City of Chips
John:
as the cold open to this episode you should just put in a clip of we built this city you know from the song probably the very opening one just those just that phrase we built this city it is very short clip and then just start the show
John:
why that's because that song is kind of a meme and maybe it's not is it it's not relevant to you too yeah maybe it's not relevant to you because you're a little bit too young for it but if you just threw that in people like people would be like what the hell was that and then eventually we get to city of chips maybe they'd make a connection maybe they wouldn't i just enjoy crap like that sometimes and it's like it's literally like a 1.5 second clip so it's not like you're you know we built this city yep or you can just put casey doing it you don't need the clip anymore that's it right he's got it
John:
john are you fully vaccinated now uh despite my continued protests of that term yes indeed it has been it has been two weeks since my second vaccine shot i am according to these standards uh you know as immune as i'm going to be i'm not sure if that's entirely true i think maybe you continue to get more immune but anyway here i am um and so i'm feeling good i'm happy to be over that hump
Casey:
Good.
Casey:
So all three of us, we can hug it out as soon as one of us travel, or the two of us travel to the other one, I guess.
Casey:
But I am so excited.
Casey:
I'm not being silly at all.
Casey:
I am so excited to give both of you uncomfortably long hugs the next time I see you.
Casey:
I am counting down the days, or I would be if I knew when it would be when we're going to see each other next.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I am super duper excited.
Casey:
So please, if you are living in a place where vaccines are being distributed, if it's your turn, if you can get a shot in your arm, please, please go ahead and get vaccinated.
Casey:
It helps everyone.
Casey:
Secondly, for those of you who did go to the ATP store and order things, thank you.
Casey:
The ATP store is now closed.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
I got a delightfully small amount of snarky.
Casey:
Is the store closed hurt?
Casey:
I was very happy that most of you abstained from that, that oh so delightful pastime.
Casey:
So thank you for that too.
Casey:
The sale went very well and we appreciate it.
Casey:
I know that, you know, as we spoke about shipping, especially overseas is tough.
Casey:
Shipping the glasses is tough and expensive.
Casey:
So for anyone who enrolled in a membership, for anyone who bought anything at all, we thank you very, very deeply.
Casey:
It really makes it much easier and helps us do the show.
Casey:
And we really thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
Casey:
You can, if you want, you can go ahead and cancel your membership.
Casey:
But, you know, you don't have to do that.
Casey:
You don't have to do that.
Casey:
You can just show us.
John:
You should also just be thanking the people who didn't cancel.
John:
Thank you to all the people who signed up to get the discount and then just forgot to cancel.
John:
Thank you, because you are the real heroes.
Casey:
You are the real heroes.
John:
The people who are not currently being reminded to cancel by this segment, but instead are basking in the glow of our thanks and gratitude, because membership is really the best gift.
John:
And, you know, if you get on a glass or a t-shirt, that's cool, too.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So I'm really looking forward to it.
Casey:
So my little secret, just between the three of us, don't tell anyone.
Casey:
My little secret is that I normally wait until the last minute to buy merchandise because I just am so busy doing other things that I don't think about it.
Casey:
And I have not yet missed a sale, although this time I was, I think, the very last day when I ordered.
Casey:
So one of these times I'm going to be that idiot saying, oh, is it closed?
Casey:
But anyway, because I'm at the end of the list, I think, because I presume Cotton Bureau goes from earliest orders to latest orders—
Casey:
I typically am one of the last to get these orders, and so it is genuinely exciting for me when I see all these people sending pictures of their shirts and whatnot, oftentimes days and occasionally even a week or two before I get mine.
Casey:
So I am really excited to see those.
Casey:
Please never feel like you can't tweet me with a picture of your merchandise, particularly wearing your merchandise.
Casey:
It's one thing just sitting on the bed, but it's even better if it's on you.
Casey:
Thank you so much to those who bought merch.
Casey:
We will almost certainly do another sale in the fall.
