Fanboats and Coattails
I don't really know if you need me for this one.
What are you talking about?
Because I really just want to go watch the Letterkenny special that came out yesterday that I haven't had time to watch yet.
So I don't even know why I'm here right now.
Oh, my God.
With people saying, with questionable amounts of sarcasm, like, oh gosh, are we going to have to listen to KC Plug membership 85 times this week?
The answer is probably.
And I'm a little concerned that this is my brand now.
He's just yelling for our own membership.
But that's okay.
So we have anything to talk about this week?
No, no.
Nothing really happened, did it?
No, nothing at all.
This was a big week.
My goodness.
Oh, wow.
So we can start with standard ATP fare.
We should talk fashion.
Have you bought any new watch bands in the spring collection?
Actually, all kidding aside, is there a new spring collection?
Because I missed it, if so.
Oh, really?
I honestly didn't realize.
Yeah, this is one of those things like in recent years, not just recent years, Apple has for a long time now debuted new Apple watch bands and iPhone cases, usually at least once or twice outside of the usual fall events.
Yeah, yeah.
And usually there's a spring collection and there is indeed a spring collection.
You got to get a nice new yellow and a new orange and I think a new green maybe.
But yeah, anyway, that's the spring collection.
Are you talking about the green phone though?
Is that what we're talking about?
No, actually not even that.
I wonder if the watch bands are going to be like, I was going to say like Beanie Babies, but like, because, you know, they do that thing where they introduce them, you know, and spring and fall.
But the other part of that is that they go away.
Like, so if there's one particular shade of like purple that you really liked, but they only sold it like three years ago in the fall, you may never see that again.
So I wonder if someone's just like collecting them all.
And like at the end of this, we'll just have like the ultimate collection of Apple watch bands.
I have all the colors.
It's impossible to get them.
so i i know that this was a thing that the watch band collections was a thing but i had no idea that they actually really did do a new one wait something's okay i i might freak out for a moment here the white sport band is gone so i'm telling you they go away the white sport band though that's always that's no like that's my band what oh the white band is your band what did it just happen to you marco it was john johnny ives band too right
I mean, I guess he's gone.
And honestly, he's looking at this event.
Good rate.
Oh, my word.
I guess we'll get to that.
Oh, man.
What am I going to wear?
I guess I'll have to switch to, like, lemon zest or something.
You're going to become like me.
You're going to stock up on them like cheese graters you have in the basement.
Just 50 white watch bands.
Starlight just looks dirty.
Dishwater, they call it.
Yes.
Dishwater white.
Which, honestly, the white man does get dirty easily.
But I just, you know, I clean it.
It's fine.
All right, so for the record, listeners, before we started recording, I knew you were going to bring this up.
Before we did anything, John says, you know, as long as we don't get mired down in the early stuff, we'll go real fast.
I think I said sidetracked.
Sidetracked, whatever.
As long as we don't get sidetracked.
Why would we get sidetracked?
I will take the blame for this one.
We are on line one of the notes, and we haven't even read it.
We haven't even gotten to line one.
We have gotten to Apple Event.
That is literally the only thing that we've gotten to.
I mean, like, line one.
That's the heading, the first body line.
All right, go ahead, Katie.
Okay, so the fashion I was trying to talk about before we went down this rabbit hole is astute individuals, of which I was not one of them, noticed Tim's combination of shirt color and watch band.
And I'm going to choose to believe this was deliberate, and I'm here for it.
He had a very lovely blue shirt and a very yellow watch band.
What could that possibly indicate?
he could just like lemon zest which is the color that he was wearing however yeah it's definitely a ukraine thing absolutely although it is interesting that like so he has this idea i should wear colors for solidarity with ukraine great right so he goes to his wardrobe and he's like well i've got the yellow watch band that's part of the new spring line
i've got to get a blue shirt but i guess his closet simply doesn't contain any shirts that are close to the color blue on the flag of ukraine he just has like a tasteful like tim cook kind of blue and so that's what he wore like i don't like he couldn't bring himself to wear like the actual colors because it would just not be appropriate for tim cook so
Well, and I think there's a limit of how much excitement Tim Cook can display.
And I think the yellow wristband, that's his limit.
It's very exuberant.
Yes, that's as exuberant as he can be.
Indeed.
All right, so in the attempt to move it right along, Apple starts announcing things.
They start with a recap of some of the things.
Not even a recap.
It's both a recap and a preview of some of their...
featured films, most of which, actually, I was not aware of.
There's apparently a new animated series, or excuse me, not animated series, but animated film.
Lucky, I think, is the name of it.
I think it was called Luck, right?
Oh, was it Luck?
Okay.
I'm getting confused with the David Milch show about horse racing, maybe?
Yeah, let's go with that.
And so as per upgrade this week, I believe that this is Tim Lasseter.
Is it Tim Lasseter?
No, John Lasseter's.
John Lasseter's new place that's doing that.
There's a spy movie of some sort with the dude from Witcher, Henry Cavill.
There's all sorts of different stuff that's coming, some of which looked really, really good.
And then they also announced, Apple announced that Friday Night Baseball is coming to Apple TV Plus if baseball ever comes back.
So two episodes every Friday night.
It will be available on Apple TV Plus and for a limited time without the need of a subscription.
uh and there's a post from friend of the show jason snell and also a huge baseball fan about this which we will put in the show notes wait hold on honest question is baseball not back i i have no idea no really no so there's there's supposed to oh well i probably know the most of the three of us about this and i know very very very little so take everything i'm about to say with a grain of salt but my limited understanding welcome to the show you know as much about sports as we know about a lot of the stuff we talk about
Right.
So it is supposed to have been back, but the owners and the players are bickering over the owners not thinking they're rich enough and the players feeling like they deserve a small cut of the ridiculous riches that the owners have.
And so Jason apparently is listening live and is correcting me already.
He said it's an owner lockout.
So the owners are refusing to, if I understand it right,
let any of the games happen because they're greedy jerks and so uh so there's no baseball yet in fact i believe breaking news do to do to do just before we recorded i believe they have announced another like couple of weeks delay in the season or something like that um so yeah it's it's kind of ugly and interesting time for apple to announce that they're getting friday night baseball assuming it ever comes back you should read that post because even if you don't care about baseball because it talks more about like uh
you know, streaming services and how that intersects with the way sports has traditionally been funded and viewed by sports fans.
So even if you're not into sports, you might be interested in that because it's all of our future.
We're not going to get into now because we're not getting sidetracked, right?
Casey, next item.
That's right.
That's right.
Moving right along.
Speaking of disputes, I have no ferry service right now because of a dispute.
I know.
We heard.
Did we hear?
I didn't hear this.
A couple of shows back, he said they're going to stop ferry service.
Oh, yeah.
And they did.
No one thought they would actually do it.
They did it starting yesterday.
So we have no ferry service.
If only you had a vehicle you could drive on the sand and go somewhere.
Just going to make them buy a boat.
Stop.
Everyone's boats are still, you know, in the marshmallow wrap.
You know, one of those off-road vehicles that turns into a boat, a duck boat or whatever.
Oh, don't even tease.
Or like, what was it?
A Gibbs Aquatica?
Oh, man.
A duck boat would fit under your house.
Take a measurement.
Would it?
They're pretty big.
No, it would not.
They are massive.
Don't they have them in Boston?
They're freaking huge.
His house is very high, though.
The duck boats are significantly larger than you think they are.
Yeah, they are.
They are absolutely massive.
Like, they barely fit on the road.
Yeah, I thought they had them tooling around Boston.
Am I making this up?
They do, yeah.
They have duck tours, yeah.
Have you not seen them?
They are massive.
I've ridden on them.
I think I went on a duck tour.
What about one of those fan boats they use in Florida?
Would that work here, or is the bay too choppy?
No, that's not good for the winter.
Because the bay's really shallow, which makes it hard to drive a lot of boats on it, but you figure one of those fan boats are actually probably really nice for shallow.
What is that actually called?
I'm drawing a blank.
I think it's called a fan boat.
Is it really?
No, I thought there was another import.
There's a hovercraft.
That's a different thing.
No, no, no, no.
I know exactly what you're thinking of.
On the Everglades.
Yeah, in Florida.
What was that show that was on the Everglades?
You probably saw it on Naked Night.
What the hell was that called?
Oh, I have no idea.
Probably not Dexter.
Jason, you're talking to Jason.
Jason, what was the show where they were on the Everglades?
I have no idea.
It doesn't really matter.
I guess fan boat is what we're going to go with.
You see, we keep getting distracted.
That's what they're called.
Us?
Totally not my fault.
Yeah, not at all.
Definitely not at all.
All right.
Moving along.
These show notes are already a mess.
We've got Apple Watch Bands, Beanie Babies, Gibbs Aquatica, Duck Boats, Fan Boats.
Oh my gosh.
It's an airboat.
Yeah, that's what I do.
I put in a link to the Luck TV show.
Don't forget to get that.
Oh, yeah.
The Lux TV show.
Oh, golly.
This is a mess.
This is an absolute mess.
But this is what the people tune in for.
All right.
So we read along.
There's new colors.
There's green and other green, otherwise known as alpine green.
This is actually interesting because, you know, normally in in like the spring event for Apple to release a new color of the like mainstream slash value phone.
that's been fairly common in recent years but to release a new version of the pro phone is less common um i believe when was the last time that happened i mean i think they did a project red a while back um but i don't remember the last time they did a new pro color in the spring yeah i can't remember one off the top of my head either unless you count when they tried to release the white what was it iphone 4 for like 18 months i never quite got around to it uh other than that i can't think of any
But yeah, so alpine green and green, and they look good at a glance.
New iPhone SE 3 for $430, as introduced by Francesca Sweet using A15.
Apparently it is, quote, incredibly popular with new iPhone users, quote.
They also made an offhanded comment that they've added more new users to the iPhone 13 lineup than each of the prior five launches.
The iPhone SE3 gets 5G.
I believe, I might be wrong about this, but I believe it does not get the millimeter wave wideband, ultra wideband, whatever it's called.
Super fancy technology.
But it's a lot of phone with Touch ID for $430, which ain't bad.
It's it's following the SE pattern of it was it's been a couple of years since the last SE and they gave it in the spring what the flagship phones had in the fall guts wise with a couple, you know, things cut here and there in an old case design.
My question is, do you think this is the last Touch ID phone finally that we will see?
I hope so.
I mean, not that I'm against Touch ID, but it's just weirder and weirder to see it.
It looks like it from a different era, you know?
Well, on the other hand, though, they leaned into that hard.
When they were showing it, they showed a huge shot of the bottom half with the big Touch ID sensor.
They mentioned the Touch ID sensor.
They showed a screenshot of Touch ID working.
So I think clearly what they're going for here is...
A lot of people still love Touch ID on their phones and don't want to move from it.
And so they are keeping this around for a reason.
Part of it is budget and price and segmentation.
But I think part of it is just trying to keep those people happy that insist on Touch ID still.
And that might be a while before it goes away.
So might this be the last one?
Or maybe it won't be.
Maybe they're going to keep this style around even longer than we think just because those last Touch ID holdouts aren't really going anywhere.
i keep hearing how expensive how how surprisingly expensive relatively speaking obviously um face id is to deal with i guess all the sensors or whatever and we still haven't really seen we saw a little bit of consolidation with when they made the notch smaller or whatever but that may be the limiting factor and not that they you know or maybe they would do something like they did with the ipad air which we're gonna get to in a second where it's like well we're gonna give you the new design but no you don't get face id because this is the budget price or whatever so
But you can't do that with the phone, right?
You can't.
Well, can you put touch ID in the power button on a phone size device?
Probably not.
I don't know.
I had to do the measurements to figure it out.
But I think I feel like that's what's holding this thing here.
It's not so much that they love touch ID is that the replacement for it would bump this price up too much right now.
At least that's my impression.
it could be both honestly but there are a lot of people who love it like if it was if it was purely a value move i don't think they would have accentuated as much as they did in the presentation i mean it's a differentiating factor it's like hey if you like touch id here's the one like obviously you're going to pitch it for how it's different from the other phones but you know that that could be just selling what you have versus uh you know updating but anyway um they did not to spoil it they did not update the super cheap ipad to have flat size but they did update the ipad air which was nice
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new ipad air which is in many ways not that different from the old but it does have an m1 in it so that's exciting yeah not an 815 yeah that this is an interesting choice um in the past the ipads like the bigger ipads would have the x versions of the of the system on a chip and of course that one z one that was weird but for the most part it was like you know you'd have the x version that had like
you know same base cores as the you know a whatever iphone one of that number but then more gpus or maybe one more cpu core um and so it's interesting in this case to not do that so to give it the m1 first of all that actually will hurt it single threaded wise or and you know in certain tests because the a1 the m1 is based on the a14 cores which of course we'll get to more later um
So to launch a new M1 iPad today, I thought was a little bit surprising, but also giving it all that heft.
It's going to have, I believe somebody confirmed that it has 8 gigs of RAM, or at least it can have 8 gigs of RAM, I don't know.
And all that massive CPU and GPU cores, huge parallel performance on the M1.
To have that in the iPad Air and the iPad Pro definitely leaves the gap as a weird question mark of like, well, what does the Pro still offer above it?
And there are some things, you know, I made a quick list here.
You know, the big thing for me is that the Pro has speakers on both sides still and none of the other iPads do as far as I know.
So, you know, if you have it in landscape, you have sound coming out of both sides, which is nice.
Pro also has Face ID, has 120 hertz, the big triple camera system with the LiDAR, and the Pro's USB-C port is a Thunderbolt port, whereas the new Air is still just USB-C.
And they said they made it a faster USB-C data rate, but it's still not Thunderbolt.
It's USB 3.1 Gen 2, which to figure out what that means, you have to go look up in the weird chart and realize that they renamed everything recently.
But yes, it's faster USB.
Yeah.
So it's interesting.
But I feel like it's, you know, now that the Air has so much of what the Pro has.
It's it's pushing the pro like more and more into specialty markets, which makes me think that, you know, maybe the pro is I know that the pro is kind of expected to have an update later this year.
So maybe this will be maybe this will make more sense when that happens.
But it does seem like there's there's decreasingly a gap between those two feature and spec wise.
And yet there's still a pretty substantial price difference and it's still a different model line.
So I am kind of curious, like where they're going to go with this.
i mean i think the this this past year where only the big ipad pro had the good mini led screen right i that seems temporary to me and i would imagine that when when the new ipads both have mini led and both have m2 or whatever other this will make more sense it's just that the cadence of ipad up is always weird and very often you get these strange things i mean even just like having having the ipad mini have a better you know cpu than the ipad air for a while
They're just all out of sync on the iPad line.
So I think we always have these periods where it looks a little bit weird.
But who cares?
This is a great product.
I'm always recommending the iPad to people because it's got the new design, new pencil.
But it doesn't have all the features that most people don't care about.
The very fancy screen and even face ID.
What's interesting, too, is if you spec them up spec by spec, which you have to spec up the Air to match the 256 gig configuration of the Pro because they don't have a matching base level.
But if you spec them up both to 256, the Pro is only $150 more than the Air.
So it's actually a smaller difference than I initially assumed.
So maybe the answer is that the Air is just, you know, they're pushing the Air higher end.
Because I feel like if you buy an iPad, either you care about the cool features of it or you don't.
If you don't, you get the cheap one, period.
And that's what most people buy.
You get, you know, the base level, you know, iPad nothing.
And everyone buys that and they're mostly happy with it.
And if you want anything else besides that, you're going to be spending 900 bucks.
Like, whatever, you know, however you spec it, you know, you're going to be, you know, you're not, no one's getting a $500 iPad anymore.
I have no problems with the iPad Air.
I recorded an episode of Clockwise earlier today where the thesis that was presented on Clockwise was that it's kind of a weird in-between product where it's not super duper duper cheap like the regular iPad or the iPad mini.
And it's not the super baller, you know, pro.
So it's kind of this weird in the middle.
I don't necessarily begrudge that.
I think it's nice for Apple to have an offering at basically any price point.
But it is a little bit, like you guys are saying, it's a little bit of a weird in the middle area where I'm not 100% sure who the right market is for it.
Yeah.
It looks real nice and it's not extremely expensive and $600 to start is not terrible.
And I don't know, for me, I don't need, in my experience anyway, I don't need a whole ton of storage on an iPad.
Maybe I'm using my iPad wrong, but you know, 600 bucks for 64 gigs, that ain't bad.
That ain't bad at all.
I should take a moment also to reflect on the ridiculousness of the air suffix on this product.
We just ignore it now, but there's no analogy to the MacBook Air.
It is not any particularly airier than the iPad.
It's just...
It's just called this because that's what it was called a long time ago.
And at one point it was actually pretty thin, but now it's just the same as the Pro.
I guess it does have more air in it.
I don't know.
It doesn't make any sense.
No, the Pro has more air because the speakers have a lot of air in them.
But the Pro might be heavier.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
I mean, one thing, you know, Air in the Mac line, you know, when the MacBook Air first launched, yeah, it was this like, you know, thing that was premium because it was so small and everything.
But that was very short lived.
What the Air very quickly came to mean was the one most people should buy because it's pretty good and pretty small and light.
Yeah, but that doesn't connect with Air.
And the thing is, Air got undercut by the skinny, plain old MacBook Adorable, but then the Adorable died and the Air is like, now I am the skinniest.
