do the math if you're good at probability and figure out uh percentage wise how much less likely that is to happen um
And then, of course, if you just have one of the squares where everything works, that's a max where everything works.
If you get a square with only some of the stuff works, that's a max with some cores missing.
And if you get a square with a whole bunch of stuff that's screwed up, in theory, that's a Pro where they just remove the bottom part of it.
I don't know if that's true.
I think they might print the Pro separately, but...
I might be wrong with that.
But either way, this was enlightening.
And it doesn't make me feel that much better about the increase in cost.
Like, you know, if I want all the GPU cores working, it's an extra thousand dollars.
But I do have a little bit more sympathy for the yields they must be getting.
But the other thing looking about this is how clever the system is for cost control.
where you design one thing, you print it the best you can, and on every single wafer, you get X number of maxes, X number of pros, and X number of ultras.
And there's very little waste, right?
You don't have to throw anything out, because if you have two ultras and some part of it's screwed up, maybe that's two maxes.
Maybe that's one max with some stuff missing in a pro.
Every square on it, you're trying to get the best that you can possibly get out of it.
And if you win the ultra lottery and a bunch of ultras come out of the wafer, great.
But if not, you don't have to throw a lot of stuff away.
So I thought that was interesting.
So second patent vaguely related to that, like this one as well, is, again, I don't understand it all this to know.
Max Tech seemed confident in their interpretation.
I read it and my eyes glazed over.
I mean, I should make Casey to keep Casey awake.
I should make him read this.
Can you, Casey, can you please read the highlighted portion and see if this makes any sense to you whatsoever?
What?
Hmm?
Sorry, did you need something?
Yes.
A communication path that travels up and down between the first package level and the second package level, wherein a first group of one or more dies and the first plurality of dies function as both functional dies and stitching devices for two or more of the second plurality of dies.
And a second group of one or more dies and the second plurality of dies function as both functional dies and stitching devices for two or more of the first plurality of dies.
Okay.
I would not have been able to make heads or tails of this, but I did do my research and I watched the MaxTech video and it was very good.
And what MaxTech is saying, or their theory is, you take two Ultra, or you take one Ultra, which is itself two Max's, and then below it, you put a second Ultra.
So you have a total of four, which is sounding familiar,
Two above, two below.
What's better than 2D?
3D, baby.
And so the theory is that they would be able to get around some of the problems of things being physically distant from each other.
So to back up a half step, let's say you had four M1 Maxes laid in a row, serially, if you will.
If you have to get data from the leftmost one to the rightmost one,
that actually takes some time and you would potentially have to go via the other ones to get that data across through all these different dyes.
So what they're saying is, and what MaxTech is theorizing is, well, if we put them two on top of two, then maybe we could make these physically proximally closer and we can stitch them together in such a way that we get a jade, what was it, 4C dye or something like that.
So, um, there, it's a theory and it does make sense to someone who does know a little bit about electronics, but nothing about chip design.
So, uh, it, it's possible.
Yeah.
I mean, part of the problem with the, the JC die is as far as we're aware of that whole, like the place where the interposer is, that's just on one edge.
There's other stuff on the other edges that do other important things, right?
So if you try to put four of these down and,
If you just take an ultra and it's got the interposer between them, where do you put the second ultra?
If you put it alongside, then it's not connected to the first ultra, right?
If you put it underneath, then the interposers are on top of each other.
And this patent is about connections made from one thing downwards to another.
All this weird patent language with plurality of dyes and the weird language you have to do.
It's like legalese mixed with techno stuff.
If you ever read a patent, it doesn't read like a normal thing.
And I'm sure all that language is there.
some important historical reason that this is this is the way you have to do it for it to be well understood in the world of patents because they use a certain language to do stuff but it just makes it confusing um to try to read and figure what they're talking about now tons of chips that apple makes have various 3d layers and stacking like or the tsmc makes or whatever so that's not a new thing and it could be that this whole patent is just talking about that and has nothing to do with taking two ultras and putting them on top of each other is just yet another system for making layered integrated circuits um
I don't know enough to know.
But the reason I bring this up is the idea that you could have two ultras that talk to each other relies on solving the problem of, yeah, but how?
And the MaxSec video where I was thinking of putting them end to end, that doesn't make any sense because there's nothing on the sort of the other ends to talk to each other at all.
Like, I don't think there's any, forget about the distance, you know, which is a whole separate issue.
There's nothing there to connect or talk as far as I'm aware.
So it would have to be one on top of the other or something slightly different.
But anyway, that would make a Mac Pro that, you know, that is not stupid.
Because, hey, it's two M1 Ultras.
And that's twice as much stuff.
And obviously, you'd charge way more money for that.
But it would also be able to do twice as much stuff if you have a workload that can use all its execution units.
So that would be great.
And that would make me feel a lot better, even if it still didn't use external GPUs, right?
Now, the final bit here related to this, we're getting increasingly sketchily sourced rumors, right?
This is from Manjin Boo.
I think this was on Twitter.
Yeah.
I don't know this person's rumor history or whatever.
But the tweet says, based on what my resource reports, here is some official information on the new Mac Pro 2022.
This is the bridge that connects two M1 Ultra together and will be found in the new 2022 Mac Pro.
And there's an image in the tweet that you can look.
Hopefully the tweet is still up.
So what the image is showing is
like a blueprint-ish looking diagram.
And in the upper right corner, there is a diagram that clearly looks like two M1 Ultras next to each other, side by side, with a strip going down in the middle, where I guess that's where the magic happens, where somehow there's this big vertical strip between them that lets them talk to each other.
How?
I don't know.
But there's a bunch of this, you know, the diagram's talking about Daisy XL sub-zero, Daisy XL sub-two, um...
and some other texts explaining that the daisy is the interconnected between the things it's basically saying we can put them side by side and we'll put a strip of this magic stuff here and the magic stuff makes them talk to each other and voila you've got a you know four square uh m1 ultra x2 um and according to this the processor name is red fern and it's coming in mac pros this september so there's a timeline there's a code name there's a diagram with a topology um
So it will be easy to assess which one of these rumors is correct, because eventually a Mac Pro will come out.
And the first thing to look at is, does it have more in it than an M1 Ultra?
Like, does it have two M1 Ultras in it?
Right.
If it doesn't, then everyone will be sad.
If it does have two M1 Ultras, how are they physically laid out?
Are they on top of each other or are they side by side?
Uh, and that will sort of let us know which one of these people was closer to reality.
But I, and the reason I did all this digging, because I just want to believe that there's going to be two M1 Ultras in there.
Um, because M1 Ultra makes sense, two M1 Ultras makes sense to me.
And Apple can paper over it by saying, we didn't lie when we said this was the last M1 chip.
It really is.
And now you have two of them, two of the, but...
Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say.
And I don't recall if we talked about this last episode, but it is not entirely unreasonable for them to say, look, we told you that what makes an M1 Ultra so ultra and amazing is that it is perceived to be one chip by the operating system and so on and so forth.
Well, this M1 Ultra Mega Max Voltron, whatever, this is two chips.
So we didn't lie.
It's two chips.
It's perceived to the OS as two chips.
But we've been doing this on and off for years, so it's something we're used to.