Casey:
I think I mentioned in the past that we have some ideas for some other new stuff that we haven't done before.
Casey:
A couple of ideas that I'm really, really excited about, just like I was excited about these glasses.
Casey:
So look forward to that sometime in the fall time, hopefully in time for the holidays.
Casey:
But thank you, anyone who ordered anything from the store.
Casey:
And thank you especially to the heroes that haven't yet canceled their membership.
Casey:
And please don't.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We have a lot of stuff to go through tonight, so let's just roll right into follow-up.
Casey:
So we had some information from friend of the show, Daniel Jalkit, with regard to third-party menu bar items.
Casey:
John, remind me what the context was here.
Casey:
This was with me dragging stuff off my menu bar.
John:
Is that right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It was a segment where we were talking about bartender and vanilla and also describing just the general way those menu bar icons work if you didn't know that you could drag them around by holding down command because it's not particularly obvious.
John:
And I said you could drag them off and remove them.
John:
Uh, and I said, certainly you can remove the Apple ones that way, but I wasn't sure about third party.
John:
I tried Skype and Skype didn't allow the removal.
John:
Uh, but Daniel just wanted to tell us that third party applications can absolutely support removal.
John:
It's the NS status item behavior removal allowed, uh, value for the NS status item behavior option in NS status item.h.
John:
Uh, if you're a programmer and wanted to know, uh, why does Skype not support it?
John:
Oh, that's a silly question.
John:
Skype is terrible.
John:
Um, but third party applications can support it.
John:
So just to make that clear.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We're going to talk about spatial audio later on this episode, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
But we had some feedback from a friend of the show, Guy Rambo.
Casey:
I believe what this was regarding was us saying, you know, why doesn't the Apple TV have it?
Casey:
Which, by the way, mine hasn't shipped yet.
Casey:
And I'm so jealous because I see people are getting shipment notifications and mine hasn't.
Casey:
I'm so sad.
Marco:
Oh, mine hasn't either.
Casey:
i'm so sad but anyways um so we were talking about you know why doesn't the apple tv uh support spatial audio and i think one of us maybe it was john but i'm not sure who oh it was you okay um the one time i assumed it was john and i was wrong uh marco had said hey if you twist the ipad it will it will make the sound sound like it's that was john oh you're right the first day i was right i was saying the things that were wrong and john was saying the things that were right shocker
John:
No, I was also wrong.
John:
So here's the problem.
John:
The example I gave was like, hey, if you move the iPad from side to side.
John:
But in reality, when I did this test, I was moving my head because who moves the iPad?
John:
So anyway, continue with the follow-up here to clarify how it actually works.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So John was saying, you know, if you twist the iPad to keep your head stationary, then the sound will move.
Casey:
And that's actually not correct.
Casey:
So here's the feedback from Guy.
Casey:
Spatial audio is not supposed to move the sound based on you moving the iPhone or iPad.
Casey:
It's supposed to move the sound depending on the movement of your head, which is detected by the gyro on the AirPods Pro or AirPods Max.
Casey:
Says Guy, I still don't quite get why it can't be done on the Apple TV.
Casey:
It has nothing to do with the U1.
Casey:
There's even an API for headphone motion.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
As far as Guy knows, it doesn't use Bluetooth low energy at all to estimate motion.
Casey:
It is all based on the initial position and the relative movement of the gyro in the earbuds or headphones.
Marco:
We heard this from a lot of people because because I was speculating last week that maybe the reason why it is on an Apple TV is that it's too far of a distance to have precise positioning between the headphones and the Apple TV device itself.
Marco:
And then we heard from a lot of people that basically it doesn't matter at all because the way spatial audio works, it doesn't know or care where the device is.
Marco:
It's it merely like when you hit play, whatever position your head is in, it considers you looking at the device.
Marco:
So it just assumes you're looking forward.