Right, well, because the Adorable was never the cheap one.
Like, well, so in certain ways.
Right, but it was the Airiest.
Right, but what I'm saying is when Apple says Air, they usually mean this is like the, it's small, but it's also like the entry level one and also the mainstream choice that you should probably buy.
So it's interesting that, you know, in the Mac, it is the entry level one.
and it has been for for a very long time but so really i think the ipad air should be the lowest end should be the lowest without the plain old ipad without a suffix but it's not but then but and i guess it would be the question of what you call this one because like it's not the pro i i don't know what i don't know what they would call oh they would call the ipad studio of course
actually that's a good point spoiler alert uh no i think the most reasonable thing if not going the studio route is the the current the the cheapo ipad becomes the ipad air so the thing that is now ipad becomes ipad air after they updated hopefully to the flat sides okay fair but and then and then the ipad air becomes just plain ipad so ipad no qualifier is the default ipad air becomes the cheapo ipad mini is obviously tiny ipad pro is if you have too much money etc
They're trying to rationalize their naming.
We know how it got to this point historically, but then on top of that, what we mentioned before, that the iPad updates are always weirdly staggered, so they're never in lockstep with each other.
They're always leapfrogging each other in odd ways and encroaching on each other's supposed market segments, but we know the next update is coming to rationalize.
They never settle down to be like, here's the iPad line, and all the prices and form factors make sense, especially with the whole Tim Cook practice of selling the old form updates.
for years and years and years, you know, instead of just saying flat sides everywhere on all iPads, you won't see that other design.
It's like, nope, you're going to be seeing that design for a long time, and it's not going to make sense, and the names aren't going to make sense, and the update cadence isn't going to make sense, but for the most part, they're still good products.
And anyway, I think I would much rather have this get the M1 than...
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So then we get to the Mac, and this is where everything got really interesting to me.
Let me ask you, and John, I think you're the most likely to remember this.
Do you recall exactly when this whole Jade, Jade 2C, Jade 4C discussion happened?
I believe it started with a German rapport.
It was like last spring.
Sometime last year.
It was a long time ago.
And do you have like a date on your diagram that – I don't have the URL handy, but the one – Yeah, if you look at the URL to them, I put – the date is actually in the URL.
And so you can see like how long it was.
I think my diagram was like May maybe.
You can look it up.
Look up one of my tweets in a second.
But I will start this section by saying something that someone else noted.
I forget who it was.
Somebody on Twitter.
made a little montage video of, oh no, it was Ben Thompson, a little montage video of this presentation saying how in this presentation in particular, and historically you'll recognize this pattern, but in this presentation it was notable because they did it almost every single time.
before they would talk about a product, everything we just talked about, before they talked about the iPhone, the iPhone SE, the iPad Air, they would start by talking about, here's the Apple Silicon that lets us make this great thing.
Even though it's not new, you know, the M1 we know about, the A15, it's not like they didn't have any Silicon announcements, but they would, you know, add a Silicon section to all those products just to emphasize, like,
you know why we're great we have great products yeah but the reason we have great products is because of great silicon and for a while now with the macs which obviously it makes sense because they're transitioning the macs to these new processors they would begin the mac section by talking about a processor before they even announced any macs they've done it in many press presentations and they did it again so let's talk about the mac and what's the first thing they talk about not a mac they're just going to talk about chips for a while and then you're going to see you know the mac that that chip is in
um i mean i don't mind that i think it's a great way to start it we get to see uh johnny suruji in his little lab uh telling us very emphatically about their awesome chips and for the most part they are awesome um did you find the date on the no i'm looking as we speak in the chat room let me down i'm sorry uh i mean here we go may 21 may 21 of last year so uh the may 21 2021 yeah so that was uh
to refresh everyone's memory, there was the German rumor and he described a bunch of stuff.
And then I made this diagram saying, okay, if we take what is described in this rumor and make pictures of it, what does it look like?
And I mostly did it just to see, um, how big would they be?
Like, you know, at that point we just had the M1 and I wanted to see basically M1 is a square this big.
If we, if we map out all these rumors, how big did the squares get?
And, you know, figuring out that they get monstrous.
And we've been talking about, uh, these things for, uh,
Over a year now, and Apple has been knocking them down.
First, they came out with, like I said, the second row of the diagram showed what would eventually come to be the M1 Pro and M1 Max.
And then in this presentation, we did the third row of the diagram, which ended up being called the M1 Ultra Pro.
which is more than max because ultra is obviously more than max the theory i had uh earlier today was that max does not stand for maximum but is short for maximilian so it makes perfect sense good old m1 max old maxi um well and i feel like the the focus on the chips as the primary introduction to the computers um
Honestly, in this day and age, especially in the context of a desktop, but in this day and age, I think that matters more because it helps dictate what these machines actually are.
It helps dictate what class of machine you can build, how good a version of that can exist.
um you know and and so like by leading with the chip and then by eventually showing you know the enclosure which we'll get to of like well here's just like a box basically it's a nice looking box it's a box with a lot of useful holes on it but still just basically a little box and because when you're using a desktop it doesn't matter like this this i feel like is such a great you know breath of fresh air compared to
the unedited Johnny Ive worst days there where the form of the machine was held as higher importance and a higher priority in its design than the stuff that went inside of it.
And by having that as their priorities, like, look at this gorgeous object.
By the way, it has some Xeon in it.
But look at this gorgeous object.
what you ended up with is gorgeous computers that didn't serve their needs as well.
Whereas now, they start with, what kind of amazing chip can we make for market segment X, pro desktops or small laptops or whatever?
And they make the chip and they design the computer around it and
In certain cases, we're seeing this over the last couple of years.
In certain cases, certain parts of the enclosure have to get less beautiful or bigger or heavier.
But that then makes a better product.
And I feel like Apple of seven or eight years ago wouldn't have done that.
And they didn't do that.
And it was to their expense and to all of our expenses.
Whereas now, leading with the chip and designing the computer around the technical needs and the user's needs...
I know we'll get to this, but when I saw the holes on the front of the Mac Studio, I almost cried.
I was so happy.
Because this is a company that is now valuing usefulness and its customers' actual needs over visual purity in so many ways.
And this just makes me so incredibly happy as a Mac user.
The interesting thing about designing the chips and designing around them, getting back to the diagram, is that what the rumor laid out over a year ago and what this diagram shows is when Apple is making its own chips, you think, oh, now Apple can make whatever it wants.
But Apple is still subject to economies of scale and...
All the other factors that make it not possible for Apple to make a brand new custom-made chip for every single possible application.
So instead, Apple wisely had a plan.
And the plan was we're going to make building blocks and we're going to use those building blocks to make a bunch of very similar chips that we think we can assemble into...
final products final system on a chips that are appropriate for the various products we have planned but they share a lot and that's the point of that diagram that the jade c die is the building block of the future of the of uh you know high performance arm based max and here's how you use that building block to build up we had the m1 but the you know the m1 was not the building block it was jade c that was the building block so we get the chopped version which is the pro we get the unchopped version which is the max and now we get the
fused together, unchopped versions, which is the Ultra.
And the reason I bring this up now is because at the start of this presentation, blame Apple, they did the sequencing, they said, and I think this is a direct quote, we're adding one last chip to the M1 family.
This is before they introduced the M1 Ultra, one last chip.
so the diagram has another row it has a fourth row because the first row is the m1 and then it shows the max and the pro and then it shows the ultra and then it shows the what i don't know the hyper the ultimate the super the epic the plaid yeah we're not doing plaid the ludicrous whatever um it shows like basically you know like four jade c dies the jade was called jade 4c die or whatever yeah
And when we talked about this in the past, it was like, look, you can't economically make a chip that big.
You can't even economically make a chip as big as the Ultra, which is why they didn't.
They do the thing that we're going to talk about in a second, where they sort of have them communicating to each other over this very high-speed bus with an interconnect that we talked about in past shows, right?
Yeah.
but you can't have that but so but so what if they hadn't said this line we would be like okay well boy i can't wait to see what the you know the one in the mac pro is going to be because it's supposed to be four of these these rumors has been dead on every you know every step of the way over the course of a year these rumors have been that rumor from a year ago it's turning out to be true every time you know we didn't know the names but you look at them it's like yep same number execution units it's made the same way everything is just coming up just the way we expected right um but when they said one last ship it's like well i guess maybe there's not
going to be a four-way thing so here's what i have to say about it so in in episode 453 how long ago was that um it was 21st of october of last back in october um i tried to give a warning to to everybody and from something i've been thinking about and you know
mulling over for a while now that that rumor is so old and that the mac pro is going to be in theory so late like maybe the end of this year or whatever that a lot might have changed by the time we get to making the mac pro like maybe the whole almost all that diagram is going to come true at that point that the middle part hadn't even come true yet well maybe almost all the diagram is going to come true but the mac pro one is so far off in the distance
that if anything is going to vary it's going to be that maybe they couldn't make that in time maybe a different roadmap interrupts that maybe they have something else planned for the mac or whatever and so when they said you know and that's what i said in that episode back in october like don't put all your even though it looks like oh this it's coming true just like the diagram shows that last step is going to be a doozy so they said one last chip so that makes it sound like that there won't be any more chips in the quote m1 family
Now, what is the M1 family?
The M1 family is whatever Apple says it is.
But we think of it as chips made with cores based on the M1 because the M1 have the Ice Storm and Firestorm cores.
Those are the things that make up Jade Sea Dye and their, you know, all that stuff.
So lots of people saw that and said, oh, the Mac Pro, it's going to have an M2 based system on a chip with 40 cores.
And as we've discussed in past shows, I will be extremely surprised if a 40-core M2-based chip ships this year for the Mac Pro.
Because that tends not to be how silicon is done.
You don't say we have a brand new chip and the first one we're going to make has 40 cores.
Like you usually start smaller and you build up.
You start with the small chip and you make it bigger, slightly bigger, slightly bigger because you get better at making the components of that chip.
Yeah.
now just because that's the way it's happened in the past doesn't mean it's physically impossible to do that it is plausible that it could but i would be very surprised and i think a lot of people would be very surprised just because historically that's not how chip making has gone so before we i know we're getting derailed into mac pro territory already but it's their fault for bringing this stuff up so i just do want to talk about the possibilities for the mac pro this is the last chip in the m1 family one possibility is the mac pro just has an m1 ultra
That's crappy because the M1 Ultra does not have enough GPU cores to be remotely competitive with the current Mac Pro, right?
So I hope that's not the case, but hey, that could be a thing.
Who knows?
And by the way, the reason we're talking about Mac Pro is Apple later confirms at the very end of the presentation that the Mac Pro is absolutely coming.
So this is not speculation.
Second possibility, put two M1 Ultras in there.
Oh, we didn't make another chip.
It's just two M1 Ultras and they're connected by a different interconnect between the two M1 Ultras.
Or it's M1 Ultra's back-to-back and stuck together, and we don't call it a new chip.
It's just M1 Ultra, M1 Ultra X2.
That would have 40 cores.
It would, you know, be plausible.
It would be fine, right?
And then the final possibility is the Mac Pro is not going to have an M1-based chip in it at all.
It's going to have an M2-based thing with 40 cores, and it's going to come out in 2023.
I don't even know.
So Apple continues to be extremely frustrating when it comes to the Mac Pro.
by like if they hadn't said this we would all just be blissfully unaware and be like here we go on our way to 40 core it's going to be great but then they just have to throw this in there and say you thought you knew what the mac pro was going to be but you actually don't or maybe you do but we're just screwing with you haha one last chip in the m1 family so that was frustrating slash intriguing um on the subject of
having an actual like four jade jade 4c die like the possibility of that hector martin who's been porting linux to the m whatever chips was looking at the m1 max and had this to say in a tweet uh the irq controller registers on the m1 max go die zero die one and then other stuff there is literally no space for dies beyond those two to exist in there if they somehow glued four chips together one pair wouldn't be able to send interrupts to the other that doesn't make any sense
And conversely, the IRQ controller claims the theoretical design max is eight dies, so it's not like they were stuck with two.
They could have instantiated with room for more dies, but they didn't.
So the implication seems to be, both physically speaking and looking at the innards of the chip, that the M1 Max, at the very least, which is what he was looking at at the time, because he hadn't seen the M1 Ultra then,
was not designed to have more than two.
And lo and behold, the M1 Ultra is two M1 Maxes stuck together with this cool Internet Connect thing, right?
So can there physically be four M1 Maxes stuck together?
Is M1 Ultra really just two M1 Maxes stuck together?
It sure looks like it.
So that's another nail in the, like, there's not going to be four, you know, Jade 4C die in the way that you think, just because...
It seems like the M1 Max wasn't made to do that, and the M1 Ultra does not do that, and it doesn't seem like there's a way to make that work.
Maybe they could be back-to-back, but it just doesn't seem like that's in the cards from what we know now.
It's hard to know because we don't know what they're doing for the Mac Pro.
The second thing is, if it's two M1 Ultras,
It's like, oh, we didn't make a new chip.
It's just two M1 Ultras.
How do the two M1 Ultras talk to each other?
You would think that's not a big problem.
That's been multiprocessor Macs for a long time.
That used to be the way they made high-performance Macs.
You get multiple processors, right?
But those Macs did not have the RAM stuck, you know, wedged, welded to the CPU.
And so what you'd end up with is a good old Numa.
Numa?
Numa Numa?
Wasn't there a meme about that somewhere?
Yodel the heat!
Sorry, go ahead.
NUMA stands for N-U-M-A.
It's non-uniform memory access.
What it basically means is that if you had two M1 Ultras in there, they would each come with their own complement of RAM that is sort of, you know, unchangeable and connected to the CPU.
That's the unified memory architecture, right?
But they would each have their own pool of it.
And so if you wanted to have a Mac Pro with 256 gigabytes of RAM, you'd have one M1 Ultra with 128, another M1 Ultra with 128,
But each one of those M1 Ultras would be really close to its own 128, but, you know, not physically speaking, but like latency-wise farther from the other 128, right?
And that's what non-uniform memory access means.
It means that you have some pool of memory that's quote-unquote close to you that you can get at fast, and there's some other pool of memory that's far away.
When you had traditional multiprocessor chips, instead you'd have two CPUs so that you have one pool of memory that they both access that they were essentially both uniformly far from, right?
The unified memory architecture having the RAM really close to the system on a chip is great and gives incredible memory bandwidth.
But if you put two M1 Ultras in there,
now half your ram is really fast and half your ram is less fast now maybe they have a cool new interconnect that is different than the one that we're going to talk about in a second for the m1 ultra that it connects the two m1 ultras so it's not that bad and the the distant ram is not that bad and it just looks like one pool of memory you know just like the m1 ultra does we don't know we still have to wait for that mac pro but it is mysterious and intriguing and
and slightly concerning to me we'll get to that maybe at the end when i talk about the possibilities for mac pro stuff but in the meantime let's look at the m1 ultra and what they actually did do by i keep trying i keep trying so hard for this whole section not to say they took two m1 maxes and put them butt to butt because it's a movie reference and i don't want to do it and it's it's unseemly but they really did so casey please save me
It's okay, butts are funny.
So I remember, and I will be the first to tell you, I have the world's worst memory, but I swear that when you were working on your chip diagrams that eventually made it onto shirts, and now we don't know what we're going to do about shirts yet, but... Wait, should we just make pants?
Somebody suggested a onesie.
Raincoats, yeah, there's all sorts of ideas.
No, because each leg is an M1 Max.
They're not that long.
They just join in the middle.
Shorts, then we should make shorts.
Yeah, that's definitely it.
What do you call it when you have the tails on your coat?
Isn't there a name for that other than tail?
I think it's called coattails.
Yeah, fan boats and coattails.
There you go.
Title.
So I remember, I swear to you, I remember that you were working on these diagrams and you were looking closely at the diagrams that Apple had showed and like the...
um the the scans that they had showed and you had said to us i could swear that it was john that had said to us there's this section off at the bottom or left or right or wherever it was that they never really explained what is this about and i swear we talked about this at some point on some show but it wasn't like i discovered it everyone was talking about it in fact on the very last episode i just mentioned casually offhand and of course there's the chip chip chip interconnects
so it becomes so accepted as like you know accepted wisdom based on the shots that there was some kind of internship uh interconnect that was sort of an open secret uh you know but yeah we did talk about that back when the original diagrams came out that we still don't have the mystery solved of why they're like the execution units were repeated and whether they were trying to hide the interconnect or whether they just have redundant stuff you know we don't know all the answers but anyway this is not a shock what they actually did was not a shock they have two m1 maxes and what do they call the thing ultra fusion and it's a die to die interconnect
I feel like they've used the word fusion like one too many times.
Well, I mean, words have stopped having all meaning when the max is not the biggest chip.
It's Maximilian.
It's just his name.
All right.
So Saruji says, the UltraFusion architecture uses a silicon interposer that has twice the connection density of any technology available.
It connects over 10,000 signals and provides an enormous 2.5 terabytes per second of low latency interprocessor bandwidth.
Between the two dies, using very little power.
That's more than four times the bandwidth of the leading multi-chip connector technology.
The result is an SoC with blazing performance due to low latency, massive bandwidth, and incredible power efficiency.
And thanks to the magic of the UltraFusion architecture, it behaves like a single chip to software and preserves the benefits of unified memory.
This is cool stuff.
It really, really is.
