With Four Hands Tied Behind Its Back
Casey:
I'd like to give a update on my situation because inquiring minds have not only wanted to know but have asked.
Casey:
I am here with the lights on and I am not in my sleepy shirt.
Casey:
I'm actually in the very old throwback ATP watch sport edition.
Casey:
Which you cannot get anymore, but it's my favorite workout shirt because it's like kind of sort of Under Armour sort of material.
Casey:
And so it's like a little stretchy and plasticky, which is good for a workout shirt.
Casey:
And so anyway, I am wearing that with the lights on.
Casey:
And if you wanted to get some sort of sweet ATP merchandise, I can tell you that now is the time to do it.
Casey:
Like literally right now.
Casey:
Because as we record, there's a little over a week left.
Casey:
Or no, I'm sorry, less than that.
Casey:
Less than a week.
Casey:
Less than a week.
Casey:
Just a couple of days left.
Marco:
Four days, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yes, I almost got my wires crossed there.
Casey:
There's just a couple of days left for you to go to ATP.fm slash store and get yourself some sweet, sweet ATP merch.
Casey:
We've got new Mac Pro Outline shirts with or without wheels.
Casey:
And all sorts of other stuff.
Casey:
We do not have mugs.
Casey:
A lot of people have asked about mugs.
Casey:
We don't have those at the moment.
Casey:
We'll probably do those again maybe next year or something.
Casey:
But we have a lot of great shirts.
Casey:
We've got the hoodie, which is extremely comfortable.
Casey:
We've got the classic Six Colors ATP shirt.
Casey:
All sorts of good merchandise at atp.fm.
Casey:
Now, here's where I do the hard sell.
Casey:
Every single time somebody, not in a funny way, a lot of people do it in a funny way, oh, is it too late to order?
Casey:
Which is fine, whatever.
Casey:
I've made this bed, now I get to sleep in it.
Marco:
That's the laugh for a truly funny joke when you get that laugh.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So every time somebody non-ironically, non-sarcastically tweets at us, at me, at somebody and says, oh, is it too late?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
There are no exceptions.
Casey:
It will be too late if you do not go now to atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
Now is the time.
Marco:
And you listeners, you might think that Casey's making this up or that 100% of the people who say that are being sarcastic.
Marco:
I guarantee you every time there is like one or two people at least who honestly, like totally not sarcastically say, oh my God, please, I missed it.
Marco:
Like, are you able to send me one more shirt or something like that?
Marco:
Like it always happens every time.
Casey:
Yep, every single time.
Casey:
So you might be thinking to yourself, I have a great memory.
Casey:
I know I can't do it right now.
Casey:
Maybe I'm driving.
Casey:
Maybe I'm walking.
Casey:
Maybe I'm just not at my computer, and I'd rather do it on a full-size computer.
Casey:
And you may think you have a good memory.
Casey:
Every time somebody says, oh!
Casey:
Oh no!
Casey:
I forgot.
Casey:
Every single time.
Casey:
Don't be that person.
Casey:
Don't be that person.
Casey:
If you're driving, pull over.
Casey:
If you're walking, especially in like Manhattan or something, get to the side.
Casey:
Don't just stop dead.
Casey:
That's not cool.
Casey:
Get to the side.
Casey:
Do what you got to do.
Casey:
Use your phone.
Casey:
Use your iPad.
Casey:
Use your computer.
Casey:
Do whatever you got to do to go to atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
Because as we record this, which is on the 11th, the afternoon of the 11th, you have three more days.
Casey:
So please, everyone, atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
Now's the time.
Casey:
And Marco, would you mind reminding me what the situation is if you happen to be an ATP member?
Marco:
Oh, yes.
Marco:
If you happen to be an ATP member, you can go to your member panel on atp.fm and you can get a coupon code that will give you 15% off our merchandise.
Marco:
So that's yet another reason to become a member.
Marco:
If you want to become a member, just use this code once and then cancel your membership.
Marco:
You totally can.
Marco:
That's totally a thing.
Marco:
We hope you don't, but you can.
Marco:
And hey, no judgment.
Marco:
And there's still time to do that, by the way.
John:
And I wanted to put in...
John:
My warning for the second order effect of missing the sale.
John:
Very often what happens is somebody who listens to the show has someone in their life who would like to get them some ATV merch for, say, the holidays or whatever.
John:
But they don't listen to the show, so they don't know when the sale happens.
John:
So if you're listening to the show and you think there's someone in your life who wants to get you a gift and you would like to get one of these gifts, you have to basically go and tell them, hey, if you're thinking of gift ideas for me, you should get something from this store that's closing on the 14th.
John:
So hurry up.
John:
You should have actually honestly done this a long time ago.
John:
If you've been leaving hints, if you've been trying to be subtle or whatever, it's time to cut that out.
John:
No more subtlety is allowed.
John:
You have to say, look,
John:
If you haven't already bought me something and you're going to get me something, I would like and then just point to the shirt that you want or the pin that you want or the hoodie that you want or whatever and say, and by the way, this sale ends on the 14th, so order now.
John:
Because we get email from those people too that say, oh, is the store open?
John:
I don't listen to the show, but my husband or wife listens to the show and I know they would love this, but it seems like your store is closed.
John:
Can I get this stuff before the holidays?
John:
Once the store is closed, no, you can't.
John:
So do it now.
Casey:
Yeah, we're not sure if it'll make it in time for the holidays.
Casey:
I don't want to make any guarantees in that regard, but it certainly won't make it in time for the holidays if you don't order.
Casey:
So atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
Thank you.
Marco:
I am holding in my hand right now my product red iPhone 12 mini.
Marco:
Wait, what?
How?
Marco:
Leather case.
Casey:
Oh, I was going to say, I walked right into that.
Casey:
You would think I'm a professional podcaster.
Marco:
But is it red?
Marco:
It's black, I thought.
Marco:
Oh, no, but I have the Apple case, too.
Marco:
You're talking about the one that you got.
Marco:
I also got the Apple one.
John:
Oh, that's right.
John:
Okay, never mind.
John:
Confusion over.
John:
We don't have time to do case reviews in this episode.
John:
This is an Apple event episode, but rest assured, next episode in the notes.
John:
I'll certainly be reviewing the cases that I've got.
John:
By then, Marco, will you have your phone by then?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
So the way things work here, my phone is going to be delivered on Friday to a ferry terminal.
Marco:
And if it gets delivered past about 930 in the morning, which it almost certainly will.
Marco:
then I won't get it till the next day.
Marco:
They're closed on the weekends.
Marco:
So I'm probably not going to get it until Monday.
Casey:
Can you like loiter at the ferry terminal all day just to intercept the package when it arrives?
Casey:
They would probably let me do that, but I'd rather not.
Marco:
That seems a little bit excessive.
Marco:
So yeah, I will get my phone a few days later than everybody else.
Marco:
Granted, I have done weirder things to get my phone on launch day, but this year I'm a little bit more chill about it, I think.
Casey:
So you got a Mini for yourself.
Casey:
Remind me what model you were planning to and now have bought.
Marco:
I did everything John said I would do.
Marco:
So I got the iPhone 12 Mini in red slash orange slash salmon slash coral, whatever it really is, in that color.
Marco:
I got the 256 instead of the 128 because John was telling me in my head, just get the 256.
Marco:
There's no way you're going to get the 128.
Marco:
And I thought, he's probably right.
Marco:
So...
John:
Don't try to blame me for doing what you were going to do.
John:
Yes, I predicted it correctly, but I didn't make you do it.
Marco:
And easily enough, the store opened up a couple minutes later than it should have, but I got mine for day one delivery.
Marco:
Tiff, at the same time, was ordering her Pro Max Blue for day one delivery, and there were no problems getting either one of them on time.
Marco:
And I think even a few hours after sale, I think they were still available for day one delivery.
Marco:
So it seems like this was actually very well stocked compared to
John:
previous iphone launches and i especially i'm surprised that the max stayed in stock that well but here we are well that's excellent well i mean these are the two lower demand models right it's the most expensive model which has historically lower demand than the less expensive models and then the small one which as much as the people who want it really want it is not the way the industry is trending so it doesn't surprise me that they were able to keep things in stock
Marco:
Yeah, and it's interesting.
Marco:
Looking at the iPhone 12 mini as, quote, the small one, typically the smallest Apple product in a lineup is the most successful sales-wise.
Marco:
But that's almost always because it's the cheapest.
Marco:
And it turns out the cheapest thing of any Apple product lineup is the most successful sales-wise.
Marco:
And in this case, the iPhone SE is the cheapest.
Marco:
The iPhone 12 mini is the smallest.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it seems like whatever big demand there is for the small phone is mostly about the cheap phone.
Marco:
And that seems to get most of it.
Marco:
And so it'll be interesting to see if the Mini actually succeeds as a major product, that they will continue.
Marco:
I sure hope it does, because I'm telling you what, seeing this case, I mean, yeah, there's no phone in it yet, but seeing this case next to my 11 Pro, I'm really excited about this.
Casey:
Yeah, I think we did reach a gentleman's agreement that you will not discuss that phone on this program at all or with me in any capacity.
Casey:
I don't want to get an iMessage.
Casey:
I don't want to get a Slack DM.
Casey:
I want nothing because I do really love my 12 Pro.
Casey:
I really honestly do.
Casey:
And I was using the telephoto lens just yesterday.
Marco:
As was I. Every time I think, oh, crap, I'm using this thing more than I thought.
Casey:
But I am having some serious FOMO about the Mini, and I don't even know but a couple of people that have gotten pre-released phones.
Casey:
And I'm already getting jealous and getting scared that I'm going to kind of wish I got that one.
Casey:
So we agreed that you're never going to talk about it.
Casey:
Great.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, right, because I forgot also between our last show and now, the press reviews all dropped for the Mini and the Max.
Casey:
I've only read Gruber's so far, but it sounds very, very good.
Marco:
Yeah, the gist of all the reviews has been pretty consistent with one exception.
Marco:
The gist is basically that the Mini is awesome, except that it gets a little bit less battery life than the medium-sized ones, which is to be expected, I think.
Marco:
um and that the max is really big and really heavy and the camera is either awesome which is what most people are saying or only a little bit better which is what a few people like mpbhd said um so it's kind of it seems like the the gain that you get from that bigger sensor in the max is there but it's only noticeable in certain challenging circumstances like low light and stuff where
Marco:
the you know the daylight pictures and and well lit pictures you you pretty much can't tell a difference um but that is you know certainly if i was a person who was at all interested in a big phone i would get it because there is a difference and it when you need it it is great uh but i like a few times during this ordering period i've picked up tiff's max and i just every time like no i can't do this
Casey:
Yeah, I haven't I haven't held a max in my hand in a long time, but certainly anytime I have, I've been like, oh, this is not for me.
Casey:
And I mean, if it's for you, that's fine.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's bad.
Casey:
It's just it is not for me.
Casey:
Not at all.
Marco:
I think what it mostly comes down to is like, do you keep it in a pants pocket?
Marco:
And do you need to use it one-handed very often?
Marco:
And if the answer to both of those is no, it's a pretty good sell to get the max because it is the best in most ways.
Marco:
But if you do keep it in the pants pocket and or use it one-handed frequently, it's challenging.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, interestingly, I haven't read really any of the reviews other than Gruber so far or watched any of the videos, but I saw fly by, maybe one of you guys retweeted it, I don't recall, but I saw fly by a tweet from Nilay Patel who said, here's why I think MKBHD and I had different reactions to the 12 Pro Max camera.
Casey:
I take a lot of photos of a toddler.
Casey:
For any given light, the Pro Max will generally pick a higher ISO and faster shutter speed, which makes a big difference when your subject never sits still.
Casey:
Which, not having any experience with this myself, that does make sense, and...
Casey:
And it certainly is another, you know, notch in the belt of why one would want a Pro Max.
Casey:
But again, every time I picked it up, I would just get nauseous and I wouldn't want to do it.
John:
You know, there was an Apple event and you two, even though there's no follow up, are just talking about the iPhone Pro Max.
John:
If you notice below the Apple event in our notes, this whole section on the Max and the Mini where there are things about the Max and Marco's going to talk about the Mini.
John:
But if you want to do it now, that's fine because I have some tweets about the Pro Max as well.
John:
notes uh matt panzarino said that the telephoto lens actually gets the 5 000 adjustments per second image stabilization that's something that apple didn't mention but it's the lens stabilization not the uh the sensor shift stabilization so it's an increase in number of moves per second
John:
Not, you know, not the sensor shift that's in the main lens.
John:
And the other thing he said is that the ISO range of the wide lens, the 1x lens, is larger, which allows for faster shutter speeds with wide apertures.
John:
And he mentions the same thing, as they'll have to tell you, that moving subjects in iffy light is a big jump in quality.
John:
But if you don't have something that's moving, you won't notice that there was a faster shutter, and then you won't notice that you get less blur.
Marco:
Yeah, it also seems like one of the major improvements for the Maxxis camera system is in night mode and any kind of long exposure situation, because the sensor is pulling in a lot more light, you have to have you can have shorter exposures.
Marco:
So night mode, what this results in is you can you can have like less time you have to hold still while taking the picture, which will almost always result in a better and sharper picture.
Marco:
So that's that's pretty nice.
Marco:
If you do a lot of night mode, it's kind of a no brainer.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I feel like a lot of these reviewers who didn't notice anything about the camera, if you put the camera on a tripod and take a picture in good light, I mean, you're not going to notice much of difference.
John:
And even in bad light, if it's, you know, it's a very stable shot or you don't have moving subjects, like, if you look at the pictures people tend to test with, it's like...
John:
you know, here is my parking lot at night outside of my YouTube studio.
John:
Here is, that's a very popular one.
John:
Here is a beautiful person smiling and staying very still, right?
John:
But no one's trying to catch a toddler.
Marco:
In like studio lighting.
John:
Right, exactly.
John:
Or even if it's in low light, like here's someone outside under a tree at night in the dark, but they're not a little kid running around, right?
John:
And so that's where I feel like you have to, like pulling up stats like Panzer did to say, what is the ISO range?
John:
I'm assuming he pulled that out of like Halliday or some other app that gives that information.
John:
you know and seeing like looking at the picture after it was taken and say how long was this shutter open for this shot versus how long was the shutter open for this similar looking shot on another iphone right so obviously it's not a night and day difference if people can't tell immediately but the difference does exist and it it uh it manifests itself in the way that you would think it would manifest itself given the actual physical changes where
John:
you know larger sensor larger pixels you know all that stuff it's not going to like it's not going to suddenly make it look like a you know quote-unquote real camera because it's still a tiny little camera in the back of the phone but the sensor is a little bigger and you can hold the shutter open a little bit less time to get adequate light and that's only going to manifest in situations where that difference makes a difference
Marco:
Yeah, two things.
Marco:
Number one, there's no question this camera is a big difference in certain circumstances.
Marco:
And if they somehow sold this camera in the Mini, I would pay any price they wanted for that.
Marco:
But it's a much bigger camera system.
John:
It would make the Mini much bigger.
Marco:
yes but well it would make the bump much bigger i mean maybe not the body of the phone but make the battery even smaller because you'd be squeezing you gotta i might take that uh but but yeah so that's part one and and if they put that same camera system in the medium-sized pro i would probably have stuck with the pro line um but number two is it really pronounced holiday or is this a bazell situation
Casey:
I was just about to say, I thought it was Halide, but I'm not convinced I'm right.
John:
Halide, yeah.
John:
Halide is how you pronounce it.
John:
Sorry.
John:
I correctly pronounced the word that I saw in my head, but I realized that's not what the app is called, is it?
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Bombas.
Marco:
They make awesome socks.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Because for every pair of socks Bombas sells, they also donate a pair to someone experiencing homelessness across the U.S.,
Marco:
And since socks are the number one most requested clothing item in homeless shelters, the generosity of giving Bombas will make a meaningful impact this holiday season.
Marco:
Bombas are specially engineered to be the most comfortable pair of socks you and everyone on your gift list has ever worn.
Marco:
They spent years perfecting every detail, like limiting those annoying toe seams that make your toes kind of hit them in the inside of a shoe, making sure their socks never slip, and creating a special midfoot support system.
Marco:
And I can honestly say I was given Bombas socks last winter for holiday gifts.
Marco:
And you think, oh, I don't want socks for Christmas or whatever.
Marco:
But trust me, you want these socks because they're so good.
Marco:
I was so happy with the gifts.
Marco:
I went and bought even more for myself.
Marco:
And I'm kind of hoping to get a few more this year, but don't tell anybody.
Marco:
All right, so Bombas come in tons of different colors and styles, including athletic performance socks, limited edition holiday socks, dress socks, and my personal favorite, socks made from merino wool, a natural wonder fiber that's super warm, incredibly soft, and naturally moisture-wicking.
Marco:
I love these in the winter.
Marco:
The generosity of Bombas customers has allowed them to donate over 40 million pairs of socks and counting through the nationwide network of 3,000 plus giving partners.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So from comfort to kindness and everything in between, Bombas aren't just giveable, they were made to give.
Marco:
Go to bombas.com slash ATP today and get 20% off your first order.
Marco:
That's B-O-M-B-A-S.
John:
bombas.com slash atp bombas.com slash atp thank you to bombas for sponsoring our show all right we have just a spot of follow-up uh jeff nato no no we're not doing it's an apple event episode oh my god people it's do we need to have pre-show this is what we need to do like people don't know this but before we put on the live stream we often talk to each other oh do we have anything we need to discuss no apparently i'm gonna new rule we always have something to discuss which is john is going to tell you how the show goes
Casey:
Today is an Apple event show.
John:
There is no follow up.
John:
I allowed Casey to have one pre-Apple event item just because I didn't know what it was and it looked like it might be funny.
John:
So Casey, if you would scroll down to topics, you will see Casey had an oops.
John:
Hopefully your oops does not take 45 minutes.
John:
If it does not take 45 minutes, you may now describe your oops.
Casey:
Have we met John?
Casey:
This will absolutely take 45 minutes.
Casey:
So Aaron's car has murdered another Apple device of mine.
Casey:
I was washing her car the other day, and I was on a ladder this time.
Casey:
If you recall, my 11 Pro, which coincidentally I just got repaired to put in cold storage because I had AppleCare on it, so why wouldn't I repair it?
Casey:
But anyways, because it was scratched to smithereens, that is.
Casey:
Anyways, so the 11 Pro, when I first got it, literally the day I got it, I was washing Aaron's car for reasons that are uninteresting.
Casey:
and I was in a rush because the daylight was fading.
Casey:
I was trying to get into the kids and into Erin, and her car is an SUV, and so I jumped up to just quickly take a swipe at the roof.
Casey:
I don't remember if I was washing or drying at this point, but I had the phone in my back pocket, which I never, ever do.