Marco:
And then when it's adjusting the position of the audio as you move your head, it's only adjusting it based on the zero point from wherever your head was when you hit play.
Marco:
And then apparently if you move your head and then don't move it back, like if you swivel your whole chair around...
Marco:
it will slowly pan the audio to be back in front of you again.
Marco:
So it seems like it's entirely just based on gyroscope and accelerometer.
Marco:
And so therefore, it's entirely within the headphones to detect what position your head is in.
Marco:
And so therefore, it shouldn't matter what the source device is, as long as it supports the software side of this from the device side, which Apple TV theoretically should.
Marco:
I wonder...
Marco:
if maybe the previous Apple TVs weren't fast enough to do that kind of audio computation in real time.
Marco:
But that probably is not the reason either because the audio computation is pretty fast to do on pretty much any hardware from the last decade.
Casey:
I actually have a quick question with regard to that.
Casey:
So I did some networking rejiggering, which we'll talk about probably in the after show.
Casey:
And I was doing a speed test using the bespoke speed test app on my Apple TV.
Casey:
And let me remind you, my Apple TV was the...
Casey:
was the 1080 Apple TV.
Casey:
And I never upgraded once the 4K Apple TV existed.
Casey:
So this is like a five-year-old Apple TV or something like that at this point.
Casey:
And I was doing a speed test, and I topped out at like 95 megabits a second.
Casey:
And I didn't spend the time to look into it.
Casey:
But it occurred to me, that isn't a gigabit connection on there, is it?
Marco:
No, it's not.
Marco:
It is on the 4K models.
Marco:
But on the HD and earlier models of Apple TV, those were 100 megabit ports on the Ethernet.
Casey:
I feel a little bit better because for a minute there, I was like, what the crap?
Casey:
Why is this not working properly?
Casey:
And then after a moment, I was like, oh, wait, wait, wait.
Casey:
It's really weird that it's topping out at a hundred.
Casey:
Oh, right.
Casey:
So anyway, thank you for clearing that up.
Casey:
I feel much better.
Casey:
Moving right along, as we record this, it was yesterday that the 24-inch iMac reviews or the embargo dropped, so we started getting reviews.
Casey:
There were a lot of good ones, of course.
Casey:
I really enjoyed Jason Snell's, and there were a couple of tidbits in here that were really interesting that I didn't really know or realize.
Casey:
First of all, and this was discussed on Upgrade as well, in order to set up Touch ID on the Bluetooth keyboards, apparently you pair the keyboard's Touch ID with the Mac by double-clicking the iMac's power button, which, that's fine.
Casey:
It's just, what a weird thing to do.
Casey:
Like, it's okay.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's bad.
Casey:
It just struck me as so peculiar.
Casey:
And then once you set it up, it's, you know, like a laptop.
Casey:
But to set it up, you have to double-click the power button, which I thought was just the funniest thing.
John:
it makes sense for like just a hardware handshake that someone can't pair it with your mac remotely like if you're working in an office and some malicious person pairs it with your mac unbeknownst to you and now they can authenticate as you or whatever right yeah you know it'll make sense it does make sense it's just funny another thing that i saw in a lot of the reviews that i thought was neat so we already talked about when we when these machines released all the different matching things the accessories of course match the color of the you know
John:
The keyboard, the trackpad, the mouse, whatever you get, match the color of the thing.
John:
The power cord is color matched.
John:
The little USB-C to lightning cable that they give you, apparently give you with the Mac, is also color matched.
John:
And by the way, all those cables are braided, which I'm heavily in favor of.
John:
You know, when I was putting together my Mac Pro system, I was looking for black braided cables.
John:
People are wondering, why do you care about braided?
John:
Is it just a fashion trend?
John:
The reason I care about it is because I find the braided cables...