Yeah, that's the big advantage, in particular for the GPU stuff, because typically like dual GPU things like the games would have to be aware of it or whatever.
So even though this is it's two M1 Maxes shoved together, they're shoved together and sort of connected in such a way that you can just think of it as one giant ship.
Again, there's no way that you could economically make a Jade 4C die.
And apparently making a Jade 2C die is also not particularly economical.
So they made them separate and they just take the good ones and they stick them together with this interconnect technology.
And I believe we had someone write in with, I think it was the first time, you know, whatever, six months, eight months ago, the first time I saw the word silicon interposer.
And here it is coming back up again, because we were discussing like how you could, when we're talking about city of chips, how you can connect all this stuff together.
If you, if you have them as separate dyes, how do you get them into one package so that they talk to each other in a high efficiency way?
And this was,
This kind of technology was one of the options.
So lo and behold, here it is.
This is things that people don't need to know about.
But it just just goes to show that Apple is not immune from the economics of making silicon chips.
They have just found very clever ways to maximize performance while not breaking the bank.
Yep.
So the M1 Ultra can have up to 128 gigs of unified memory, a 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance and four high-efficiency cores, a 64-core GPU, a 32-core neural engine, and
800 gigs a second of memory bandwidth, which according to Apple is 10 times the latest PC desktop chip.
This thing sounds like it is going to scream.
And as the owner of a mid-range M1 Max, I can tell you, I don't exactly long for power today.
I cannot fathom what this is going to be like.
yeah it's a jade 2c die here it is all the specs are the same we'll get to the more interesting parts of uh the again the economics of this product but um if you get one where all the parts work you get 2x the parts that you get in one max uh and and the gpus more or less scale linearly like you would expect and the multi-core scares scales according to your workloads and uh
You know, we're continuing along on track, despite the fact that Apple essentially totally derailed the train at the start of this by saying this is the last M1 chip.
And we don't know what that means.
Indeed.
So then we had a testimonial, which normally I wouldn't call out, but I did enjoy that it was all women during that testimonial.
And this was this was recorded or released, I should say, on International Women's Day.
So that's pretty cool.
And then speaking of women, we had a friend of other shows and not ours.
Colleen.
Well, hold on.
Colleen was the product manager of the Max Studio.
She's a friend of ours.
I'll declare that right now.
Never met her.
Never talked to her.
She's a friend of ours.
You know, if only there was an episode where we discussed who is and is not a friend.
But I guess she is a friend of ours, whether or not we are a friend of hers.
Or maybe, did I get that backwards?
You know what I'm saying.
One way or the other.
It's a single direction friendship.
It's just like a mob thing?
It's a link list.
It's a link list.
Single link list, not a double link list.
Not a double link list.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, moving on.
So Colleen Novielli introduces the Mac Studio.
There were some rumblings in the days leading up to the event that Studio was going to play a role in this and there was going to be a product or products announced.
Honestly, I don't even care about the Mac Studio.
Can we talk about the next thing they talked about?
We'll get there.
We'll get there.
I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
You know, if you listen to the last episode, you were like, wow, these guys got things totally wrong.
But the thing is, by the time the event came, if you had read the rumors, a lot of this stuff leaked out.
And obviously, we've been talking about this for over a year.
Like the rumor, I think it was also from Gurman, the quote unquote half size Mac Pro.
And then eventually in the week leading up to it, we got the tall Mac Mini.
They're going to do a tall Mac Mini.
Is the tall Mac Mini the same thing as the half size Mac Pro?
All sorts of late breaking stuff.
all extremely accurate and you know before we start talking about the reality of this machine i just want to say that i think a tall mac mini is not attractive no i'm sorry i'm sorry mac studio it is not i agree like when they were doing that video where they were showing it like in everyone's workspaces right after the introduction of it
um i i think it kind of looks bad sitting under a monitor on your desk great it's not great like i and i i am so happy that this computer is what it is in so many other ways but i do agree it is not attractive yeah and again i'm not i'm not slamming it i'm saying like this is not a beauty contest like like marco was saying i don't actually care that you've made the most beautiful object i care what's inside it's it's what it's what's inside that counts and also the ports to get to it both of those yes just like people
All right.
Marlon will appreciate that one.
Okay.
But I really do think that there is certain something missing from the design of this product.
Now, part of it, granted, part of it is because the Mac Mini has been a product for so long and we've become so accustomed to it.
But to that, I will say the Mac Mini has gone through many iterations of its rounded rectangle extrusion form.
And almost all the iterations have looked progressively nicer.
And maybe it's because they've gotten lower and wider, like the sports car thing.
You make a car lower and wider, people find it more attractive, right?
So the Mac Mini has gotten lower and wider, and I think it's looked cooler.
And this reversed that trend by taking it lower and wider and saying, now you are a top hat.
It's just like there's no... And I know they pointed out like,
uh like that it's made of one thing of aluminum i'm sure it's going to be solid as a bank vault i'm sure it's going to fulfill its function well like i'm not saying this is a bad computer design and i'm not just saying that my mac pro is prettier although it absolutely is for a bazillion times the price and half the speed but anyway don't forget the power consumption yeah yeah it's it's this is not a particularly attractive computer and i kind of wish
that they had made it a little bit nicer.
That's it.
I don't want to slam it too much.
It's just my personal opinion.
I think it gets the job done.
And the thing is, it is small.
It is not big.
It's not going to dominate your desk.
So I think it's fine.
No, I completely agree with you.
And I feel like part of the problem I have with it is the front of it has so much just dead space on it.
As tacky as I would normally find this to be, I almost wonder if, what do you call, is it embossed that's on the bottom of these laptops, the new laptops?
No, no, no.
No, just put like,
studio on the front of there in Boston.
Oh, come on.
At least it would break up all that dead space.
How about RGB lighting?
Yeah, right?
That makes everything better, so I hear.
How about a series of really complicated holes that people can't figure out how to make?
Yeah, all the tryptophobia people really messes them up.
Right, right, right.
Things grow on you.
I got to say, when we started this episode almost an hour ago, I did not expect that by the midway point, maybe, we would be wearing top hats and have coattails and be getting on airboats.
Like, this is a journey that I was not prepared for.
The Mac Studio has a five head.
What?
A what?
A five head.
Wasn't that a Seinfeld episode?
Oh, I don't think so.
It's like a forehead, but taller.
It's a five head.
It sounds like something that would be like, you know, edited out, like, you know, the cutting room floor of the Seinfeld writer's room.
I'm not making this up.
Five head is a thing.
All right.
We're moving on, moving on, moving on.
Yeah.
So this is the Mac Studio.
You know, I got to say, I did not buy one of these.
And
If this had come out before the 14-inch MacBook Pro, which, by the way, still freaking love, I would have been really tempted by this, even despite the relatively hefty price tag, which we'll get to.
But I'm living a pretty good life right now, and I don't want to mess with my system.
And honestly, I don't long for power right now.
Remind me of this in like a year when they come out with an M2 and I must have it.
But sitting here now, I really don't long for power.
And as much as I am so genuinely excited about this machine, in so many ways, they did exactly what I slash we want.
And this is what you were saying earlier, Marco.
They didn't do what they wanted, largely.
Yeah.
They did what I want and what you want and what we want.
And that is so exciting.
And this is the same thing we saw with the laptops.
They were giving us our ports back.
They're giving us things that help us do our jobs.
Imagine this, a bicycle for the mind that helps you actually do your frigging job.
Like, how exciting is this?
We're back and better than ever, baby.
So I did not buy one of these.
Marco, how many have you bought?
Just last week, I said I have been very happy with my desktop laptop and separate laptop situation.
Although I have to format and pave the laptop laptop because I got some weird stuff going on.
It doesn't get... I don't know.
sidetrack it like i have to reboot it for facetime calls to come in on it like it doesn't get alerted it's as if it's in do not disturb but it isn't anyway i don't know what that's about um so i i gotta format and reinstall just a couple other weird things about that installation but i don't know how it happened because it was clean anyway um so but i was just saying last week how my desktop laptop i was super happy with this setup and
i too have chosen not to buy the mac studio right now oh i'm stunned well because here's you know in in a world in a world where where the laptops were what they were a few years ago hot compromised loud you know desktops could outperform them you know pretty well for the kind of tasks i was doing you know the laptops a few years ago sucked
The laptops now don't.
They're really great.
And what you were just saying a few minutes ago, how you're not really hurting for performance.
Most of the time, I'm not either.
And in most of the ways that I would be hurting for performance, I'm not even sure how much more of the same CPU cores would help at this point.
I'm usually not waiting on all my cores to do something anymore.
The M1 Max is awesome.
I really am not hurting for performance most of the time.
And again, I think if I were to buy the M1 Ultra Max Studio, I think it would drop my build times by maybe 30% at most.
But they're already so short that I'm not sure that that's worth the downside of not having it be a laptop anymore.
And because the MacBook Pro...
Seems to suffer from almost none of the shortcomings that laptops used to suffer from.
I would actually be losing functionality by going to a desktop right now because I do still go back and forth between a couple of places on a regular basis.
I do still very occasionally travel, although I haven't been on an airplane in a couple of years.
Yeah.
It is really nice to be able to just take my desktop laptop with me and to have all my files as a desktop when I do travel.
But to not be constantly unplugging it and plugging it as my only portable thing.
Anyway, so I really do love the desktop laptop lifestyle.
And the other factor that will play into this significantly in the latter part of the show is that I already have the XDR.
I kind of already made this ridiculous setup and I love it.
And anything I would change about it with what's available right now, I think would make it worse in some way that I care about without making it better enough to make the change worthwhile.
Now, that being said, if I was still on an Intel Mac and I was looking to get a new desktop set up,
maybe I'd make a different decision.
Just hypothetically.
Right.
Suppose I had bought a very, very large, very large, very expensive, cost more than my first car Mac Pro.
Just hypothetically.
Just hypothetically.
This would be a really compelling option.
Especially if I wasn't really using what makes the Mac Pro currently differentiated.
Like,
card slots you know like i think this would be very compelling uh but right now my personal needs don't really have a role for this but that being said i am so happy this exists yep and because i've seen a number of reactions to this uh kind of themes to the reactions uh
some of the themes immediately about about half the people who i saw react to the price of the mac studio we'll talk about the monitor later but the price of the mac studio about half the people were like yeah that's about right and the other half were like oh my god four thousand dollars for the big one and then and you know people even freaking out about two thousand dollars for the like base model and it's like
You know, we've been waiting for a reasonably priced pro level performance Mac desktop for a long time.
The last time a reasonably priced pro level performance Mac desktop existed was, I believe, the 2006 Mac Pro, where there was a configuration you could get for like $1,800 or $2,000.
And that was more than a decade ago.
And so to have this come out and be that level of performance, the base model I'm talking about first, that level of performance with just the M1 Max in a very port-covered, well-cooled desktop for $2,000 in today's dollars...
that's pretty good now i understand that you know pc hardware is cheaper yeah you get what you pay for right now pc hardware right now sucks and mac hardware right now is really good so you know good for you on your pc by the way i i own pcs actually i just bought i had to replace adam's desktop or adam's gaming laptop it's it's really having problems now um
And I'm pretty sure blue screening, when I plug in an HDMI cable, is probably not a software problem.
But anyway, so that's a story for another day.
So I say this as a PC owner.
We now own four PCs.
Oh, my gosh.
And as a multi-Mac owner, obviously, over time, PC hardware, you're getting what you pay for with a lot of that stuff or less.
And this hardware, like...
just the base model alone here, the base model of $2,000 for an M1 Max, 32 gigs of RAM, 512 gig SSD, that's an awesome machine for what is a very reasonable price for what it is.
And so, and if...
you are balking at that, wanting like, I want the X-Mac, an expendable tower made of component parts.
Look, that doesn't exist, and this shows you that will never exist, but the role that we all always wanted the X-Mac to fill, what to Apple was mid-priced, but to many of us was high-priced, like...
I didn't have a Mac Pro until 2008.
In 2006, I couldn't afford one yet.
It was $2,000.
I couldn't afford $2,000 in 2006.
And I was so upset in 2008 when the next one came out and it was like $2,800 for the configuration that was reasonable.
But...
Now it's 12 years later, 14, whatever it is, I can't do math, 14 years later, to be $2,000 for what this base model offers, and then to have some headroom on that, that if you want or need more than that,
you can spec it up four grand for the highest cpu or almost highest cpu i guess there's the extra gpu model for an extra you know thousand bucks whatever but most people don't need that you know four grand for the highest cpu option basically uh 64 gigs ram one terabyte ssd
That's really good.
If I look back at how I've configured my iMacs over the years, back when I was using those as my desktops, configuring an iMac really high to this level of performance or to these capacities is usually more than this.
And yes, this doesn't have a screen.
We'll get to that in a few minutes.
But even when you factor in the price of the future discussed screen, this is actually pretty much in line with where things have been for quite some time.
Once you consider what you're actually getting again, compare spec for spec.
And consider inflation.
I think these are very, very well positioned.
I think what you're getting for the price is very good.
And it is right in line with what we would expect Apple to charge for such a thing without being super outrageous on that scale.
So thumbs up for me.
I'm not buying one yet, but thumbs up for me regardless.
You know, I have a couple of points here.
First of all, I would like to publicly acknowledge your restraint because this is a multi-day— Well, it's only been a couple of days.
For Marco, that's—I mean, Marco's usually measured in minutes, not days.
No, he's had this thing where he has kind of like a delay period where he thinks about it and tries not to give in, but we'll see how long this lasts.
Yeah, fair enough.
Like when Kramer walks in, I'm out.
You know, it's like—
Well, and the other thing I wanted to point out is you've introduced a little bit of new thought technology for me.
So one of the things that the Mac Studio and the – and I'm jumping ahead ever so slightly – the apparent death of the 27-inch iMac is that it leaves a hole in the lineup.
And I think that hole is there, but it's not quite as big or wide, if you will, as I thought it was.
Because I'm thinking back to my Mac Pro, which I loved so much.
I really did.
But I believe, and this was somewhat my own choice because of the spec I bought, but I think I paid like $7,500 for that thing or something like that.
Whatever the number was, it was ridiculous.
And for the Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra and the
This thing I'm excited to talk about in a minute, the studio display, you're looking at what?
A little less than $6,000?
I'm not trying to say that $6,000 isn't a crap ton of money.
It absolutely is a crap ton of money.
But...
This is not an unprecedented price point for the performance that you're getting.
And I think you're right, Marco.
I didn't really think of it that way.
But this is the compute component of an iMac Pro in spirit, if you look at it in the right light.
Yeah.
And, yeah, I mean, you look back, you know, the iMac Pros that I've bought over the years, usually they cost so much I wouldn't even want to discuss it in public.
Yeah.
I've usually, you know, well over $5,000 in almost every case.
You know, I think my most expensive might have been like $6,800 or something when I got the 4TB SSD back when that was fairly new.
That's what you get a lot for that.
But, you know, going back to this, again, we'll talk about the display.
Yeah.
The display being, in my opinion, only, and we'll get to that too, $1,700 or whatever.
The price of the M1 Max, not the super big CPU, so base model Mac Studio plus Mac Studio display, you're looking at like $3,700.
that's actually really not bad when you look at the price of what a 27-inch iMac spec to this level actually cost.
Well, and the iMac Pro started at $5,000, didn't it?
Or am I making that up?
Yep.
But it came in space gray.
I mean, let's be fair.
Well, that is actually a genuine point.
That makes it tremendously faster.
Well, it makes it better looking.
Should have had racing stripes or maybe a little fin on the back.
All right, easy, big fella, easy.
You two have made a mockery of my show notes here.
Let me try to get this back on track.
Sorry, Dad.
Yeah, I was going to say in the pre-flight, I meant to say, but I totally forgot in the pre-flight that we should talk about what we did and didn't buy and say that to the end.
But you two didn't do that.
But I'm going to do that.
So you'll have to wait till the end to hear what's going on over here in terms of purchases.
All right, fine.
um so one tidbit about the uh the mac studio if you get it with the m1 ultra it's two pounds heavier because they use a copper heat sink instead of aluminum i like the fact that the verge article that got a quote from uh apple about this giving the explanation that's apple's explanation by the way um it has a copper heat sink that's fantastic i was wondering like if they just gave you like half of a heat sink like like you got like you know the left half right because remember that the the uh you know well yeah it
we'll see when they crack these things open but the whoever authored the verge article they did the work they did the due diligence they got the quote from apple that said it's you know it's because of a larger you know copper heat think whatever uh and then they said at room temperature this is the verge article at room temperature copper copper is 8.96 grams per cubic centimeter whereas aluminum is 2.70 grams that means that the design of the heat sink is exactly the same the copper version would be over three times heavier than the aluminum one yay
yay physics and chemistry you make mine with the tungsten heat sink i want to see how that feels so that's cool um just to get to what this machine actually has on it um it's got on the back of it so much just so many ports just the best all the ports i'm so happy they're going from left to right and panning across them and sorry not panning sorry sorry todd when they were doing a tracking shot going across the ports in the back um uh it's got four thunderbolt ports
right wait what's the difference is panning like your feet are still but the camera moves whereas tracking your feet move panning is you have the camera on a tripod and you twist it on the tripod right and tracking is you have the camera on a set of wheels and you move it in parallel with the you know it's like moving versus strafing in a first person shooter
uh yeah looking looking looking versus strafing yeah yeah you're moving forward and back that's dollying right and then track i don't have the diagram in front of me casey don't quiz me i know i'm looking for it i'm looking for it here it is here it is all right we'll put in the show notes i'm so sorry todd i apologize on behalf of all of us if we are we are all we're a mess send the joke one that has the the what is that the uh director's version another director's or the
camera movement guide versus client camera movement guide there you go client that wasn't director because that would be the director of these things but clients don't anyway we're not getting sidetracked yeah 10 gig ethernet that shows that it's a pro computer because apple's pro computers have 10 gig ethernet
Two USB-A.