And now it's almost like having two whole computers in one.
And I don't think that's necessarily unreasonable, especially if, like I said, this is perceived by the operating system as being two different processors.
You still got the Numa thing, though.
So you can say it's two different processors.
We made dual processor computers before.
That's not a big deal.
At no point did each one of those processors have its own private pool of memory that was attached to it.
And this diagram, by the way, doesn't address that.
The second diagram that shows the two M1 Ultras right next to each other, where's the RAM in that picture?
Because if you look at an actual M1 Ultra, it's not just the two Max's attached to each other.
It's two Max's attached to each other flanked on both sides by RAM chips.
where are the ram chips in this diagram where did they go because this looks like it would be addressable as one chip and the ram would be around it or something and then how can apple get it we're calling that uh two m1 ultras when it it's it's really confusing and upsetting to me and i don't know how this is going to turn out what it's making me think is is no matter how this turns out that it's either going to be a crappy computer that i don't want to buy or it's going to be something that i there's just too much money and i'm going to end up getting a mac studio
I mean, so the RAM thing, I think, might help steer this one way or the other.
Because what if... I wouldn't say it wouldn't have unified RAM, but what if it has RAM slots?
Because looking at the gap between the current Mac Pro and the Mac Studio, in certain areas, the Mac Studio is already way past it.
in certain areas the mac studio can't compete with it yet like it doesn't it can't reach those levels and i think the area that has the biggest discrepancy is not gpu performance it's the ram ceiling and you know the current my pro has a ram ceiling of 1.5 terabytes right isn't that right um the mac studio maxes out at 128 gigs
mm-hmm that's a pretty big gap uh and i i can't imagine that by going from two dies to four we would somehow multiply the ram ceiling by 10 i i don't see how that works with keeping everything made the same way that's that it's been made
Now, I am as big a skeptic as they come about the next Mac Pro being super expandable.
I don't think there's going to be a lot of slots or GPU.
It would be surprising to me if there was ever the support for a slotted GPU, for instance.
I don't think that's going to happen.
However, I do think there might be RAM slots because I don't see how they keep the same memory packaging strategy with all the other M1 family while replacing the Intel Mac Pro without having severe ramifications for its use in things like scientific computing, which is – I don't know how big this market is, but among people who buy the current ridiculous Intel Mac Pro –
that is some part of that of that group and that's some part that like you look if you need a terabyte of ram or even just more than 128 gigs of ram in a mac you know right now you have no option except that mac pro um and to get rid of that option in the future i i think you know without having something that could replace it that could even come close to that ceiling of resources in this one area i think that would be that would be you know kind of crappy for the lineup and and for the specialty for the specialty needs that that need that
So I think we are very likely to see something different about the next Mac Pro that does not follow the restrictions of the other MX series up to this point.
And I think RAM slots are the most likely thing to see.
Again, I'm not super optimistic about card slots, especially not for GPUs.
like you know as as you mentioned like the various options for whether it has card slots or not one of them is doesn't have card slots at all honestly i think that's the most likely um and one of them is it has card slots that don't support gpus i think that's second most likely and then i think the least most least likely is the you know support gpus is like we have them now i don't i don't see that happening but
um i do i do think that um you know what we have in terms of ram with the with the m1s i don't see how we reach one and a half terabytes with the current architecture unless the mac pro version of it supports socketed ram now i think they could still do unified ram because the ram that is next to the package in in the m1 or in package i guess whatever whatever it is
uh that's not some like magical ram type that doesn't exist in the rest of the pc world isn't it just like you know ddr5 something whatever no it's a it's hbm2 or something i think it's a high bandwidth memory like it is that's the thing like a lot of the a lot of the amazing performance of the m1 series has to do with that unified ram it is very fast it is very close um and obviously it's shared between the cpu and the gpu and
As soon as you go to external pools of it, it gets more distant, physically speaking and metaphorically speaking.
The bandwidth goes down or becomes much more expensive to try to maintain the same bandwidth.
Because as they said in the thing, like this 800 gigabytes per second is like 10 times a high end PC.
And I think you lose a lot of the performance.
Like, I mean, what I keep thinking about this machine is Apple has to say something to sell it.
They have to say, here's this machine, here's why you should buy it.
And they've made their job hard by putting out the Mac Studio.
Because to sell this machine that presumably will be more expensive than the Mac Studio, it has to do something better than the Mac Studio.
Now, you mentioned the RAM ceiling.
Let's say it has slots and it has a bigger RAM ceiling on it, right?
Are there applications that Apple cares about or would mention in an advertisement or are common enough where they would say...
You couldn't do this on a Mac Studio because it won't fit in RAM.
But on this machine, it will because we can have, you know, 768 gigs of RAM or whatever.
I don't think many people are buying the 1.5 terabyte except for a few rare instances.
But I think there are use cases that won't fit in 128.
But I think that the number tails off real fast when you go up to 256 or maybe even 512.
Because I think you're mostly limited for the RAM on these system on chips by the max size of that little square chip you can put in there.
And that does go up over time.
So even though you can only fit 128 around it now using the best available little RAM chippy thing that fits in the thing, eventually that number might double.
So I'm wondering, I don't think they would sacrifice memory bandwidth and latency
for capacity unless there was some use case that we already know about where capacity is super important because again they have to advertise this somehow and i think that machine that you described with external ram slots would do almost everything worse than the mac studio i don't know i mean it wouldn't again i i don't i haven't followed like what the what the different pc ram specs are these days um so i don't know what's available and what's not but
it wouldn't surprise me you know like to to you know glue two m1 maxes together they invented their own custom interconnect what if they had their own custom ram socket protocol and controller i don't know that that i wouldn't put it past them at this point you know yeah chat room saying that it's actually lpddr5 and not hbm but it's just very wide like the fact that
It's just sort of wired next to the thing and has the massive bandwidth because it's got these multiple.
And the thing about the bandwidth, it's got multiple memory controllers.
And each time you add a memory controller, you have that much bandwidth.
And so it's not like it has that much bandwidth to every piece of memory, I think.
I think that's how much bandwidth it has in aggregate.
across all the chips that are wired up not that it really matters because it's not like you're physically addressing memory anyway but just keeping that in mind that the reason the bandwidth keeps going up is because when you add a second max that second max also has its own memory interfaces to its own private memory and the whole making it look like one chip is the magic that you know instead of just like one max with 400 gigabytes per second and a second max of 400 gigabytes per second it looks like one chip that has 800 but really the lower max has 400 to its ram and you know it's not its ram you know what i mean
yeah like that is kind of magical but i don't see how you weave two of them together and say with the straight face of the m1 ultra was your last thing unless they're just gonna say just kidding ha remember we said it was our last one well surprise it's not but i don't how can it be a surprise you told us the mac pro is coming like well they didn't say the mac pro is gonna have m1 series chips in it yep
I know.
I mean, obviously, I said the M1 is anything Apple says.
You just call it the X1.
You're like, problem solved.
See, we just did a different letter, right?
One line of dialogue.
Yeah.
Marketing solves all these problems, too.
But I keep thinking, like, is it plausible for an M2-based thing?
Because the thing about the M2 is, I think the rumors of it is having slightly more execution units, more cores, right?