John:
less likely to sort of get permanent like permanent bends or kinks in them you know if you get like a plastic cable and it comes out of the box and you kind of unwind it to try to make it straight but the the bends that were in it from it being packed in the box are still there braided cables don't retain their bends as much so if it comes wrapped in a circle or wrapped around something when you unwind it it sort of relaxes and lays flat and i find that a nicer experience and
John:
there is an aesthetic preference one direction the other as well but mainly i want it because they don't kink i just feel like they they feel nicer so anyway braided stuff comes with this um some things that we didn't know until people got them i mean we kind of know from the the marketing copy and marketing images that they all come with desktop backgrounds that match the colors so if you buy a yellow one you get like a yellow background you buy a red one you get a red background and of course we know those backgrounds are like zoomed in portions of the hello logo right um
John:
but there's even more to it than that so you get stickers and if you get a one of the macs that is not the silver one you get two stickers and and they're different colors one sticker is the color of the back of the mac and one sticker is the color of the front but of course the silver one is the same color front end back so if you get a silver one you just get one sticker and it's just silver right um
John:
when you apparently when you first boot the thing it has like an intro movie this is the thing that mac os 10 used to do after install for a couple years a couple different releases you would boot mac os 10 for the first time and it would show like this welcome video with the word welcome flying at you in a bunch of languages or some sort of shiny apple logo with a light behind it or a star field like they were just quick time movies that they would play but it was kind of fun these show a little hello intro movie where it sketches out the script hello from the original mac or whatever with colors and
John:
um and then once you're into the mac if you go into system preferences in general you'll see that uh each mac depending on what color the mac is comes with a configured highlight color that matches the mac and the color is called this mac so like what color do you want the selection to be when you know when you select text and it puts like a colored background behind the text because you are selecting it
John:
that color is color matched to whatever color your mac is so you get the color match desktop background of course the highlight color you know the highlight color being if a button is not silver but is instead a color is it a blue color red that matches your thing as well and the highlight color matches it so it's really you know lots of lots of cute niceties to really complete the the theming these are things that you know individual users could have always done but the fact that it comes that way out of the box really just adds to the
John:
You know, the fun experience, right?
John:
Now the intro movie, I'm hoping there's no bug where the intro movie constantly plays because an intro movie like that is delightful the literal very first time you take the thing out of the box and start it.
John:
But I probably don't want to see that movie again.
John:
So I'm assuming it shows once and then disappears.
Yeah.
Casey:
Moving right along, we also have information about gasoline stabilizers because that's what you thought you were getting when you turned into the Accidental Tech Podcast.
John:
Well, this is a very important episode.
John:
Last time I had to tell people, people who don't watch tons of movies about the end of the world, who didn't realize that gas goes bad, that it doesn't last forever.
John:
If you leave gas in a gas tank for a couple of years, don't expect to step into that car and start it.
John:
It's not going to happen.
John:
Why?
John:
What happens to the gas, right?
John:
Well, I say it goes bad, but, you know, there's some chemical process takes place probably involving oxidation or something.
John:
But a lot of people wrote in to say, well, all you need to do is buy some gasoline stabilizer.
John:
In fact, I here in insert remote state somewhere in the United States use gasoline stabilizer in my insert, you know, lawn equipment thing.
John:
So it will still be good the next year.
John:
So I had to look up what the expectations are for gas stabilizers.
John:
And here's what I found.
John:
Depending on the product, the stabilizer can increase gasoline shelf life to between one and three years.
John:
Stabilizers work best when you mix them with new gasoline.
John:
They're ineffective at slowing down the degradation of old gas and they can't return contaminated gas to working order.
John:
So, if it seems like the apocalypse is happening...
John:
Hurry up and put the stabilizer in all of the tanks of all the cars that you can reach.
John:
Because if you wait six months for the apocalypse to have happened, the stabilizer is not going to bring that gas back.
John:
And even with stabilizer, five years into the apocalypse, any gas out there is going to be no good.
John:
So I really hope you've worked on, you know, what is it?
John:
Is it Barter Town?