Casey:
This, again, was a year ago, and all of a sudden, as I landed, I heard something hit the concrete of my driveway and thought,
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
And so literally within 12 hours of receiving my 11 Pro, it had a shattered back glass, which is, even with AppleCare, considerably more expensive than repairing the front glass.
Casey:
So anyway, just the other day, I was washing Aaron's car, and I was on a ladder this time.
Casey:
I was taking my time.
Casey:
I was in no rush.
Casey:
Everything was going well.
Casey:
And I was I believe I was washing at this point.
Casey:
I was not drying yet.
Casey:
And I was swiping across the roof.
Casey:
And by some miracle, in a way that has never happened to me in the however many years I've owned Apple watches, I swiped at the like the bottom of my wrist clipped the roof rack.
Casey:
and i watched the apple watch this is a series five mind you i still haven't bought a series six yet i i watched it roll down her windshield across the like top of the fender and hit the cement and sure enough i picked it up and it now has a little shatter in the upper left hand corner was it on your wrist so it like unsnatched what kind of band was it solo loop no no no it's series five i know but solo loop would have saved you right
Casey:
Oh, that's a good point.
Casey:
I see.
Casey:
I did not get your point at first.
Casey:
Yeah, you're right.
Casey:
It would have saved me.
John:
Your call is like Apollo Robbins.
John:
It removed the one out of your wrist.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
Yeah, so I, honest to God, have no idea how this happened.
Casey:
I've never in my, you know, what, five, six years, whatever it's been, of owning Apple Watches and wearing them literally every day,
Casey:
Basically all day long.
Casey:
I have never done something where the watch just catapulted right off my wrist.
Casey:
And so I swiped the bottom of my wrist against the roof rack in some particularly perfect way that it just went catapulting right off my wrist.
Casey:
So it is not unusable, but every time I look at it, I die a little bit inside.
Casey:
And this is not news to basically anyone except me.
Casey:
Do you gentlemen know how much it costs to repair the Series 5 watch just to get the display fixed?
Casey:
The thing that's $30 if you have AppleCare on an iPhone, and I think it's like $100 if you don't.
Casey:
Do you have any idea how much it is on an Apple Watch?
John:
I'm surprised they repair those things at all because I've seen the process of repairing them.
Casey:
Well, just wait.
John:
Yeah, it's like, what can, you know, it's, we make this joke about laptops, like when you open them up, like once you've opened them up once, it's hard to really get them back together quite the same way.
John:
But with the watch, when you see what's in there, can you imagine opening that up and there's so many things that are glued that you have to heat up and then re-glue?
John:
It's like, why are they even...
John:
bothering they should just use the broken one for parts or like you know just disassemble it or i don't know what they could do with it but like actually taking it apart to repair some part and then putting it back together so that it stays together seems to me that it's perhaps a money losing proposition
John:
But go ahead.
Marco:
How much was it?
Marco:
Jeez, John, this was supposed to be a fast intro.
Marco:
It's an Apple event show.
John:
What are you doing?
John:
Well, I let him have the oops.
John:
I let him have one oops because it's fun to hear about him breaking things and it's less exciting next week.
Casey:
It is $350 to repair this watch.
Casey:
Oh, that's not bad.
Marco:
Yeah, that makes sense because it's basically full replacement to do any kind of repair for an Apple watch because the parts and stuff inside, I think maybe you might be able to inexpensively and easily replace the battery, but that would be about it at most because...
Marco:
Most repair at this scale is effectively you replace it and you send the old one to refurbishing because it's just so hard to service.
Marco:
And as discussed in previous episodes, what you can refurbish out of an Apple Watch is not much because typically, especially first-party manufacturer refurbishing, you typically don't refurbish the case or anything that people can touch for various sanitary and aesthetic reasons.
Marco:
And usually you don't refurbish batteries either because you just replace them and recycle the old one.
Marco:
And so you figure, like, how much of the Apple Watch is the exterior and the battery?
Marco:
And then how much is the actual refurbishable part on the inside?
Marco:
It's very little.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, it's fine.
Casey:
I was planning on getting a new one anyway.
Casey:
I would rather not have murdered this one.
Casey:
But, you know, it's frustrating, but it's not the end of the earth.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Golly, $350 to replace the screen on this thing.
Casey:
And for all the reasons that both of you said, I'm not saying that's wrong or it's not reasonable, but holy smokes, that is a lot of money to replace this thing.
Casey:
And as it turns out, a new one, a new Series 6, I think starts at $400 if you get the small one like I do.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But I mean, look at it this way.
Marco:
This is an excuse to get the new watch, which you always want every year.
Marco:
You always want an excuse.
Marco:
And here you just popped off an excuse.
Marco:
So here we go.
Casey:
Well, that's the thing.
Casey:
And I wish I could tell you this was also some master plan to just back my way into getting a new one.
Casey:
But I actually had planned on already having a new one on my wrist at this point.
Casey:
And it's funny you say that about the solo loop, John, because I guess that would have saved me.
Casey:
But no, I just hadn't gotten around to it because I'm so frustrated by the order process because I'm a petulant whiner.
Casey:
And so anyways, I'm going to order one sometime in the next day or two.
Casey:
But I couldn't help but realize that Aaron's car is now murdered both a phone and a watch.
Casey:
And lesson learned, never wash your car.
Marco:
Is it the car's fault when it causes problems to happen when it is not being operated or moving?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's like if you ride your bike into a parked car, then you get hurt.
Marco:
Like, is that the car's fault?
Marco:
Like, I don't know.
Casey:
We're going to go with yes, because otherwise then I have to feel even more responsible than I already do.
Casey:
I don't want that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I guess we have to talk about some stuff that happened yesterday or else John is going to explode.
Casey:
Is that how this works?
John:
Yeah, I think you've cut into your time to talk about the glorification of Apple Park.
John:
I think you've lost the ability to talk about the celebrities that were shown.
John:
I think you've lost the ability to talk about John Ternus' big pitch about Apple Silicon and how great they are.
John:
And I think we actually have to dive right into the M1.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, let's do it.
Casey:
Tell me about the M1, John.
John:
Let's start with the sidetrack from the M1 because we have time for that.
John:
Yay.
John:
Man, it's good to be the king, isn't it, John?
John:
My word.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, I sacrifice.
John:
I sacrifice pre-show.
John:
I take things and I cut them out of fault.
John:
I move them down.
John:
I compress.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Now my sacrifices pay off.
John:
And I didn't break any of my hardware.
John:
So I didn't have any.
John:
So this is a call for listeners because we're bad and we should really have full text search of our episodes.
John:
But we don't.
John:
And I have a terrible memory.
John:
I can never remember when we talked about something on some past episode of ATP.
John:
It could have been literally years in the past.
John:
And someone, probably Casey, said, hey, what do we all think?
John:
Place your bets.
John:
What do you think the name of Apple's, you know, ARM chips for the Mac will be?
John:
Will it just be the A series?
John:
Will it be X something?
John:
Will it be M something?
John:
Everybody place your bets.
John:
And all of us chimed in and said, I think it'll be this.
John:
I think it'll be that.
John:
I would love to know what we all said and which one of us was right, but I have no idea when we talked about that.
John:
So if you know, please write in and tell us.
John:
Don't guess.
John:
Send us a timestamp link in Overcast so you can be super cool.
John:
If nobody knows, then it'll remain a mystery.
John:
It's not a big deal.
John:
I was just wondering.
John:
Anyway, the reason that comes up is because when we were discussing what they're going to call the new series of chips in Apple's ARM-based Macs,
John:
when we talked about them being called m we said oh but also isn't apple has already kind of used m with the m7 apple motion coprocessor that they included in the something or other i gotta look it up 5s i believe yeah anyway and they've incremented that number apparently like the m8 was in the phone after then the m now and i think they're up to m14 now right so it's like well they already used m something but
John:
They can reuse names.
John:
They've reused iBook for a piece of hardware in a store where you buy e-books, and nobody knows the name of the motion core processor anymore anyway, and it's all folded into the system on a chip these days, I think, anyway.
John:
Or maybe not, because it's got this little mint, is it?
Marco:
No, I think that's kind of why they stopped talking about it, because it used to be a separate chip, and then at some point it just became part of the A-whatever series system on a chip.
John:
right so anyway we know that apple decided to call it the m1 which made me think of the bmw m1 which was a late 70s early 80s mid-engine supercar from bmw um and bmw has a line of cars that we talk about the the m series you know they have a three series five series seven series eight series so on and they make an m3 and m5 i think they make an m8 now it's m3 m4 right because it's the four-door and two-door
John:
Anyway, BMW made a 1 Series, and if they're going to make an M version of the 1 Series, it would have to be the M1 to go along with the M3 and the M5 and so on and so forth.
John:
Aha, but BMW said, we can't use the name M1.
John:
We already used that for our supercar in the late 70s, early 80s.
John:
So they called it, frustratingly and non-uniformly, the 1M, a car that Marco owned for a while.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
Apple, again, has no such problem.
John:
They're calling this thing the M1, despite the fact that six years from now, they're going to put a chip in some Mac called the M7, which will be the exact same name as the motion coprocessor, but no one will care.
John:
I just thought this was funny.
John:
And the M series of chips...
John:
that i think regardless of who thought that was going to be um the the chip is like the obvious choice we always talked about as like the the boring choice m for mac right i heard someone say might be m for mobile no i think it's m for mac so this is the the first chip in a mac and it's called the m1 now
John:
As for the actual chip, we talked at the very end of last week's episode.
John:
What is Apple going to do?
John:
This is the first time they're doing an ARM chip for a Mac.
John:
They could do all sorts of stuff.
John:
They could do three entirely different chips for three totally different Macs because the rumors were there was going to be a 16-inch, which turned out not to be, and the 13-inch in the air or whatever.
John:
So in the 16-inch, they could have this huge monstrous chip with tons of cores and a giant GPU that just is a massive performance beast that fits within the power envelope allowable in there, all the way down to a very tiny, wimpy little chip that they would put in their small laptop that didn't even require a fan.
John:
And on the other side of the spectrum was maybe they just used the same A14 everywhere.
John:
I guess not by name, but like literally...
John:
you know, the same little wimpy chip that you see in phones, just use that chip everywhere because it's what they have on hand and they don't want to make custom, expensive, weird variants for every single Mac.
John:
Those are the two ends of the spectrum.
John:
What Apple ended up doing is a lot closer to the just use the same chip everywhere, but that same chip is not exactly an A14.
John:
In fact, what it looks like, it looks a lot like, if you can imagine what an A14X would look like,
John:
That's what the M1 looks a lot like.
John:
Maybe a little bit beefier than an A14X, right?
John:
I think I just read a tweet today that if you look at the part numbers, if you had to guess based on the part numbers and the code names and stuff, you would think the M1 is the A14X because, I don't know, they stick a G at the end of the regular part name and that's the X version or whatever.
John:
But they used this M1 chip.
John:
They used this same M1 chip across all of the Macs they introduced today.
John:
So we'll get to them in a little bit.
John:
It's the Air, the Mini, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
John:
And so, you know, the idea that Apple would invest a huge amount of money in giant, scary chips right out of the gate for the Mac seems not to have happened, which is not particularly surprising, especially given the Macs that they actually introduced.
John:
But...
John:
I'm not gonna say I'm disappointed.
John:
I'm surprised.
John:
Put it this way.
John:
I'm surprised that
John:
It seems almost like they said, what kind of chip can we make and what Macs will be best suited to use that chip?
John:
And that's what they introduced.
Casey:
It's the first system on a chip on a Mac, though.
Casey:
That's exciting.
John:
Yeah, that was their big pitch where people don't know what a system on a chip is.
John:
They showed all the different chips in a motherboard without any labels on them.
John:
They said, take all these chips and shove them into one thing, and it's like a system, but on a chip.
John:
It's like, yeah, right now.
Yeah.
John:
We've seen it in phones and iPads.
John:
It's cool and everything.
John:
But in terms of size, it's 16 billion transistors, which is 35% more than the A14.
John:
Again, kind of like, you know, the X things, the A13 or sorry, A12, A12X, A12Z.
John:
You can add more GPU cores, you can add more CPU cores, a little bit more memory, a little bit more transistors, right?
John:
So if you're wondering how much bigger is this chip than the chip in my phone, in terms of transistor size, 35%.
John:
So it's not that much bigger.
John:
There's no T2 in these Macs because you don't need it because the M1 has all that stuff inside it, right?
John:
So in case you're wondering because the 13-inch MacBook Pro has a touch bar,
John:
Does that touch bar run off a T2?
John:
No, it doesn't.
John:
I mean, they could have, and maybe it would have been more like the old way it ran, but that's not how it works.
John:
Apparently it works.
John:
As far as the computer is concerned, the touch bar is just another little miniature screen and just another little input device like the trackpad or whatever.
John:
right all running off the same uh you know system on chip unified memory architecture which is just their way of saying that we don't have dedicated vram um there's just one set of ram for the gpu and the cpu again like every ipad and phone that's been out there right not surprising what they showed in the keynote and what i think a lot of people weren't aware of before and continue not to be aware of based on the questions i see on twitter is
John:
is that on Apple's system on a chip, the RAM is in the same package as the system on a chip, right?
John:
Or at least in the M1.
John:
Anyway, I don't know if I was on the phones.
Marco:
Yeah, and do we have confirmation that it's not on DAI, right, but it's in the same package?
John:
Yeah, I put a picture in the show notes.
John:
You can see this is a picture that Apple put up, and unlike their other pictures that are just like sort of logical diagrams of the bits and pieces, this appears to be an actual photo of a physical part,
John:
So you can see the shot of the M1 die, and then in the same package, meaning in the same thing that we're going to cover with a piece of plastic that says M1 on it, over to the side are two chips that represent the RAM, right?
John:
So it's mere millimeters from the thing, you know, in the same package, connected by little interconnects, not wires or anything, right?
John:
And then that thing is slathered over with a piece of plastic that has M1 on it, right?
John:
and so people were wondering like why you know we'll get to the ram you know the ram specs in a second but why why are the ram limits the way they are well the amount of ram you can put in an m1 mac is the amount of ram you can fit in the package in those two little spots now there's no reason an arm based mac can have ram external to the system on a chip but this one doesn't so so there right um i believe this is the first die shot that apple has given at least in recent memory um
John:
meaning a photo of what the actual m1 silicon chip looks like presumably under some kind of microscope if you've ever seen one of these photos they always kind of like shimmery and multicolored because of the the way the tiny features uh you know bend the light and reflect off of it and you can look at them and it looks kind of like a city viewed a multicolored city view from very high above and a satellite or something and you can identify you
John:
different regions based on the sort of patterns of regularity right um if you compare to apple's logical diagram you can kind of see oh i see how they when they draw like the gpu and they draw a bunch of rectangles i kind of see what they're drawing because here and that looks kind of like that but as you can see in the real die shot diagram anatech has a good article where they put outlines around the parts and they try to label them
John:
it's not as neatly as arranged as their diagrams are it is it's more like a city that has evolved over time and by the way i did when uh when i wrote die shot into the notes this reminded me of a game from a classic mac game called sky shadow by cassidy and green and it had a sound effect it must have been like a you know 22 kilohertz sound effect of some british person saying nice one when you went over a power-up
John:
right but with the british accent and the sort of garbled nature of the recording when i was a kid me and my brother would debate is he saying is he saying die schwatt or is he saying nice one die schwatt nice one so every time i hear die shot i think die schwatt which is not a real thing if you would like to hear that sound effect we will put a link to it in the show notes
John:
wow it's funny what sticks in your head after all this time and not just you john like the royal you it's funny what will stick in your head someone just did someone just did but speaking of that i don't know what the word for this is someone will tell us but um uh there was some video of a news reporter being heckled and he turns around to the person behind him and like it's it's a it was a video meme video on youtube and it's captioned right so you can watch it with the sound off on your phone and so the heckler's behind the reporter the reporter turns around to the heckler and the caption says f off
John:
but not f just so marco doesn't have to believe right but if you close your eyes and don't read the captions and listen the reporter says buzz off but because the captions say f off you hear f off in your head even though he says buzz off i think we've done that with the really yeah because i've seen that video and i could swear that i heard the the i know that's well watch it again with your eyes closed and you'll hear him say buzz off it's like the uh what was it the green needle and the brainstorming green needle one that's another one
John:
oh yeah and the purple yeah well that was visual but the purple green dress or whatever it was i forget exactly what purple gold something i still can't see that dress as gold it's always blue to me anyway dash what um let's talk about this uh cpu eight cores um i can't remember is the what does the a12z have i should have put this in the notes we're doing a little bit of a scramble to get the notes
John:
But anyway, I mean, this this is sort of in keeping with what I said before, like bottom line, 16 billion transistors, 35 percent more.
John:
Where are those 35 percent of transistors being spent?
John:
They mostly got spent in having more of a certain thing, the more, you know, more execution units, more CPU cores, more GPU cores or more RAM.
John:
Right.
John:
The eight cores has got four high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores.
John:
The Anantech article labels these as Firestorm and Icestorm, which presumably are the real codenames that they extracted from some technical doc somewhere.
John:
Apple did give us the instruction cache and data cache sizes.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
That was really wild.
Casey:
I rewatched the video this morning to enter way too much information in the show notes.
Casey:
So we would have it handy.
Casey:
And I realized, whoa, they actually put cash sizes on there.
Casey:
That's very on Apple.
John:
It's like of all the things to give us, especially since they don't give us things like the clock speed.
John:
which seems like it'd be more higher level than anyway so they give the cache sizes and it's only interesting to say like for example um the shared 12 megabyte l2 cache this is an l2 cache that's shared just among the high performance cores as far as i can tell it has 12 megabytes the a14 has eight megabytes so again this is am1 is like a slightly scaled up a14 has more cores it has more cache to feed those cores um
John:
it's got the high four uh four high efficiency cores similar uh you know i'm assuming these are the same cores in the a14 that are high efficiency similar slightly larger cache sizes so on and so forth and apple's bragging that this is the best cpu performance per watt the fastest cpu in the world uh casey was upset about uh the charts they provided to uh to demonstrate this i'm assuming that's you put this in here and said called it a bezos chart they are bezos they are that's fair
Casey:
There's no units.
Casey:
It's performance.
Casey:
Higher is better.
Casey:
Power consumption.
Casey:
Lower is better.
Marco:
I would generally have a problem with the use of Bezos charts, but when you're trying to communicate in a PR, you know, commercial performance, that's a really hard thing to generalize into one graph because performance has so many different aspects.
Marco:
So like there is no way to create a precise graph of quote performance as a whole.
Marco:
So the fact that they're using hand wavy things here, it doesn't really offend me that much.
John:
I thought these charts were good in that what they were trying to show, like they eventually did label and put numbers on what they were trying to show, which is relative performance.