Yeah.
because it's three nanometer instead of five so you can fit more cores in the same power envelope right um and which would mean that the biggest size and like the m2 ultra would have more cores than the m1 ultra and there again is your differentiation you could say oh well how is this better than the mac studio well it's got more cores but the real problem is if you can make like an m2 based you know ultra
for the new mac pro you can also make it for the mac studio and now there you are again with no differentiation like what makes the mac pro different than the mac studios the the big mystery that is weighing on my mind you're very worked up about this john i am because it's potentially my next computer or not like i mean if it's here's the thing if i wait around and the thing comes out and it's disappointing or it's too expensive or whatever then i just end up buying a mac studio uh
It's like, well, then why did I wait a year to buy a Mac Studio?
Because you're trying to get a lot of use out of your existing $15,000 Mac Pro?
I know, I know.
Too soon, too soon.
I don't know.
So if you were to buy a Mac Studio today for you, how do you think you would spec it?
It should be delivered in approximately November.
Well, there's that.
The dates on the Mac Studios are ridiculous at this point.
But all right.
So how would I configure it?
Yeah.
Like, can we, you want to walk through it real quick?
I'm curious if you were to buy one, you know, what would you, how would you configure it for you?
I mean, honestly, I think my, uh, my cheapness and patience would kick in and I would say, uh, my Mac Pro is fine for me for a while.
I know, I know, but work with me on this, please.
I know you love hypotheticals.
If I was forced to do it, if someone stole my Mac Pro and I had to buy a new computer, I wouldn't obviously buy another Mac Pro.
I'd be very sad about it being stolen.
But anyway, I would probably max it out because I would get 128.
I would get the M1 Ultra.
I wouldn't get the 8TB SSD.
I'd get 4TB SSD.
And those are basically the only options, right?
Max out GPU cores?
Yes.
I mean, because I don't, you know, and it would be very expensive, but like, and I don't know, I don't quite know what I would do with those GPU cores because I wouldn't be able to play Windows games on it anymore, but I would be like, well, something will use them.
Like, there are some Mac games, even Apple Arcade devs.
Sometimes I forget that Apple Arcade stuff is all available on the Mac.
I spent a while on Apple Arcade on my Mac the other day saying, these games that I play on my phone and my iPad, can I play them in 6K?
And the answer to a lot of them is, yeah, you can.
And you can't play them on 6K on your phone.
So there's things that Macs can do with GPU cores.
But yeah, I would probably get everything maxed out.
So if I'm doing this right, looking at the website, that's $6,800, which is like half the cost of your existing computer and like twice as fast.
And I don't have to buy a monitor.
And you don't have to buy a monitor.
That's the important part.
It's so cheap.
I should buy an upgrade every year now.
Just keep using the same monitor with all these computers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
honestly there's something to be said for that i know that's not your style but it's there's something to be said for that i've actually wondered a lot uh you know since i love my my max book pro if you will i i just adore this machine so much um hi steven hackett i know you love that um so i'm just hearing like i'm feeling the collective groan from all of our audience when they hit this point and hear that let me tell you
So I don't change the name of Macintosh HD, but my computer name is Casey's MaxBook Pro.
And you know it and you love it.
But anyway, I love this thing so much.
And I've wondered to myself, like, when this M2 comes out, you know, would I pull a Marco and upgrade this less than a year old or perhaps a year old, you know, 14-inch MaxBook Pro?
Yeah.
And I don't think I would, mostly because I'm cheap, but if the M2 was that compelling, would I start to get myself on a yearly or every other year plan?
I don't think I'll ever get to the point of as often as I change my underwear like Marco, but I could see myself, money notwithstanding, which is a big, big, big if, I could see myself wanting to upgrade my laptops more frequently than I used to in the past if the gains continue to be as big as they have been.
And I think the question I need to, or the thing I need to look into to answer this, which I haven't done, is, you know, what's the difference between the A14 and the A15, right?
Because the A14 core is what's powering the M1, if I'm not mistaken, and we're up to A15 this year, right?
Yep.
So maybe even the A16 would potentially, probably not, but potentially be in the M2.
So what are those differences?
And I can look into this.
I'm not asking for feedback.
But I think it's something that I've asked myself, would I be on a far more regular upgrade cycle than I ever have been?
Because the chips might be getting that much better every year or every other year.
I don't think the chips would make you upgrade because the chips are not going to give you the bump you just got from going from Intel to this.
What would make you upgrade is if like, and I don't think this is going to particularly happen, but if it did happen, this would make you upgrade.
It would be like, oh, it's got cellular and face ID or something like that.
Or no more notch, right?
Those are the type of things that are going to get you in the door, not compile 15% faster.
Because like what, after a year, I don't think you're going to have complaints about this.
Like, oh, my computer feels so slow.
Like it's not, you know, that's not going to happen.
I would insta-buy for either—I don't know if I would for Face ID, actually, but I would absolutely insta-buy for cellular, without question.
yeah i probably would too that's that's a big deal but i had to decide which laptop would get it oh no now i'm miserable like john no no no like and this is i i've despite you know despite my reputation here um i actually don't usually upgrade my max uh that frequently outside of like
the butterfly keyboard is destroying my life.
Maybe this next one will be better.
And then, oh, then architecture changes.
It's been a frequent update cycle for me recently, but usually I get a few years out of my Macs, especially my desktop Macs.
Those tend to last a while.
And
Because really, year to year, Mac updates are not that different.
Year to year, when the new iPhones come out, and they've tried out all these cool features, and we're all wowed by the marketing.
I'm like, oh my god, I have to have that new camera.
Oh, I have to have this new thing.
It's a huge difference, and it's palpable how much you want that.
Usually, when a Mac update comes out that is generally just like a spec bump update,
you don't you don't usually have that oh my god i have to have that right now because the one i have from last year or two years ago is so much worse like no it's usually it's like okay you can buy this new one and it might be like 15 faster or something it's not it's not going to be like a huge huge difference you know right now we're going through this period of turmoil where you know the architecture transition and everything it's it's a big deal we're getting big gains and big changes uh but that's about to slow down i think to a pretty large degree
Yep, I think you're probably right.
And also, phones are only like $1,000, which is a lot for a phone, but it's nothing for a Mac.
And phones, especially after one or two years, the batteries start to get a little cranky, whereas even a laptop battery tends to not fall off a cliff the way phones can do if you use them hard for a few years.
So the urge to upgrade to a new phone
is easier to give into and it makes a little bit more sense than buying like especially it's not like we're buying none of us are buying a thousand dollar max even though you can buy a thousand dollar mac those aren't the ones that we're buying so being on an annual upgrade cycle for something that expensive for a 15 gain doesn't really make much sense
That's fair.
But it's a fun thing to think about.
Until Marco dropped that, what Mac does cellular go in?
Oh my gosh.
Can you imagine if they did like a cellular, they're the only Mac that gets a cellular modem is like the adorable round two.
So somehow it's like slower than dirt.
I mean, I don't know why it would be slower than dirt, but hypothetically, you know, so it's like this complete compromise machine, but it's got cellular baby.
I don't think you have to worry about it.