Yay!
Like, I know people, who cares?
It's USB-A or whatever.
But that shows that, like, they could have left those out.
It's weird.
They're not super pro.
Johnny Ive would have left them out.
But you've got room on the back of the computer.
USB-A doesn't take that much bandwidth.
You've got these monster chips in there.
Just put some USB-A ports.
And you know what?
It's got them.
Love it.
Two of them, not just one.
Yeah, we still use them.
Like, I still, you know, every desktop that's out there, you probably have at least one thing you're going to plug into USB-A.
Like, for me, I plug my keyboard dongle into that.
Like, everyone has stuff like that.
yeah and so and again you've got room on the back it's not a big computer it's not huge it's not it's mini ish uh but you got it there so put it in it's got hdmi for like for the same reason who wants hdmi darn it isn't everyone gonna have a fancy monitor no maybe you have an hdmi monitor it's fine put the port there like and or what if you want to run it headless for some reason and you need one of those silly little dongles like i have a my mac mini right
um the pro audio jack with high for high impedance headphones right because make the make the good version of everything and then it's got ports on the front which no mac mini has ever had before because apparently people didn't sit in front of their mac minis let's not start this again
It says ports in the front.
It's got two USB-C, but if you get the Ultra, those front ports become Thunderbolt 4 because there's just so many freaking Thunderbolt, you know, controllers inside the system on the chips that the front ones can be Thunderbolt as well.
So that's six Thunderbolt.
four ports on the ultra i guess that's that's what you get when you throw two maxes in there i guess um and then sd card the only real disappointment in terms of the slots is the sd card i think is still not one of the faster sd card standard things again it's an obvious update just like we talked about in the macbook pros
maybe on a four thousand dollar computer put in a better card reader but you know whatever like you can always attach one to it attach one to one of the usba ports maybe if it's fast enough um but yeah that's that's all great uh and they brag about what you can connect it to you can connect four four pro display xdrs to it plus a 4k tv um it's it's kind of interesting that you can't connect six pro display xdrs because it's got six thunderbolt four ports but i guess they run out of bandwidth eventually but and no one's gonna have that set up because it's ridiculous um
They did mention, you breezed by it a second ago, that the front ports are not Thunderbolt.
They're only USB 3.0 if you have the M1 Max instead of the M1 Ultra.
Because I guess you need the additional Thunderbolt controllers on the M1 Ultra to make them Thunderbolt.
So maybe they're just not worth... I wonder if maybe the M1 Ultra versions...
do actually support six displays and they just didn't want to say that to avoid confusion i don't know maybe not it'd be weird having monitors connected to the front of your computer though yeah that would be weird i mean you just rotate it sideways then everything's coming out of the side it's very it's very symmetrical um and so they did a bunch of bragging about performance i mean the m1 max is the m1 max like it is what it is we already it's a
They didn't say it was clocked higher than it was in the MacBook Pro, but conceivably it could be.
So this is a small-ish computer, but it is a 5-head and it is taller than a Mac Mini.
I think a single M1 Max in there, even overclocked, there's going to be cooling to spare.
They emphasize how quiet it is and so on and so forth, but just remember, an M1 Max fits in a laptop.
And now it's in a case that's not only bigger than a laptop, but it's way bigger than a laptop.
There's so much room in there for the fans and the blowers and the heat sinks.
I think if you get an M1 Max version of a Max Studio, it will essentially be silent.
Like, I don't see why it wouldn't be.
Because it is just over-provisioned for cooling.
Because it's got to have, in that same size case, they have to be able to cool twice as much CPU heat.
Or, you know, system-on-a-chip heat.
Because the Ultra is 2x that.
I would even say the Ultra, with its better heatsink, might even be quieter under moderate loads.
Obviously, the Ultra will be able to go higher and generate more heat, so that the ceiling of how loud the Ultra can get is probably higher than the ceiling of the Max, but it might even be quieter.
I love when they...
briefly showed like the like the cutaway diagram of this case and they show they were showing the big blower fans and you could see like about half of the height of the case is just those big fans more than half yeah it's it's a huge proportion of the height is just cooling that's amazing
They do not want to be painted into a thermal corner ever, ever, ever.
Speaking of thermal corners, I feel like this case design, it's a little bit odd in terms of, you know, a lot of people are comparing it like, oh, it's like the G4 Cube.
Oh, no, actually, it's like the trash can.
But both of those two computers had a more straightforward and sensible cooling strategy, which was cold air in the bottom, hot air out the top.
this one does not do that there are no holes in the top of this computer it's like a mac mini up top there right it's a single piece of aluminum right so this does cool air from the bottom hot air out the back which is not bad i mean at least you can't put a piece of paper on top to make it shut down yeah i mean it's it's fine like i'm sure it's fine i'm not saying this is bad cooling but like part of the trash can design it was just like totally embraced the idea hot air rises cool air comes in the bottom of this thing and it vents out that's why it looks like a trash can right
um and so it was and and the cube embraced it in a different way by not having any fans and using convection which maybe wasn't the best idea but still it made sense and this one makes like the the weird fan designs that are in there are because they do want to do sort of the right angle thing i'm gonna you know cool and they could have done what the mac pro does cool air in the front hot air at the back also very common used in server racks all the time you get the hot aisle in the cool aisle just like the mac dlt right but
but they didn't do that either.
So it's, it's cool.
I love the Mac DLT.
I know it was lots of styrofoam.
It was a very wasteful product.
I really liked it when I was a kid.
Oh my God.
Cool.
Cool air in the bottom, hot air out the back.
And that seems like it's kind of to serve, well, it's practicality because then you can put things on top of this, although don't put any chocolate on top.
I think it might melt.
You know, just harder to block the vents because the back's going to have the cable so you can't push anything up against it and you can't really block the bottom unless it's on a shag carpet or something.
But if they had done cool air in the front, hot air out the back,
it could have been more efficient cooling if they had done cool air in the bottom hot air at the top it would be more efficient in cooling but the for whatever reason this is what they went with and again if it was aesthetically beautiful to my eyes i'd be more willing to forgive it but now i think it's homely and also it has a slightly awkward cooling thing that you know it's probably not probably not gonna make a difference again especially with just an m1 max in there it's gonna be so silent and to marco's point if you provision it for with twice the cooling for the m1 ultra but then you don't stress the ultra that might even be quieter so i don't
I don't fear that these are going to be noisy machines, but it is interesting to note what they've done.
And also, the stylistic choice to make very, very tiny holes, right?
It's kind of going, it's the opposite of the Mac Pro instead of these huge, giant 3D holes.
These are very, very tiny holes.
Lots and lots of it.
They think it's like 2,000 of them or something, which is interesting, but, you know, cat hair, dander, dust, like the smaller the holes, the more it could potentially clog, so...
fingers crossed that this uh this cooling setup this slightly unorthodox cooling setup doesn't cause any problems yeah i was actually a little bit concerned that like because the intake is right up against the desk surface and it has all these little tiny holes like i do think dust down there is going to be a little bit of a thing but probably not enough to matter don't don't put it on a carpet please well yeah obviously or a cat
yeah and so then and then they did the m1 ultra benchmarks uh and of course in the m1 ultra benchmarks in the gpu it scales essentially linearly because it's an embarrassingly parallel problem so you just take m1 max numbers and you multiply them by two and that is real that's not like a fake thing um and cpus it'll scale with your load you've got twice as many of each kind of core and if you have a workload that can actually parallelize across them it will take advantage of them if you don't it absolutely will not so be aware of
what your workloads are and whether you can actually take advantage of that number of cores and of course the because they've got the two of them there the uh the bandwidth uh doubles is like what 800 gigs a second or something on the m1 ultra instead of 400 on the max because it's two of them hey makes sense
um they brag about their 8k pro res because they have like dedicated hardware for pro res uh video on the m1 max and now they've got twice as much so this thing can do 18 streams of 8k pro res 422 video which no other machine can do that's you know but what the m we talked about this with the macbook pros like that apple designs its chips to do the jobs that it thinks people want to do with its computers which unfortunately for some of us is not play games or you know
Many of the other applications we might want to use GPU for, but for Apple's customers, it's doing video work.
It's doing machine learning with a neural engine and all that stuff.
And that's where these things excel.
And the M1 Ultra is 2x that.
In some respects, it's like boring to talk about because, you know, what's new?
It's just...
double the thing that we already knew about but if you can use double the thing we already knew about this is like having two computers in one so you know you can get your job done twice as fast because now you've got too excess much stuff that's great um marco touched on this before but let's uh just put a pin in this the xmac angle what the heck is the xmac way back in the day back in 2005 ish i wrote an article and when i wrote this article in 2005 at ars technica it was already an old thing so the xmac as far as i was able to determine in 2005 and i'm certainly not going to do any better today
was a term that we came up with, and I say we because I was there too.
In the Ars Technica forums, they used to have like web forums on their website.
I think they still do.
In the Mac section, and we would just argue with each other about Mac stuff and yell at PC people and stuff.
And we would talk about the idea of an XMac.
For this article, I tried to find out where this term came from.
I found the oldest post in the forum that referenced XMac, but it was already using the term like we all knew what it was.
So it didn't help.
But I think I am as well positioned as anybody on the entire planet to tell you what the definition of X-Mac is at this point because we're all old and none of us really remember and I couldn't figure out back then.
And by the way, no one corrected me and gave feedback and said, oh, I know where it came from.
None of us remember.
It's lost to the mists of time.
Or as they would say in the Lord of the Rings movie only, I believe.
None now live who remember it.
The X-Mac is a Mac that...
People who hang out at Ars Technica would like to buy because it lets them configure and upgrade the parts that they care about, right?
And it's, you know, so it's like, it's not a Mac Pro because that would let everyone do that.
But, you know, who has Mac Pro money, right?
It's not a Mac Pro, but it's also not something that's completely unupgradable or a consumer thing or whatever.
It's something in the middle.
And what did people back then care about?
I want to get a Mac where I can...
you know, change the RAM, upgrade the storage, maybe even change the CPU, right?
And Apple would say, we've got one of those.
Look, here it is.
It's a Power Mac.
It's a Mac Pro.
It's a whatever we have.
It's like, no, but I don't want to pay a bazillion dollars and I don't need it to be gigantic.
I just want a desktop Mac, no screen built in, and I want to be able to do those things with it.
Like just basically...
a tech enthusiast computer, right?
Not a professional giant workstation thing, not an iMac where everything's all built in, not an X serve in a server rack.
Just make me an X Mac.
That's what the X Mac was.
That's what everybody wanted.
It was a product like that.
When the Mac mini came out, there was much debate.
Is the Mac mini the X Mac?
Based on that definition I gave you, I think you can say that not really.
It was a Mac without a screen that was lower priced, and you could upgrade back in the day the RAM on it and the storage, but that's about it.
There was no GPU to speak of at all, especially back in the early days of the Mac Mini with the Intel integrated graphics and crap like that.
You couldn't add a better GPU before the days of eGPU.
Um, and it was just, it was just a little bit too small, right?
It was like, well, it's not really the X max, but it's better than nothing.
And it certainly is inexpensive.
The first one was like 500 bucks or something.
Those days are long gone.
Right.
Um, so there was always the need for the X max was still there.
Is the Mac Studio the X-Mac?
Well, here's the funny thing.
If you have this thing like the X-Mac that has been circulating in a community for 10, 15 years as an object of obsession, Apple never seems to make the computer that me, the weird tech nerd, wants.
They just won't make a product for me.
And you'd say, I know I'm not a big market, but tech nerds want what they want.
They were just so excited for Apple to make that.
If you have that in your mind for so long, eventually the world moves on.
This is getting to what Marco was saying before.
at this point it's not that like oh apple's never going to make this for us or they keep you know cruelly keeping it from us at this point the fact that we can't have upgradable ram for example in any of the macs that we're talking about any of the arm backs right
We get huge benefit for that.
Apple's not doing it just to be mean.
Not being able to upgrade the RAM is bad.
That's the con.
On the pro side, the memory is really, really fast and makes everything faster, right?
Huge memory bandwidth, low memory latency.
It makes the computers better.
It's lower power in the laptops, right?
It is less configurable.
It is less flexible.
And we'll talk more about that when we talk about configuring the Mac Studio.
It has cons, but it also has pros.
What about the GPU?
Oh, certainly in this Mac Studio size box, they could probably fit a half size GPU in there or have an upgradable card.
No, the GPU is integrated into the system on a chip.
Well, that's terrible.
Integrated graphics suck, right?
I want an X Mac.
I want to be able to buy an NVIDIA GPU and stick it in there.
i'm not saying the world has totally moved on from that but in many ways apple you know didn't give that to us con you can't change your gpu upgrade your gpu pro the gpus are really fast and low power amazing performance without huge amounts of fan noise and that doesn't just benefit laptops because it lets you put tons and tons of cores into small desktops like this without having them sound like hair dryers right and
it may be that the time of the xmac is moving you know we've moved past the time of the xmac that it should no longer be an object of desire as i've defined it because the ability to upgrade your cpu gpu storage and stuff like that you're basically describing a tower computer and apple makes one of those and yes it's a hojillion dollars right and we're back to the whole thing of like but that's what apple makes like apple is never going to make you a cheap pc
right there was a window of time where apple could have made a small computer with one pci slot or one agp slot or one whatever slot with a video card and a good cpu yeah there was a time when apple could have made that computer it would have had upgradable storage it would have upgradable ram it could have even had upgradable cpu and you could put the gpu that you wanted into it and it would be half the size of a mac pro and it would have cost less than a mac pro but i feel like the window is rapidly closing on that machine even making sense for apple because the way apple is building macs
that precludes a lot of the things that we said we wanted to be able to upgrade and it gets rid of them not punitively it gets rid of them in exchange for benefits that even tech nerds will appreciate marco is appreciating the fact that his computer is fast and silent it's not just silent but dog slow right it's it's silent and also very fast it's faster than his old noisier computer
no he can't upgrade these things in it he can't do tech nerdy things or whatever but i think the window is rapidly closing on the x mac i'm not going to have a funeral for the x mac like in theory apple could have still made one but i feel like the way apple has decided to build future macs really closes the door on the x mac and i'm not i'm not really sad to see it go there again caveats we'll get when we get to the configuration part of it because i think the benefits we're getting from it are worth it and like
You don't want to get stuck in the idea of like, well, you know, if a car doesn't have a carburetor, it's not a real car.
Like you have to embrace the march of technology.
And the march of technology is that the advantages offered by a system on a chip are so huge for almost everything that anybody does with a Mac computer.
that there's no reason to hold on to the past you didn't say a computer has to have a separate cpu a separate north bridge and a south bridge and separate pci slots and thunderbolt controllers and like that was the way we used to build computers but things get consolidated and i think the way macs are built now and the way modern pcs are built is better than the old ways in enough ways for it to be worthwhile at least for me so
Is the Mac Studio an X-Mac?
No, it is not.
But I think it's the way things are going.
And I think it is better for most people who want an X-Mac.
It is mostly better.
But now we have to start talking about the bad news and start talking about pricing.
Honestly, I don't think it's that bad.
Well, so you went through the pricing before and how it seems reasonable, right?
But Apple is really embracing its role as the Porsche of,
computer right because the base models are all pretty reasonable right but when you start doing options and we moan about this all the time but it's really hammering at home with the mac studio uh you know especially as it relates to 27 inch imac which we'll talk more about in a bit um the options really really do hurt on this thing so let's look at the cpu options the base one is 24 core so you get an m1 max with a bunch of stuff broken in it what's the what's the m1 pro
uh the pro it's i think it's same 16 is it the same cpu cores or is it you actually lose that i can't keep it straight we can't keep this too many numbers because they list like the neural engine cores and like you have to look it's just always 16 per right it's 16 anyway um
the base of one is 10 core cpu 24 core gpu so stuff is broken in the gpu but i think that's all the cpu core is working yes right eight and two yeah yeah it's always the same cpu cores but the but the gpu cores are variable yeah and so if you want to bump that up to an m1 max with nothing broken in it you know 10 core cpu 32 core gpu is 200 bucks you're like all right that's not bad or whatever
You want to go to the Ultra, it's plus $1,400.
Now, granted, you're getting two of them, right?
So it makes some sense, right?
But still, that one really hurts, right?
Because we know, like we talked about, like the system on a chip, they're expensive, but they're not $1,400 each.
They're just not.
Like they don't cost Apple $800 to build either.
They absolutely don't, right?
It's just that's a lot of money.
And that's the one... Just to be fair, there is going to be additional cost in all the other stuff around it.
You have all the different other parts that are required to have two dies.
You have the interconnect.
You have to have two dies that both have the interconnect part of their silicon working.