John:
Now, if you just look at the chart with nothing labeled, you're like, well, that can't be relative performance because I have no idea where zero is.
John:
So these two lines could be .00001, whatever units from each other.
John:
And they're just showing me a real zoomed in portions that look like they're far apart.
John:
Right.
John:
But when they labeled them, they said, look, we are, you know, twice the speed at half the wattage.
John:
And they put like, or they put like a 10 watt line down the, you know, vertical line down the thing.
John:
So they did show, oh, we're not fooling you by zooming way in on what is actually a small difference.
John:
They came out and said, we are, you know, this much faster, this much less power, so on and so forth.
John:
They're really just showing the relative curves of things.
John:
and this is their version instead of showing benchmarks they used to say here's a common task and here's how long that common task takes they just they're going with more synthetic benchmarks here like we're this much faster per watt on whatever it is that we're deciding we're measuring same thing with the gpu they didn't even label this is another theme they didn't say intel anywhere they just kept saying pc laptop pc chip you know our latest pc laptop gpu like
John:
we know what they mean we all know they're talking about intel they are in fact also talking about all of their own products although not every one of apple's products has the latest and greatest of everything but what they're saying is m1 performance really good which is not shocking considering how much faster the a14 is than every mac that apple sells and now this is like an a14 with more cores in the cpu and
John:
Of course, in the GPU as well, it's got an 8-core GPU.
John:
Cores in GPU parlance is weird because I don't know how Apple counts cores.
John:
Every company that makes GPUs decides what number they're going to throw at you.
John:
You can break it down into smaller and smaller pieces and say we have...
John:
you know 5 000 of these little execution things but apple tends to go in bigger chunks so these core things for the gpu they're only comparable between apple's own chips because gpu cores don't have a sort of agreed upon meaning and it really depends on how big a block of your gpu you decide to look at but anyway um it's eight gpu cores which is the same as the a12z in terms of number of cores whatever that means um
John:
uh seven gpu cores on some of the models which we assume is exactly the same situation as the a12x and the a12z where they make a chip with eight gpu cores and for some of those chips one of the gpu cores doesn't work and they just disable that core and say now it's a seven core gpu because gpu cores in general is just you know not infinitely but very easily horizontally expandable you can just keep adding more cores depending on what your budget is for transistor space and there's plenty of pixels to pump through them
John:
um yeah they do give executions 8 gb gore 128 execution units 24 000 concurrent threads yeah i would love to know a breakdown of what they consider a core if you look on the chip you can see kind of a shape that's repeated eight times and i'm like well i guess that's the core because you can look at it and it looks like the same shape a couple times um
John:
And the boast Apple makes is, when it comes to personal computers, the M1 has the world's fastest integrated graphics.
Marco:
Probably does.
Marco:
I mean, that wouldn't be hard.
Marco:
Like, Intel's integrated graphics attempts are not great, historically.
John:
I mean, what they're...
John:
see here's here's the other modifier you're missing here is when it comes to personal computers did you put this quote in here casey is this actually a quote yeah sorry i didn't put the literal quotation marks around it but yes that was a verbatim quote if i recall correctly yeah they have to put personal computers because the playstation 5 and xbox series x exist which also have integrated gpus technically speaking
John:
Casey put the big technology slide in here where they have the big slide with a bunch of little boxes all around the M1 saying all the stuff that it has.
John:
Is there anything in that slide in particular that jumped out to anybody?
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
They do – no, it was a different slide actually that they were talking about like video encoding and decoding.
Casey:
But no, I thought that this was –
Casey:
relatively straightforward hdr imaging is on there oh there it is i'm sorry high performance video editing oh no editing not encoding decoding i don't know it was there was nothing that that remarkable now um there's one little bit here that looks interesting always on processor oh i didn't even notice that i guess that has to do with the uh that craig was talking about later on yeah that's a great which by the way was easily my favorite moment of that entire presentation by a mile yeah craig has a sexual harassment case against apple there don't always sexualize craig
John:
He's a technologist first and a heartthrob second.
Right.
Marco:
But yeah, the always-on processor, I think, you know, I'm glad that, you know, even though it was kind of cringy, I'm glad that they called out the instant wake because that's something that just the architecture and the realities of Intel-based PCs makes that really hard to do.
Marco:
And when Apple can control so much more of everything with using their own, you know, everything, basically, like they are here...
Marco:
they can make stuff like that better.
Marco:
And that's one of the ways that I am so happy that they attacked that as a thing that the Apple Silicon, I'm so glad we can stop saying that, the M-based Macs can actually improve on in a meaningful day-to-day way.
Marco:
Because a lot of this stuff, I mean, a lot of people don't push their computers very hard.
Marco:
A lot of people don't use their batteries that heavily.
Marco:
And
Marco:
And so a lot of people aren't going to see incredibly noticeable differences in day-to-day use.
Marco:
But something like that, like instant wake and having it wake up reliably every single time, that's something that we can see.
Marco:
And something like an always-on processor probably maybe enables things like background push notifications to background update apps, things like that.
Marco:
We'll see how that works out.
Marco:
But that could be a really meaningful thing in just day-to-day niceties that we couldn't have before.
John:
And this goes all the way back to the old Steve Jobs thing where he added like a MacBook Air.
John:
So the story goes and talked to the Mac team and said, when I wake up my iPad, it's ready to go instantly.
John:
Why isn't the MacBook Air like that?
John:
So it took a while, but it seems like we finally got there.
Casey:
And imagine if you started your MacBook Air or what have you and you didn't wait five minutes for the last 24 hours of iMessages to come in.
Casey:
That would be a neat change.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
We're lucky that we have computers that we don't use very often that we occasionally wake up after a week of sleep.
Marco:
And yeah, it sucks having to wait for everything to roll in.
Marco:
And iOS devices don't work that way.
Marco:
iOS devices are always on until you manually power them off.
Marco:
But if it's just in sleep mode, then it will keep receiving background updates and keep updating the apps periodically.
Marco:
And so it's never that out of date when you turn it on.
Marco:
Whereas Macs don't work that way so far.
Marco:
And so to have this have an always on processor and instant wake and everything, that's probably going to be a really nice improvement.
Marco:
And we'll see how much the software supports that.
Marco:
It might take a few years of software evolution to be able to get things like background updates reliably working on the Mac.
Marco:
But it's really nice in the iOS world.
Marco:
And I think this brings us closer to that reality on the Mac.
John:
One funny tweet someone had about this diagram is off to the side, there's one of the squares that says cryptography acceleration.
John:
And they joked, hey, will this make expanding an Xcode zip any faster?
John:
Again, XIP zip.
John:
Unfortunately, I doubt it because that task is almost certainly IO bound.
John:
But I'll be happy to be proven.
John:
IO bound and I think non-multi-threaded.
John:
So if they just multi-threaded it, it would really...
Marco:
well and also cryptography acceleration is nothing new in modern cpus like that what that what they probably are getting this from partly is bringing the t2 in chip because the t2 had acceleration for disk encryption even the previous intel chips and all the previous a series chips have had hardware accelerated cryptography instructions at the chip level so that itself is nothing particularly new it's nice but it's not new
John:
The way to think about the T2 is they took stuff out of their iPad and iPhone chips and put it into a little chip that they called the T2.
John:
So anything that T2 is able to do, that's stuff that their iPad and iPhone chips have already been able to do.
John:
The H.264 or H.265 decoding, encoding hardware, the I.O.
John:
processing, that's all.
John:
System on chips had to do that themselves because they dealt with their own flash storage on the phones and everything like that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Pretty sure the T2 was just sort of like the opposite of that diagram we saw at the beginning where a bunch of chips merged together into one.
John:
The T2 was like a tiny chip ejected from Apple's phone chips and it landed on our Macs.
John:
But now we don't need it anymore because all that crap is in the M1.
John:
I wonder what the high efficiency audio processor is.
John:
I mean, it's probably something that already exists in phone and iPad chips.
John:
It's some kind of audio, you know, it's like the image signal processing thing they have for the camera, right?
John:
But for audio.
Marco:
It could be like hardware accelerated DSP, but they already had that in the CPUs.
John:
I mean, here's the thing about Apple not really telling us all the details of their system on a chip.
John:
Even if you look at an entire article, they're trying to guess what's inside the CPU, like how many execution units, how deep are the pipelines, how many reorder buffers, you know, what is the dispatch with?
John:
But they have to guess because Apple doesn't tell you.
John:
Right.
John:
So they have to run these tests that try to experimentally determine these answers.
John:
If you look in the system on a chip with the die shot that we had earlier.
John:
They have labeled regions.
John:
There's also a lot of regions that are not labeled.
John:
And that stuff does something.
John:
What is it?
John:
And so you're like, oh, well, there are instructions in the CPU for doing this type of stuff.
John:
And, you know, the Neon instruction set, the SIMD instruction set that ARM supports, that's in there too.
John:
But for any given task...
John:
um and this is part of apple system on a chip design if there's a thing that you need to do you have a lot of choices you could do it on the cpu like think of just audio processing you just do it on the cpu you could do it on the cpu with simdi instructions um if you have some kind on the gpu sometimes you use gpu to general purpose compute stuff right and then you get into these other things that this chip may or may not have what if i'm encoding or decoding video
John:
I could do that in 10 different places.
John:
But if this chip has dedicated hardware for this codec, I could also use that.
John:
Image single processing, audio processing.
John:
If there's some region on the chip that has a separate little minute, either miniature CPU or miniature set of execution units just for a specific task.
John:
Apple has a lot of flexibility to dole out the workloads to just the part of the chip that will do that job in the most power efficient manner and also the fastest, right?
John:
That's why the M1 is so much more than a CPU and a GPU.
John:
That's why all these other little label blocks are in there.
John:
And that's what makes their ability to tie these things together so important because Apple does tons of work to figure out what is it that our devices and apps are actually doing when somebody uses them.
John:
Someone uses an iPad over the course of the day.
John:
How much is this corner of the chip used?
John:
How much do we use the integer units?
John:
How much do we use the floating point units?
John:
The NN Tech article has an interesting thing about the fact that the M1 can apparently do like...
John:
dispatch do four floating point operations per cycle or something like that which is wider than even like the biggest intel chips and like why would apple care so much about being able to crank through floating point instructions and they speculate it's because in javascript every number is a floating point
John:
And that's why Apple's things could do so well in JavaScript benchmarks, right?
John:
Who knows?
John:
Like they're just speculating.
John:
But the whole idea is that Apple figures out what their devices actually do.
John:
And then they say, look, we're spending a lot of time, for example, doing audio processing on the CPU.
John:
And the CPU is a relatively large thing to keep powered up and cranking.
John:
So maybe if we fed, you know, whatever that audio API is to a dedicated tiny unit that just does that one function, we could keep the larger CPU asleep.
John:
Like even the high efficiency cores can be less efficient because you've got to turn all the machinery of, you know, instruction decode and everything instead of have those things go to this dedicated unit.
John:
I have no idea how much of that is happening in the M1.
John:
But if you look at the results in terms of, we'll get those in a little bit, what is the performance?
John:
What is the supposed battery life?
John:
Or just look at the results on iPads and our current phones, right?
John:
Clearly, they're doing a really good job of not burning electricity, doing everything, you know, with the CPU, right?
John:
So every one of these little blocks in this diagram is not an execution unit.
John:
It's just a bunch of words on a slide.
John:
But some of them might be.
John:
Some of them might be in that sort of unlabeled region of the chip.
John:
We just don't know.
Marco:
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John:
all right so what else we got performance a little just we don't have any benchmarks yet because nobody has these things and we just have those bezos charts right but everyone wants to know what is this thing going to be like um and attacks again keep referencing this article they don't have one either but they're saying look we do have an a14 and we do know how the a14 runs and let's compare the a14 to a bunch of other chips and it's already like the fastest chip out there and this is going to be better because it has more execution units in a bigger gpu and so on and so forth right
John:
some concrete m1 performance numbers this is from david smith not underscore uh on twitter who uh is an apple employee uh he says fun fact retaining and releasing an ns object takes 30 nanoseconds on intel 6.5 nanoseconds on an m1 and 14 nanoseconds on an m1 emulating intel
John:
so intel an intel app running an emulation for this one tiny little operation which is retaining and releasing an ns object was just incrementing and decrementing a number which is a very common operation in mac code yeah you i think we need to take just a quick pause here so
Casey:
When you're doing stuff in code, you need to keep things in memory and then eventually let them go and give that memory back to the operating system.
Casey:
And there's a million different ways to handle this problem.
Casey:
But the way that Apple technologies handle it is by saying, how many people care about this memory?
Casey:
And just keep a count, keep a number.
Casey:
And when that number falls down to zero, which means nobody cares about it, then that memory can be given back to the operating system.
Casey:
So as the guys were saying, this happens...
Casey:
just constantly.
Casey:
It's nonstop that you're saying, Ooh, I care about that.
Casey:
Ooh, don't care about that.
Casey:
Ooh, I care about this.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Don't care about that anymore.
Casey:
And it's just nonstop.
Casey:
And so for this to be considerably faster can make a tangible difference in the speed of your, of your computer.
John:
So it's, you know, and again,
John:
it's not this is what getting back to what i was saying before it is not shocking that this operation is very fast on apple's hardware because apple has a platform that does reference counting on all of its memory and all of its programs and has for years and years so all of the iphone chips and the ipad chips like when they were you know saying what is what does the cpu spend most of its time doing a huge chunk of his time surely is spent retaining and releasing things and sending messages uh that's why they're always optimizing objectively message and stuff like that
John:
um so this is not like just the m1 is doing this m1 is standing on the shoulders of every chip that came before it including of course the a14 uh and you know it's just saying just fyi like this is probably true of the a14 as well the m1 is almost five times faster at doing this common operation than intel and an m1 running intel code in emulation is twice as fast
John:
And this one particular tiny operation as an Intel chip doing this specific thing, because no one at Intel is optimizing their chip architecture around Apple's need to call retain and release on, you know, in their Objective-C and Swift code.
John:
Right.
John:
But Apple sure is.
Marco:
I mean, this is one of the benefits Apple gets of having, like on the App Store, they have all code that runs on the platform passing through their hands.
Marco:
On the Mac, you now have notarization.
Marco:
So they're getting the same benefit now on the Mac.
Marco:
And when you have all of the third-party code out there passing through your hands, or at least most of it,
Marco:
The Mac doesn't have necessarily all of it because you have things that aren't notarized going through open source stuff or whatever.
Marco:
But for the most part, you have almost all the code that is being run out there on your platform passing through your hands.
Marco:
And you can save a copy of it if you want.
Marco:
And you can analyze it if you want.
Marco:
And you can really have a really good idea of what kind of instructions are being used most often and how can we design our silicon to optimize for the entire world of third-party software out there.
Marco:
And you can have even more advancements when you consider things like bitcode, where with bitcode, code that was originally not written to take advantage of certain instructions, maybe, that you'd later add to your instruction set, can be automatically recompiled to take advantage of those instructions.
Marco:
So you can retroactively improve performance of apps as you improve your silicon in
Marco:
through your own distribution channels.
Marco:
That's a pretty powerful thing.
Marco:
That's something no one else in the industry has.
Marco:
And as much as a pain in the butt as it is for us developers, it gives Apple a huge advantage in performance design.
John:
David Smith warns that this boost in speed comes at the cost of potentially exposing certain multi-threading bugs.
John:
So he suggests using thread sanitizer in your apps to make sure you're not making a threading mistake.
John:
That also gets to one of the things in the Anatech article.
John:
There's speculation about the size of the instruction reorder buffers.
John:
They're huge.
John:
The reorder buffer is like... These CPUs don't execute instructions in the order that they are in the program.
John:
They're out of order execution.
John:
And they do parallel dispatch.
John:
They're executing multiple instructions at once.
John:
And so they have this buffer where they keep some window of instructions, some big bag of instructions.
John:
And they pull from that bag and say, okay, well, these four instructions are going to go together.
John:
And these three instructions can go over here together in the floating point unit.
John:
And that's what the CPU is doing.
John:
But it needs that bucket because...
John:
If you were just given four instructions, maybe you can only execute like one of those and the other three have to wait.
John:
And so the bigger the bucket is, the more you can sort of pick and choose.
John:
Now we've built up enough instructions that I can say, okay, this set can go together and this set can go together and that set can go together.
John:
CPUs are very complicated.
John:
Anyway, the reorder buckets on these CPUs, according to Antec's analysis, are hundreds of instructions.
John:
They're bigger than even they are.
John:
Again, they are on the biggest Intel CPUs, right?
John:
And that, you know, lends itself to the idea that Apple has determined in its own real programs.
John:
It is advantageous to have big caches, big, you know, big reorder buffers and wide execution.
John:
And they can actually extract that level of parallelism and, you know, use it to good effect.
John:
it is frustrating how much of this is speculation because apple doesn't want to talk about or brag about these things intel had like data sheets down to you know the practically the gate level not really but they would tell you for each instruction what the latency is and you know what instructions can be dispatched with other instructions and they would have conferences where they would tell you about their you know instruction decoder and how it works and apple is much more tight-lipped which which is fine
John:
Anyway, so that's the M1.
John:
This chip that I described, eight cores, you know, the eight-core GPU, we know less about, but it's very similar to the GPU that's in the A14.
John:
It's just got eight cores of both of it.
John:
Four big, four little cores, eight-core GPU, all the rest of the stuff you'd expect it to have, you know, from the phone and iPad chips, secure enclave, all the stuff the T2 did, image signal processing, yada, yada, yada.
John:
It's all in there.
John:
This one chip powers all the Macs they introduced.
John:
The only difference is...
John:
maybe clock speed but they won't tell us and we'll find out as soon as we get the hardware and that one gpu core that may or may not be working if it's not working you pay less money do you want to explain that a little bit more we've talked about in the last show like i'm talking about earlier today i think i think people yeah people know about binning right same deal as a12x versus a12z yep
John:
We have a big section of Big Sur here, but I think we can skip right to the Macs.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Well, we started with MacBook Air, and it is now without a fan.
Casey:
So in many ways, this seems like the love child of the adorable in the existing MacBook Air to me, because it doesn't have a fan, which is good, I think.
Casey:
It has more than one port, which is excellent.
Casey:
And so you've got the no fan from the adorable and the more than one port from the Air.
Casey:
They claim that it is faster than 98% of PC laptops sold in the last year.
Casey:
My word.
John:
They love bragging about that, but it's like, who cares?
John:
Most laptops sold are not fast because by definition, the fast ones are at the edge of the bell curve, right?
John:
The thing that I'm bragging about how this is faster than X percentage of PCs that are sold, I don't know why they do that.
John:
They should just say that it's like,
John:
really really fast and compare it to like a fast laptop right or i don't know if they don't want to compare it on price because they'll fall down or anyway i don't think that this macbook air has anything to be ashamed of speedwise again we'll find out from benchmarking but i just described the chip that's in it right the only way you can make that chip not insanely fast
John:
is to just clock it really, really low.