Cause I don't think Apple's ever going to add cellular to a Mac.
see what i'm doing apple i'm making you do it to prove me wrong look at this sound clip you said they would never do it i don't know if that i'm not a psychology of work but something's got to work because it just seems like they have no interest in ever doing this i think it's one of those things like on a very long time scale i think they they probably will on an infinite time scale i they probably will do it but they're going to take their sweet time because they're probably waiting until they don't have to pay qualcomm some royalty thing yeah oh yeah
Oh, that's a really good point.
You say that, but they eat that cost on iPads, for crying out loud.
They can't eat that cost on a $5,000 MacBook Pro.
It's because it's a percentage of price of the product or whatever.
Maybe.
We've heard that that is the rumor that it was percentage of price.
i don't know i mean they've charged you know they charge 120 bucks or 130 bucks for it on the ipad from the very first 500 ipad all the way up to the um you know whatever what's the biggest ipad like 1500 now like you know they charge basically the same price for all that so i mean yeah if if they charge 200 bucks on a mac great i'd still buy it like that would be great
Yeah, I mean, you would, but anyway, I don't know if the upcoming iPhone, is that the year when Apple's 5G chips are going to be ready or are we waiting one more year?
I haven't kept track of it.
We've talked about this in the past in the show, but Apple is 100% making its own cellular radio chips.
It just takes a long time because it's really hard.
The second they can do it, rest assured, they will be off Qualcomm and onto their own chips.
I like that they're taking their time because I don't want them to rush out the door with a crappy chip that's worse than the Qualcomm ones.
So, yeah, take your time.
Make sure you get it right.
Test it really well.
Test it directly against the Qualcomm competition.
When it is as reliable, but you own it and don't have to pay royalties, then please ship it on every single device you make.
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So in the last few days, all the betas are no longer beta.
Now they are out.
What is this?
15.4?
Is that right?
I don't even remember anymore.
Something like that.
In the new version of whatever ridiculous California name we're on.
God, I'm a mess.
What are we on Monterey?
So it's 12.3 and 15.4.
And now we can do universal control, which I have played with very briefly.
John, I think you played with at least a little bit.
And Marco, you haven't had a chance to play with it yet.
Is that right?
i'm honestly i don't really keep an ipad next to me on my desk and i typically don't either actually at the moment i don't have an ipad that's a whole separate issue well let me let me talk to you about it let me tell you the good word about uh so casey mentioned that the things are out of beta what he means is that mac os and ios and ipad os are out of beta but universal control which ships in the non-beta version of those operating systems is itself still beta with a tiny little beta tag next to all the little things just let you know this might not work um
so yeah universal control the thing demoed so long ago that people might have forgotten about it drag your cursor off the edge of the screen and watch it burst through the edge of your ipad screen i don't keep an ipad near my mac either um i keep it in a whole different room in the house but i brought the ipad down here to try it out uh and it's super cool and it works magically just like they said performance is great i did cause it to crash that's fine it's beta all right um
But I had an actual task I was doing.
I was filing a bug against the version of Apple Podcasts that's on iPadOS.
And I was like, oh, how am I going to get a screenshot off of my iPad over to my Mac?
I'll have to airdrop it.
And, you know, it's like, but wait, this is a great opportunity to use universal control.
I'll just take the screenshot on my iPad.
And then just yank my cursor from my Mac over there, grab the photo, and pull it over to my Mac.
And on the second try, it worked.
And that was cool.
And I like the little animations.
This is also the first time that I have had any extended period of time to use iPadOS's cursor support, which I know has been out for years now, but I haven't really...
ever used it um besides briefly my wife's got the little what is it called the weird keyboard foldy thingy for the ipad pro what is that the foldy one is it smart is it magic does it have a trackpad or not it has a trackpad it's the magic okay it's the magic smart pro max yes okay
It costs as much as the small iPad.
Other than playing with that, I hadn't done it.
But now using my actual mouse and keyboard was cool.
But the thing I will say is that, and I haven't tried this myself, but it just occurred to me when watching a conversation in another Slack, it says this right in the documentation too, I think.
Universal Control doesn't just let you drag your cursor from your Mac screen onto your iPad.
It also lets you drag your cursor from your Mac screen onto another Mac screen.
And I think more people might potentially have a laptop and a desktop on the same desk kind of area.
Yeah.
And I think that is even more useful use case.
Now, there have been third-party products that have done this for a while.
What was the popular one?
It was called like Synergy or something.
That's right.
And before that, there was another one that I'm not remembering.
There's a bunch of these things for Linux.
But there's something about, for someone with my kind of philosophy of these things, there's something about it being a first-party OS integrated thing versus a third-party product that makes me more likely to use it just because there's nothing to install.
I have some faith it will be supported and work well.
Um, and maybe that's not true.
Maybe like the third party one is actually better than the Apple one because it's less buggy.
They had a long time to work out the things, but that means the third party software has to be installed and all the different things.
And it's another thing for you to mind and tend and make sure that it doesn't have some sort of problem that spins out of control or a security floor or whatever.
This may be incorrect thinking in my head, but it's the way I think about every third party product is just a little bit of an extra burden of me to just keep track of and make sure it's not going wonky.
Whereas things that go wonky in the US, I have no control over anyway, so I might as well just forget about it.
But we talked on a past show how annoying it is that file sharing is so terrible when I just, you know, two Macs are in the same room and I want to grab a file from one and bring it to the other.
I have to say that the fastest way to do that now is probably to use universal control to go over to my wife's desktop, grab the file and bring it back.
Now, unfortunately for me, I can't see both of the screens at the same time particularly comfortably.
And secondly, unfortunately, if she's logged in as her and I'm logged in as me, that's not going to work because you have to be logged into the same Apple ID and everything.
But this has made me think a lot more about essentially virtual KVM.
The idea of having multiple computers on your desk, but one set of input devices, one keyboard and one mouse, but you're controlling multiple computers.
That's what universal control is, essentially.
It works with iPads.
It works with Macs.
If it worked with a phone, that would be really cool, too.
It's making me think a lot more about...
What I can do with the desk space that I have, not that there's much room with this giant monitor on here, but maybe there might be room for in the future, let's say a laptop somewhere in my life.
Uh, when my children take all of my children already have taken all the laptops and my children finished commandeering every single laptop in the house because they don't know what desktops are.
um if i ever need something portable to bring with me somewhere i may have to get a laptop and literally the only way i would ever bother using that laptop is if i could do it using my big keyboard and my big mouse on my desk because i don't like smushing myself onto laptop it's bad for my rsi i just don't like it i feel all hunched over and gross laptops are gross but if i just had it on my desk and especially if it's one of the new laptops with a really fancy monitor that can you know hang with my xdr uh i might think about that
I played with universal control very briefly, and it worked surprisingly well.
And it was pretty fluid for the most part.
I was doing most of this on my screened-in porch where the Wi-Fi is good but not spectacular.
And so there were a couple times there was definitely some latency and lag and whatever.
But generally speaking, it worked very well.
And what was absolutely bananas was I sat my iPad Pro, which is four years old now or something like that,
I sat my iPad Pro to the left of my—my MacBook Pro was previously covered.
And I just kept pushing the mouse to the left edge of the MacBook Pro.
And sure enough, pink, all of a sudden, my cursor was over on the iPad.