There is a lot of other stuff that makes it probably not...
not 1400 expensive i think it's big margins that maybe maybe 50 you know but at this point i think that's given what it is and how specialized it is i think that's fair and that's the one with the 48 core gpu so still you got a bunch of gpu cores broken and then when you upgrade to the one without the gpu cores this really hurts an extra thousand to go from 48 to 64 gpu cores that's just really gouging the people who want the best of the best
right because that's the same yeah that's fair but now all the parts work extra thousands all right but whatever that's the top end all right ram this is where this is one of the big cons of the system on a chip thing you get massive super fast ram that share between cpu and gpu which again has pros and cons you know con you don't get your separate pools you have to have less of it pro
it's way faster for the cpu and gpu to operate which is important for a lot of apple's applications right but the other bad thing about this is that obviously the ram is unchangeable it's also tied to your cpu choice so you can't get a mac studio with the cheap cpu and max ram you just can't because the base is 32 if you want to go to 64 that's plus 400 bucks which seems a
If you want to go to 128, it's plus 1200 bucks, which really hurts.
But by the way, you have to get one of the ultras because if you look at where the RAM is, it's around the little, it's around basically the Jade C dies.
And the only way to get 128 is to get two Jade C dies, each of which has 64 around it for a total of 128.
So you lose flexibility due to their system design.
You can't get, I just want lots of RAM from applications, but I don't need tons of cores.
It's just not possible anymore.
and that ram costs a lot because like in what universe is uh you know going from 32 gigs of ram to 128 adding 1200 bucks granted this is fancy ram like it's not regular ram it's fancy ram excuse to the thing but oh that it just really starts to hurt you on the price and in storage this i think is the is the most objectionable because it has nothing to do with any particular advantage that apple has like this is not all the system on chip stuff that's all apple magic we love it it's awesome it's great it makes fast stuff it's low power right
Their storage is just storage.
They're just buying it from a third party.
Their storage controllers are probably great, but this is just flash storage.
The base is 512, which is, yeah, all right, fine.
Terabyte is plus 200, but you could probably get a terabyte flash drive straight out for 200 bucks, not going from 512 to a terabyte.
I mean, in all fairness, that's worse flash when you do that.
It depends.
We'll have to see what the speeds are.
Anyway, going up to 2TB, it's plus $600.
It goes the opposite the way you would think.
You get economies of scale.
No, it's 4TB plus $1,200 still.
Still plus $1,200 for the 4TB?
You're just talking about how much it used to be?
It used to be more than that, but...
That really hurts.
And then 8TB, obviously, plus $2,400.
Those prices are not connected with reality.
You could look at the vendor that Apple is using for their flash and see what the real prices are.
And just the margins as you go up and the options things really kick.
At least the storage is not tied to the CPU because it doesn't have to be.
So again, Apple is not doing this to be punitive.
It's part of the system design.
But it is a downside of this.
So...
And I would say most of this doesn't matter that much because, like, well, that's how they're all priced.
Look at the Mac Pro prices.
It's the same way, right?
These are the high-end computers.
But where I think it hurts is because of the 27-inch iMac going away.
I spent the whole last show saying, oh, when the new big iMac comes out, I'm going to get that from my wife, right?
Hey, no new big iMac, right?
Surprise.
At least not yet.
But now, given these prices, what Casey was just talking about, if I buy a Mac Studio plus the display, here's what the price is, and that's less than what my iMac Pro was, but it is not less than what a 27-inch iMac is.
No, certainly not.
Dan Morin beat me to the punch with this, and he's a fast writer.
He's got an article on Six Colors about the missing grid-range Mac desktop.
If you do the price range of Apple's desktop line, there is a hole in the middle.
Between, essentially, the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio.
Because the cheapest Mac Studio is... Like, there's a gap where, basically, the 27-inch iMac should be.
Just in terms of pricing.
Forget about, like, built-in screen, not built-in screen, or whatever.
It's not a big gap.
And you could argue Apple doesn't need to fill that gap.
But I feel like...
there's an obvious 27 inch iMac thing go there.
And the good thing that the Mac studio does is it makes it so the 27 inch iMac can go there.
It can be straight up a 24 inch iMac with a 27 inch screen.
Like don't even change the internals, right?
Because if you want an all in one computer, like, and you want it at the price that's going to fit between those two items,
Like, the Mac Studio lets you say, oh, but I want something faster.
Well, great, Apple makes that for you, but I don't want a big Mac Pro.
Well, great, Apple makes that for you.
It's the Mac Studio.
It's right there.
Like, I don't even think they need to make, like, an iMac Pro or a thicker, faster, you know, a 27-inch iMac with a M1 Ultra in it.
You could just straight up take the 24-inch iMac, colors and all, everything about, scale that sucker up to 27-inch, slot it right into there.
You could also do many variations of...
having you know an m1 max inside it or not having it be in colors and calling it the imac pro and apple may still do that a lot of people were getting hung up on the idea of like at the end of the thing where they said um what did they say i got the quote in here uh making our transition nearly complete with just one more product to go mac pro but that's for another day right and
But that doesn't preclude a 27-inch iMac at all because they've already transitioned the iMac to ARM.
I think it does.
They just didn't make a 27-inch version.
So the door is absolutely open for a 27-inch computer.
And the reason I think they need something to go in there is because as you start specking out the Mac Studio to be kind of the way you want it, it's clear that this is a product for people who really do need the extra power offered by it.
Whereas if all you want is a 27-inch 5K display, but you need a little bit more than the Mac Mini, you're kind of stuck.
So just make a beefier Mac mini problem solved.
I mean, they could, but they didn't do that either.
I mean, this is not a beefier Mac mini.
Yeah.
I mean, so I think we, you know, there's, there is, there was already a rumor today from German about how like there, they are apparently working on, um, a, a up a Mac mini update using, I think the M two was the current rumor.
Now.
Um, it, it, it seems like the rumors are now, are now kind of converging on there being a collection of M two max coming out, like between June and fall.
Um,
something in that range i mean the m2 macbook air is in there and once you've got the that m2 chip that should spread to all the places the m1 was right right and if you look you know performance wise the m1 is totally fine for both low end and for mid-range needs i mean again i used m1's full time for a lot of this past you know time and but the ram limits on exactly that's that's where it really hurts you and yes to some degree it's tied to the system on a chip but in other ways it's not like there's no reason you couldn't make an m1 with more ram they just
haven't right well and i mean maybe it's just you know the the however they they spec the m1 however like m2 was like it's not like there's not enough circuitry on the on the chip to address more memory or something like that like when they make the m2 they could make a different choice right you know m1's limited to 16 gigs and i don't think you need to go to like 64 and 20 i think 32 would be fine like for for all these mid-range needs 32 would be a totally fine ram ceiling but i honestly i think the 27 inch iMac is dead and i don't think it's coming back um you know and so here's
Here's why.
I would almost put money on this thing coming back.
Great.
How much?
Maybe, like, probably a dollar.
Okay, you got it.
Maybe not this year, but I feel like it's untenable for... Put it this way.
It's untenable for Apple to keep the iMac at 24 inch for much longer.
Like...
like i understand why they made it this way because i 24 inches actually i've said this before about my sister how we were trying to get a new computer and she was viscerally uh repelled by the idea of a screen as big as 27 inches because it's just people don't want something dominating their household in that way which is why i think the 24 inch iMac is so great because it is it's a nice big screen but also it does not dominate your desk like it tries to be like unobtrusive but technology marches on i mean the original iMac had a 15 inch screen and it didn't stay that way forever and
eventually the imac screen is going to be larger than 24 inches and when it does 27 inch imac will come back that's all i'm saying i'm not i'm not saying like that tomorrow there's going to be a 27 inch imac despite this hole in the lineup or whatever it's just the 24 like it went up from 21 the low-end imac used to be 21 so they made 24 which is a nice in-between size and keep it but eventually two or three years from now they're gonna be like 24 really everyone else is so much bigger and they'll they'll work their way back up to 27 and 5k
You really just infinite timescaled us on this?
It's not infinite.
I'm going to say within three years, there'll be a 27-inch alignment.
You really just finite timescaled us on this?
All right.
That's the bet.
Three years from now, I'll bet you a dollar.
That's my $1 bet.
Yes.
See, I don't think it's coming back.
So first of all, the hole in the lineup, it is there.
But it's largely only there because the 24-inch iMac starts out so low-spec.
Again, if you spec things up, you actually can't spec up the 24-inch iMac to be anywhere near the base model Mac Studio with the display.
It's pretty far from the RAM.
Yeah, I mean, CPU, RAM, GPU, everything about it can't get close to the base Mac.
studio right if you get as close as you can which you still only have half the ram and of course the very different processor um it's two thousand dollars almost like for the for the 24 inch imac um so i mean that's what that's what i say with the space in the line whenever you do space in line you can't look at the options because options destroy like and like porsche options destroy any semblance of market segmentation because you can take the lowliest thing and then add all the options you're like what the hell happened i'm gonna buy a 24 inch imac for how much money
In some ways, it's a blessing you can't add RAM to them because it keeps the price down.
We don't know how big the market for the 27-inch iMac in 2022 really is.
I'm sure Apple has lots of sales data to suggest what they should do with this, but I think what Apple has done here, which probably reflects the market, the market for large desktops with high-performance stuff in them is probably very small.
and that market probably tends towards people who can afford and who want higher-end gear.
Now, that isn't everyone.
There's the whole XMAC crowd, which, as you mentioned, the XMAC crowd is largely computer nerds like us who know how to build our own computers and maybe have done that in the past or currently, or maybe it's gamers who want to put in gaming hardware and stuff like that.
These markets exist, but I think the market for people who are buying Macs to do that, first of all,
and then secondly people who are people who want to buy a large desktop display and a large desktop you know computer in 2022 i think that's mostly a first of all i think it's a very small market and i think it's mostly a pro market or it's the pc people who apple's never going to win over anyway and who wouldn't want modern macs to begin with because they can't play these games anymore
But the problem Apple has is that they sold a lot of 27 inch iMacs.
Now, I don't know how many they sold.
Only Apple knows.
But that's their biggest problem is that this was a product in their lineup.
They sold it to a lot of people.
And those people forget about anyone else that you're ever attracting to the market.
Those people have a difficult choice ahead of them because their choices go up market and spend a lot more money.
or go down in screen size to the 24 now maybe apple is correctly calculating like i said that more people are like my sister and really don't want that 27 inch thing dominating their space and the 24 that's like very thin and it comes in pretty colors they'll take that and they won't even notice the screen is smaller but i'm i have a hard time believing that i know a lot of people who really love their 27 inch iMacs those are existing customers someday their computers will get old they'll want to replace them and that's the that's i feel like that's the part where the whole new lineup will
will hurt apple the most existing 27 inch imac customers i mean we're replacing potentially no spoilers a you know a 2015 27 inch imac right there's the it's not just like how many they sold last year these things last for a really long time because your needs aren't demanding and it's the it's just the screen size right that's all it comes down to it's not as if people are saying oh i need something faster or whatever they just say really the only way i can get a screen that's even just people expect technology to march on that you know the screens get bigger or are
have better color, or have HDR, or have high refresh, and you say, really?
Just to match the screen that I've had since 2015, I have to spend how much more money for this Mac Studio thing that I don't even want and that I think is ugly, right?
That's their problem, is they just, they've sold a lot of 20-centage iMac.
So I think they will address that problem eventually, hopefully within the next three years.
The new 27-inch iMac is a studio display and either a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio.
Hard to agree.
That's what they want people to do.
And I can tell you, as somebody who has owned many 27-inch iMacs, I think this is the way to go.
But that's better for us, but it's not better for people who don't care about computers.
They just want a big screen and they want it to be an all-in-one.
They do not want more boxes and wires.
Ah!
not so convinced you're right i think a lot of those people would go with either first of all a laptop which is the real answer for most people but they're going to go for the 24 inch imac but they have a they have an existing 27 inch thing it's an all-in-one computer with very few cables with a 27 inch screen and they don't want to get a smaller screen but they don't want a separate box with a bunch of wires because they don't care about that stuff like it is it's a problems
So wait, these people don't care about computers, except they really care about the size of their screen.
You know what it's like when you get... It's the reason why Marco and I are spoiled now with our 6K.
It's the reason why you don't want to go back to 4K screens, because once you get used to a bigger screen, you get used to it.
And it seems like technology with everything, our televisions, the displays inside our cars, and yes, our computer monitors...
they just get bigger over time and we consider that the mark of progress because we use the space up to a limit obviously but i feel like 27 is not over that line so many people have been used to that space and if you get a computer where where the screen is smaller it's going to feel like somewhat of a downgrade now again apple may be right that
It'll feel like a downgrade, but people will get over it because they come in colors.
That's powerful.
I'm not discounting that.
I'm not saying that as a joke.
That is a real thing.
And those computers are even slimmer, which I think is something that people look for.
The same reason they don't want a Mac mini with a monitor is because they don't want more crap on their desk.
They like the fact that the iMac is just one thing and the new iMac is even less of a thing.
It's so thin and it comes in colors and it looks nice.
It's not a big miscalculation.
It's not a big miscalculation.
But I feel like it's something that Apple should address, either by just taking the iMac 24-inch and replacing it with a 27-inch of the exact same computer, like not adding it, not having a 24 and a 27.
Because I agree, having a 24 and a 27 seems weird.
But I feel like people who are used to 27 inches aren't going to want to downgrade, and they shouldn't have to.
And they shouldn't also have to suddenly become a computer nerd and have a bunch of boxes with wires.
As someone who has owned many 27-inch iMacs, the problem I always had, and I even, I got the opportunity, I ran into Craig Federighi at an event at WTC a few years back, and it was right around the time I was complaining a lot about the display and Mac Pro situation, who knew?
Did he tell you to drive it over to his house?
Yeah.
And we got to talking, you know, he knew that I was, you know, very vocal about my opinions on such things, and I forget the full context of it, but the one thing I told him was, like, the one thing I don't like about this setup is that the monitor and the computer are glued together, and so...
When I have a problem with either the computer or the monitor, I have to lose them both.
Whether that's sending them in for service or eventually replacing them, you have these things that are bonded together.
Now, the iMac display panel, that 27-inch panel that it seems to be very similar or the same as the studio display panel that they're releasing...
that monitor can last through many computer generations worth of hardware for a person.
As long as the monitor doesn't break, and they tend to last a pretty long time with no moving parts and stuff, they tend to be pretty long-lasting.
And so to be able to just have a monitor that you buy once, and then you have different computer guts that you can have on a totally separate schedule, and then you have redundancy or easier service mechanics...
that to me is great i i have had to sell or decommission so many perfectly good monitors because the computer in them had broken or vice versa many many monitors there's not not many some monitors had problems that i had to get rid of the imac because the monitor had problems and whereas this if you if you configure
The base model Mac Mini, the M1 base model Mac Mini, that's 8 gigs, 512 gigs, M1.
That's a great computer for so many needs.
That, plus the new studio display, is $2,500.
That's your new 27-inch iMac.
that's still more than the 27 inch imac and it's a separate box like what you're arguing for is what you're arguing for is obviously like we computer nerds no of course don't put the monitor with the computer because you need to be able to service them and upgrade them separately and that's totally a computer nerd thing the way regular people deal with the fact that you've got this monitor and the computer becomes obsolete is they don't care like i have a seven-year-old imac back there and the it's like oh but then i this monitor should be able to use across multiple generations they do use them across multiple generations they
They never upgrade.
They take a 2017, 2015 5K iMac and they just use it.
They're going to use it for 12 years because it's fine for them because that what they want.
That's why Apple still sells the iMac, that some people don't care about upgrading components separately, don't care about servicing.
They don't care about wedging them together for reliability.
They don't care about e-waste.
They don't care.
most people just want like if they want a desktop computer at all which is rare to begin with but if they want that they probably want a big screen and they just sit it there and they use it until something goes wrong with it that makes them have to get another one they're not listening to this podcast and they don't care about the separate stuff like obviously you're you're you're you're showing off your history with apple computers because i can't think of anyone who has an all-in-one pc all-in-one pc suck no but but
John, all people want is a one-piece solution with one cable and nothing else.
If that were the case, then even if all-in-one PCs were utter pieces of trash, which they were, then there would be more of them.
People bought tons of all-in-one PCs back when the iMac was popular.
Remember when everyone was copying the iMac and making it all on computers?
It's just that they were terrible.
No, the PC ones never sold.
Nobody ever bought those.
But they made tons of them because they were trying to cash in.
They made them.
No one bought them.
I wouldn't look to the PC market as a reflection of what people who buy Macs want.
Like I said, the Apple sells a lot of all-in-one iMacs and they sold a lot of 27-inch ones as well.
I don't think they did sell a lot of 27-inch iMacs.
Like I'm thinking of all the people that I know that have 27-inch iMacs and I can't think of anyone that
Are they still using them?
That had or has a 27-inch iMac that wasn't some sort of creative or software professional.
I know my friend Steve, who did the icon for Masquerade, he has an iMac Pro.
He does design for a living.
and keep in mind keep in mind too like a huge reason to buy the imac since like 2015 was that it was well uh when when was the retina imac was it 2014 somewhere around yeah yeah 24 yeah so that's the last eight years when the retina is that that was the only way to get retina on the desktop for a very long time
Yeah.
I mean, more importantly, to get a bigger screen than a laptop screen.
Because again, people who are buying a desktop computer probably want a screen that's bigger.