John:
But we already know, in a fanless iPad, a lesser version of this same chip, you know, much lesser version.
John:
Hell, the A12Z, two generations old thing with, you know, fewer CPU cores and similar GPU cores...
John:
is insanely fast this this macbook air again unless it's the clock lower than the ipad which i can't possibly imagine um is going to be very very fast um i don't think it's a love child of anything i think it is just take the existing macbook air
John:
remove the fans because you don't need them anymore, and put a way, way faster and more power-efficient CPU in there and a faster and more power-efficient GPU.
John:
This computer is, with the exception of the complete lack of touch and face ID, but again, set that aside.
John:
We'll get there.
John:
I think it's great.
John:
I think if you have an old MacBook Air, you should throw it into the sea right now.
LAUGHTER
John:
not really because you might need to run intel stuff or whatever but but can you imagine like just set aside the apple silicon stuff pretend this was still an intel mac if this was the new macbook air and we weren't talking about our mac so this is just the new intel macbook air and
John:
I mean, I know we don't have benchmarks yet, but I'm saying right now when people start benchmarking this thing against the previous MacBook Air, it's going to embarrass the previous MacBook Air big time in both performance and battery life.
John:
And the battery life isn't 5% better.
John:
right it's not like it it's hugely better and everything else about it is the same still scissor keyboard still the same you know function keys on top of it the the display is the same resolution although now it's a p3 thing this computer is fairly amazing um oh and by the way it's got usb4 slash thunderbolt 3 ports instead of the older thing i know that whole spec thing is confusing but just trust us when we tell you it's
John:
At least as good, if not better, than the ports on the previous MacBook Air, as far as we know.
John:
Same crappy 720p FaceTime camera.
Marco:
That was hilarious.
Marco:
I love how much time they spent talking about how much better their image processing was.
Marco:
So you'll be able to get better video out of the stupid FaceTime camera because of their wonderful image processing.
Marco:
So in other words, the hardware's the same, which is still embarrassingly bad.
Marco:
And they... I mean...
Marco:
I don't know how long their timeline is for developing such things.
Marco:
But if they aren't really working hard on improving the webcams in their laptops and desktops, they really should be.
Marco:
Because the world really demands that right now.
Marco:
And their webcams are so... Even before this past year, their webcams were kind of comically out of date and crappy.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Yeah, people say, oh, well, it would make the lid thicker.
Marco:
Well, figure something out.
Marco:
Figure out some kind of compromise.
Marco:
Camera bump.
Marco:
Yeah, maybe.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
That would be fine because people actually need that.
Marco:
I personally wouldn't use it a ton, but I use it some, and it's fine.
Marco:
Yeah, people use that.
Marco:
It matters.
Marco:
It matters now more than ever, but it has always mattered.
Marco:
And yeah, so I did find that kind of hilarious how much time they gave to their lack of hardware upgrade to the camera.
Marco:
But somehow we're going to we're going to fudge the image a bit to make it better.
John:
Well, see, the thing about fudging the image, like, yes, they should upgrade the hardware.
John:
They absolutely should.
John:
They need to or whatever.
John:
That said, our experience with Apple's phones has shown that a lot of progress can be made with quote-unquote crappy sensors just by improving the image processing.
John:
Now, I don't know how much this particular image processing improvement makes a difference on this terrible 720p FaceTime camera.
John:
But it can hurt, right?
John:
And if it wasn't being done before, like the fact that they can sort of piggyback on all of the work done for the front face, or for all the cameras, but, you know, for the traditionally lesser front-facing camera on phones, that's one of the benefits of going to ARM.
John:
It's like, oh.
John:
why don't we just do the same thing we do when people look into their front-facing camera on phones it's the same architecture we've got the same libraries the same weird execution units whatever same image processor whatever we're doing on the phone do that here and they do it and they say hey this makes the camera look a little better does it make the camera that much better no we still need better hardware but this is like it's not not free really because it's a different operating system but like this is what i expect to get from moving to arm is things that the phone was previously better at
John:
Now the Mac should be better at them as well.
John:
And in terms of the hardware, I said camera bump.
John:
I said the same thing during the keynote and tweet, I think.
John:
If you start thinking about a camera bump on a Mac, you start to wonder how that would manifest, right?
John:
You could bump it out the back.
John:
which would, you know, make Johnny Ive cry, but hey, it's bumped out of the back on phones.
John:
Like, you know what I'm saying?
John:
The camera faces front, but the bulk of the camera bumps out the back for like a little bump or a notch or something.
John:
I would pay that price in a heartbeat for face ID.
John:
But I can see them not wanting that.
John:
You could bump it out the front,
John:
But then you need like some kind of dent or ditch for it to go into when you go into clamshell mode.
Marco:
Right, which is right where your thumb lifts the lid up, though.
Marco:
So they already have the cutout there.
Marco:
So you kind of can't.
Marco:
I mean, you could do.
John:
You can make it go into the cutout and think of it as like a tab going into a cutout.
John:
So now when you lift, you're actually lifting the little tab out of the slot instead of just having a slot with nothing in it.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I would even accept just make the lid a little bit thicker.
John:
It's not like someone's crying that the MacBook Air is super thick and they can't handle it anymore.
John:
Especially on the front edge, right?
John:
Just make the lid thicker.
John:
Anyway, that's future facing.
John:
This hasn't been discussed, but as far as I'm aware...
John:
uh this macbook air is exactly the same like it's the same case other than potentially different venting holes and obviously different sort of internal structure but dimension wise i don't think this is any bigger or smaller than the current macbook air in fact it weighs the same as well yeah and i think and that's been a point of a lot of criticism of this event so far that basically what they released
Marco:
it did do you know kind of we were saying last time like it did change out the guts and now they're faster and better in a few little ways and a few big ones and and they are you know better battery life but otherwise they look pretty much the same you know the they didn't really shuffle up the lineup very much and they don't really look any different and they don't really have like massive hardware differences um on the that are visible from the from the outside and so
Marco:
they do look kind of dated in a way, you know, when you look at what PC laptops are doing and have been doing for some time, Apple's laptops look like they were designed in 2015 still.
Marco:
And, you know, we, we still have these big thick screen bezels.
Marco:
Um, we still have, you know, relatively small screens for the body size for the 13 inch class.
Marco:
Like, cause you know, when you make the bezel thinner, you can fit a bigger screen in the same laptop size that the PC world has been doing forever or for years.
Marco:
Uh,
Marco:
We still don't have things like cellular that we were hoping to get with this transition.
Marco:
We still have the same situation with touch, which is we have no touch screens.
Marco:
And on the same models as before, we have forced touch bars.
Marco:
And on the ones that don't, we still don't.
Marco:
That's nice.
Marco:
And so a lot of that stuff hasn't changed at all.
Marco:
Now, it remains to be seen whether that will change.
Marco:
You know, in previous architecture transitions, the first models of the new generation kind of looked the same as the previous ones.
Marco:
And then they, over the following years, used their gains and efficiency and everything else to make better things that they wouldn't have been able to make with the old architecture.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I have a feeling a lot of that stuff is yet to come, but a lot of people are understandably kind of disappointed at all the things that didn't change.
Marco:
We didn't see big price cuts.
Marco:
We didn't see, as a result of not having to use Intel's chips anymore, we saw small price cuts here and there, but mostly similar.
Marco:
We still have the exact same dimensions, size, weight, all that stuff.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I hope and I suspect that more differentiation in the hardware is coming.
Marco:
But here on day one, it's not here yet.
John:
Yeah, that was another sort of spectrum that we talked about the previous show.
John:
The spectrum of the CPU was are you going to make a radically different CPU and three different radically different CPUs for three different Macs?
John:
Or are you basically just going to take an A14, puff it up a little bit and use that across the whole line?
John:
And similarly, the range of do what you did in the Intel position, which is take your current line of computers and put different chips inside them or something radical where these computers look nothing like the previous ones and they have touchscreens and face ID and they're just, you know, totally new.
John:
They didn't do that.
John:
This they went in this case, they went hard on the other edge, which is like if you looked at these, you cannot visually tell the difference without squinting at most of them.
John:
so i mean for the first generation product it's not unexpected again it's what they did with intel people who are disappointed i hope that they channel that disappointment into more fervor in the second and third gen because i think it is very excusable for the first gen it's not like apple doesn't have a lot to do they have a lot to do just to make these things work at all with all the software stuff and to get it all you know to work in this package and you know thankfully they sorted out the keyboard situation before this came right so i i give them a lot of leeway
John:
to have these computers be boring and there is this was talked about in the intel thing i don't know if apple talked about this but obviously all of the uh you know the customers talked about this like that it is comforting to say i heard the macs have this new thing and now i'm scared and apple's here to say it's the same computer you know and love look it looks identical like oh i feel better now
John:
Whether that was ever an actual strategy or whether it's just the reality of you can't do everything all at once, it is a real thing in the market that having a computer that looks the same as your previous MacBook Air but is just better in all measurable performance ways.
John:
Makes people happy without scaring them.
Marco:
And to reinforce that point, doing that is a ton of work.
Marco:
All of the other things that had to happen for an architectural transition to be pulled off smoothly, to make the new things that are completely different internally and technically look and work just like the old things but better, that's a ton of work.
Marco:
And that's a ton of engineering.
Marco:
And so it is reasonable to expect that we didn't have...
Marco:
massive other changes because even making this happen was a massive undertaking so i have faith you know apple is pretty good on the whole there have been some dark periods but they are pretty good on the whole at moving mac hardware forward over time and making exciting things happen in their hardware lineup and you know it doesn't it usually doesn't happen as quickly as we want and sometimes we take a step back before we take a step forward but it does happen on an infinite time scale
Marco:
And so I do think we will get there.
Marco:
And even though I was hoping for more excitement in the hardware, it is totally understandable why they aren't there yet.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
I don't think it's unreasonable to have hoped for it, like you just said, but I don't think it's unreasonable at all that they're wading into the pool rather than jumping in the deep end.
Casey:
And I don't know, in some ways this is kind of jumping in the deep end, right?
Casey:
Because the M1 sounds, if you believe the Apple hype machine, to be like a phenomenal, phenomenal processor.
Casey:
And if the M1 is basically just the A14 cranked up a bit, like we've been saying, imagine what an M2 or an M1Z or whatever, and I know we've covered this earlier, but I'm really,
Casey:
It seems so obvious to me in retrospect that you would want to, if you're Apple, wade into the water very slowly, use these chips that are almost exactly like what you've already been shipping for a while and use them in the basic laptops and smaller computers that a lot of people rely on.
Casey:
And then it seems to me like...
Casey:
If there was going to be a hardware refresh, I would think, and you can remind me of this in a few months, whenever the hardware refresh happens, but I would think that they would wait and do something bigger with the 16-inch MacBook Pro or something like that, or even the 16 and 13 in concert.
Casey:
And I would imagine that they would do something where the processor is bigger, better, and different-er than the M1 is to the A14.
Casey:
I don't know what that looks like, but maybe it has features that have never existed on a Mac before.
Casey:
Hell, it could have a cellular modem in it, which has never been in a Mac before.
Casey:
I don't know, something like that.
Casey:
I feel like today or yesterday, strictly speaking, was the, all right, let's get our feet under us and let's walk before we run.
Casey:
And I would be very surprised if we don't see stuff in the next six months that's really going to knock our socks off.
Marco:
And maybe even not six months, but I think a year or two, then we will look back on this time and be like, oh, those were so quaint.
Marco:
Whatever we have in a year or two, and especially once they complete the transition across the whole lineup, we're going to look back on this like those first core duos and the core solo in the Mac Mini of the first Intel transition of just like, wow, those chips were so important at the time, but so primitive in retrospect.
Yeah.
John:
I'm glad to see that all of the specs of the M1 in terms of the supported protocols and ports and everything, that they didn't skimp, right?
John:
I mean, most of it, they're just piggybacking on stuff that they've done in the iPads and phones already, but not all of it.
John:
So this has Bluetooth 5 and Wi-Fi 6, the latest versions of that stuff.
John:
uh two thunderbolt slash usb4 ports right as that's that's new to mac like as far as i'm aware the ipad pro doesn't support thunderbolt in any way shape or form and none of them support usb4 which is a confusing spec that we talked about in the past in the show but it supports display port thunderbolt 3 usb 3.1 gen 2 like
John:
it has ports that you would expect a mac to have like when i saw the macbook air when they said it's fanless i immediately had dread on my heart oh no are those just plain usbc ports on the side like are those basically two are those two ports are those just like two ipad ports
John:
no no they're full-fledged mac ports there's only two of them which isn't great right and they're more limited right but hey it's the macbook air right so i'm glad these specs are you know it's a forward-looking architecture like they they you know if you're wondering how are they ever going to figure out how to do thunderbolt with an arm mac done don't worry about it they've got it under control um
John:
Obviously, more work to do for the bigger Macs.
John:
We'll talk about that later.
John:
But for the Air, this makes sense.
John:
The one hardware change in the case, again, other than the sort of venting situation, which we can't really assess from the photos, is that the hardware function keys, the F4, F5, and F6 keys have different little pictures on them.
John:
And presumably, they're mapped differently in the software.
John:
The F4 key has a little magnifying glass.
John:
The F5 has a little microphone.
John:
And the F6 has a little crescent moon.
John:
what does that mean spotlight siri and sleep maybe dark mode maybe do not disturb mode i don't know maybe yeah you can bind these keys to anything so this is mostly you know we'll see when we get them what they have them bound to default by default and over the years it's been kind of weird that they ship
John:
I mean, I'm using a keyboard like this, too.
John:
It has hardware, quote-unquote, function keys.
John:
They do say F1, F2, so on and so forth underneath them, but they always have these little pictures on them.
John:
But if you rebind them, the pictures become wrong.
John:
Like, if you bind F4 to something that's not searched, that magnifying glass doesn't mean search anymore.
John:
So it's, I mean, this is obviously the way they made the touch bar.
Marco:
Hey, look, it's not a, it's just like a... I was going to say, why don't we just make it a whole big screen and then we can update the keys to look like whatever they want.
John:
It's why they didn't have a hardware keyboard on the iPhone, because you have a screen and it's infinitely changeable, but buttons are cool.
John:
anyway yeah please please don't encourage them john please don't encourage them to use more touch bars please i don't like like i don't know like the the idea of changing the symbols uh every couple years on the function keys and the physical function keys like i don't all right whatever i'm it's fine all i'm saying is that those those pictures just remind me of how
John:
how limited it is to have to paint little pictures on actual keys.
John:
But I do love the keys, and I don't like the touch bar, so I prefer to have this model.
John:
The pricing is the same.
John:
It still starts at $999, and that's for the quote-unquote 7-core GPU, which has an 8-core that doesn't work.
John:
And then the 8-core one starts at $1249.
John:
There's a storage difference between them.
John:
That's a 7-core...
John:
See, this is so weird.
John:
They have to find some way to make an expensive one and a cheap one.
John:
This is true of all these models, right?
John:
They want to have a range of prices.
John:
But given that it's a system on a chip, and given that the RAM is on the package with the thing, it's not easy to decide how you're going to price tier them.
John:
The only things you can adjust is RAM, which I guess we'll talk about now.
John:
You can get two amounts of RAM, 8 and 16 gigs.
John:
Done.
John:
That's it.
John:
There are no other options, because it's on the same package as the system on the chip, and I guess they couldn't fit more than 16, given current memory sizes and the size they wanted to make the thing.
John:
So that's a difference in price.
John:
There's 7 versus 8-core GPU, which is a binning thing of like, well, sometimes they come out with 7 working, sometimes they come out with 8 working, but it's more rare, so those won't cost more.
John:
And then there's SSD space, right?
John:
How big do you want the drive?
John:
And depending on which one of those things...
John:
you care about, you might say, oh, that's where all the cost is.
John:
Or you might get super angry and say, how much is it an increase in cost to get, you know, go to eight, 16 gigs of RAM, I can get eight gigs of RAM for 20 bucks.
John:
How is it a $200 price difference to get another eight?
John:
It doesn't matter where you think the money is.
John:
Apple just says, look, we're going to charge you more for the better model.
John:
And you can decide to distribute that money wherever you think it goes, but there's not much that varies between these things.
John:
And no, you're not going to be able to say,
John:
subtract the prices from each other take that bucket of money and then lay it lay bills down on the parts that are different it don't do that exercise it won't add up the margin the margins are better on the more expensive products right that's that's why apple makes a billion dollars right uh but as they use system on a chips like you know and get sort of more regular for example there's no clock speed difference that you can pick you can't get a faster cpu you can't get an i7 i8 you know you know i'm sorry i'm thinking of bmw again you can't get an
John:
You can't get an i5, an i7, an i9 CPU.
John:
It's just the M1.
John:
And whatever speed it's clocked at or whatever clock, it's the same for all of them.
John:
So they can only differentiate on... The thing that blows my mind is they're differentiating on GPU cores.
John:
what has apple ever tried to differentiate their pricing models on gpu never like they give you a better gpu with the big one maybe especially if it's a discrete gpu but boy so weird so like they won't tell us the clock speed but they want us to know how many cores are working in the gpu and they tell us the instruction caches
John:
Anyway, all this to say is the price range is the same.
John:
The memory range of 8 to 16.
John:
8 as a default is terrible.
John:
I wish they had all been 16, but so what?
John:
As long as they offer 16, that's fine.
John:
Overall, the assessment of the machine is like I said before.
John:
It's like the previous MacBook Air.
John:
But better in every way that you care about.
John:
Like, you know, do you want the battery last longer?
John:
Do you want it to be faster?
John:
Do you want it to be quieter?
John:
Do you want it to be cooler?
John:
And probably do you want the SSD to even be faster?
John:
We don't have this in hand.
John:
We can't benchmark it.
John:
But I will confidently say that this thing is going to have amazing performance in battery life compared to the previous MacBook Air.
John:
If you're disappointed that the MacBook Air can't support 32 gigs of memory, you're not a MacBook Air customer.
John:
I think it's fine.
John:
Using it with 8, I think, is not fine.
John:
So if someone in your life wants to buy this computer and they want to get the super cheap one with 8 gigs, I don't remember what the default was for the Intel one, but just in general.
John:
I think it was the same.
John:
8 gigs.
John:
I know it's their cheapest computer.
John:
I understand it, but...
John:
8 gigs is not great.
John:
16 gigs, I think, is fine for a MacBook Air.
John:
I said earlier that they have this chip, the M1.
John:
They're going to use it across all their computers, and they're going to use all the computers that were introduced at the event, which is three computers, and they're going to use it in computers where it makes sense.
John:
This chip makes total sense in this computer.
John:
I said in the last show, what if they make the Air fanless?