John:
Gas Town?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Something from one of the Mad Max movies where you've somehow got a refinery working again.
John:
Otherwise, no gasoline for you.
Casey:
We are sponsored by Aftershocks and their trick new open com headset.
Casey:
Imagine this.
Casey:
Say you're, I don't know, working from home a lot these days.
Casey:
But imagine you want to be aware of what's going on around you.
Casey:
Maybe your kid needs help with virtual school.
Casey:
Maybe your dog is ringing the bell to be let out.
Casey:
Perhaps you're running outdoors and want to, I don't know, know if a car is going to run you over.
Casey:
Maybe you plain just don't find the idea of cleaning gunk out of your earbuds once a week a terribly enjoyable pastime.
Casey:
I don't blame you.
Casey:
Aftershocks can solve all of that for you.
Casey:
They use their straight from the future bone conduction technology so your ears are completely free.
Casey:
You can hear what you're listening to while also having an awareness of what's going on around you.
Casey:
I'm here to tell you about the OpenCom, which is Aftershock's new headset designed specifically for efficient communication in the workplace, whatever that workplace may be.
Casey:
What makes OpenCom nice is that the microphone is on a delightful, noise-canceling, unobtrusive boom arm, which you can slide up and down when you need it or when you don't.
Casey:
This makes for clear communication on all of those work calls.
Casey:
OpenCom has 16 hours of talk time on one charge, and if you need to top up, only five minutes of charging via their very nice magnetic connector gives you two more hours of talk time.
Casey:
We all know what it's like to be on all-day Zoom calls, and don't worry, Aftershocks' OpenCom has you covered.
Casey:
I took a couple of calls with the OpenCom and nobody was any the wiser.
Casey:
They all thought I was using my actual phone.
Casey:
The OpenCom is comfortable and it ensures that I know what's going on locally as well as remotely.
Casey:
To get your own OpenCom or perhaps a no boom arm Aeropex, just go to aftershocks.com slash ATP for 15% off.
Casey:
That's aftershocks.com slash ATP for 15% off.
Casey:
Thanks to Aftershocks for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
All right, so we spoke earlier about spatial audio, and this week Apple announced snake oil for music people.
Casey:
Wait, what?
Casey:
Oh, jeez.
John:
You're going to get us in so much trouble.
John:
I know.
John:
Well, no, because snake oil, they sell you, but this you get for free.
Casey:
Oh, so then it's not snake oil.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
See?
Casey:
Thanks, John.
Casey:
Problem solved.
John:
I'll call more of a placebo.
Casey:
placebo for placebo for music people here you go everyone um no i have i have thoughts about this obviously but nonetheless let's try to stick to some facts so you listen to vinyl apple music is adding spatial audio lossless and lossless uh recordings at no extra cost uh sometime next month
Casey:
The quick executive summary of this is that spatial audio with Dolby Atmos will be arriving in June.
Casey:
Apparently, it will be the default for any headphones or headsets that have an H1 or W1 chip, which I have a question here, and we can get back to it in a second.
Casey:
But does that include the original AirPods?
Casey:
Because I didn't think my AirPods, my non-pro AirPods, could do spatial audio.
Casey:
So I must be confused.
Casey:
We'll come back to that in a second.
Casey:
The entire iTunes catalog will eventually go lossless.
Casey:
However, I shouldn't have said that, actually.
Casey:
It's not the iTunes catalog.
Casey:
It's the Apple Music catalog.
Casey:
So iTunes Match and Purchases will not get lossless audio, only Apple Music.
Casey:
And all of this is at no additional cost, which is pretty cool.
Casey:
So if you are the kind of person who thinks you can detect the difference between lossless and compressed audio,
Casey:
then I have a bridge I can sell you.
Casey:
But also, you can have some great new stuff to listen to in June.
Casey:
So that's really exciting.