And, you know, the third party monitor market was terrible.
But if you bought an iMac, you got a really nice screen.
And by the way, a computer stuck to it as well.
And it was just one thing.
Right.
And now, like, I bet a lot of those 27 inch iMacs that were sold over the last eight years...
myself included a lot of those people would have gone the separate route if the studio display or equivalent existed yep oh yeah but the computer nerds would have but i think a lot of photoshop people for example who just do art like you think oh photoshop that needs a high-end computer not these days if you're doing 2d illustration work a 5k iMac you could still be using a 2015 5k iMac and using photoshop every single day on it and you'd be perfectly fine and the key feature that you want for it is i need a big screen for all my palettes and stuff right
Uh, you don't need a pro computer.
You don't need to upgrade them separately.
Like, you know, again, the 24 inch iMac exists because Apple still thinks there's a market for people who want an all one desktop computer with a larger screen.
And all I'm saying is that does still exist.
And the extra three inches don't invalidate that entire product.
I understand the words that are coming out of your mouth, but I'm team Marco on this.
I really don't think that the 27 will be coming back as an additional computer peer to the 24.
That wasn't the thing.
I was saying it could replace the 24 just because the streams need to get bigger.
I don't see that happening.
It's too big.
For a lot of the cases where you want a cute little desktop, the 27 would be too large.
Imagine that on a reception desk in an office.
A lot of these are sold for places like that.
Look at the measurement, though.
With a thin bezel, 27-inch iMac and the current 24-inch design would probably be like...
half an inch bigger half an inch wider and half an inch tall like we have to do the measurements because there are huge borders on the 5k iMac side you forget how big they are i was just doing the measurements for the thing we're going to get to in a second studio display it's those those borders the big black borders around the 5k iMac they make that machine much bigger than it is which is again why i think that the a 24 inch iMac design the slightly larger screen i think will inevitably happen and if it happens within three years i get a dollar from Marco
Either way, I really think that you are dramatically over-inflating the market for a 27-inch iMac.
Now, in the same way that I'm pooping on you for having no facts to back up your suppositions and your theories— Well, Apple won't give us the sales numbers.
If they tell us, we could just look it up.
We don't know.
I know.
No, it's not your fault.
Yeah.
For so many people, people who genuinely don't give a crap, they'll buy the 24-inch iMac.
For people that want a really nice monitor, they'll be getting something that I'm so excited to talk about.
And for people who want their own spin on things, I know a lot of nerds and PC people that don't want to talk about anything that is less than 30 inches and about 17 feet wide.
Yeah, but it's like three inches high, and it looks like you're looking at a gun slit of like a... Right.
No, I don't understand why people like this, but you do you.
Ultra wide, curved.
Seriously.
No, that's exactly it.
And so I really, really am 150% on the same boat as Marco here.
Well, the boat that's stuck in the sound or whatever it is.
But no, I really think that Marco is right, and I strongly agree that...
I think that there could be a place for a 27-inch iMac.
I'm not saying that that place is gone now, but I really think that it's already mostly filled by what we've got today.
And I think that once we get a slightly better equipped Mac Mini...
Something that can perhaps have at least 32 gigs of RAM or something along those lines, maybe with an M2, maybe just an M1 Max or an M1 Pro, whatever the permutation may be.
Once the Mac Mini can scale itself up just a touch and then you've got the studio display, I really truly think that that is Apple's intended solution for the former 27-inch iMac buyer or the former casual 27-inch iMac buyer.
Mm-hmm.
No, look at the casual 27-inch dynamic buyer wants all-in-one more than they want a big screen.
That's why they're going to get the 24.
The strongest argument you have is that anybody who wants a 27-inch all-in-one wants an all-in-one more than they want the power, and they're just going to go to the 24, and they'll be happy because it's colors.
I don't know.
Who are you talking to that insists on an all-in-one?
Where are these...
three people like all in ones like i'm talking to people the people who buy an imac are are attracted to the idea that there's less crap and you're like how much crap is the mac mini is tiny it's like three cables it's not a big deal they want it to just be a thing you plop in your desk that's the whole computer they want it to be like on tv and movies where people think the screen is the computer when you shoot the screen you've killed the computer you know that's a trope it's a trope because that's how people think about it they think the screen is the computer and with the imac that's actually true they don't need a little mac mini saucer puck thing that they don't understand attached
See, but if people want an all-in-one computer, you know what they buy?
A f***ing laptop.
That's what they buy.
That's what they buy, John.
People who are in the market for an iMac are already saying, I need something with a bigger screen than a laptop, right?
They're already moving themselves out of that market.
They're choosing to not buy a laptop.
Obviously, most people buy laptops.
We know that, but...
anyway someone in the chat room mike 484 i don't know if mike 484 worked at an apple store but says i'm telling you guys 2007 2014 in the apple store 27 inch iMac outsold all desktops i don't know if that's true we actually don't know the numbers it would help if we did but we'll see i mean if you really want me an infinite time on you i'll just go back to what i said before it's like screen sizes tend to go up over time so the idea that the iMac is going to stay at 24 is just as absurd as the idea that it was going to stay at 21.5 if
It stayed at 21.5 for a long time, much longer than my three-year window for the bet.
Granted, but it didn't stay at 21.5 forever.
Eventually, the cheapest iMac became 24.
And why?
Because if you're going to buy an iMac, it probably means you want a bigger screen and screen sizes go up over time and no one's going to argue with a little bit more screen space up to a certain limit.
Obviously, when we get into the 65-inch iMac, we're getting a little bit silly, but people are buying 42 and 48-inch OLED televisions to game on, so stranger things have happened.
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Oh.
can we please can i can it be my turn now please can we stop talking about displays and talk about a display yes exactly thank you so after much whining and moaning and complaining and fussing
I am happy to report that on behalf of everyone, I alone have manifested the studio display.
You are welcome.
What WWDC thing did we do where you two idiots made us walk out to we are the champions?
The Mac Pro.
It's not we.
It's not we.
I'm the champion, my friends.
No, you'd be the champion if you had a studio display, but you don't.
You would have caused this to happen if you would have bought an XDR.
Then it would have been your fault that it happened.
Oh, please.
After all the whining I've been doing, I'm claiming this is a personal victory.
So what do we got?
We got a studio display.
You're still not going to buy it.
We'll see.
We'll see.
You're not going to buy it.
We'll see.
All right.
We've got a studio display.
If that LG 5K stops working again, I'm not sure he can bear to send it to City of Industry for one more.
I think we saw a view of City of Industry during this presentation.
We saw so many cities and cities of chips.
It was ridiculous.
But anyway.
So, yeah, so we got a studio display.
This is presented by Nicole Cordes.
This is a 27-inch LG 5K that doesn't suck balls.
That's basically the summary.
And there's a few things that are important about what it's not.
Yeah, that's the interesting thing about this.
Yeah, it doesn't support HDR, XDR, whatever.
It doesn't have micro-LED.
It's not high refresh rate either.
Yeah, not high refresh.
It's just a 60 hertz, 27-inch, 5K good screen.
It's not as good as the XDR or as big, but it also costs like a fourth as much.
And this is kind of interesting because we were talking about this before of like, well, the laptops, they have these amazing screens, 1600 nits or whatever, but of course they're laptop size.
But then we were going through the whole thing of like, well, let's look at 27-inch screens that have like modern specs.
And it was like, but...
They cost so much money.
It's like, well, but maybe they're cheaper now because the laptop screens are obviously not that expensive because the whole laptop isn't that expensive, but also they're smaller.
So maybe panel tech has caught up and will be able to put out a 27-inch monitor that has good modern specs but also is less than an XDR.
And I still don't know whether that's a thing that's possible, but it's not a thing that Apple did.
And I think when we were talking about it, we were like, but would they make a 27-inch monitor that's just the same as the 5K?
Like, wouldn't they try to make it better in some way?
And as far as I can tell, the answer is no.
It's not better in any way that I can tell.
It's P3.
It's 60 hertz.
It's 5K.
Not that this is bad.
It's a good monitor, right?
And do they pass those savings on to you?
Kind of.
and what's what's great about this this is again like yeah it's not it doesn't have all that latest greatest tech it doesn't need to what this monitor needed to be is pretty much exactly what it is like yes they they nailed exactly what they needed to ship because people who want this monitor and who have wanted this monitor for eight years hi yeah hi people who want this monitor want it to be
significantly less expensive than the XDR.
They want it to be as similar as possible to what we've had in the aforementioned 27-inch iMac for the last eight years.
And they want it to be, you know, good Apple stuff, all integrated, not made by stupid LG, you know, good quality, looks nice, all that stuff.
And they wanted it to be a reasonable price for what it is from Apple.
And, you know, once the rumors started up, and we talked about this, you know, recently enough, my guess for what the pricing on an Apple 27 external monitor in 2022 would be...
I was saying the least I expected it to be was like $1,800.
And the highest plausible price that I think it might have been was $3,000.
And so to come in at $1,600... Asterisk.
But you were saying that it would have some modern specs.
Either it would be high refresh, or it would be HDR, or it would be mini LED, or some mixture of those.
Still, for today's Apple to release...
A standalone 5K monitor that's good, again, not super cutting edge on those fronts, but good for $1,600 is exactly what they needed to do.
And I'm so happy they did it.
This, I mean...
We thought this event was going to be fairly low-key.
Until the rumors came out right after we published our show last week, we thought this event was going to be a couple of new iPads, new iPhone SE, maybe some new watch bands.
And then the big iMac would be the star.
Even that was a maybe.
And it turns out this event, like, settled so much old business.
To have this display in the lineup and for it to be what it is and what it costs solves so many problems for so many people.
Yep.
This is so great.
And...
to even then get the, you know, the quote Mini Mac Pro that we've been expecting for, you know, for a while, but we didn't, we didn't think that was ready yet.
We didn't think the Mini Mac Pro or Jade 2C or 4C stuff was coming out until later this year.
So to have this, to have this all come out today, I just said last week,
That, you know, we heard the display rumors, but they didn't seem like it was going to be ready for, like, you know, anytime soon.
I was saying, like, six months to a year.
And then after we recorded, everybody said, oh, actually, the monitor's ready.
So, yeah, we missed that one again.
Excuse me.
I said I thought it was going to happen.
Thank you very much.
And you two jerks said no way.
I mean, because we had just been here.
We'd just been hearing the same rumors, but none of them ever had dates.
It was like they're making a monitor.
They're making a monitor.
It's got a it's got a it's got a, you know, a series chip in it.
They're making a monitor.
It's like, yeah, but when it's like, oh, I don't know.
It'll come eventually, probably.
But here it is.
And it's just again, this this fills an eight year hole in the lineup.
yes well put that is so great and the fact i mean i i just i i'm still kind of blown away i still almost can't believe you know it's like we've been missing this for so long like i almost can't believe that it's here finally that that people who want a 27 inch 5k retina display for a mac we actually finally have that
We actually have an external retina display for Macs that is the right DPI that is anywhere close to the right DPI that is less than $6,000 with its stand.
That's incredible.
We've been missing this for so long.
It's such a huge hole, and it's now filled.
What was the first retina Mac?
The 15-inch 2012 MacBook Pro.
So it's been 10 years, right?
Because we didn't have an Apple external retina display until now.
We had an LG external retina display.
There was a brief window at the time when there was a Dell one.
That doesn't count because only weirdos buy that.
It doesn't count because only weirdos with too much money buy that.
Hey, fellas.
Anyway, this is the first time in 10 years that we've had an external retina display by anyone other than LG, really.
And this is extremely exciting.
It is a little disappointing in the sense that, yes, like HDR would have been nice for many LED or so on and so forth.
But the LG 5K, when it was brand, brand new, I believe it was $1,500, wasn't it?
Or thereabouts?
It was something in that ballpark.
And I waffle back and forth between an LG hater and an LG apologist, depending on the moment in which you catch me and whether or not my monitor happens to be working at that particular moment.
But right now I'm on a happy swing.
The LG UltraFine 5K is a sufficient monitor.
It is a ripoff at $1,300 when it's working.
It's a ripoff at $1,300 or whatever it is new.
It was a hilarious ripoff at $1,600, $1,500, whatever we just said it was.
I thought it was $1,200 new, but I could be wrong.
No, no, now it is.
It's in shouting.
Today, it's in shouting distance of the price of this monitor.
And that's the thing that really makes this monitor look good is its complete lack of competition.
Because if you compare it to the LG, like the two things that Mark didn't mention, I really think put this monitor over the top.
Decent speakers, by all accounts, which LG does not have.
Oh, I can attest to this.
Decent speakers and a camera.
That makes it a system completer for people because who wants a monitor?
Oh, but I got to buy a webcam and I got to stick it on the top, but I got to do a thing.
It's like when I have a laptop.
Remember, this is not like, oh, this is the computer for the Mac Studio.
This is a monitor for all the laptops.
Like Mark was saying, this is not just a one single hole in the lineup.
It's a huge number of holes in the lineup filled by this thing.
And it lets you have the complete experience.
I don't have to add a camera.
I don't have to buy external speakers.
I just plug whatever my Mac is with one cable into this thing.
And by the way, it's 96 watts of charging, so it will charge everything.
This is a system completer.
That's what this product is.
And that's why I think the most important things it has in it are actually the speakers and the camera.
Because that lets you not worry about, like, it does all the things you need it to do.
Like, because if you don't care about HDR, don't care about mini LED, you're probably on Zoom calls, and it's nice to have it.
And by the way, it's a decent built-in camera.
It's not like, oh, it's a, you know, whatever the old one was, like the 1080p camera.
It's not that.
Like, it's a decent camera and good speakers.
With center stage.
yeah and and center stage like so i i really think they they nailed this product with the obvious succession of the stand which is some weird johnny i've hangover that i don't quite understand and we'll talk about in a second but forget about that no one's gonna buy that except for dumb people like me maybe but
but yeah this this product definitely fills the role and it does it like it embarrasses the lg because like would you pay an extra couple hundred bucks for apple quality better speakers uh and a monitor and by the way it charges your laptop and it's got like it's like stop yes i'll totally pay that for this product like it works yeah the value reliably
Well, and if it doesn't work, where do you go with it?
Do you have to ship it to the city of friggin' industry?
No.
Poor city of industry.
It's not their fault that LG has their center there.
Still, you don't have to ship it to the city of industry.
Like, they didn't even have the common courtesy to be somewhere in the Midwest, like, you know, other grown-up companies.
Anyway, you don't have to ship it anywhere...
generally speaking you just take it to the local apple store i know some of you don't live near an apple store just bear with me here you know you take it to the local apple store for me it's like 10 minutes down the road don't be creepy and then i can get it repaired if i were to buy one which i mean i forgot to mention the three mic thing the noise like again this is like oh who needs the mics or whatever because the mac studio doesn't have a mic and the laptop mic is over there and maybe it's clamshell wouldn't it be great if the monitor had a
Yes, it does.
It does all the things like you just you plug your computer in and now you have a system with a monitor that does all the monitor things that you expect a Mac monitor to do.
And you don't have to worry about any other crap.
So yeah, this this is great.
And for anybody for whom the price of this monitor seems absurd, I bet most of those people would not be in the market for an Apple monitor at all.
Yeah.
What are you cross shopping with?
Oh, this is expensive.
So show me the other Retina 5K monitor that you can use.
Is it the LG?
Well, we've talked about that.
Right.
Like if you if you want an inexpensive PC monitor that is totally not the right DPI range for either retina or non retina use on a Mac, there's lots of options for that for like, you know, a few hundred bucks.
Great.
Do that.
This monitor is filling a hole in the lineup that many people have demanded and it fills it exactly right at exactly the right price for what we expected it to be.
And that is it's I'm so happy about that.
Even with like, and you know, if I were to get this, I would be the sucker who spent the extra few hundred bucks on the height adjustable stand because every Apple monitor and iMac that I ever bought before, the stand was too low.
And too low.
Yeah.
And this continues that trend.
And so I would always have some kind of like book or, you know, some kind of big metal something or other that I would stick it on top of.
I had multiple books.
I had like college textbooks that I carried with me from job to job whose sole role was to be beneath my Apple monitor to get it to write out.
Right, exactly.
I would pay just a few hundred bucks for the tilt stand.
Even that, that makes it a $2,000 monitor, which is still roughly what I expected this monitor cost.
I'm so happy.
Even though I'm not going to buy one because I have the XDR now, and which has ruined me forever, as John mentioned earlier, because now I want 6K forever, but still...
This is so great for so many people.
This answers so many questions of like, okay, well, I want a good Mac desktop situation, but I also want a laptop.
Bingo.
Buy this.
You're done.
Most of these are probably going to be sold to people who have laptops.
That's great.
Oh, man.
So, so happy.
and it's like the kind of the realization of like the thunderbolt display with the weird cattail where you can charge your laptop or whatever like technology has gotten to the point where that is all solved as well so this is you know this is totally solving now uh this is apple's first non-ridiculous monitor i was gonna say it's their first monitor again we're ignoring the xdr because it's ridiculous um
there is room for more monitors if apple ever wanted to make them they can make a 4k version of this for people who want to spend less money and don't want as much space same features slightly lower price make it 4k like you were saying like oh this is a this is too expensive or whatever well get a pc 4k monitor the problem with the pc 4k monitor is it won't have a camera won't have decent speakers and won't have microphones
You know, like, well, I can buy things and stick them on.