It was very, very cool.
I look forward to playing with this some more.
Again, I don't—
I think I get probably more use out of Sidecar, which is the thing where your screen is expanded to be on your iPad, than I expect to out of universal control.
But back when I had the iMac Pro and my MacBook Pro, which often was on my desk as well, this would have been amazing at that point when I had the two computers on my desk.
That would have been so great.
But even still, it's extremely well done from the limited use I've had with it and very, very cool.
Yeah, I feel like the killer feature is, like, the unification of input.
Like, because getting things from the world of the iPad onto the Mac has just always seemed cumbersome.
Like, direct manipulation, even if it's just copy on the Mac, paste on the iPad, right?
That's just so much easier than, like, oh, I can do things like I'm going to put this in Apple Notes, which I guess is a testament to Apple Notes.
I need to transfer some piece of information from my iPad to my Mac.
It's text.
I'll just make a new note.
I'll paste it in.
I'll go over to my Mac.
I'll open up Notes.
By then, it will be synced.
I'll pull it out, right?
That's dumb, right?
You know, why don't you just airdrop it?
Why don't you email it to yourself?
Like, there's a million different ways to do it.
Universal clipboard, baby.
Yeah, yeah.
No, universal clipboard.
I don't need universal control for that.
Although universal clipboard for me is not as reliable as universal control has been so far.
And like, this is the other thing I have to say about universal control.
like universal clipboard there's not a lot of exposed knobs and buttons and machinery for either one of these features they either work or they don't and if they don't you just shrug like why isn't it working i copied here and i paid why is universal clipboard not working there's not a lot of feedback about it there's not some place where you can look there's not a button you can press to say reset universal clipboard same thing with universal control it just so happens i think on the honeymoon period of universal control with the exception of one crash um
it has always just worked for me and if it just works i don't care about the knob so the second it stops working i get cranky because there's nothing i can do about it um but i am thinking about how like i do want to use my ipad as an ipad there are apps that are on the ipad that i don't have on my mac i don't i don't have an m1 mac so i can't run the apps on my mac right oh you should get an m1 mac i know it's all right it kind of i mean it sucks
like doing that is not fun yeah i mean i have to say like i i haven't done this but i'm assuming when you do that on your it's got to be when you do on your mac you don't get the ipad cursor experience right no and i think that experience is super cool with ipad apps it fits for me i've always thought that was one of the best thing ui things apple has ever done is cursor support on ipad os because it is cursor support reimagined for the ipad instead of just putting putting a stupid apple you know arrow cursor on the ipad screen which would look weird um
I think that fits so well, and now I can do that using my actual mouse instead of that tiny little trackpad or, you know, whatever on the magic smart Pro Keyboard Max.
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Let's start with Ryan Petriello, who writes, even though the DTK was never going to be a machine that was released to the public, was it an appropriate harbinger of what the M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini would be?
I never had one, so I don't feel like I really have much I can say about this.
But it was almost underwhelming, wasn't it, compared to how incredible these machines are?
And we all thought it was pretty great from the get-go.
So I don't know, you guys actually had one.
Let's start with Marco.
What do you think?
I actually barely ended up using mine, in part because it was a Mac Mini.
And at the time, I didn't have an external monitor with me.
And so I use it exclusively through screen sharing.
And also keep in mind that the dev kit did not have Rosetta.
And so you could only run, you know, Apple Silicon compiled, you know, Arm compiled stuff.
And at that time, it was very hard to get any other third party apps that were Arm compiled.
And so there was really not a good way for me to move into it or like set it up as mine, really.
And so it was only ever a machine that I used through screen sharing.
And I would run Xcode and compile a few things here and there and test some things here and there.
but I never really got a feel for it.
That being said, it was also an A12Z in there, which is two pretty big processor generations behind the A14 cores that made up the M1.
And it had different resources and didn't have the unified memory stuff.
So it was a very different experience than using the actual M1 Max for lots of reasons, mostly due to the lack of Rosetta and the much older chip.
did have unified memory they all have you know there was no separate oh yeah you're right never yeah i was wrong about that but yeah it was the a12z and it was it yeah and and for me yeah not having not having rosetta and me not having a monitor uh really made it so i i never really use it as a user like pretty much only as a developer building my stuff
So Ryan's question is, was it appropriate?
I think it was for two reasons.
One, even though it was just an A12Z, it showed to developers that ARM-based chips running macOS are fine performance-wise.
There are some things that the A12Z did faster than my Intel Macs at the time.
Like these weird little parts of the OS are just interacting with your Mac that are just shockingly faster on ARM-based Macs.
The fact that that was true on an A12Z
when the M1 will be based on the A14 cores.
Let developers know, because this is for developers, don't worry about, oh, the ARM Macs are going to come and your app is going to be super slow because ARM chips are wimpy.
That's not going to happen, because look how well your app runs on this thing, and this thing has an A12Z in it, right?
uh and the second thing is because it was an a12z and an older chip that is the appropriate thing for people to do their dev work on because you don't want them to do dev work on some monster chip and then the real arm max come out and they're slower what you want to happen is they do their dev work they get the performance of their application to be adequate on the a12z then the real ones come out and it's even faster and that's exactly what happened so i think it was absolutely perfectly appropriate it was
100% usable, performed really well, showed developers what it was going to be like in the ARM world, and also was the slowest ARM Mac that Apple ever released.
All right, Peter Wagoner writes, I currently use two 30-inch cinema displays.
How old are those displays now?
They're amazing, though.
They just aren't retina.
So they're not amazing.
I currently use two 30-inch cinema displays with a maxed-out 16-inch 2019 MacBook Pro.
I'm considering switching to two Apple Studio displays.
I will use every ounce of power of my machine for creative work, while upgrading my resolution from 2560x1600 to 5K in each display put a noticeable additional strain on my CPU or GPU.
I don't want to upgrade my displays only to downgrade my overall computing experience.
I don't know, but I can't imagine it would be noticeable, would it?
Well, it's four times the pixels, roughly.
That's enough that it would give me pause, especially with a laptop driving it.
It's not like in a Mac Pro, like John has, if you really had a GPU issue, you could upgrade the GPU, or maybe add a second one, and you could probably alleviate that stress.
But driving four times the pixels is going to be a significant increase.
Whether it's going to be noticeable, that's a different story.
I don't know what the headroom is like when driving two 30-inch displays versus two 5K displays.
I mean, it could be... Maybe it doesn't matter.
I don't know.
But I would say when you're driving...
multiple external monitors, especially from an Intel MacBook Pro, you're already kind of, you know, you're pushing the bounds of like heat and noise probably.
And so I would expect increasing the pixel load by a huge amount of pixels would probably run the risk of either noticeable slowdowns or increased heat and noise or both.
Yeah, I would say the heat and noise is your big concern because modern GPUs are really good at pushing pixels.
If you're not running games on those 2, 5, 12 things, you're just displaying the UI with a bunch of windows, it's probably fine performance-wise because when are you going to see performance?
Assuming it supports it at all, which I'm assuming the best GPUs on the 2019 16-inch do, it should be fine.