Casey:
Tell me, first of all, before we argue about whether or not this really is snake oil, tell me, how is it that I can listen to these with my second generation but otherwise old and busted AirPods?
Casey:
Because I can't do anything else with spatial audio, can you?
John:
As we established, all you need for spatial audio is accelerometers in your earphones.
Casey:
Agreed, but I could swear, and it doesn't really matter, so I'll let it go, but I could swear when all the spatial audio stuff came out, that was only AirPods Pro, I thought.
Casey:
Maybe I'm wrong.
Marco:
I wonder if maybe the original AirPods, because they have the accelerometers to detect those terrible tap gestures where you break your ear, but I wonder if they don't have a gyroscope.
Marco:
because remember like the first couple iphones had only accelerometers and then they added a gyroscope somewhere around the iphone like 3gs or 4 somewhere around there and that made the precision of the motion tracking significantly better and so i wonder if they need that precision in order to give spatial audio like good accuracy and maybe the gyro is only in the airpods pro and the airpods max
Casey:
So there's a knowledge-based article that R. Maury found in the chat.
Casey:
And we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
And it says, listen with spatial audio for AirPods Pro and AirPods Max.
Marco:
Yeah, it's got to be a gyro thing.
Marco:
Or maybe like a CPU speed kind of thing.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But anyway, I think it's useful to talk about these two things separately.
Marco:
There is spatial audio with Dolby Atmos, whatever that is, you know, spatial audio.
Marco:
And then there's lossless.
Marco:
Those are two very different things.
Marco:
They're announcing them at the same time.
Marco:
There is a lot of press about both.
Marco:
And I think, frankly, I don't think either of them are ever really going to become a meaningful thing.
Marco:
That being said, there is demand for them.
Marco:
You know, spatial audio...
Marco:
This is not the first time that the music industry has tried to release some kind of surround sound music format.
Marco:
I think this will probably be the most widely used one.
Marco:
But the reason why they haven't really gone anywhere in the past is because there's not really a lot of benefit to it most of the time.
Marco:
If you think about what people expect from their music, usually music is mixed in such a way that it would sound kind of like you're at a concert, and so the singer is panned right in the center, dead center, exactly between left and right.
Marco:
It doesn't sound like the singer is off to one side.
Marco:
You might have some instruments that are panned a little bit left or a little bit right, but for the most part, you're hearing stuff mostly right in front of you.
Marco:
And the way audio is mixed, the way music is mixed, it's kind of like you are,
Marco:
Standing in front of a concert, like listening to the concert in really good seats.
Marco:
Like that's usually the way it's positioned in the mix and the way it's expected to be played.
Marco:
And so what studios and artists are going to start doing, if they haven't already, is to start making surround sound mixes basically for their spatial audio versions of their music.
Marco:
The thing is, again, we've had this before.
Marco:
We've had this about, I think, roughly every 10 years for the last 50 years, something like that.
Marco:
We've had things like this before.
Marco:
We've had other music formats that have had multi-channel surround audio capabilities.
Marco:
What usually happens is you play it, you listen to like one or two songs, you know, maybe you like, you know, consume some illegal substances and listen to songs like, whoa, this is really cool.
Marco:
And then you don't listen to it anymore because it's kind of a gimmick.
Marco:
It's kind of like 3D TV.
Marco:
Like it's a fun gimmick for like two seconds.
Marco:
You listen to the handful of things that are mastered that way.
Marco:
And then you just go back to listen to stereo because that sounds normal to you.
Marco:
I think this is going to be more successful, as I said, than the previous attempts at surround formats in the sense that it's not going to require people to significantly buy into new hardware.
Marco:
You know, if you don't already have the headphones that do it, you're going to need to get those.
Marco:
But a lot of people are buying AirPods Pro and AirPods Max anyway.
Marco:
So many people are going to already have the equipment to do that.
Marco:
I would also suspect that
Marco:
any future AirPods nothing revision, which has been rumored to happen at any minute now for the last year, whatever the next version of the base AirPods will be, will probably also support this.