John:
And they did.
John:
They didn't have to.
John:
They could have put a fan in there and then presumably clocked it higher like they do in the other models that we're going to talk about.
John:
But they didn't because being fanless...
John:
is a benefit and it's cool and on the macbook air model they're not dying to do you know tons of high performance work because it's the macbook air it's the casual mainline computer uh this marco said the computer is dated and it is it looks like a computer designed 2015 because more or less was or 2018 or wherever this design came from
John:
But on the inside, I think it's pretty amazing.
John:
I think this could, especially if they redesign the MacBook Air sometime soon, this could go down in history as like the new modern equivalent of the 2011 MacBook Air, given that the shape and everything is very similar, because this is probably the biggest bump in performance.
John:
And I mean that like in terms of how the product performs, not necessarily like CPU benchmarks, like performance as far as the customer is concerned.
John:
from one year to the next because if you got an intel macbook air and then your friend got this one your friend got the better computer by a lot you would be so jealous your battery is dead in half the time your thing is so slow the fans are spinning up and their thing is sitting there quiet cool as a cucumber like an ipad with a hinge they would call it but faster i think this is a phenomenal computer
John:
Maybe you think it's boring because it doesn't have a touchscreen and face ID and cellular and I want all those things too.
John:
But boy, I was blown away by this.
John:
As far as I'm concerned, this is like the no compromises Intel MacBook Air.
John:
It's a compromise arm MacBook Air for all the reasons that we talked about or things they could have done and they could have had a fan.
John:
But if this was an Intel computer, we would be bowing down to worship it.
Marco:
Yeah, and my only reservations on the MacBook Air that we will only be able to tell by people getting them and using them and everything is they made it fanless, but the other two computers they launched with the exact same CPU have fans.
Marco:
So clearly this is a chip that benefits from active cooling.
Marco:
And by the way, real-time follow-up in case everybody hasn't emailed us yet.
Marco:
The A12X is a four-core high-performance and four-core low-performance chip.
Marco:
So it actually is the same core count as what's in the M1.
Marco:
So that's just for reference.
Marco:
Different cores, though.
Marco:
Yeah, different cores.
Marco:
The A12 cores versus the A14 cores and probably a clock difference and everything too.
Marco:
Anyway, so we were assuming earlier that the A12X was fewer cores, but it actually wasn't.
Marco:
Anyway, so back to this.
Marco:
My main reservation with the MacBook Air is in order to make it fanless, how much did they have to either clock it down or how much does it have to throttle its performance down under heavy load?
Marco:
Because obviously, they said twice that on the other Macs, they mentioned their active cooling, their fans, and they mentioned that it would allow them to, quote, sustain their performance.
Marco:
So what it sounds like, based on that, is the MacBook Air probably peaks at the same performance as the other ones, but I bet it has to throttle down after a couple of seconds, maybe, of high load to some kind of lower clock speed, just for thermal reasons.
Marco:
So it is probably going to be kind of peaky and limited in that way.
Marco:
How much that matters to you is a different story.
Marco:
And certainly to most MacBook Air buyers, it probably doesn't matter at all.
Marco:
And it's still probably, even in its throttled state, it's still probably going to be way faster than the old one.
Marco:
But that is something to be aware of here, that the 13-inch Pro and the Mac Mini are able to, quote, sustain their performance by using fans.
Marco:
So that means this can't do that.
Marco:
And then secondly...
Marco:
We don't know how warm it's going to get.
Marco:
Like, for me, I cannot stand a hot laptop.
Marco:
Like, it makes my hands all sweaty.
Marco:
It makes it really hard to use it.
Marco:
Like, I hate heat radiating out of my laptop as I'm using it.
Marco:
And one thing that, you know, you can make something fanless by just having it spread the heat around a lot and tolerating a high temperature as okay is
Marco:
I hope that's not what they've done here.
Marco:
I hope that it's fanless because it just runs so cool in this configuration that it can be pleasantly cool and still perform well.
Marco:
But one way they could have also done it is it just radiates a lot of heat constantly and it's really warm in use.
Marco:
And I hope that's not the reality of using this computer.
Marco:
So we'll find out.
Marco:
But those are two things to watch out for in the early reviews for sure.
John:
I'm very confident in the heat, and I'll tell you why, especially given your real-time follow-up that the A12Z has four high-performance and four high-efficiency cores and an eight-core GPU.
John:
This is built on five-nanometer process, and the A12Z is, what, 10-nanometer?
Yeah.
John:
7.
John:
Unless this thing is clocked massively higher than the A12Z, we have a direct comparison.
John:
How hot does the A12Z get?
John:
I bet an A12Z iPad can get a little toasty playing a game for a long time.
John:
But in general, people don't complain about the iPad Pro getting super hot.
John:
I think this laptop will be exactly the same.
John:
For most people, this will be the coolest, as in temperature, laptop they've ever used until they play a game.
John:
They're like, oh, I can finally hear, feel some warmth, right?
John:
Because it's not a situation where Apple was forced to make this fanless.
John:
If there was any doubt, they could have put a fan in there.
John:
fanless ipads have existed for a really long time and i have confidence that apple will make the right sort of trade-off you know most of the laptops that get hot have been the ones that have fans that are screaming all the time right so um in terms of throttling this will almost certainly throttle right if it doesn't throttle they didn't clock it high enough like i this is the type of laptop you want to throttle because you want it to be able to peak high and
John:
But then most of the time you want it to be going low.
John:
This is not the computer for doing your pro video editing, although I'm sure it will work fine for that and be better than most of the Mac laptops ever made.
John:
But if you care about that quote unquote sustained workload, yeah, get one of the other models with a fan in it because that'll help it.
John:
But I personally think this is exactly the right tradeoff to make.
John:
Give me less consistent performance in exchange for having no fan and having it be super cool all the time.
John:
And everything is relative.
John:
So you're like, oh, it's a little bit slower than it could be.
John:
If this little bit slower than it could be is like 80% faster than the previous MacBook Air that quote-unquote didn't throttle because it had a fan, who cares that it's throttling?
John:
It's so much faster.
Marco:
Yeah, like one of the things they said in the presentation was that when they were talking about the M1, they said that the...
Marco:
low performance cores like the efficiency cores on their own have similar performance as the dual core macbook air outgoing from intel so like it's like with four hands tied behind its back right yeah exactly
Marco:
yeah so this is this is pretty it's pretty likely that it i mean i think they they effectively outright told us that it will throttle like that's i'm i'm accepting throttling as a given because i think they literally said that uh but you know in their way in the in the most pr way possible they told us it will throttle so that's yeah that that's gonna happen i think but uh how much it matters remains to be seen and how much it matters for this product i think the answer i think john you're right that this is the right move for this product
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
You know, I was impressed by the presentation, and I enjoyed the presentation, but I didn't come away from it thinking, oh, my God, my 13-inch MacBook Pro, my Intel 13-inch MacBook Pro is a piece of garbage that needs to be thrown into the sea.
Casey:
Now, part of that is purely because there wasn't a direct comparison, right?
John:
And Apple is still selling them, too, so they might not want to tell you that.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Fair point.
Casey:
But listening to you, John, I'm not in the same place in my computing life that I was when I bought my Adorable, my one-port MacBook, which I bought in like 2017 or thereabouts.
Casey:
But the more I think about it, the more I think that the things I loved about the Adorable were that it was incredibly small and incredibly light, a little smaller than the MacBook Air.
Casey:
I'm not sure if it's lighter off the top of my head.
Casey:
But it was incredibly small and it was incredibly light.
Casey:
And even though I am nowhere near as offended as the two of you are by fan noise, I don't like fan noise.
Casey:
I would rather not have fan noise if I have the choice.
Casey:
And that also did not have a fan.
Casey:
And I loved that computer so much, even despite all its flaws.
Casey:
And there were two major, major, major flaws to that computer.
Casey:
The first one was that it only had one port.
Casey:
It only had one USB-C port.
Casey:
And it was only USB-C.
Casey:
It wasn't Thunderbolt.
Casey:
So that severely limited what you could connect in terms of the quality of things you could connect, because you could only get USB-C things.
Casey:
You couldn't get Thunderbolt things.
Casey:
But it obviously limited the quantity of what you can connect.
Casey:
So if I were to record a podcast for the sake of discussion, I need a dongle that will give me like traditional USB out and USB-C in for power.
Casey:
I would need a dongle just to plug in power and a microphone, which is kind of ridiculous if you think about it.
Marco:
And one thing you don't want is for your live audio gear to be plugged in through a dongle because they are never 100% reliable.
Marco:
Ever, ever, ever.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So that was a huge flaw.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Check.
Casey:
It's been fixed.
Casey:
There's two ports.
Casey:
I'd prefer four, for sure, but, I mean, two is better than one.
Casey:
And the other thing that really stank about the Adorable, in a way that was arguably much worse than the one port, because the one port bothered me frequently.
Casey:
But its incredibly slow performance bothered me always.
Casey:
And from any measure, this forthcoming MacBook Air, it's going to be way faster than the Adorable was.
Casey:
And potentially, like we've been saying, way faster than the existing MacBook Air that it's replacing.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
In most cases, anyway.
John:
Not potentially.
John:
100% it's going to be faster.
John:
When they said this, when they got done with this part of the presentation, I said, is there anything that the fastest MacBook Pro you can buy today will actually do faster than this fanless MacBook Air?
John:
That's the thing to watch for on the specs.
John:
Don't watch for how much faster is it than your stupid adorable.
John:
How much faster is it?
John:
When they show the specs and when they put it on a big chart, try to find something that the top end, most expensive 16 inch i9 MacBook Pro does faster than this fanless air in terms of CPU and GPU speed.
John:
That's what I'm looking for.
John:
I'm not even comparing it to forget about the period.
John:
It's going to blow all those things away.
John:
It's like, okay, but does it embarrass Apple's most expensive laptop, this fanless thing?
John:
Single-threaded, yes.
John:
Single-threaded, we know it does.
John:
A14 already does, right?
John:
But multi-threaded GPU, well, discrete GPU, it's going to lose out on that, you know.
Marco:
We can tell that.
Marco:
If you look at any benchmark that benchmarks the A14 and you compare that to Macs.
Marco:
I always like Geekbench.
Marco:
You may have your benchmark of choice, but you look at that and basically we're still looking at
Marco:
multi-threaded, multi-core performance that scales up with core count.
Marco:
And the four high-performance cores in the latest iPads, or in the old iPads now, and the two high-performance cores in the A14, we can kind of extrapolate and
Marco:
We're not going to beat the 8-core MacBook Pro or the 10-core iMac Pro or the God knows how many cores Mac Pro until Apple delivers an M chip with more cores.
Marco:
Simple as that.
Marco:
They just need more of them.
Marco:
And I don't see any reason why they can't release that sometime in the next year.
John:
I don't know if that's necessarily the case, though, and Apple will make the same point.
John:
When I say compare it, you know, doing something, I'm saying like a real-world task.
John:
They leaned on this as well.
John:
They said, like, let's do a thing with an app.
John:
Let's encode a bunch of video.
John:
Let's, you know, I figured what their examples were.
John:
Let's play, you know, 4K, multiple 4K video streams, whatever.
John:
You know, let's process raw images in Lightroom, whatever it is they were trying to show.
John:
Because, especially in the case of Apple apps,
John:
when apple is able to tune its software to its specific hardware they can get ridiculous numbers that are not that it's not possible for apps that are just intel apps that are just made for generic intel cpus you know now eventually the apps will catch up with that on on apple's platforms or so apple hopes but i think that even cases where it is it is underspecked like oh well you know the the eight core uh macbook pro has eight full power cores and i've just got four good cores and four wimpy ones right um
John:
maybe it gets outclassed there but maybe it still completes the task faster in one of apple's apps because apple has you know custom tailored and optimize it for its specific hardware and in the end that's what people care about right i'm basically saying like synthetic benchmarks versus application performance i'm still not entirely counting out against an eight core against obviously a 12 core or whatever as the core counts go up you know it loses right
John:
But and GPU, I think it's going to lose two to the biggest discrete GPUs that Apple ships.
John:
And certainly it won't be as fast as like a gaming PC or whatever.
John:
But I am very optimistic about direct performance comparisons to pretty much any Intel Mac laptop, except for in the extreme cases.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, my best guess is, you know, performance-wise, again, having known nothing about this except seeing the A14 in iPads and phones so far.
Marco:
My best guess is, you know, right now the A14 Geekbench single core is in the 1500 range.
Marco:
I'm guessing we're somewhere near that, maybe a little bit higher from clock differences.
Marco:
Maybe we're at like 1700 or at most 2000.
Marco:
But like, you know, the best Macs are like 1200.
Marco:
So we're already single-core going to be significantly higher, possibly like 50% higher, possibly more.
Marco:
So we're looking at significant gain, single-threaded.
Marco:
Multi-threaded, this is where it gets interesting.
Marco:
The new iPad Air, which is the fastest A14 but only has two high-performance cores, has a multi-core score of about 4,250.
Marco:
And if you imagine that can be doubled with having four cores instead of two on the high performance end to roughly 8000, including and, you know, it doesn't scale exactly linearly.
Marco:
But, you know, we do also have a higher thermal envelope here, probably a higher base clock.
Marco:
So if we get roughly 8000 multicore on Geekbench, whatever this is, five, I think, then that puts it in the performance category of an eight core iMac.
Marco:
And that puts it ahead of every MacBook Pro.
Marco:
So it might actually be faster than the MacBook Pro in CPU-bound things.
Marco:
Where it won't probably be able to compete is with discrete GPUs for GPU-bound stuff.
Marco:
So I'm not expecting it to crush the other laptops or desktops in things like video editing that heavily rely on the GPU.
Marco:
And probably gaming is not going to be a massive thing for lots of reasons.
Marco:
But that's...
Marco:
Anything that's heavily GPU bound, I expect these to still not do very well.
Marco:
And I think Apple will get there.
Marco:
This is step one.
Marco:
I think they'll get there for the rest.
Marco:
But for CPU bound tasks, I am optimistic.
Marco:
I think these things are going to be quite something.
Marco:
And I think once they eventually do an update to the 16 inch,
Marco:
and possibly a 14-inch or whatever, that I think is where things are going to get really hot.
Marco:
And it's not in a bad way.
Marco:
The good version of mine.
Marco:
So I'm very much looking forward to that.
John:
Before we move on to the... Hold on.
Casey:
I haven't even finished my thesis here.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
We're on our 17th sidetrack.
Casey:
Us?
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
I'll try to make it brief.
Casey:
But I went on this meandering point that I'll try to close now, which is...
Casey:
You know, if you look at why I bought the Adorable in 2017 or thereabouts, I wanted something that was basically like an iPad but wasn't constrained.
Casey:
Please email somebody else.
Casey:
I wanted it to run macOS, but I wanted it to be light and portable.
Casey:
And I had to trade off having more than one port.
Casey:
And I mean, heck, even my iPad Pro from, what, two years ago now?
Casey:
Now it has two ports thanks to the keyboard.
Casey:
But I had to make the tradeoff of only one port.
Casey:
And that bothered me frequently, but I also had to make the trade-off of just dog-slow performance.
Casey:
Like, even when the thing was brand new, it was not a particularly fast computer.
Casey:
And I knew that going into it, but it got real bad after a year, really, really bad after a couple years.
Casey:
And so that was something that bothered me every time I used the computer.
Casey:
And now you're telling me for $1,000... Because I think I paid like $2,500 for that computer or something like that.
Casey:
For $1,000, you can get a MacBook Air that has two ports and will absolutely smoke that adorable.
Casey:
Like...
Casey:
How do you say no to that?
Casey:
I mean, you can't.
Casey:
It's phenomenal.
Casey:
And to extrapolate what the gains could be on a proper 13-inch MacBook Pro, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute, or even a 16-inch MacBook Pro, which is not really the computer for me anymore, but I can understand those who like it, this is going to be something.
Casey:
And this is going to be an interesting and exciting ride over the next 6 to 12 months.
John:
So some limitations and these limitations are some of them are across the whole line.
John:
Some of them might just be this one computer.
John:
Only two terabytes for the max SSD size.
John:
The fact that all the other machines have the same limitation makes me wonder if it is a product choice or some kind of inherent limitation.
John:
I bet it's probably just a product choice, especially on the air.
John:
Although it would have been nice to offer a four terabyte model because as Apple itself has pointed out several times, sometimes the computer you want is weirdly balanced.
John:
You're like, I don't care about CPU or GPU performance, but I store a lot of stuff.
John:
So please, storage is important to me.
John:
So I would love an Air that has four terabytes of storage, right?
John:
Or vice versa.
John:
I need very little storage of a really fast CPU.
John:
They don't give you that flexibility.
John:
So kind of like the RAM, only eight and 16.
John:
uh you know that the ssd only goes up two terabytes kind of disappointing no e gpu support despite the fact that it has thunderbolt uh apple says no no external gpus for you so if you're not happy with the gpu that's in there you cannot use an external gpu it only supports one external display starting to smell a little bit like an ipad now isn't it only supports one external display it the external display it supports it can support the 6k display at 60 hertz right so it can support apple's big display which is great
John:
but i think a lot of nobody has apple's big display and a lot of people have two small displays and if you're thinking of using those two ports that connect to two displays not going to happen which is kind of disappointing they did find the one guy in the world who has a mac mini connected to their six thousand dollar display though for the video i mean yeah so i mean they want it like i think this is good if apple's going to sell a big giant expensive monitor with tons of pixels
John:
all of their Macs sold in the years after should support it.
John:
Even the wimpy ones.
John:
And I think that's great.
John:
I think it's not saying, oh, you need a pro computer to connect that display.
John:
Nope.
John:
The mini will do it.
John:
The air will do it.
John:
The limitation of one display though is kind of disappointing.
John:
And I feel like that is a hangover from the iPad architecture from which this is derived slash shared with or whatever.
John:
We'll find out in the coming years.
Marco:
I think these are all just signs that what they have updated is still only their low-end products.
Marco:
People are complaining, and we'll get to this later, there's no 4-port update to the 13-inch, for instance.
Marco:
And the Mini lost a few I.O.
Marco:
ports, which we'll get to in a second.
Marco:
But overall, what they updated is only their low-end stuff.
Marco:
And we'll see what comes once they get around to the high end, which I'm guessing probably next year, maybe next summer, something like that.
Marco:
We'll see what changes, which of these limitations get lifted and which ones don't.
Marco:
I would expect higher RAM ceilings, although how they do that is up for debate, whether the RAM goes off package and they have soldered or socketed in various models.
Marco:
That's a big question mark because right now their high-end products support very large amounts of RAM that would be impractical to keep in package in the SoC.
Marco:
So I'm assuming that their high-end models will have off-package RAM and maybe use the additional space in the package for more CPU cores.