But it is going to use more power, and I think the extra heat and noise produced by it will be more annoying to you than any kind of, like,
you know stutter or anything up to the point that like i would say uh the heat could be so much that you get like heat-based gpu glitching which can happen in laptops and desktops for that matter and eventual failure more likely yeah and i and i only say all these scary things because this is an intel laptop it's the intel 16 inch i don't remember if those that which generation of the 2019s were the ones that got super hot and the gpus are really pushing the thermal limits or whatever
that's going to be your main constraint.
If you had a desktop computer and you wanted to do this, I would say any GPU is fine.
If it says it supports it, you're fine because they just have cooling to spare.
But a laptop, you're going to be pushing it.
So the good thing, though, is that if you get studio displays, when you get rid of that junky laptop, the studio displays will be there and waiting for your much better one that will be able to drive those displays without breaking a sweat.
Yeah, it's the wonder of having good external monitors from Apple that they make every computer modular.
It's wonderful.
And they outlive your computer.
Wouldn't it be terrible, Marco, if your monitor and your computer were inextricably linked, like you couldn't just separate the two?
Who would want like an all-in-one that's like that?
That would be terrible, wouldn't it?
I can't tell you how many... It kills me thinking back.
I know we already talked about this, but now that they have released what is basically the 5K monitor's screen in an external monitor, and the specs on it as a monitor are basically the same...
i it kills me thinking about how i have like discarded basically i mean i've sold them or given away but i've basically discarded i think three of those over the last like eight years in the same boat yeah yeah plus tips like that's just mine alone mine were i think three of them and that it kills me to think like oh those are i could have just i could have had three perfectly good 5k monitors or just bought one and you know kept it this whole time but oh what a waste yep um
So Wade writes, and this is either going to be three minutes or 30, so buckle up.
Wade writes, what are the top three ugliest Macs of all time?
No particular reason for the timing.
Maybe you can limit it to the time since the iMac to make it fair for Marco and Casey.
Plus, we don't want it devolving into just a list of quadros.
So I don't know how you want to handle this.
I have been frantically doing my research as we've been recording, uh, coming up with a list and I actually came up with four.
So I'm quite proud of myself.
Um, but, uh, well, so we'll see you, we're going in true top four spirit in every measure of the word.
Cause we've got four and we're not following the rules.
Uh, so I assume John, you have exactly three.
Would you like to start or would you rather critique our selections first?
Yeah.
I can start.
I think I only have two, but I think some of the ones you pick might be mine.
I was trying to pick ones that you probably wouldn't pick.
So the actual right answer
that old timers know i think pretty much everyone would agree on this one and you will as soon as you see it is the molar the tooth mac you know what i'm talking about i i know of what you speak but i can't picture in my head i'm putting some uh links to uh steven hackett's website where he's got some pictures of it just two angles of this computer please please to look at these now
that is not attractive the front is is a real problem just right off the bat the front is just this terrible mess it is not particularly nice looking the the the face that the drives and everything make the way the drive it's like a fat flat face it just looks like there's some sort of grievous skin injury like even just the cutouts around the floppy drives right and the
The proportions, the way the speaker grills are set in, the way it curves, but then you start rotating around.
That top, by the way, is translucent.
It's one of the early translucent plastics.
That's clear translucent up there with holes in it.
This thing is just a mess from top to bottom.
Oh, God.
Gotta be the ugliest.
Look at the Apple logo, the horrendous translucent Apple logo shoved up into the corner of the weird side.
so bad just the ugliest thing you have ever seen yeah this is pretty bad um this was mostly seen in education that's why most people don't haven't seen this mac or even heard of it it was the actual official name i believe was let me get mac tracker up here i closed it uh i think it was the power macintosh g3 all-in-one is that what it's called yeah power macintosh g3 parentheses all-in-one hyphenated um from 1999 that is the ugliest mac i've ever made
The second one might surprise some people.
There's a bunch of computers that look like this Let me see if I can find a good
All right, let's pick the LC580.
It's not this particular computer.
They made a bunch of computers in the same case, including, by the way, the Apple TV, which you may have heard of.
No, not that Apple TV, or the Macintosh TV.
Sorry, it's not the Apple TV.
It was also made in this case, but at least it was black.
This case is just a confusing stack of rectangles.
It uses a lot of the good design language of the Macs of the day, but whoever, it was like they took that design language and they threw it into a blender and out popped this ungainly thing where it's just...
It's just an awkward stack.
It looks like almost like it's upside down.
It's like an awkward stack of rectangles.
It looks like an AI created it.
It's like, we know we have floppy drives and we know I have optical drives and we know we have these features and these smooth things and these stripes and then just like, computer, make me a computer out of that.
And it's like, how about this?
No, it's terrible.
It's just so ungainly, so hideous.
It shares so many individual details with its good looking computers that were around at the same time, but this one gets everything about it wrong.
Um,
Those are the two that I find the most offensive.
And it's not like I'm ignoring the modern ones.
Whatever you guys are going to say about the modern computers or whatever, I think these two are worse in the absolute values and also, in particular, worse compared to their contemporaries because they just took a design aesthetic that was actually pretty nice for what it was and totally misfired on it.
That's probably the right answer.
Now, Casey, let's give them the wrong answers.
Yeah.
All right.
I went by years, but I didn't write down what years these were from.
I think my first one was from roughly 2006, 2008, somewhere in that neck of the woods.
And coincidentally, it was my very first Mac.
But I don't think it aged well.
I don't think it was ever particularly good looking.
And it is the Polybook, the polycarbonate MacBook.
The white plastic one?
Specifically the white plastic one.
Yeah, you're talking about like the 2007-ish.
It launched in 06, but you probably had the 2007-ish version.
I had, I think, a 2008 version, but yes, we're saying the same thing.
Yeah.
I actually loved... I own the same computer, but I own the 2006 version.
I actually loved the way that computer looked.
Because mine never had the weird yellowing on the palm rest that a lot of people had.
Mine never had that.
And so I just had just a nice white map.
And actually, later on, I think they really perfected it when they made the plastic unibody-ish kind of one toward the end of its life.
That is true.
That is better.
But yeah, I actually really enjoyed that design.
And I think it actually looked...
I have some modern Macs on my list that were contemporaries around this era.
And I actually did not say this was an ugly one because I actually enjoyed this one.
This is not an ugly computer.
You're wrong.
Good try.
Next guess.
Okay.
Wait, wait.
Did you have three, John?
You had the molar Mac, the LC580?
I just had the two.
I was going to take one of yours, but so far you're over one.
try again all right so uh my next one it was actually going back in time flower power just no just absolutely oh really absolutely i mean it's not pretty that's an easy one that's the one that people know about remember when apple made that funny computer with they forget about the polka dot one right because there was flower power and what was the other one called dalmatian or something like that there you go dalmatian and arguably the flower one was worse than dalmatian because i went back and forth but in your face yeah that's
those are reasonable picks it's interesting that
They decided to make like IMAX, like towards the end of the IMAX.
Hey, let's just do something fun.
And they made not, they didn't just make one, they made two.
And that's what they picked.
Like, you know, they have like 50 different choices of like, what are we going to do in the background?
And these are the ones they picked.
And it's just, it totally looks like, you know, not that I'm going to blame it on Steve Jobs.