Marco:
The chances are pretty good on that, I think.
Marco:
So eventually, if not already, there will be a large install base that can kind of try this for free.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I think it will have way more consumption than previous attempts have where you might have had to buy a DVD audio player or something like that and set up surround sound speakers in a living room.
Marco:
No one really did that.
Marco:
So this might have some benefit there, but I think it's going to prove mostly to be a gimmick.
Marco:
And it might be a fun gimmick.
Marco:
It's not to say they shouldn't do it.
Marco:
They already had everything else in place to do it.
Marco:
So it'll be a fun gimmick, especially for the for the you know, the substance crowd.
Marco:
But I don't think it's going to become a big thing.
John:
And in terms of scope, like just to put this in contrast of the losses, which we're going to talk about a second, they're doing all 75 million of their tracks.
John:
Whereas with spatial audio, they say it will start with thousands.
John:
So thousands is not nothing, but 75 million versus thousands gives you an idea of, you know, how likely will you be to find a spatial audio track that is also a song that you actually want to listen to versus you just playing with the feature.
John:
You know, I don't know.
John:
Whereas lossless, it's just, you know, it will be an option for you for everything in the Apple Music Library.
Marco:
And I'd be shocked if the Stroke 9 song Not Nothing was actually part of it.
Casey:
Okay, good to know.
Casey:
By the way, real-time follow-up, Steve Trouten-Smith points out that perhaps spatial audio for audio is possible with the original AirPods, but not spatial audio for video.
Casey:
I'm not sure why that delineation would be meaningful, but I think he's right, because if you look at this press release, it says Apple Music will automatically play Dolby Atmos tracks on all AirPods and Beats headphones with an H1 or a W1 chip.
Casey:
All right, cool.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
I don't get it, but...
Marco:
Either way, it's going to be a whole lot of people who can play it.
Marco:
And so that's good.
Marco:
And if there's ever been a chance for surround sound mixed audio to take off, this is it.
Marco:
This is a way better chance than it's ever had before.
Marco:
But I'm still not optimistic that it's going to become a thing.
Casey:
No, it's definitely a neat party trick from time to time.
Casey:
I feel like it's very similar to surround sound when that was still a unique and novel thing.
Casey:
I remember vividly putting in the Laserdisc for Top Gun when I was not terribly old.
Casey:
I don't know if I would say I was a kid, but I was certainly not an adult.
Casey:
I'd put in the LaserDisc for Top Gun on my family's home theater, and we would use a little, I don't know if you guys ever saw this, but there was a jog wheel on the remote control.
Casey:
I think we've talked about this on the show.
Casey:
And you would go frame by frame on the LaserDisc, and you would do that, and people thought it was the neatest thing ever.
Casey:
And the other thing you'd do is you would listen to the planes go over your head and behind you.
Casey:
And when you've never heard surround sound in a house before, it was mind-blowing.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And, you know, we had some super audio CDs back in the day and I think HD CDs back in the day.
Casey:
And it was it was a very neat party trick that ultimately didn't amount to anything.
Casey:
I would suspect that, you know, you're exactly right, Marco, that this is going to be certainly more adopted than most equivalents that we've tried, like you said, every 10 years or so.
Casey:
But I don't think this is going to be more than just a neat party trick personally.
Marco:
By the way, the LaserDisc, for any of you out there who are not too familiar with the LaserDisc format, it's fascinating.
Marco:
It does not work the way you think it does.
Marco:
If you're thinking of a giant CD that has digital video encoded on it, no, that's not what it is.
Marco:
The video is encoded in analog, yet read from a laser.
Marco:
Trust me, read into it.
Marco:
It's pretty cool.
Casey:
Wasn't there technology connections on this?
Casey:
I feel like there was.
Marco:
I think there were more than one.
Marco:
But yes, that's a good place to start.