Marco:
GPU support is still very much a question mark.
Marco:
They took out eGPU support so far.
Marco:
We don't know if it'll ever come back.
Marco:
I'm guessing probably not.
Marco:
I'm guessing every GPU that ever runs on Apple Silicon is an Apple GPU.
Marco:
But then that raises a huge question of what the heck they do with the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Do they have...
Marco:
apple gpus on something like mpx modules that you can buy like three or four of them and slot them in later maybe that's one possibility will they support other gpus from other manufacturers i don't know probably not if i had to guess now but i don't know these are all questions that will be answered as they release higher end products and we're just not there yet and so i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily assume that
Marco:
Anything about their high-end limitations from what we have so far.
Marco:
But we can certainly take educated guesses, and I do think that the likelihood of external GPUs from other manufacturers being supported is low.
Marco:
But that doesn't mean that Apple can't take their own GPUs and make them external to the package for their higher-end products and kind of still have discrete GPUs just for chip size and heat reasons.
Marco:
That is still on the table, I think.
Marco:
But I wouldn't assume that we're going to get AMD or NVIDIA support.
Marco:
Certainly not NVIDIA.
Marco:
Probably not AMD support either.
Marco:
But I also wouldn't assume that that would preclude the existence of high-end expandability and options.
Marco:
Honestly, I think having Mark Gurman's theoretical smaller Mac Pro that has slots for the Apple G3, G5, and G7 GPUs they can slot in there and different configurations, that's a possibility.
Marco:
I wouldn't rule it out.
Marco:
And I think that's actually probably a more likely possibility than...
Marco:
what they have now which is like we'll take parts from other people and put them in nope don't see that happening but i also don't see them taking a mac pro and making it not expandable again so we'll see what happens in the high end anyway this is all we're getting ahead of ourselves here right now we're looking at the low end and while a lot of people are really upset that it's capped at 16 gigs of ram and two thunderbolt ports
Marco:
that is in line with their previous low-end products that this is replacing.
Marco:
And the high-end stuff that has more than that, they just haven't replaced yet.
Marco:
So we really don't know.
Marco:
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John:
So speaking of low-end, the Mac Mini was the next computer, and if you look at the specs and limitations, it looks very familiar.
John:
It's an M1.
John:
It goes from 5GB SSD to 2TB.
John:
It can have 8 or 16GB of RAM.
John:
It has no external GPU support.
John:
It has Thunderbolt slash USB 4 ports on it.
John:
It's a little bit Mac Mini.
John:
It's just got an HDMI port on the back.
John:
It's got USB-A ports.
John:
um it supports two external displays but i think only because it's got the hdmi port so yeah the thunderbolt port supports up to the 6k display at 60 hertz and then the hdmi port supports up to 4k resolution at 60 hertz right um it you know it has we didn't mention this about the other one either but both this and the air have a headphone jack we didn't mention it which means just assume that still i guess headphone jack still exists on these computers um the thing that surprised me the most about the mac mini
John:
other than it only coming in silver and not coming in space gray, which is a little baffling, is that it has a fan.
John:
Because when they introduced the fanless MacBook Air, I'm like, well, the Mac Mini is a similar kind of low-end computer, right?
John:
Like, if you can make the MacBook Air fanless, you can make the Mini fanless.
John:
But they didn't, which makes me think, again, we have no idea because they won't tell us.
John:
They, like, literally won't tell us.
John:
People asked them and they said, you know, whatever they say.
John:
We're not talking about this today.
John:
uh is the mac mini clocked higher than the macbook air seems like it's got to be right because why why would you need a fan in the mac mini which has way more room for airflow and cooling and everything compared to a macbook air and not needed in the air so the mac mini could end up being a little speed demon because it's got a fan probably a very quiet fan um running on that same
John:
that same m1 uh system on the chip um what is i don't know i think i put this in the notes do they even offer a seven gpu core version and the mac mini or are they no that's that's only for the air all right so it's all it's all the top bin parts it's the same m1 presumably clock tire but everything else about it is the same they dropped the price a hundred dollars the entry level price it used to be 799 now the entry level is 699 um
John:
And they're differentiating the only... So given all the specs I just said, the only thing they have to differentiate the Mac Mini, how can you charge more for it, is storage.
John:
Because nothing else about it changes.
John:
Like RAM, I guess.
John:
But like RAM and storage, they're really getting...
John:
And how long will the RAM last?
John:
We talked about this before the RMX came out.
John:
You differentiate iOS devices just by storage.
John:
What size phone is Marco getting?
John:
128, 256?
John:
We never ask him how much RAM he's getting because you're getting what you're getting, right?
John:
So it's nice that they gave two choices for RAM.
John:
I dread the day they give one choice and it's like 8 gigabytes or something.
John:
But yeah, this one doesn't even differ in the GPU cores.
John:
If you are interested in a Mac Mini to be a tiny little Intel server, this is not your computer because it's not Intel.
John:
What ports did it lose versus the Intel ones?
John:
I forget.
John:
I think it lost some USBs.
John:
I think just two USB-C ports.
John:
yeah oh and a gigabit ethernet instead of 10 gig the intel mac mini has 10 gig ethernet why does it have gigabit ethernet well you might not know this but ethernet has not big been a big feature on the ipads and iphones thus far in history right so but it's supported it's supported certainly on the ipad and possibly on iphones i don't remember but i know it's supported on ipad yeah but not 10 not 10 gig ethernet
Marco:
And that could be a PCIe lane thing.
Marco:
More likely, it's probably just a high-end versus low-end thing.
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me at all if they do later, once there is a higher-end M chip for their higher-end products, they might offer a higher-end configuration of the Mac Mini with that chip.
John:
yeah like once they integrate that because they've had no reason thus far to make 10 gig ethernet support in any of their arm based products and arguably with this line of things that they've released they still kind of don't i know the old intel mac mini had it just because it's probably cheap and easy to make with given the chipsets that work with the intel things but they don't quite have it yet so there are some regressions but the entry level price being lower is great uh i think this is and you know and the performance again
John:
the performance compared to the past mac mini this should have phenomenal performance especially since you don't really care about the gpu probably in a mac mini if you're just using it as a little server or something but even if you're not like so the picture that everyone's making fun of that the mac mini sitting there uh you know and connected to an apple 6k display where the computer costs less money than the stand that is holding the monitor up
John:
right it's like it's sitting on i think they had it sitting on top of the stand yeah it's a little bit absurd in some respects but in other respects what i thought about was here's what i immediately thought about i like with the uh the intel transition kits the developer transition kits they they like what do they do they give you like you send back the developer transition kit and they give you a good deal on like an intel iMac or something i would love to send back my developer transition kit by the way i just uploaded my arm versions of all my apps to the store they're available now if you want to go get them
John:
um i would love to send that back and have them give me a good deal on an arm-based mac mini and you know what i'd do with that arm-based mac mini i would sit it on the stand that costs more money than it does and i would connect it to my 6k display because you know you could have a whole second computer with the same peripherals and the same desk setup and it would be a fast computer it would be faster in single core performance than gigantic mac pro that's over there
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Just take your display keyboard and mouse and disconnect them from your old computer that you're switching away from and plug them into Mac mini.
John:
Just Bluetooth.
John:
Right.
John:
I mean, I do this with my laptop.
John:
Like, you know, the magic of Bluetooth accessories like, you know, all I'm saying is that a Mac mini connected to an absurdly large display only sounds ridiculous because you think of a Mac mini as a wimpy computer.
John:
It's not wimpy.
John:
It's got the same M1 chip as the other three computers, and this one has a fan on it, which probably means it's clocked higher and can sustain higher speeds.
John:
This Mac Mini, again, like, what are we going to be comparing to?
John:
Are we going to be benchmarking against the Mac Mini?
John:
Or, as Marco mentioned before, are we going to be benchmarking against the 8-core iMac?
John:
No.
John:
It's an inexpensive computer, and it's silly to connect it to a $7,000 monitor setup, but if you've already got a $7,000 monitor setup, it's suddenly faster than your Mac Pro.
John:
All three of you.
John:
Hell of a flex there, John.
John:
This Mac Mini is going to be faster than my Mac Pro in almost everything not related to gaming.
John:
It's terrifying, and obviously it's 16 gigs of RAM, so it's a limited computer, but
John:
You know, I think this Mac mini is perfectly fine.
John:
And I think like the like the Intel Mac mini, it's a bit of a sleeper in terms of performance.
John:
Like if you don't care about the places where it's weak, like if you're not like going to play games on it, for instance, doing day to day stuff and you have an external monitor that you like, because a lot of people have external monitors that they like.
John:
it's not bad now the fact that you can only do a 6k and a 4k monitor one has to be hdmi and one thunderbolt that's a little bit limiting if you want like a three monitor setup or whatever but i think this is a perfectly fine computer i'm excited to see a price drop again don't try to allocate the money
John:
you'll just get sad don't try to think about how much less the m1 costs apple to put in these machines than the intel chips because it's a lot less and they do not pass that savings on to you for the most part i know it's a hundred dollars less but in general apple is benefiting more from this savings than you are which is fine like for prices to be stable or to go down a hundred dollars on the low end i think that's all fine i give apple a pass on that i think the mac mini is fine
Marco:
Can you imagine how many more of these Mac minis they would sell if they sold a 5K external display for like $1,000 or $1,500?
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
John:
That's crazy talk.
John:
They would never make a 5K display.
John:
They don't even know how to make a 5K display.
John:
Apple has never shipped a 5K display except inside other computers.
John:
Don't look at those.
Yeah.
Casey:
No, I couldn't agree with you more, Marco.
Casey:
I'm not in the market for a new computer, in any capacity, really, but particularly to replace my iMac Pro, which we should talk about eventually one day at some point.
Casey:
But if I were to replace the iMac Pro tomorrow, and if there was a 5K first-party display, I would really think hard about getting exactly that.
Casey:
I love this iMac Pro.
Casey:
I really do.
Casey:
But the Mac Mini should be a screamer for all the sorts of things I would want to do and made it with a decent 5K display.
Casey:
I mean, why wouldn't you?
Marco:
Yeah, that's that's why I like more than ever.
Marco:
The giant hole in Apple's lineup for displays is not only apparent, but I think holding them back at this point.
John:
yeah agreed yeah and this is another instance again uh the two terabyte ssd max on on a mac mini you feel like can't you give me the four options plenty of room thermals aren't a concern you've got a fan this is where you start to think is it actually a limitation of i don't understand how it could be though but maybe it feels like well it was the the storage management stuff was tailored to the ipad and the biggest ipad is one terabyte but it just seems it seems a missed opportunity not to give higher ceilings on ssd size because
John:
Just to be clear, the SSDs are not on the package with the system on a chip.
John:
Those are elsewhere on the board.
John:
So there's no sort of packaging constraint saying you can't fit more than, you know, they could and they would price it ridiculously.
John:
And we know how it goes with Apple storage and just saying like capacity wise, you know, it hurts a little bit more for them for the Mac mini to not be able to scale up.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, and it could be as simple as these are their low-end products.
Marco:
I mean, they historically have not offered their highest SSD sizes in their lowest-end products.
Marco:
Like, you couldn't get a 4-terabyte MacBook Air before.
John:
But isn't their highest size 8 now, not 4?
Marco:
On the high-end products, yes, but again, you couldn't get those in the Airs.
John:
I feel like now that you can get eight on the big ones, you should be able to get four on the lesser products.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
But I think the more likely explanation besides – I think it's both.
Marco:
I think it's both the product segmentation of wanting to push people with higher-end needs to the higher-end products.
Marco:
And I think it's possibly just the reality of how many chips does that take on the board to offer those larger capacities and how much room do you want to devote to those on these products.
John:
Well, the problem with the Mac Mini, though, is that the higher-end version of that is $6,000.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yes.
John:
Because there is no other headless desktop computer that they sell.
John:
You go from mini to something that's like 17 times the volume of the mini.
John:
20, 30.
John:
How many Mac Minis could I fit inside my computer?
John:
A lot.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we should talk about the MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Now, it was so obvious when I heard them say this, but it didn't occur to me until I was listening to Dithering, I think, this morning.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
Well, I forget if it was John or Ben, but one of them said, you know, you could think of the MacBook Pro that was released yesterday as the spiritual successor to what Marco dubbed the MacBook Escape.
Casey:
And so this was the MacBook Pro, you know, the Escape was the MacBook Pro, you know, Intel, of course, that did not have a touch bar and it only had two ports.
Casey:
Is that correct, Marco?
John:
Yep.
Casey:
okay so this new macbook pro running on the m1 also has two ports and in many and many many ways with with the exception of having a touch bar now seems like it's kind of the spiritual successor of the macbook escape in that it is a macbook pro in name but maybe not in other ways question mark
Casey:
But nevertheless, I mean, it's nice.
Casey:
And if you don't mind giving up a couple of ports, I don't know why you wouldn't be interested in this.
Casey:
The reason I'm not interested in it is because I really don't want to replace a six-month-old laptop because my name is not Marco.
Casey:
But beyond that, I do use all the ports in this laptop.
Casey:
Perhaps I'm just port crazy now that I've spent three years without them.
Casey:
But there are occasions when I'll have like Ethernet plugged in and a phone plugged in or maybe even a phone and an iPad plugged in and of course power.
Casey:
So I don't want to go back down to two.
Casey:
But if I didn't mind...
Casey:
This would be a very interesting and compelling machine.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, and to be clear, like there have been, as you mentioned, like the 13 inch MacBook Pro has actually been two very different products since 2016.
Marco:
You know, since they went to this generation with like touch bar and crappy keyboards at first and everything.
Marco:
The 13-inch MacBook Pro has always had the low-end model, which is basically a souped-up Air in many ways.
Marco:
And the higher-end model, it always had four ports on the higher-end model, and it always had the touch bar.
Marco:
But it's always been these two very different products.
Marco:
One of them was basically a souped-up Air.
Marco:
The other one was really what you would expect from a, quote, MacBook Pro.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
They've only replaced the lower end one here.
Marco:
Again, it's only the low end products.
Marco:
So many people are especially upset at them calling this quote pro while not offering higher RAM than 16 gigs and everything like that.
Marco:
And again, I think that's reasonable when you look at what they replaced so far and what they haven't gotten to yet.
Marco:
The higher-end 13-inch Pro has always been a higher-end product.
Marco:
It's always used higher-grade CPUs, higher thermal envelopes, higher performance, higher core counts for most of the time.
Marco:
So again, I think it's reasonable what they've done here.
Marco:
It's just that the computer that a lot of people want as the, quote, 13-inch MacBook Pro, they haven't replaced that one yet because that's the higher-end one.
Marco:
That said, I do take issue with when they have only two ports.
Marco:
Why don't they put one on each side?
Casey:
Yeah, a lot of people are very upset about this.
Marco:
Because one of the most wonderful luxuries ever since they went to all USB-C on laptops in 2016, one of the wonderful luxuries of having a four-port model is that you can plug in the charging cable on either side depending on whatever was convenient for you.
Marco:
Now, there have been a few asterisks on this arrangement so far.
Marco:
In many of these computers, one side had more Thunderbolt bandwidth than the other.
Marco:
There's a common problem with the bigger ones that, like, if you plug it into the left side or something, it makes the whole thing run hotter.
Marco:
And if you plug it into the right side, it doesn't for some reason.
Marco:
Like, there's a few weirdnesses that have cropped up.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
For the most part, as somebody who for most of this time has owned four-port models, having the ability to plug the charging cable in on either side is a wonderful little nicety.
Marco:
And I do wish that for the two-port models, they would put one port on the right.
John:
So now that we've seen all three of these computers here, it is like the two-port 13-inch MacBook, like you said, the MacBook Escape.
John:
You could squint and see that as just like an error in a different case.
John:
But with these three new ARM computers that they've rolled out, right, it's basically the same computer in three different sort of contexts.
John:
One of them is a fanless thin laptop.
John:
But in terms of what's in there, it's the same stuff that's in the Mini, but now it's got a fan and a couple different ports, and that's the same stuff that's in the MacBook Pro, but now it's a laptop with fans and a bigger battery and so on and so forth.
Marco:
And a touch bar.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
We know the M1 is in all of them, but also most of the limitations are the same across all of them.
John:
Eight or 16 gigs of RAM across the board, only up to two terabyte SSD, only two ports, two Thunderbolt slash USB 4 ports, right?
Yeah.
John:
I wouldn't be surprised if they crack these things open, like iFixit, and it looks at the motherboards of all of them, and that the motherboards actually look kind of similar in terms of what's on them, right?
John:
And if you looked at the motherboard when they showed it, like, floating into the, I think it was the MacBook Air when they showed it floating in, it looked for all the world, like an iPad, you know, logic board, quote-unquote logic board, or whatever, because it's like...
John:
Like, oh, that's a skinny thing off to the side and it makes room for the big battery in the iPad, right?
John:
Or like if you've seen what the logic board in the phone looks like, it's just like, oh, it's basically a giant battery.
John:
And then along the edge, there's this little tiny thing that's the actual phone.
John:
That's what these things are like too.
John:
So the limitations of this sort of system, this M1-based system, and Margo mentioned PCI Express Lanes, right?
John:
How much bandwidth is there?
John:
How much connectivity can you even have?
John:
How much RAM can we even fit in the system on a chip?
John:
It's basically the same.
John:
And these three computers they introduce are the three computers where this sort of system, this set of constraints, is reasonable.
John:
There are places where it's like, you know, a little bit unreasonable, like, again, the storage thing or whatever, and it would be better if they supported more monitors and so on and so forth.
John:
But if you looked at Apple's existing line and said, here is the M1-based system, and here are its possible capabilities...
John:
What computers will this fit into?
John:
This is the three you would pick because these are the three where this type of thing makes sense.
John:
None of the other models does it really make sense to have these limitations.
John:
You can't do the quote unquote good 13 inch MacBook Pro and just have two ports.
John:
You can't do the 16 inch.
John:
You can't do an iMac.
John:
You can't do a Mac Pro, right?