And now you're screwing everything up.
Right.
So there is a market for a 4K.
And there's also a market for a more expensive version of this that has some of the modern stuff.
Maybe it has HDR.
Maybe it has mini LED.
Maybe it has iRefresh.
Pick whichever of those you think are important.
It would obviously be more expensive.
But there's a lot of room between the sucker and the XDR for you to slot in a higher end one.
So Apple could, in theory, have three external displays.
Not today.
Baby steps.
One is good.
And they picked the right one to make.
This is the one to make.
5K, right?
Because if people wanted 4K, they could get that.
You can get 4K, decent 4K monitors and deal with the old peripherals.
But if you wanted 5K, you were screwed and you were Casey.
You just had to be dealing with the LG.
So this was absolutely the one to make.
I really do hope that they start expanding this.
The one thing that gives me a little bit of pause, again, not complaining about this product.
It's specced and priced and everything about it is right.
But now that all the laptops have HDR, it kind of makes the desktop people feel like, oh, so if I want to look at HDR stuff, my only choice is I got to open up my laptop screen, which is amazing.
Or I have to get an XDR, which I'm never going to get.
HDR, the more I've dealt with the XDR, the more I think.
It's like when I first got it, I'm like, I don't even care what the HDR.
I just want a 6K screen.
But at this point, like every movie I take on my phone is HDR.
The photos I take on my phones are HDR.
It's nice.
That's why I sit in front of my computer and I go through photos and videos.
I see them in HDR.
Why?
Because I have this stupid monitor that shows them that way.
And if you have a Mac laptop, you get to see all that stuff.
But if you have this thing, you won't.
And I know HDR doesn't seem like a big deal, but Apple's devices are producing HDR.
And most photos that most people make are going to be produced by their phones and not by some weird camera thing.
So...
i think hdr if i had to pick one feature that like what is the version of this two years from now have or what is the higher end version of this have hdr is what i pick not high refresh and not mini led because i feel like mini led to get better blacks you know blooming is a problem anyway don't worry about it and high refresh
not a big deal but we're all producing hdr content the laptop have hdr that is the next obvious upgrade to this monitor i i wouldn't want it to come with hdr now and be an extra thousand bucks absolutely not right this is the right product for it's it's overdue this is an overdue product it's not the right time the right time was three years ago right but it was overdue six years ago i think 10 but okay fine it should be what it is but
I am now counting the years.
I'm not going to say counting the days.
I'm counting the years for this product to get HDR because it really deserves it.
And part of it is Apple's fault for having such phenomenal laptop screens because this really kind of like pins it in on both sides.
And also, by the way, this makes me this is, you know, always looking for reasons to make myself feel better about buying the stupid monitor.
this makes me feel slightly better with xdr because now i'm like you know what i don't have to worry about the fact it doesn't have hdr because my stupid mother has hdr and only costs five times as much right now i think i co-sign on all of that like i too when you heard me say it here when i bought the xdr i didn't care about hdr
I was only buying it because it was a good retina large screen, and that's what I wanted.
And I have since come to very much appreciate the HDR display, and exactly for the same reason.
I'm not watching HDR movies from studios and stuff, or producing them, for that matter, on my computer.
I'm viewing photos in photos that I take on my phone, and viewing videos that I shoot on my phone, and they're HDR, and it looks really cool.
And it looks like I was there, which I was, but you know.
Anyway, so...
this is why i talk unscripted for a living but yeah like it is really nice however again yeah totally agree they they shouldn't have added it in the 27 inch if they couldn't do it for this price yet and they didn't and so i assume they couldn't and that's great and down the road if they get to add that at some point that's great too um but uh but getting this to be like in the you know 1600 range that was really really what was what was needed here
You know how Apple can actually do this, like obviously not this year or whatever, but like the way that we're going to sort of solve this conundrum of, oh, if you want a really big monitor with HDR, it costs $5,000, right?
And the other choice is HDR, but on a smaller monitor.
Who is it?
Dell has a QD, and we talked about this past, Quantum.OLED.
They have a QD OLED screen.
uh it's not retina resolution i believe but it is smallish i forget how big is the qd oled uh dell thing chat room they'll look at it for us and it's like maybe 30 something inches like wide form factor or whatever is it the 8k one or that's something else no no but anyway it is a computer monitor it's made for gaming right it's oled so true blacks better than mini led you know per pixel blacks right
really great color hdr not as not 1600 nits but still hdr more than 500 nits and it's reasonably priced it is i think it's like the number starts with a one it's a four digit number starts with a one it's like 1300 1500 or something or whatever that shows that we are within shouting distance in a few years of grinding on qd oled to be able to have a 5k qd oled screen for not a huge amount of money because if they can do
like whatever this resolution is now it's is it 1300 whatever it's a 34 inch wide screen it's non-retina right for for 1300 bucks this is a generation one qd oled thing it makes me think that the the potential of a reasonably priced qd oled like qd oled everywhere across all of apple's products but especially on the desktop will solve this problem probably before we get to the point where mini led hdr is affordable that you can put it in a 5k retina res 1600 display
I'm just so happy that this thing exists.
I'm so incredibly happy.
The unfortunate thing about it, though, is that I already have a 5K monitor that is really not that different from this one.
Well, it depends on the day.
You can sell that.
You can say it's refurbished.
The USB ports are as good as they're ever going to be.
That is true.
You could use both.
You could have the dual display lifestyle, which I know you love.
You know, it's funny you bring that up because I do love the dual display lifestyle.
And I like having my two displays, my 5K and my 4K.
Marco, you said that there was no chance I paid the money for this because I'm cheap.
And John, do you have a vote?
Oh, whether you already bought it?
I so much hope that you did that I'm going to say yes, you did.
So I hemmed and hawed because why would I pay $1,600, as much as $2,000, for a monitor that is really not that different than what I have?
However, I've paid the price with this LG.
You pay every day you use it.
And I pay every day I use it, and I deserve a treat.
So a friend was kind enough to offer me his Apple discount, which was very cool.
And so I was able to acquire one at a slightly discounted number, and it will be here in a month.
Nice.
Which stand did you get?
Here's the thing with the studio display.
You didn't face it mounted, did you?
So here's the thing with the studio display.
I didn't know what I wanted to do because I really do like the dual monitor lifestyle.
I know it's not for everyone.
That's fine.
But I really do like the dual monitor lifestyle.
And I could swallow the $400 for the height adjustable stand.
But right now, I have a two-up Visa situation on my desk that's actually working out pretty well.
So I have my 4K to the right.
the 5k ultra fun in front of me.
And I actually really like this.
And since I have to choose a purchase time, you cannot swap back and forth.
I went with the vase amount and, and I think I'm going to be, I'm going to be happy with that.
I sure hope I am because this ship has sailed, but that's what I did.
So it'll be here sometime mid April.
And what I plan to do
is put the lg4k which by the way we were talking about this earlier you know what are your options for a retina display as as i've said many times this lg4k is is a perfectly serviceable monitor if you're not snooty and i am not terribly snooty and if you don't need it to be reliable or no no no the 4k the lg4k is very reliable yeah the 4k is very reliable 4k also shakes when you type though doesn't it
No, that stand was better.
Not stellar, but it was better.
But nevertheless, it doesn't have a camera.
It does have speakers, but they're utter trash.
They make the ultra-fine speakers, which are truly garbage, sound excellent.
And so it's not an all-in-one solution, but as an accessory monitor, it's not bad.
So anyways, this LG 4K will be put to the side and maybe used as like a, I want to work on the porch monitor because I'm turning into that device.
guy.
Uh, and then I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to shimmy the 5k over to its spot and it will be my access of the existing 5k to, to the, to that spot.
And it will be my accessory monitor and the new studio display will be my primary monitor.
And that's what I plan to do.
And I am so excited and I can't wait till mid April.
Let's just talk about the Apple stand problem a little bit.
I mean, if you look at it, it looks like it's similar to the XDR stand in terms of the mechanism, at least aesthetically speaking, similar kind of like rounded thing that comes out and whatever they have inside there for counterweighting and all this other stuff.
and that's that stand i mean plus 400 for a stand that's not appropriate apple go to your corner um and well in all fairness that's very similar to the pro stand that cost a thousand dollars by itself i know but like for the pro one everything's absurd up there it's ridiculous it doesn't make any sense but when you this is a 1600 monitor an adjustable stand is
Like if you want to make it an optional extra, it shouldn't be $400 extra.
And the way you do that is don't use the over-engineered one you made for the XDR.
I know that probably saves you some time.
Hey, we don't need to engineer it again.
We've got one.
But the problem is the one you engineered costs a lot of money to make.
And then you need to make your margins and then blah.
And then you need to make margins on top of the margins because every time you have options, that's where you get all your margins from.
And the final thing is what Marco said.
This thing is too damn low.
Apple's monitors are just too low.
And I was looking at this because, again, I haven't talked about what I'm buying, if anything yet.
I was waiting for a big iMac.
I didn't get a big iMac, but my wife does need a new computer.
And I was like, oh, what about this stand?
Let me look at what the heights are.
How big is the...
How high is her current iMac?
And if I got the one that didn't have the adjustable stand, if it's just the height of her current iMac, maybe that's fine.
Well, there's two problems.
One, when I asked her about this, she said her current iMac, she always felt it was a little bit low.
So right away, I said, okay, well, I don't want to match the height of her iMac because she feels like that's low.
I should get it higher.
The problem is if you get it with the regular stand,
it is even lower than the current than basically a 5k iMac so the non-adjustable stand is very low kind of like it is in 24 inch iMac it's it's not it's not it's not the height my wife prefers it and ergonomically speaking where they say where your eye line should be on the monitor all those things are very low i kind of understand why apple errors on the side of being lower because higher feels more awkward than lower because looking slightly down at something is much better casey than looking slightly up at them which is why you shouldn't put your tv over at the fireplace and
But that's what they do.
And then your only option is adjustable stand or you can just put books under it because books are way cheaper than $400.
Well, maybe not.
Actually, maybe not the textbooks that I've been putting under it.
There's another whole other issue there, right?
So here are the things.
The regular stand height to I think this is the top of the monitor is 18.8 inches wide.
for 400 you get adjustable height and the adjustable height the minimum adjustable height is 18.8 inches so if with the adjustable stand at its lowest position that's how high the non-adjustable stand is the non-adjustable one is not in the middle of the range it's the bottom of the range right and the max height is 23 inches and an imac 27 inch is 20.5 inches but there's a huge bezel on top of the thing so it's really like 19.5 inches to the pixels right
so yeah the non-adjustable one is low be prepared for that um i haven't seen anyone look this up but could you stick the monitor on top of the mac studio or is the stand too big would it hang off the edges i don't know the answer to that question that might be awkward but you can only just put books but also i think that would be too high then probably but you never know like
Anyway, I'm sure people will work something out.
Apple never showed it in that arrangement.
I think it would be awkward and potentially dangerous and tippy in that arrangement.
It might not fit at all, but just keep that in mind.
The other thing to keep in mind is the stands are not interchangeable according to Apple.
Apple's little thing here says, note, each stand or mount adapter is built in.
They are not interchangeable, so it's important to consider your workspace needs at the time of purchase.
So if you buy the adjustable one and you want the regular one or you buy the regular one, you want the adjustable one or you want to switch to VESA,
no go now that's what apple says it could be when mac fix it gets this they realize there's something you can swap out and do or whatever but just keep that in mind and that's that's that's part of the unfortunate thing of apple's weird stand problem is it makes you think about something you shouldn't have to think about if we just took it for granted that of course all apple large display things for the desktop come with an adjustable stand because that's ergonomically appropriate and apple cares about ergonomics
We should just take it for granted.
And we shouldn't have to worry about how Apple figures out how to engineer it or whatever.
They would engineer the over-engineered one for the 6K.
They would engineer a cheaper one for the other things.
Keep in mind, they produced the, you know, the iMac G4 with that amazing spring-loaded ARM thing.
That was in like a $1,700 computer.
That thing was freaking amazing.
It had like a million degrees of motion.
You can move it with your fingertip.
If they can do that, there's no reason it should be at $400 to get a slightly height-adjustable display on an otherwise well-priced monitor.
So I hope Apple works that out.
I'm just so excited this exists.
I'm so excited to get mine.
I am overjoyed that this tremendous gaping hole in Apple's product lineup has finally been plugged.
One more thing to talk about with this product.
The rumors were that it would have an A-series system on a chip inside it.
We're trying to figure out what the hell they would do with that.
um if it was a weird made-up rumor would they use the gpu to augment your gpu things i threw in the one of our slacks the previous day is like when you don't have a computer attached to it it could doubles an apple tv because why not like and it turns out they put an a13 in it right so the apple tv 4k apple's top end apple tv has an a12 in it
So this has a better system on a chip than the Apple TV.
And it has a gorgeous screen attached.
There's no reason, technically speaking, why they couldn't have just made this an Apple TV.
Would that be dumb?
I don't know, but it's there.
But the question is, all right, so it's got an A13 in it.
What the hell is the A13 doing?
Well, like I was saying, when everyone was spinning out the rumors of this, like the simplest answer is probably that it runs the display.
And why do they use an A-series chip for that?
Because Apple's got a lot of A-series chips.
Like they can probably make A13s pretty cheaply these days.
Maybe they got a bunch of them hanging around.
rather than custom designing a chip just for this display, the A13 is a fully, you know, Turing-complete tiny computer that you can make do whatever the hell you wanted to do.
And so I think, what is the A13 doing inside there?
Well, probably mostly twiddling its thumbs, honestly.
But when it's not twiddling its thumbs, it runs the camera, runs the speakers, does spatial audio stuff, like...
handles like the usb like who knows like it does all the things it's again would apple have created the a13 for this monitor hell no but if you've got the a13 already and it fits in the pricing thing it's probably a reasonable thing to chuck in there now uh philippe esposito on twitter uh had this tweet which is a potentially our the grim future of this product which he says
I guess this is what happens when you put an A13 chip in a display and it's using plutil to dump a plist file from, I guess, a beta version of macOS.
And in the plist file, it is a name value pair and the name is title panic display.
And the value is your display was restarted because of a problem.
Oh, no.
Yeah, when you've got a system on a chip in your display, kind of like Marco's car, you might have to reboot your display after it crashes.
We hope not.
And obviously, there's processors inside the XDR.
There's processors inside all these things.
Apple didn't make a big deal of it, but this is like the most overpowered display ever shipped because the A13, don't forget, there's GPUs in the A13.
There's like the motion processor.
It's not like they can make a special custom version of the A13.
It's an A13.
It's got an image processor.
It's maybe they're using that for the camera.
This is the most overpowered display probably Apple has ever made.
And
i hope that it opens the door for them because they fit into the price envelope of this thing right so the a13s are probably pretty cheap you know and it's not a big chip to begin with it's a phone chip not a mac chip and all that other stuff and it's old all right there is the potential to do way more interesting stuff with this hey maybe face id again we didn't get face id it's not we understand face id is not a thing on a mac for reasons that are frustrating to me but
uh you know again people who repeatedly explained to me how expensive and annoying it is to deal with face id i say it's on it's on ipads it's just anyway if we get it eventually it'll be great to be in the monitor if we do the a series chip will already be in there if they just do that as the status quo like it makes me wonder if the xdr replacement will also have an a series chip in it just because
Like, that's how they're building monitors now.
Fine.
I'm okay with it.
I just feel like there is a lot of wasted... Not wasted.
There's a lot of potential that is not being used.
It's not wasted because it's not like the price is jacked up because of the $30 A13 they had to stick inside the thing.
Or $15, whatever it costs them now to make.
I think it's fine.
But I am excited about the possibility of doing more interesting things with that.
Primarily Face ID, but, you know, making it doubles in Apple TV.
That sounds dumb, but, like, you basically...
I guess you need storage.
You get it almost for free, right?
Just a streaming Apple TV.
I guess you need Wi-Fi at that point.
I don't know.
I haven't really thought it through.
But anyway, there's a lot of compute in this monitor.
Hopefully, they'll figure out to do something with it.
Real-time follow-up from Jelly.
The foot on the non-adjustable stand would fit on top of the Max Studio.
So the Max Studio is 7.7 inches square.
The foot on the non-adjustable stand is 6.6 inches.
However, the adjustable stand is 8.1 inches.
So, womp womp.
Yeah, that's the other thing about the adjustable thing, because I'm assuming it is straight up the thing from the same sort of hinge part from the XDR's $1,000 stand.
It's kind of awkwardly proportioned because that little hinge was proportioned for this giant monitor.
When you put it on a smaller monitor with a smaller foot, it kind of makes the monitor jut out more a little bit.
So it's a little bit weird.
Also, the XDR can rotate, can't it?
Yes.
And I presume this cannot.
Well, the VESA mount allows or is able to be rotated or you can mount it in portrait or whatever.
But I would assume that the height-adjustable stand, it does not let you rotate the monitor.