But when you see a decision like that from a big company, it's like, well, they probably had a lot of different options.
And it came down to one person who's in a position to make this decision.
Just said, I like that one and that one.
Like literally one person steered the course of this entire product line.
Because you don't have people vote on it.
One person, and for all we know, it was Steve Jobs saying that one and that one.
And everyone else in the room was like, all right.
You're the boss.
Those are the ones you want.
Because how else do you pick something like that?
Like you've already decided you're going to do something fanciful and fun.
And it's not like, you know, you're not going to do design by committee and just have everybody, you know, vote on it or something.
You're just going to go with what the boss says.
And the boss usually has good taste except for when everything was coated in leather.
But, you know, you end up with a flower-prown Dalmatian.
I think, like, the leather contacts in Find My Friends were worse than that computer, but similar idea.
Yeah.
all right uh the original look of the imac the 2004 era imac with the just mountain of chin and white plastic wait you're talking about the the 17 inch imac g5 yes i have that on my list my number two
See, there you go.
See, now we're on to something.
So yeah, the 2004-ish iMac G5.
So this is, imagine the general gist of a modern day iMac, but super duper thick and with just like a third of the front of it is chin.
And it's just, it's chin for days.
It's a five head of chin is what it is.
And it's just not good looking at all.
Yeah, I am with you on this.
It's my number two, because, yeah, just the purport, like, because it came in a bigger size.
I'm talking about the 17 inch one, like the smaller one.
If you look for, you know, G5 17 inch iMac, you'll see like is ridiculous proportions.
And it has the metal foot, but then the all-white plastic enclosure.
It's not a good... The proportions are all wrong.
And then in the middle of that sea of white plastic, it has that webcam punctured at the top.
So you have this big black circle.
It's just a black squarish thing.
It has terrible proportions.
Yeah, I'm totally with you.
Because I actually took the option here that was posing the question of...
just restricting it to the iMac era forward, because this era that John's pulling these ugly things from, I wasn't even here for that.
So I'm just seeing the ones that I actually ever get to see in person or use.
And then my final entry, the Trashcan Mac Pro, which...
What?
No, because it's just so stupid.
What's ugly about that?
Okay, it's not really ugly, which I guess I'm now changing the context of the question.
That is not the question.
But it just looks so dumb.
I just picked the butterfly keyboard.
It just looks so dumb.
Yeah, right?
It's just such a dumb-looking computer.
Like, I guess it's aesthetically fine.
Disagree.
It looks like a jet engine.
It's cool.
Honestly, I am a big fan of that computer for what it was.
Before, like, the GPU failures started to become noticeable.
Yeah.
If it worked, it would have been great.
Yeah, like I actually really liked the design of that computer in a number of ways.
I mean, the only reason I stopped using mine was because I wanted to go Retina and it never really had a good desktop Retina story on that computer.
And they never updated.
But that computer, during the year or so it spent on my desk, I really enjoyed looking at it.
Well, see, but it doesn't look like a computer.
Like, I want a computer to look like a computer.
This looks like a damn trash can.
So, no.
You have a 50% success rate.
It would be good if you were hitting in baseball, but it's bad if you're picking ugly Macs.
All right.
So, Marco, what do you say if you're so smart?
all right so my first one this is my honorable mention my my number four because it said it asked for it asked for the top three but i have an honorable mention i have my number four again modern era only um which i i'm basically defining as like you know like a modern era is defined when you started using max yes i haven't used for your 1998 is not modern
Okay, well, anyway, so, you know, roughly modern era only.
I'm going to say the first Intel MacBook Pro.
It's not that it was, like, you know, more horrible than the molar.
It's just, like, you know, compared to its time.
What the hell is wrong with you?
This is perfectly fine.
I saw a whole bunch of these in my office around that time, and I used one for a little while, and I never liked, like, the top edge really kills it for me, because you had those two giant holes for, I assume, microphones, plus the giant webcam, plus the giant thing next to it.
No, those holes are not for microphones.
Was it the latch?
Yeah.
Do you remember what this was like?
I reviewed this, so I remember it, and I actually own one.
This was before Unibody, and Unibody made these things look like garbage, right?
But before Unibody, the way they closed was they used magnets, but the way the magnets works is there were two very thin metal hooks inside there.
I think there was only two slots in the 17-inch, maybe only one.
And then you'd bring them towards the magnet and the magnet would pull the very thin metal hook down so that it would hook onto the little latching mechanism.
And then you'd press that button in the front that would release the little hooks.
But it was literal like little metal teeth that would come out of there.
So those slots were holding the little metal things that were on a swivel.
Actually, maybe I should have picked the 17-inch version of this because it made everything even worse because you had the giant C around the keyboard.
The keyboard with the giant speaker grills.
Oh, that is true.
I had forgotten about that.
I will give you the keyboard.
Maybe the 17-inch MacBook Pro would be worse.
The keyboard was real bad.
or that whole like surface.
Because they use the same size keyboard on the 12 inch and the 17 inch.
I also complained about that in my review, which I will find a link for for notes.
Like the other thing about the little latchy things is that little piece of metal that rotated out was incredibly thin and very easy to bend.
And that mechanism was very delicate.
And if the little latchy thing, like the magnet pulled it down, but it didn't quite like the tiny, you know, one eighth of a millimeter thing didn't hook underneath.
It wouldn't stay closed.
It would just pop open and you'd push it down and it would pop open.
It's like nothing you can do because...
It's like the light in the refrigerator.
Once the thing is closed, that's when the hook is supposed to come down, and if it didn't come down, you can't get it to come down because you'd have to open it, but then it can't reach anymore.
It was a bad mechanism.
I didn't mind it so much on my PowerBook G4 because that was before webcams and IR sensors.
Once they added the webcam and the IR sensor, they just poked so many holes in that case, and it didn't age well into that.
Oh, that's why it was two latches, because the one I reviewed was the PowerBook G4, and it just had the one latch, except for on the 17 had two.
But you're right, you couldn't have the one latch once the camera went there, I think.
Right, yeah.
So anyway, yeah, just too many things looking at you and holes in the case.
It looked really sloppy in person.
My number three, this is going to anger some people.
What a surprise.
The 11-inch MacBook Air.
The 13-inch MacBook Air of this generation and many of those that followed it looked fine.
The 11-inch, the proportions that it had, especially the screen, that you had a huge wide bezel around a very short squat screen on this weird squat computer.
It did not look attractive.
The proportions were all wrong.
it was impressive for what it did and you know it i still think we haven't released anything like it um because the the 12 inch macbook was not like it it was a much more compromised machine than 11 inch r ever was um but it's not the 11 inch r is not an attractive computer it's cute i think it's definitely it's like your dog it's it's weirdly proportions but in a cute way all right fair enough
All right, my number two was the 17-inch iMac G5, as Casey said, the big, white, thick, weird thing.
And then my number one... Oh, no.
You're going to kill me.
Oh, no.
The 2019 Mac Pro.
What?
No.
I think if you had one in person, you'd come around on it a little bit more.
No, even I have to disagree with this because I was going to choose that just for the lulls.
But no, I actually think it's a pretty good looking computer.
I do not like the holes.
And I know I've seen them.
I mean, look, I have them on the back of my XDR.