John:
this set of constraints only works in these computers and this computer is the one where it is probably pressed the most even though as marco said it's like it's people don't understand it's replacing the lesser 13 which has always been a weirdo computer and by the way it's replacing the lesser 13 with cpu and battery performance that blows away any 13 ever made right right
John:
people apparently don't care about that all of a sudden people don't care about performance and battery life anyone complaining about these computers i give it to them for one day and have them look at that battery meter and not go down and they'll you know again assuming apple's claims are correct nobody has these computers i don't know i'm just i have faith that it will perform as behaved um
John:
it's kind of fascinating and it's it's it's fascinating for both of the reason of like how they're rolling this out and also about the future which i guess we'll get through this computer first and i'll talk about the future but what else is there anything else to say about this computer um battery life is even bigger than the air as you can imagine because it's not wedge shaped right
John:
up to 17 hours of wireless web your your brain may be breaking on these numbers you'd be like i get like five hours out of my macbook what are they talking about 17 hours that must be a typo we'll find out but like you know how long your your ipad lasts and this has bigger batteries than your ipad right um 61 watt power adapter whereas the uh air has a 30 watt right again this has a fan presumably it's clocked higher but apple won't tell us
Marco:
um and the pricing is the same uh more or less uh and differentiated only based on ssd size and i suppose ram yeah i i'm very interested to see how much faster it is than the air and in real world use and in benchmarks because the the cooling system has to mean something here and they again they said as much with you know the whole thing about sustaining its performance like so i know it's going to be faster than the air i don't know how much faster and how much that matters and and
Marco:
Will a fan be noticeably loud during high performance or can they only give it a little bit of active cooling and that might be enough?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Time will tell, but I'm very interested to find out.
Casey:
Can I ask a dumb question?
Casey:
Why is the power adapter on the MacBook Pro double the wattage?
Casey:
Some of this I think I could explain away by perhaps maybe a difference in the screen or...
Casey:
I don't know, but they should be the same screens.
John:
I mean, presumably... What's the battery size?
John:
It's a 58-watt-hour battery?
Marco:
Yeah, like the MacBook Air is something like 50, and this is something like 60, or it's something like that, but... Yeah, yeah, it's 50 and... Well, 50 and 58 is not that much bigger.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think I just put the bigger one in it because if it's going to have that sustained performance, you need a power adapter that can keep up with maximum power draw from everything, and maybe all they had on hand is 30 and 60 watts, and if the 30 watt won't do it, which might be borderline, give them a 60.
Marco:
Yeah, and to be clear, that's also what the previous ones used.
Marco:
The previous Air was 30, and the previous 13-inch Pro was 60.
Marco:
I'm guessing this is partly keep everything external the same, and also the power adapter is sometimes the limiting factor with high-end workloads like video encoding.
Marco:
sometimes the laptop can't actually be fully powered by the power adapter and that's when you see some models that actually will slowly discharge themselves even when plugged in when doing something like a heavy video encode and that's more tolerable on something like an air than it is on something called macbook pro that's going to be used by video people so that could be a situation as well i'm guessing it's probably that's probably not going to be a major factor but um it could just be like pros want the battery to charge faster you know it could be as simple as that
John:
And to be clear, this only supports one external monitor as well.
John:
That's another thing that can draw power.
John:
This one probably hurts the most because it is MacBook Pro.
John:
It does have two ports.
John:
The ports do look the same as each other, but you cannot connect two monitors to them.
John:
Why?
John:
Because, like I said, this is the system they give you.
John:
It makes me wonder how they managed to give HDMI output on the Mac Mini and maybe like...
John:
Maybe, you know, the HDMI output can be limited to 4K because of limitations of the HDMI spec that they're using or whatever.
John:
But once you have these Thunderbolt ports, it would be weird to have like, you know, if you plug in a 6K monitor into one Thunderbolt port, now all you can plug into the other Thunderbolt port is like a 720p monitor or something.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But that's a pretty disappointing limitation.
John:
I feel like that is one of the more painful inherited traits of this overall system that the MacBook Pro gets.
Marco:
one more power adapter theory also um is that they will presumably at some point in the next year launch a higher end 13 inch macbook pro or maybe 14 inch but maybe they want to use the same adapter for both because it's very confusing if you have a 13 inch macbook pro and you need a power adapter and they have to say which one right because people won't even know which one they have you gotta feel you gotta feel along the sides to see are there ports on
Casey:
the right side yeah right headphone port this is the smaller adapter right so it could it could be also just planning for the future where they just want to have one power adapter for each size class and that that could be it well what i was hoping to back one of the three of us into is is it feasible or possible that they would crank up the clock speed or something on the m1 specifically in the macbook pro or i suppose the mini for that matter and make it considerably quicker than the one in the air i don't think that's what's happening i think your theories are better but is it possible
John:
It's limited by cooling, not by power draw, I imagine.
John:
It's not as if you can go faster.
John:
It's kind of like the Switch is like that.
John:
The Switch actually goes faster when it's in its dock.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Because it's powered.
John:
That's a battery life savings.
John:
But I think in this case, it's the dissipation of heat that's limiting the speed these things can go.
John:
So I don't think you can clock it any faster if you plug it in.
Marco:
yeah and also think about battery math here like if you're if you're running a 30 watt adapter and maxing out how much power it can draw on a 60 watt hour battery that's not going to last a lot of hours right so like they these are like peak charge level or you know peak power draws not meant to be anything sustained
Casey:
That actually reminds me that a common thread I heard throughout the entirety of yesterday's presentation, but particularly when it came to the discussion of the M1, was that everything was couched and hedged to some degree as low power.
Casey:
Like this is the fastest low power processor ever put into a computer.
Casey:
This is the best.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
The one for the 13-inch.
Marco:
There were like five words in that qualification.
Marco:
It was like the fastest of any like, you know.
John:
Fastest 13-inch silver computer with an Apple logo on it.
Marco:
Yeah, that was so many qualifications on that one.
Marco:
It was kind of ridiculous.
Casey:
Yeah, it's absolutely true.
Casey:
But I don't know, it occurred to me like the non-tinfoil hat justification for that was that, hey, there are other computers that exist today that are not low power that are quite a bit quicker.
Casey:
Simple as that.
Casey:
But I couldn't help but wonder
Casey:
Is it that there's going to be, which presumably there will be one day, but is it that there's a, you know, an M1Z, an M1+, an M1++ or what have you, that is a high power version of this chip that,
Casey:
that is going to be in an entirely different class.
Casey:
And they're just setting up for, you know, in the future, in the next presentation, saying, well, you know how we kept talking about how low power it was?
Casey:
Well, here in the Mac Pro, where we don't care about low power, look at how she screams, you know, or something like that.
Casey:
And I think the simple answer is probably the right answer, but I couldn't help but wonder if all of this hedging was a very quiet nod to the future.
John:
Well, that brings me to my next point about the future, right?
John:
So obviously Apple can do whatever it wants with the Macs.
John:
That's why we talked about the various, the spectrums, the possibilities of what they could do with the hardware, what they could do with the CPUs.
John:
But we did have the history of all the iOS devices before it, right?
John:
And it turns out what they did was with the hardware, similar to what they did with the Intel and with the system on a chip, they reused the stuff they already had for the iPad and the phone in not radically different configurations, right?
John:
Now, on the iOS side, the cadence has been more or less, you know, you get the A13 and the next year you get the A14, right?
John:
They've just gone, the number has gone up once each year, A7, A8, A9, like it's fairly like clockwork.
John:
And there are variants during the year and trailing where you get the Z and the X variants, which have been for the bigger versions of them.
John:
But for the most part, you know, we got the A14 in our phones this year.
John:
Nobody is looking forward to an A15 based phone this year.
John:
Obviously, it's the end of the year.
John:
It doesn't make sense.
John:
But you know what I mean?
John:
Like there's the idea that you're going to increment that number after the letter more than once in a year.
John:
That hasn't happened on the iOS side.
John:
And because we assume, and thus far Apple has done nothing to dissuade us from this, that the Mac gets basically, not the leftovers from the iPad and the phone, but basically Apple does the work for the phone.
John:
And to a lesser extent for the iPad, and now the Mac gets the benefit of that, right?
John:
But so far...
John:
Apple has yet to show that they are doing some work that is clearly only for the Mac.
John:
If you look at the M1, it looks a lot like an A14 with more cores and stuff in it, right?
John:
So we're like, okay, we've got these new Macs.
John:
These are low-end Macs.
John:
They get the M1, right?
John:
And now we're like, yeah, maybe in January, February, or March, or maybe in the spring, we'll see the M2.
John:
It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
John:
The M2?
John:
We just gave you the M1, right?
John:
If you follow the same cadence as the iOS things, you shouldn't be expecting an M2 until next November.
John:
Because we just gave you the M1.
John:
Now, M1X, M1Z, something like that?
John:
Maybe.
John:
But don't go looking for an M2 because you're not going to see an M2 until, you know, next fall at the earliest.
John:
We don't know that that's what the cadence is going to be.
John:
But if the M2 is based on the A15...
John:
That's not an unreasonable assumption.
John:
All this is to say that the future of this line of computers like, oh, and I bet they're going to do the 16-inch MacBook Pro in the spring.
John:
If they do the 16-inch MacBook Pro in the spring, expect its CPU and GPU to look an awful lot like the current one, maybe with more cores.
John:
Don't expect the 16-inch MacBook Pro to come out in the spring with an M.2 with entirely different CPU and GPU cores.
John:
That would be awesome if that happened.
John:
We would all love it.
John:
But it seems to me that everything Apple has actually done so far makes me think that they really, really want to share sort of a foundational technology stack with their other products, which makes perfect sense.
John:
It's the whole reason that Macs are getting these to begin with is that Apple didn't have to go to the drawing board and start a whole new CPU and GPU architecture.
John:
They had the work they had already done.
John:
Now, that raises the question, what the hell is an M1X or an M1Z?
John:
Because the M1 is already basically an A14X.
John:
I guess you just put on a different letter at the end and give it more cores?
John:
Because, you know, you can give it more cores.
John:
You can give it more high-performance cores, more high-efficiency cores.
John:
You can scale out the GPU.
John:
presumably they can give it more pci express lanes for more thunderbolt ports and all and you know higher storage limitations you can give it more ram you can maybe put more on the package but you can take the ram off the package for the high-end machines these are all things that apple can do with the basic underpinnings of the m1 architecture the m1 suffix architecture all those things are possible
John:
But it seems to me right now that for obviously the rest of this year, but for all of 2021, I do not expect, except for maybe the tail end, I do not expect to see any Macs that come with anything other than A14 cores and those same GPU cores in different arrangements with different IO and different RAM sizes.
John:
which, to be clear, is fine.
John:
Those will all be faster.
John:
They'll be the fastest Macs Apple has ever made, and they'll be awesome, and you can scale them up to everything except the Mac Pro, which is a real problem that's probably not going to happen until 2022.
John:
But that's my current thinking on this.
John:
As I said before this presentation,
John:
Feel free to surprise me, Apple.
John:
Feel free to roll out the M2, M3, and M4 all next year.
John:
It'll be awesome.
John:
I'll be cheering you on.
John:
Totally new core architectures, everything, just amazing stuff that I've never seen before.
John:
But I am not getting my hopes up for that.
Marco:
No, I think you're exactly right.
Marco:
I think it's most sensible.
Marco:
We were going to see exactly what they've done with the iPad, what they are doing here, which is this is the M1.
Marco:
And the other products that are going to be released maybe next spring or summer or whatever it is are going to be the M1X or something similarly named or similarly functioning where it is the exact same cores as the M1, just more of them.
Marco:
And we'll see how they scale RAM and GPU performance.
Marco:
As I said earlier, and as you said, I don't think it's out of the question that they would have maybe in the models that currently have discrete GPUs.
Marco:
So iMacs, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Maybe they have an architecture where the higher-end chips have more cores on the chip, and they move some of the stuff that's in the chip now out of package.
Marco:
And so the RAM is one of the biggest things to move out.
Marco:
Then you can make a bigger die to have more CPU cores.
Marco:
And to solve some of your higher-end performance needs, you probably move the GPU out as well into its own chip.
Marco:
And then you have higher-end CPU... You have more CPU cores available for a reasonable die size in the chip.
Marco:
And then you have a whole separate chip to make an even higher-end GPU to be able to compete for high-end workloads there in that way.
Marco:
And I think that's your answer.
Marco:
Then... And the RAM is also off-package.
Marco:
Then you can basically make...
Marco:
things like the 16 inch the way they've been made you know this the 16 inch has had a separate gpu and off package ram and the 15 inch before that always had the same thing with the exception of the handful of models that had integrated graphics as an option but um for the most part like that's how these models have always been made and it's been fine and you can take that exact same architecture and scale it up to basically whatever level you need for that product you can you know you can fit probably easily to
Marco:
eight of the high performance cores into an M1 that didn't need to have a GPU in it.
Marco:
And so the more you can separate out from the main package and into separate chips on the board, whether they're slotted or socketed or not, the higher end performance you can achieve.
Marco:
And so I think that's most likely where this goes next.
Marco:
That at some point next year, we have an M1X that has pushed some of the stuff that's in the package now out of the package in order to offer more of everything.
John:
I don't think anything is getting pushed out except for RAM next year.
John:
I think the entire 16-inch line next year will have, the GPU will be on die.
John:
Like, I know what you're saying, and it's totally possible, and I think they have to do it for the Mac Pro, but for the 16-inch, quote-unquote, integrated GPU only is my guess.
John:
The other possibility with the naming is interesting that we talked about BMW before.
John:
BMW has the M3, the 3 Series, right?
John:
Very recently, BMW decided, you know what?
John:
When we take the M3 and give it two doors, that's not the M3 coupe anymore.
John:
Now it's the M4.
John:
It's like, wait, what?
John:
Why is that the M4?
Marco:
Makes total sense.
Marco:
You subtract two doors and add one to the number.
John:
Right.
John:
It has fewer doors, but the number is higher.
John:
Normally, the 5 Series is bigger than the 3 Series.
John:
It's bigger than the 2 Series.
John:
It's bigger than the 1 Series.
John:
It all makes sense.
John:
but the quote-unquote four series is not bigger than the three series in fact it's smaller in some ways because it's got the two doors it doesn't make any sense anyway apple could because it's just a marketing name come out with essentially the m1x and just call it the m2 there's no rules about this stuff right they can do it i mean under the covers it would just be you know the a14 core like it would do you know we can look at it we'll figure out what it actually is they can call it the m2 if they want
John:
We don't have precedent, right?
John:
All we've got is this one point so far.
John:
We don't have a line yet, right?
John:
So it's possible that Apple could do that.
John:
It seems less likely than sticking letters on the end of it.
John:
But who knows?
John:
If you want to make a big splash with the 16-inch MacBook Pro with its, you know, huge number of cores and amazing integrated GPU, the fastest integrated GPU ever made, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And you want to call it the M2, but it's really just an M1 with more stuff inside it.
John:
Sure.
John:
Go ahead.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So what'd you order, John?
John:
uh actually i want to give one quick technical note here from this is a tweet from longhorn i think it's his thing is uh never underscore released on twitter you should follow him whoever this person is they seem to know a lot about this stuff but uh one one check in on the security stuff they talked about this in the keynote oh we made our ios devices so secure and now max will be secure too and blah blah blah
John:
And there's Big Sur with its secure boot image and all that other stuff.
John:
People are still worried about, okay, but if I want to just do development work myself and not be in super security mode, can I write my own kernel extensions?
John:
Can I recompile the kernel?
John:
Can I boot basically a quote-unquote untrusted operating system?
John:
And according to Longhorn, on all these ARM Macs, there is no all the security checks are turned off mode.
John:
What you can do, however, is take your unsigned operating system kernel and bless it yourself so that the secure boot policy allows you to boot.
John:
It's kind of like a self-signed certificate in SSL if you're a web developer and understand what I'm talking about, right?
John:
These ARM Macs will not boot a non-secured operating system image.
John:
But you can make your own secured operating system image with your own changes in it if you're that type of hacker.
John:
Huh.
John:
And one final note, the A14 has four kilobyte page support.
John:
So I know we were talking about how we couldn't boot Windows on the DDK because the page support wasn't right.
John:
You still can't boot Windows as far as I know, but that particular limitation, as we suspected, does not exist in the shipping ARM Macs.
John:
It was just a DDK thing.
John:
That's interesting.
John:
Hmm.
John:
All right.
Marco:
Your move, Microsoft.
Hmm.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Bombas, Mack Weldon, and Flatfile.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can become one if you'd like to at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
Oh, we have a post show.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
I put it in there.
Marco:
I suppose we should talk about what we ordered.
John:
Yeah, that's what we should talk about.
Marco:
That's our post show.
Marco:
That's what everyone's demanding.
Casey:
But this is a timely thing.
Casey:
It's a timely thing.
Casey:
We can do both.
John:
We'll get the order done quickly.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
You heard it here first.
John:
i'll get the ordering done quickly john what'd you order i ordered a macbook air because it is basically perfect for what i wanted i wanted a computer for the kids to use uh and i just wanted it to be an arm-based macbook air that's good and bonus it has way better battery life and has no fan in it um so i got uh the 16 gig obviously 16 gigs of ram one terabyte ssd
John:
uh space gray and it's coming on the 18th and i am looking forward to my children accidentally destroying it i ordered it uh like within moments of the end of the keynote i just fired up the store and as soon as the store came up i ordered it i ordered it in such a hurry that a i ordered it on the wrong apple id i ordered on my developer apple id and i hope i can
John:
transfer you know when you go to your apple id it shows you like all your computers i hope i can like make it go on the list with my my other apple id my non-developer one and b i forgot to buy apple care so as soon as the computer comes i have to buy the apple care retroactively which apparently you can do up to 60 days after you get the mac but you can't do it most devices you can't do it until you get the mac because they ask you for the serial number so anyway that's what i got
Marco:
Also worth pointing out, any orders placed now are under the extended return policy for the holidays in the U.S.
Marco:
at least.
Marco:
So anything you buy now, you can return until like early January.
Casey:
Oh, that's true.
Casey:
I forgot about that.
Marco:
Remember that saved my butt last year with my defective 16-inch?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I had gotten it like the day it started.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, John, we knew that you were looking for a computer for your children, although from the sounds of it, you might be stealing it from them.
Casey:
Now, Marco, I honestly don't recall what your laptop scenario was.
Casey:
So can you, before you tell me if and what, well, knowing you, what you bought, can you recap for me what the laptop scenario was in the Armid household?
Marco:
I use a 16 inch.
Marco:
TIFF uses a previous year 15 inch.
Marco:
And with the exception of TIFF's laptop having to be serviced recently for a defective logic board, otherwise they have been fine.
Marco:
And we are both fairly stable in that.
Marco:
Our plan was whenever they update the 16 inch, at least she would get one and I would probably end up getting one as well.
Marco:
And then we'd sell it to Intel ones, but that didn't happen yet.
Marco:
And so when I look at what my needs are, I don't want to go smaller on my laptop.
Marco:
I'm very happy with the big one.
Marco:
I've lived a lot of years in the 13-inch size class, and it's nice for a lot of reasons.
Marco:
But my current needs and priorities, I'm just happier with the bigger one.
Marco:
As for development needs, though, you know, I'm a software developer and I have a couple of little Mac utility apps and I have a big iOS app that I need to care about.
Marco:
And so I need some kind of hardware to use as a development platform for my apps.
Marco:
and, and to test things and everything.
Marco:
And ideally I would love for that to just be my computer.