And the weird thing is like –
you know the over-engineered hinge like one of the things i complained about when i got my xdr is that the hinge actually doesn't feel that sort of precise or smooth or expensive it's kind of scrapey and not great like it's very solid it's not like it's shaking or anything but it's not the premium experience you would expect from a thousand dollars that i feel like most of the thousand dollars is the fact that i'm assuming the foot for the xdr the stand is like machined out of a single giant block of aluminum and that's like half the cost right there yeah probably
and you know and i think it's also true to be fair of these ones like the imac foot and the non-adjustable foot i think those are also from a solid piece of them it's just smaller um as far as i can tell i don't know it might be friction welded or some other crap but this is what we miss when not having the johnny i videos where he tells us in intimate detail how to manufacture every single part of these products
And then one final thing that Apple released is a new silver and black keyboard slash mouse slash trackpad, which I think if I didn't just drop like $400 on a trackpad and keyboard, I would definitely be buying a pair of these as well.
Now, are these the same ones that came with the Mac Pro?
no because they have touch id i was confused by this too when i was going through the store and i'm like i'm like wait aren't they always black i'm like i guess not because someone posted a picture of i think it was merlin sent me a picture of his like touch id keyboard i'm like white keys what is that and they have the black ones so i have the mac pro one does indeed have black keys but of course no touch id
right but and what about the other like the the pointy devices are those the same as the mac pro i assume oh i don't i don't think i even unwrap that mouse i don't i don't deal i don't deal with this it's if i can leave it mint and package never having been done i will do so i'm pretty sure that's still in the mac pro box in the attic i don't touch that crap it's not crap i just it's not the mouse that i prefer
We've been going two hours and almost a half, nearly a half, and you just brought up the Mac Pro, and this is when we heard the quote, which you had quoted earlier, making our transition nearly complete with just one more product to go, Mac Pro, but that is for another day.
So they spent a lot of time during the Mac Studio portion of the presentation kind of crapping all over the Mac Pro, which made me laugh very, very hard and made me feel very bad for you and Stephen Hackett.
But nevertheless, what do you think?
Oh, you never told us if you bought anything.
Is this the time to tell us if you bought anything, John?
Sure.
So again, the plan was my wife needs a new computer.
She's in 2015 iMac.
It's a little bit creaky.
I wish I had more memory.
I wish it was faster, especially because all the kids have accounts on there too.
And if they're going to log into a computer, it's going to be that one.
If you have all three people logged in at once, your RAM is starting to get, they're starting to get fights over RAM.
Sometimes switching users, you can see it swapping and stuff and it makes noise sometimes anyway.
But no big iMac, right?
But I am the exact person that Marco talks about who appreciates the fact that if I can get a separate monitor in a computer, I prefer that.
to having an all-in-one my wife on the other hand is not excited about having another box on her desk even though i told her it's going to be a very small box it's not going to be a big deal what do you think of that right so my plan was okay i'm not going to wait around for a bigger iMac i like this better anyway even if my wife will grumble a little bit about having more cables and boxes and wires in the end it will be good because i will upgrade the computer part of it
more often than every seven years or whatever we're doing with this imac right i will do that um just to sort of keep up with things so i'm like i should get a mac studio so what i should get is obviously the cheapest cpu because i don't you know she doesn't need any cpu the m1 max is more than enough it's gonna be so much faster than her computer unfortunately one of the things i want out of it is more ram because again three kids logged in at once and doing stuff and the kids are launching photoshop now because they know how that works and you know i do need more ram and now i've got to like
how yeah i can only max out at 64 because i'm not going to get the ultra so i guess i gotta look at the m1 max with 64. i mean that's probably plenty but you know grumble a little bit i don't care about the gpu we don't do any gaming on it but you get what you get right um so that's how i can spec that out uh disk space my problem before was stopping myself from spending money is i'm filling up this external disk i need a bigger external ssd oh don't buy one
your next your big iMac that you buy will have four terabytes so i have to go to four terabytes and now i gotta eat the stupid four terabyte price plus twelve hundred dollars oh screw you but all right fine you know and then i was like like halfway through configuring this and i'm like why am i doing this now that the display is out why don't i just get a mac mini and i was reminded why i don't get a mac mini ram
so back i go to the studio display page and i'm specking it out again um and so what i ended up with and i we had the discussion about the adjustable height that's how i had the thing of like do you care about the adjustable height stand and she's like how high is it and then she said it's too low and so we have to get the adjustable height because or we have to put a book under it and i'm not going to make her have books underneath her computer so we're going to get the adjustable so it's studio display adjustable stand uh mac studio with the cheapest cpu with 64 gigs of ram four terabytes right
But, kind of like Casey, and I assume Marco, I have friends and family who work for Apple, and I wanted a friends and family discount.
And my friends and family said, oh, we can't order that yet because Mac Studio is not available for purchase under the friends and family plan.
Yet.
So here I am.
I have not ordered anything.
I want to order something, but I also don't want to pay a lot for this muffler.
So I'm waiting for the employee, friends and family purchase, whatever, blah, blah, blah thing to make it possible for people to buy the Mac Studio.
As of, I think, last night, it is still not possible to do that.
So I am just patiently waiting.
And by the way, the shipping dates and these things are pushing out like weeks and weeks and weeks.
so who knows when i'll have it yeah i was gonna say like i think you waiting for your discount to work is going to cost you like three months at least yeah i mean that's fine again this is a seven-year-old computer and she's not she kept saying she doesn't need a new one so she's not in a hurry to get it so you know i'm unfortunately it seems like atp as a whole marco will probably beat me to buying this when he eventually caves and
which by the way and i've i've actually never used one of those friends and family discounts for you you said that i that you assumed i'd do it i don't i've no one's ever i assume you have friends i assume you have friends or family at apple and you definitely have friends at apple who you know you could get the discount because that's the point of the friends and family discount it's not like we're getting some inside deal if you work for apple you have a certain amount of friends and family discounts that you can give to family but also friends so if you are friends with someone in apple they might be able to get you a discount on your computer and
when i looked at what the friends and family discount was because you can see the prices uh it's substantial like because what they do is they cut down on the margins and i end up buying all the stupid options that kill the margins you're like wow that option for the four terabyte ssd is still obscene but not as obscene it's it ends up being like i think on this particular computer it's like 900 savings right so it is not small beans and especially since i'm kind of like
honestly for my wife a mac mini and the studio display i would get that for her if i could get it with more ram because she does not need the mac studio this is what marco and i are saying i don't particularly but you can't because it's m1 and it's only 32 today on an infinite time scale john you'll be able to yeah like i i bet that i bet the next mac mini update i think will close some of that gap
Yeah.
And anyway, and yes, this Max, just to be clear for all the making fun of my 4 Mac Pro.
Yes, this Mac Studio, the low end Mac Studio I'm getting will probably stomp all over my Mac Pro.
Oh, totally.
To that point, two things.
One, I totally unrelated to this announcement because this is, you know, just the thing I was doing.
I was noodling around a weekend or two ago.
uh playing with microsoft flight simulator in windows 10 uh in hdr and you know and not 6k because that's a that's a beast of a game um that's the thing i can't do with the mac studio because i can't play intel games right so there's still things that my clunky old computer can do that this one can't and uh on the front of the mac setting aside my personal stuff um
uh one final note on the mac pro like so that ending thing this is another thing i love about the new apple someone said should we mention something about the mac pro and they did they just said it because if they didn't we'd spend this whole freaking show going oh my god is the mac studio the new mac pro what about expandability no they said and we're gonna do the mac pro don't worry about it we're still gonna get to that it's like okay good now we don't have to waste any you know fretting over that
They're still going to do a monster, horrendously expensive computer with that's huge and has tons of expansion and probably, you know, even bigger CPU somehow that we can't figure out yet.
They're still going to do that.
But just looking today at the Mac Studio, what if I get a Mac spec Mac Studio?
Isn't that like the best computer Apple owns?
when we talked about this before the possibility of apple doing you know the jade 4c and counting up the gpu cores what i said was that it is plausible that a you know jade 4c type thing without amount of gpu cores can match or exceed the performance of the best video card available in a mac today but what i also said back then was but if you get a mac pro you don't can't you can put more than just one
of the best GPU available today.
In fact, you can put four of them in there.
So if you look on Apple's Mac Pro page, they will show you, hey, if you get two of the Radeon Pro W6800X Duos, so two cards with two GPUs on it each, you get 60 teraflops of single precision computing power on it.
An M1 Ultra max spec'd up is 21 teraflops, right?
So even if you double that for a double M1 Ultra or a Jade 4C, you're still at 40 teraflops.
So you're not able to put as much GPU compute in the top of the line 2022 Mac Studio as you can in a 2019 Mac Pro.
Because of the magic of expandability in third-party video cards.
So it remains an open question.
Well, first of all, that's why people would still buy Mac Pros, because if you really need maximum GPU for whatever the heck you're doing, you can put more of it into a Mac Pro than you can in this thing, right?
And the second thing is, why are they still making the Mac Pro?
Why doesn't everyone just use the Mac Studio?
It seems like the answer still might be, well, the Mac Pro has card slots and things that can go into those card slots are third party video cards.
Like, again, it's an open question, but the bottom line is the numbers just don't add up to a world where
there is a mac pro shipping that is less computationally capable than one from 2019 so i have to think that when the mac pro comes obviously it'll be cpu monster like there's no like the freaking mac mini is faster than this thing in cpu right whenever it's obviously it will be a cpu monster but gpu wise because the mac the current 2019 mac pro because it has all those card slots and because gpu vendors keep making new gpus and because you keep sticking them in the card slots and there's a lot of them you just can't match that with the gpu that's built into the system on chips
So I don't know what Apple's going to do here.
This is a real sort of decision point for them.
Do they continue to pursue the Mac Pro strategy of you can have cards and stick them in there?
Or do they say, we're giving up on that and in exchange, you're not going, the ceiling is going to be lowered on your GPU, but we think most of our customers don't care about that anyway.
So we shall see probably December or next year.
It's hard to predict, but that's going to be, that's going to be exciting and are incredibly disappointing if they just put the M1 Ultra in it.
That, I think... I'm sure we'll talk more about this in future episodes.
But I do not expect a Mac Pro with Apple Silicon and slots.
And I think they were pretty clear today.
In all the comparisons they were doing to the Mac Pro, including GPU and CPU comparisons, there were a lot of qualifiers on those.
Comparing it to...
particular GPU configuration XYZ on the Mac Pro.
Or doing metal benchmarks instead of picking benchmarks that are tailored to their specific hardware that they know they put in the system on a chip.
Right.
They obviously cherry-pick benchmarks to make them look the best, but
I think a lot of what they were showing us today, like the way they chose to present certain things, a lot of it was basically saying, look, you don't need the old Mac Pro anymore.
Even though, you know, you're right that the ceilings are higher on it for the expandability.
The RAM ceiling is way higher.
I believe it's one and a half terabytes compared to 128 gigs.
Like, that's way higher.
It obviously has higher ceilings.
But what Apple is trying to push here, I think it's pretty clear that
that whatever the new Mac Pro is going to be, it's probably not going to be radically different than the Mac Studio.
We're seeing how they're scaling their architecture.
They're scaling it by just multiplying the chip.
That's what they're doing.
They're taking the same system on a chip and they're multiplying it.
The M1 is very similar to the M1 Pro and Max, and the M1 Pro and Max are very similar to each other.
The Max is just, you know, a longer version of it or whatever.
And then the, you know, the Ultra is just two Maxes stuck together.
And, you know, if the four die plans come together, and that's what forms the Mac Pro, which I think is the most likely outcome here.
then I don't think it's going to be any different than just a bigger version of the Mac Studio that has four of whatever the big CPU of the year is glued together and no slots.
This is what I've been predicting for a long time, and I think I'm sticking with this prediction.
And when they make that transition...
There will probably be a bit of a regression in certain maximums that are available compared to the Intel slot-based Mac Pros.
But I think everybody will take that.
Not everybody.
I think most people will take that in exchange for the other benefits that it will provide.
And I don't see them ever having third-party GPU support or slot support or any of that again.
I think that's all over.
I mean, this is another area where it would help to know Apple sales numbers because, you know, I'm sure people who are the five people who are listening to this are yelling like slots aren't just for GPUs.
What about audio interface cards?
I have every one of the slots on my Mac pro filled with audio interface cards and those things are not GPUs and you can't put them in a Mac studio size thing.
So what are we going to do?
And that's to get back to the question we always get back to is like, does Apple care about that market?
Do they want it?
And the thing I still have trouble with is they made this big turn with the Mac pro and said, we're going back into that market.
And I just feel like even just to recoup the cost on the investment of the tooling for the Mac Pro case, they're just going to have to ship more computers in that case.
And if you ship computers in that case, you can't fill that case without expansion slots.
So I'm still in the camp that I think there's going to be expansion slots, if only as a consequence of the decision that they did make about the Mac Pro all those years ago.
Just to sort of see that to its logical conclusion and reap all of the money that they've already invested in this particular computer, it seems like...
they should at least make one more round of computers with it.
But to your point, the way that Apple would pitch this is it's not about specs.
Like who cares how much RAM you have?
It's about capabilities.
What are you trying to do with your computer?
Oh, but I'm trying to render video in Final Cut.
Well, guess what?
This thing renders video in Final Cut twice as fast.
But how do you do it twice as fast?
You have half the GPU compute and you have a quarter of the RAM.
It's like, don't worry about how we do it.
We're just telling you the job that you want to do.
we can render it twice as fast so now do you want to buy this and you're like but but i want ram and it's like look do you want to render twice as fast or not but that really depends on apple precisely knowing what people want to do and unfortunately for apple if they want to if say let's say the market for audio professionals is important if they want to keep that market and if that market demands
a bunch of physical interface cards and they're not gonna build those physical interfaces into the computer, they're just gonna lose that market.
And it's just a question of which market do you want and which market do you not want, right?
I feel like it would be another flip-flop betrayal for this point to Apple say, actually we changed our mind, no slots, right?
Even though I agree that for lots of important use cases,
you don't need that stuff you don't need 1.5 terabytes of ram you could get away with less gpu compute because apple knows for those specific use cases whether it be image editing you know or like machine learning or uh you know obviously gpu video rendering apple can highly tune these computers to that case but i still kind of feel like that's the mac studio that's that's the computer that does that and the mac pro is the outlet valve for letting the mac studio be awesome for the people who want it
And for everyone else has weird needs and is willing to pay a ridiculous amount of money.
Tower Mac Pro expansion slots, ridiculous system-on-a-chip conglomeration thing, and also third-party video cards on top of it.
I don't understand how that works in my mind for all the reasons we discussed in the past.
How do you do?
Do you have...
even more non-uniform memory you have 128 plus 128 plus another pool of extra ram do you have the big built-in gpu but then also the other gpu cars just use your computer i don't understand how it works this is this is in many ways way more fascinating and confusing than the original mac pro for us because the original the mac pro the 2019 mac pro
They said they were in a modular computer and it straight up made a cheese grater, like just a bigger, nastier one, right?
Made perfect sense.
Works.
Everything works out.
It's got a Xeon in it.
It's got a bunch of slots.
Like it is exactly what we hoped and thought it would be.
But the ARM-based Mac Pro is just this cloud, just giant nebulous cloud of hopes and dreams and doubt and Casey annoyance.
So we'll wait.
I guess we could probably get at least until the end of the year to figure out what that's going to be.
But I'm super excited.
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And thanks to our members who support us directly.
You can join at atv.fm slash join.
We will talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
apple snuck in one final one mac os 12.3 is coming out next week apple said in the press release they pre-announced the product how do you know it's coming next week what if there's a last minute bug oh no so brave of them i still i can't believe like the way how they ended it with john turnus basically saying there's only one more and it's the mac pro and it's coming only one more makes sense because it's had one more product what product needs to be transitioned from intel well but in that in that one sentence he killed the 27 inch iMac
no because the iMac has already transitioned to to arm iMac already did that all right we'll talk about that some more some of the time but here here's the real problem why are they still selling the intel mac mini that's a really good question i mean that's just weird like it's still the has the mac mini product transitioned to arm yes has the just name a product the only product left that is not transitioned is the mac pro so that doesn't say anything but i just love the fact that they said mac pro because if it didn't i'd swear this whole show would have wiped out with me tearing my hair out over like
Is the Mac Studio the new Mac Pro?
What does this mean?
I mean, again, they didn't say what the Mac Pro would be.
If the Mac Pro is just a Mac Studio in space gray, then Marco is 100% right on his prediction.
But still, there's going to be some product called Mac Pro, and it's going to have an ARM chip in it, and they're going to make it.
i think they're going to keep selling the mac mini as intel for a while longer for the same reason they're selling the mac pro as intel because a lot of people still have like weird specialized needs that require an intel machine or some capability mini colo it's the mac mini colo machine
probably i mean like i'm guessing because i mean a lot of mac minis are frequently used in those kind of roles that's that's a critical part of what the mac mini needs to address and so that actually does make sense that they would keep offering that for a while oh wait i think doesn't doesn't amazon have speaking of aws i think aws has like an ios server build farm thing that you can do and i think they use mac minis for it
pot it that wouldn't surprise me i mean that would make sense i mean that's the type of thing of like it's kind of like the whatever whatever there is the the 101 the macbook with the cd thing that they kept around forever for education yeah the md 101 la yeah i'm wondering if like the intel mac mini is the equivalent of that this is some big a bunch of big customers maybe even just amazon that say we're we're still buying intel mac mini so could you keep making it for us whereas no one's saying that about the 27 inch imac
yeah exactly you can put them in server i think i've seen that have you ever seen we remember we saw the trash cans and server racks yeah on their side right so you can take anything and put it in a server rack if you try hard enough 27 non-time max sure just wedge it in there