I mean, fortunately, I never have to see the back of my XDR.
But like, I don't like the hole pattern.
I don't like the handles.
I don't like the feet.
The wheels make it a little bit better.
But like the feet design with those big flat...
I don't think it's an attractive computer.
I really don't.
And that's maybe one of the reasons why I never wanted to buy one.
Like, I just am not, I don't find that attractive.
And I think, honorable mention to the rack mount version, which I think is even worse.
Oh, that's true.
I would agree with that.
The rack mount version is pretty rough.
I didn't pick the rack mount version because I thought, like, that's, you know, it's such a specialized thing.
Like, I've never even heard of anybody buying one.
So it felt like that was kind of off the table.
But the tower version, I think, is not attractive.
Well, if the whole thing is bothering you, maybe you wouldn't get over that.
But the whole thing never really bothered me.
But I remember when I first saw it, it didn't make much of an impression.
But actually having one and looking at it and sort of – I've taken photos of it.
Seeing how the light reflects off the weird little hole things has definitely grown on me way more than I thought it would.
It is just – it is a nice object, right?
It's setting aside how it looks as a computer.
Yeah.
like the weird the weird feety things they they have a little bit of a miyazaki look to me the little little squat suction cuppy little feet and i don't mind the little chrome handles and the sharp edge on the top the only thing that bothers me about this computer is the seam between the the front and the back but i didn't want don't want them to make it even more expensive by making it one solid thing um but yeah it definitely grew on me having it in the house way more than before now i definitely uh have a lot of affection for it but i can understand people not liking it because the holes are divisive
Yeah, the holds and the feet, I think.
If I got this, I would get it with wheels just to not have those feet.
And the wheels do look good.
I think they're good-looking wheels.
Yeah, that's my number one.
I do not like the way the computer looks at all.
Well, if we put a molar on your desk, I think you would run screaming to that 2019 Mac Pro.
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Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Do we have a little time for something that maybe we'll end up covering again next week?
But if we have a few minutes before we all pass out.
So I bought and I received the CalDigit TS4, right?
Oh, yeah.
Which actually, I changed my setup this week.
I'm using the CalDigit TS4.
And so far, I really like it.
And I am really, really digging the one cable lifestyle.
Except, apparently... Except that one cable cost $130.
Well, not only that, but no, apparently the way the LG 5K works is it's two different streams of monitor data mashed together.
So I guess if I'm... I am way outside my comfort zone here, but I think what's happening is because this is effectively two monitors in terms of like data...
When I plug in both the LG 5K and my 4K, I am now using effectively three monitors, sort of, kind of, worth of data, which means I don't have enough bandwidth to do both on the CalDigit, or something about the CalDigit in combination with this makes it such that it is transmitting 4K to the 5K,
And then 4K to the 4K.
But what I can do is I can upsample the 4K to be effectively 5K, which people with better eyes could probably tell the difference, but I can't.
So it's very weird because I'm running the 5K in scaled mode at the native 5K resolution, but it's being scaled.
So that means even with my forthcoming studio display, what I was planning on doing is moving the 5K to be the accessory display and then just making the 4K like a portable display if I ever work somewhere else for some reason.
And apparently if I want to continue the one cable lifestyle, I will always have this 5K scaled.
Even though it's scaled to 5K, it's scaled.
I thought they said it was if it used display stream compression and that your current monitors didn't support it, but the Apple one might.
Right.
But the problem isn't with the forthcoming monitor.
The problem is this monitor.
And this monitor isn't going away.
Which one isn't going away?
The UltraFine 5K.
The LG?
Oh.
Oh, we'll make it go away.
Well, I don't want it to go.
I want to have two monitors.
I guess I could do that.
It's interesting that you can't tell the difference.
If no one had mentioned that, you couldn't tell it was upscaled.
Well, I knew that I needed to go into system preferences and fiddle with it, but I didn't really think much about it.
And my eyes, as I've gotten older, have gotten worse.
And so I'm sure somebody with better eyes could come and be like, oh, no, no, no, no.
Such and such icon or such and such text is blurry.
And I'll be like, oh, I'm excited to get my new monitor, though.
I really am.
I think you should just – I think you should try just living with one of them.
I know you have all these monitors, but you can recoup some of your costs by passing on the curse slash blushing of the 5K to someone else and just try the one monitor lifestyle with your Apple monitor.
See, and I certainly could or I could go and I could keep the 4K as the accessory monitor and make the ultra-fine 5K the portable monitor since it does so well when I move it around.
But –
But I don't know.
It seems so well standing still.
I mean, it's as good as it's ever going to get now.
This is the perfect time to sell it to somebody.
Yeah, I could.
That's true.
It was just serviced.
That is true.
You're putting bad, maybe good thoughts in my head.
Just had the van of service.
I'm sure it'll be fine.
Can I suggest something?
Don't sell it to somebody.
Give it to somebody.
Because you don't want to take money for that thing and then it dies and then it's a problem.
If you give it to them, it feels more like a curse.
Oh, that's terrible.
Pass this curse on to you.
Anybody who's getting rid of an LG 5K, mail it to Casey.
That should just be what everyone does with their LG 5K.
That's fine.
Just mail them all to Casey.
That's fine.
You'll have like six of them trying to figure out how to hook them all up at once at your desk.
Yeah, I will.
I absolutely will.
If you assemble the parts from all of them, you get one working monitor.
That's also true.
This is the LG ship of Theseus.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
I send John all my Kindles.
The role is in Casey all there.
Oh, goodness.
Can you imagine?
What a horrible curse.
Like you go outside like, ah, Aaron, there's a giant box again.
Yeah.
That would be hilarious.
And she would not find it funny at all.
Like Aaron is extremely easygoing, but after like the fourth one of these, she would like, I think more than anything else, where are you putting this?
Where are you going to put it?
Like when the toasters kept showing up at my house.
Yeah, exactly.
Just everyone's mediocre LG five case.
Like the mediocre toasters.
I feel so bad.
Did I ever tell you the story?
I probably did.
The story of how the toasters left my house?
Yes.
Somebody, like a courier, came and got them or something.
I mean, in hindsight, now I know this was Alex doing all this.
But I was like, Alex Cox was responsible.
But I just kept getting these toasters.
And they come in big boxes.
But then the boxes didn't leave.
So they were just stacked in the garage.
They have some photographs of it.
And so the solution was, I was like, look, these toasters need to leave my house.
um so they hired a task rabbit i think that's still a thing like a person to come and a person showed up in my house just a regular person with their suv and those toasters barely fit in the suv we filled the entire trunk the back seat and the passenger seat just cardboard boxes because it was like 12 you know very large boxes and that person like that person showed up and they're like i'm ready to do a task rabbit thing i'm like i'm not sure you
I'm not sure you were well briefed on what's going on.
I'm picking up toasters.
How the heck could that be?
You could see her face drop.
It's like, I'm sorry.
Were they getting mailed or donated or trashed?
I don't know where they went from.
The task person took them out of my house.
Where they went from there, I don't know.
I think they actually got shipped back.
You should ask Alex about it.
They will be able to tell you whether they got shipped back somewhere or donated.
All I knew was at that point, speaking of wives, was these toasters needed to get out of my house.