Marco:
I would love to upgrade my main desktop or my main laptop to be that, but they didn't release anything that I would consider suitable for that purpose yet.
Marco:
Um, so although we'll see, you know, once these things actually get here, we'll see, but,
Marco:
The main problem with the desktop is the damn display.
Marco:
I hate the LG 5K.
Marco:
I don't want to haul it out to the beach.
Marco:
I don't want to use it on a day-to-day basis.
Marco:
I have done that before.
Marco:
I don't like it for lots of reasons, not least of which that it's a buggy piece of crap.
Marco:
But anyway, so they didn't release anything that can replace my iMac Pro.
Marco:
They didn't release a desktop that has a good monitor story that I could replace the whole setup with.
Marco:
And they didn't release a laptop that's a direct replacement for what I want.
Marco:
Instead of getting the Mac Mini, like I have the DTK, which is a Mac Mini, and I've kind of shamefully not used it very much because using it through screen sharing on my computer is terrible.
Marco:
I don't have enough space here in the office to have a second monitor just for that.
Marco:
I don't want a whole second setup like keyboard mouse monitor.
Marco:
I don't want a whole thing like that.
Marco:
And so I passed on the Mini because I would use it as much as I use this DTK, which is unfortunately not enough.
Marco:
And I didn't want to buy a $7,000 screen to use or use the LG one, which I don't like.
Marco:
So I was considering the two laptops.
Marco:
And I thought, okay, well, for performance reasons, the 13-inch Pro is probably the one to get.
Marco:
When I do use it, I'm planning on actually doing software development on it.
Marco:
Presumably Apple's going to want the DDK back pretty soon.
Marco:
So I'm about to lose my ARM development platform, we assume.
Marco:
We haven't heard anything yet, but we assume that's probably what's going to happen.
Marco:
And so I'm going to want some kind of ARM Mac to compile my software on, to test it on, and to ship it to the App Store with until I can get my replacement desktop whenever that happens.
Marco:
And so obviously, so I'm going to go for a laptop and I'm going to do my development on that.
Marco:
So clearly the right answer is the 13 inch pro, but the 13 inch pro is not very exciting to me.
Marco:
The air is exciting.
Marco:
The air is fanless and it, and even though it's, it's not a big difference, it also feels better.
Marco:
Like it feels thinner and lighter, you know, at least assuming they feel the same because given that they're the exact same dimensions and weight, they probably do feel the same.
Marco:
Um, so, you know, assuming it's probably still going to feel a lot better.
Marco:
And even though the air is a lower end machine and will perform worse, I think it'll make me make you just happier as like a novel new thing because it is not only this whole new architecture, but it's fanless.
Marco:
And I also thought the Air might be more likely to have a longer lifespan in my household because what I'm really doing by picking one of these laptops is getting something temporary.
Marco:
I don't want to be using an Air full-time for myself for the entire next two years or three years or whatever it would be.
Marco:
Once there's a 16-inch replacement, I'm going to get that in all likelihood, unless major things change in what they do with it, but they probably won't.
Marco:
So what I'm looking for now is really a temporary laptop to be an ARM development machine for a little while until they release higher-end stuff.
Marco:
And even though for development the Pro is almost certainly better for performance and fan reasons, the Air is the cooler one, I think.
Marco:
Not temperature-wise.
Marco:
It almost certainly won't be.
Marco:
But it is the cooler one in terms of awesomeness and novelty and advancement in how these things work and feel.
Marco:
So I went for the Air.
Marco:
I figure after I'm done with it, either I'll sell it or I'll trade it into Apple or whatever.
Marco:
Or maybe that might become Adam's first laptop, depending on what his needs are and when I'm done with it.
John:
Yeah, you got a homework laptop too.
Marco:
Yeah, possibly.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So we'll see what happens.
Marco:
The difference is that yours is maxed out in every spec.
John:
no i didn't i only got the um one terabyte disc not the two oh my goodness you're really really skimping on adam's laptop here it's like four hundred dollars tell him about this your dad decided because you might use his laptop you don't deserve two terabytes no i said i figured i didn't deserve two terabytes i don't even i always get one on all my laptops so far i like i've gotten either 512 or one terabyte i just figured you would max it out because it's it's the cheaper one you did get the eight core gpu though right
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
And the 16 gigs of RAM.
John:
Me too, by the way.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't want a seven core.
John:
I don't want a broken GPU core in my computer.
Marco:
No, it was more because I couldn't tell you about the GPU, honestly, but it was more for the 512 or for the higher storage and the higher RAM.
Marco:
It basically made the price.
Marco:
I think it's the same price once you spec it up.
Marco:
So anyway, it was that's it.
Marco:
So I ordered the MacBook Air and I took a bit of a risk.
Marco:
I ordered it in gold.
Marco:
I've never had a gold laptop.
Casey:
I can't get behind that at all.
Casey:
You do you, but I can't get behind that.
Marco:
So I didn't like the shade of gold they used on the 12-inch MacBook.
Marco:
But when they switched over to 13-inch, they tweaked the color of it.
Marco:
And every time I've seen it in person, I'm like, ooh, that's kind of nice.
Marco:
And it looks different in different lighting.
Marco:
Sometimes it looks a little bit rosy.
Marco:
Sometimes it doesn't.
Marco:
But it's a cool-looking color.
Marco:
I'm doing everything differently here.
Marco:
I'm getting the lowest-end product.
Marco:
I'm getting an Air Air.
Marco:
it's going to be like a probably temporary thing.
Marco:
It's like getting a different outfit for like one night out.
Marco:
This is my weird winter 2020 temporary laptop that I'm going to develop ARM stuff on.
Marco:
And then I'm probably only going to have it for nine months or something like that.
Marco:
So we'll see what happens.
Marco:
So I kind of figured it would be a fun little diversion.
Marco:
And it helps it look more different because it's more different than anything else I've ever had.
Marco:
So it kind of helps the novelty factor as well.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So a couple of weeks ago, my name is T in the chat made a request for this episode, which I thought we could at least try to honor.
Casey:
They said after show requests for the week after next two Wednesdays from now is the 10th anniversary of the first build and analyze episode.
Casey:
So happy quasi anniversary.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
And it would be great to hear some reflections on 10 years of podcasting, how it's changed, what surprised you, et cetera.
Casey:
I think I'm the least well-equipped as the newest of the three of us to podcasting to answer this.
Casey:
And obviously, since this is kind of centered around build and analyze, it makes no sense for you to start, Marco.
Casey:
So any thoughts on 10 years of podcasting?
Marco:
Huh.
Marco:
I didn't prepare for this at all because I didn't think we would get to it.
Marco:
As we are over two and a half hours into the show, it might be worth having a quick little celebration now and actually talking about this next week.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Well, congratulations and happy anniversary.
Casey:
John, do you want a chance to get in on this or no?
John:
is this your way of saying you didn't order anything no i didn't order anything you nuts of course not i don't know how could you not get this macbook air it is basically you're adorable but good yeah but i want more ports more than you got more you got two instead of one that's more it's 100 more i mean i guess it's heavier i guess it's not it's not as sleek as the as the adorable was oh it's a lot heavier casey you said earlier that you thought it was a little bit heavier it's 2.0 versus 2.8 pounds it's a lot heavier yeah
Casey:
Oh, I mean, but I'm used to this 13-inch MacBook Pro now for all its benefits and drawbacks, and I just bought it six months ago.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I could go the Mark away and resell it or whatever, but I don't know, man.
Casey:
I really do like this MacBook Pro that I have.
John:
What does your 13-inch have?
John:
What are the specs?
Casey:
Oh, God, I don't even remember.
Casey:
It was a good one.
John:
It was a high-end one, right?
Casey:
It was a pretty good one.
Casey:
So let me look here.
Casey:
So it's a 2 gigahertz quad-core Intel Core i5, 32 gigs of video memory.
Casey:
How much actual memory?
Casey:
I'm sorry, 32 gigs of regular memory.
Casey:
Apparently, I'm getting tired at the end of this episode, even though we're recording it four hours earlier than normal.
Casey:
So anyway, yeah, so it's 32 gigs RAM and a 1 terabyte SSD.
John:
Yeah, I mean, the RAM is the real thing is going to kill you, and that's why I'm not recommending you upgrade.
John:
But honestly, this air is going to stomp all over that computer in every area except for RAM, where if you're using 32 gigs of RAM and doing lots of stuff, which is not that hard to do if you're doing a bunch of development, have a thousand Chrome tabs open and whatever else, and have 20 copies of your app running in simulators.
John:
I can see that, but yeah.
John:
When Marco gets his, you two should, before the show, come up with some sort of representative tasks, like, I don't know, build some publicly accessible app in Xcode or something, and compare your quote-unquote high-end 13-inch.
Marco:
Well, I'll build Overcast on my 16-inch, because I have a command line build script that can do it for benchmarking.
Marco:
So I'll build Overcast on the 16-inch, and then I'll build it on that, and I'll let you know what it does.
Marco:
but but he's got a 13 inch not the 16 inch and so i know that's why it'll be even better when the air embarrasses it i don't it's not gonna be i feel like compiling is is you know it's highly multi-threaded with parallel processes being forked off and everything we'll see well but only in short bursts though like a lot of it is just like shuffling data around and so it's you need like ssd performance and memory throughput and stuff like that you need a whole bunch it's kind of like whole system performance gets stressed there
Marco:
you know there are big chunks of it that are that you know you see all the cores max out for like 15 seconds here in the middle and then it goes back to other stuff but you know it is certainly more than just that so it would not surprise me if i'm not sure if the air is going to beat my my eight core macbook pro or my 10 core iMac pro but i bet it's going to actually put on a pretty good showing if it doesn't beat it so that's what i want to see
Casey:
Well, you know, it's funny you say that because as you're talking, I'm thinking to myself about you writing SwiftUI and Swift in general.
Casey:
And I don't think it's going to be faster than your iMac Pro.
Casey:
And certainly the screen real estate will be night and day different.
Casey:
But there's a universe that we could splinter into in just a few weeks where suddenly you come sheepishly to this very program and say, I've stopped using my iMac Pro because the...
Casey:
Darn MacBook Air is so much faster and so much better.
Casey:
Screen space is going to keep them on.
Casey:
I know, I know, I know.
John:
You can't go back to looking through that tiny, tiny little porthole into the world.
Marco:
Yeah, like the true, the true like, you know, resignment and giving up and defeat for me will be when I get my LG 5K here for one of the new Mac minis.
Casey:
That's true, that's true.
Marco:
That's when you know I've just given up.
Marco:
Like, oh man, I just couldn't do it anymore.
Casey:
I really do kind of mean it, though.
Casey:
I see a future wherein you could decide, because I agree from what I know of you, and I like to think I know you pretty well, that real estate is a big deal for you.
Casey:
But with all respect, you are not the most patient human I've ever met.
Casey:
And so I think that if somehow builds of Overcast are considerably quicker on this MacBook Air, which is not entirely implausible,
Casey:
I could see you.
Casey:
Well, actually, I think you're right that the more likely thing you would do is just get a new Mac mini and, you know, take the 5K from home or whatever and bring it to where you are.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I could see a reality wherein you decide to just go all in on developing on this Mac mini real estate be damned.
Marco:
That would only be if it's a lot faster, though.
Marco:
And honestly, I don't think it's going to be a lot faster, because there is a parallelism advantage that I have significantly in the iMac Pro.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And a lot of compiling is IO-bound, because you've got all these files, and you've got, you know, there's lots of, you're reading files in and writing files out, and as multi-threaded as you want, like how much faster, you know.
John:
Compiling is not going to probably play to these machines' strength.
Yeah.
John:
But I think it'll be competitive.
John:
But for you, Casey, all I'm doing is endorsing the idea that even though you just got this computer, I think you should be open to the idea of selling the 13 inch in a couple of months and buying whatever the equivalent to less expensive computer that is better in all possible ways.
John:
Again, the RAM, the RAM is hampering you.
John:
But, you know, you can, you know, don't feel tied to this 13 inches, what I'm saying.
Casey:
And I mentally I don't, but I don't know.
Casey:
I, I've never hold, held onto a computer for only a handful of months.
Casey:
I mean, it's something that people can do before, but yeah, I see.
Casey:
That's the other thing.
Casey:
I don't want to rip that bandaid off cause it's a slippery slope.
John:
He can't even hold onto his phone or his watch apparently.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
Too soon.
Casey:
Don't wash any cars with your new laptop.
Marco:
Yeah, just take the laptop out, wash your car, put it in your pocket, and things will solve.
John:
Aaron's car is at it again.
John:
It destroyed my laptop.
Casey:
It might run it over.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
It's actually funny, though, because sitting here today, I consider 32 gigs RAM table stakes for a computer that I would want to use.
Casey:
But is that really the case?
Casey:
Like, is that just some sort of vestigial like old?
John:
Are you on your computer now or are you on your iMac?
Casey:
I'm on my iMac.
John:
If you open up your laptop and go to activity monitor and see what your situation is.
John:
Now, here's the thing with RAM measurement.
John:
Unused RAM is wasted RAM.
John:
So in all conditions, no matter how much RAM your computer has, it should be using all of it.
John:
The question is how much of it is used for like file caches and stuff like that versus how much of it is used for actual applications that you're using.
John:
So it's not always easy to say, oh, I opened up my computer and I'm using all the RAM.
John:
Therefore, I must always need a computer like we do with the storage on our phones, like how much storage you're using.
John:
RAM is different.
John:
The operating system's goal is to use all the RAM at all the times, because there's always something you can be caching, right?
John:
The real question is, are you pushing into swap?
John:
Are you paging anything out?
John:
It's harder to make that assessment, but the easy way to do it is to just launch all the apps that you expect to launch, and before you even start using them, before you start warming up the file caches, then look after a fresh reboot how much RAM that takes and how much you expect them to expand.
John:
I get what you're saying, though.
John:
Like, I said when I bought my Mac Pro that I no longer have to think about RAM because I got enough that my workload fits in it.
John:
And not having to think about RAM is great.
John:
And so I fully endorse at least 32 for the stuff that you're doing, just because why even have to worry about it?
John:
Right, exactly.
John:
It's possible you could live in 16 and not notice too much of a difference, but you'd be thinking about it.
Marco:
See, I've had 16 on my laptops forever, and it's been fine in a secondary role.
Marco:
But on my iMac Pro, I have 64, because I thought, I'm going to need more, and the price difference wasn't huge.
Marco:
I knew I would have it for a long time, so it's fine.
Marco:
And currently, according to Activity Monitor, I'm using 37 of that.
Marco:
But again, it's tricky.
Casey:
So where in Activity Monitor are you looking to get that?
Marco:
I'm looking under the Memory tab down at the bottom.
Marco:
You have Physical Memory, and then you have Memory Used.
Marco:
But I don't know if that includes the cached files that's below that.
Marco:
I don't think it does.
John:
I mean, what does it say for swap used?
Marco:
149 megs.
Casey:
See, on my laptop, I see swap used of a gigabyte.
Casey:
I don't have Xcode up.
Casey:
This is like my... The laptop is currently in like second computer social networking web browsing mode.
Casey:
And right now...
Casey:
I am memory used 18 and a half gigs, swap used one gig.
Casey:
Whereas on the iMac Pro, which is recording two different ways, it's got two different browsers open.
Casey:
I don't actually have Xcode up right now.
Casey:
It has Skype.
Casey:
It has Visual Studio Code.
Casey:
I am at 21 gigs, actually almost 27 gigs used and swap used zero.
John:
Yeah, I'm going to swap zero as well on my 96 gig Mac Pro.
John:
I hope so.
John:
I mean, when I'm looking at the memory view, I, you know, I could send you a screenshot of the Chrome section, you know, it's in the hierarchy, hierarchical by process name, and the Chrome section doesn't fit in the window.
Yeah.
John:
But it's more than one process per tab.
John:
It's got a VT decode XPC service for some video thing, MTL compiler service.
John:
Like, who knows what these are?
John:
But, yeah, there's a lot of tabs.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So what I was going to say earlier, just to put a period on the end of the sentence, is, you know, I tell you that I need 32 gigs of RAM, but I don't really have any empirical evidence to back that up.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
If the CPU and the SSDs scream as much as we're being told they do, maybe I don't.
Casey:
Maybe I'd be fine with 16.
Casey:
And I don't want to roll the dice by paying between $1,000 and $2,000 and going on a wing and a prayer, especially since I have something that really does work quite well.
Casey:
I really, really do like this laptop quite a lot.
Casey:
But you make a good point that I might not need 32 gigs RAM.
Casey:
And I think if they released an equivalent of this computer today, and for all the reasons we already discussed, I understand why they didn't.
Casey:
But if they had a four-port MacBook Pro, 13-inch MacBook Pro, preferably that I could put 32 gigs RAM into, I might have already bought it.
Casey:
If they had the four-port with only 16 gigs RAM, I would have thought about it real hard, but I don't think I would have pulled the trigger.
John:
This brings up a point.
John:
You mentioned how much RAM these new Macs might be using.
John:
I've seen a lot of people tweeting about this, and I think people are somewhat confused.
John:
They're like, well, you know, iOS devices don't have a lot of RAM, so if these new ARM Macs, quote-unquote, use RAM like an iOS device, maybe a 16-gig Mac will be the same as a 32 Intel Mac.
John:
And I'm here to tell you, don't get your hopes up.
John:
Because...
John:
The things like the way iOS devices use RAM has to do with the operating system and the app runtime environment.
John:
It's less to do with the architecture of the CPU.
John:
These Macs still run macOS.
John:
MacOS manages memory the same way it always has.
John:
MacOS has made totally...
John:
Tons of advancements to try to be more like iOS with sudden termination and automatic termination and all sorts of other things that try to make it more iOS-like, but it's not iOS-like.
John:
And being 64-bit only helps too because you don't have to have copies of the 32-bit libraries, but you get that same benefit on Intel Macs now with the operating systems that don't support 32-bit.
John:
So do not expect these ARM Macs to be massively different in terms of memory usage.
John:
If you're running the same apps and doing the same stuff, the memory usage is going to be similar
John:
to what it was on Intel Macs running the same operating system.
John:
You know, 64-bit compared to 64-bit, like if you cut up 32-bit libraries.
John:
that said there is a possibility that you know you know mention like what if i go into swap are these ssds faster than the ssds in the intel max maybe i mean these are newer macs the ssds could be faster they but they said during the macbook air segment up to twice as fast ssds but that's because the previous macbook air had actually very slow ssds like that during they actually updated at one point and made them slower yeah
Marco:
And they didn't say anything about the SSDs on the Mac Mini or the 13-inch Pro.
Marco:
So I'm guessing we're looking at roughly the same SSDs.
John:
So if you have one of those MacBook Airs with the slower SSD, this new MacBook Air may swap faster.
John:
But honestly, you really just want to stay at a swap, period.