Marco:
That's the only way Marco knows about any technology before his time is technology connections.
Marco:
I knew about it before that.
Marco:
But yeah, we'll link to that in the show notes.
Marco:
Check out that video.
Marco:
But yeah, the way Laserdisc works is fascinating for modern nerds to look back on.
Casey:
That is pretty cool.
Casey:
I loved Laserdisc at the time, though.
Casey:
Well, it was great until you had to either wait for it to change the head to get to the other side of the disc or pop the damn thing out and flip it yourself.
Casey:
Oh, man, those were the days.
Casey:
All right, so let me... I would like to talk to both of you, particularly Marco, about this lossless audio thing.
Marco:
Yes, I've been waiting all week for this.
Casey:
I know, and so let me get out my quick thoughts, and then I promise I'll shut up and let you go on a tear for half an hour.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
I...
Casey:
i think this is one of those scenarios that i'm trying to be more conscious of as i get older where i feel like i'm doing like a reverse that's fine or maybe it's a that's fine for casey or a reverse that's fine for casey but basically i don't think that i can tell the difference between lossless audio and compressed audio and i've not done like the proper ab testing or whatever like i'll be the first to tell you this is very it's pronounced ab testing
Casey:
I haven't done any app testing.
Casey:
I've done a lot of crunches, but no app testing.
Casey:
And so anyways, it could be that my quote-unquote testing methodologies are broken, that I would totally believe that.
Casey:
It could be I haven't listened to good source material.
Casey:
I totally believe that.
Casey:
It could be the stereo or whatever that I'm listening to this stuff on is crap, and I would believe that.
Casey:
But there are people in my life, including me in certain capacities, but certainly there are people in my life that have genuinely phenomenal stereos.
Casey:
And I have heard them.
Casey:
And I've heard great compressed music on those stereos and great lossless stuff on those stereos.
Casey:
And I really don't want to get into the vinyl conversation, but generally speaking, I personally can't tell the difference.
Casey:
And so that's why I'm snarking about snake oil and all that.
Casey:
And I think that I'm probably being unfair because I'm probably asserting what is true for me to be true for everyone, which isn't really fair of me.
Casey:
So
Casey:
i i'm curious to hear you justify marco why this is so important because i can hear how god-awful compressed like xm radio is because that is the pit oh that's the worst but but i can't hear generally speaking i can't really tell the difference between a well compressed you know like not you know a 96 kilobit or whatever you know you know like 120 256 kilobit mp3 i can i can
Casey:
can't really tell the difference between that and a cd and i've tried it's been a while but i've tried and i can't tell the difference so marco tell me am i in am i just missing the boat here are my ears too terrible to understand or what what's now that you just found it you're old now casey well there you go
John:
The hearing is going and going fast.
Casey:
Sorry, what was that?
Marco:
No, so you're not wrong, largely.
Marco:
So here's the thing, and I know people are familiar with my points of view on this.
Marco:
I'm going to surprise you on parts of this.
Marco:
So here we go.
Marco:
Okay, so first of all,
Marco:
The human ear cannot hear the difference for anything that represents frequencies above roughly 20 kilohertz.
Marco:
Even like young kids who have perfect hearing who haven't had any high frequency loss yet, you can't hear above 20 kilohertz.
Marco:
That's just how our ears are built.
Marco:
um there's also limits on the oh and anyway sampling theory that means that you can perfectly represent the human hearing range of frequency range within the 44.1 kilohertz range of a cd of cd audio that's one of the reasons they chose a range in that or a frequency sampling rate in that in that range um secondly
Marco:
The 16-bit side of CD audio refers to how precise the numbers are that you're storing to represent the amplitude of the signal.
Marco:
That affects the dynamic range.
Marco:
What's the loudest versus the quietest?
Marco:
What's the range of that in decibels?
Marco:
And the dynamic range you can store in 16-bit...
Marco:
Even if you ignore the way dithering works, which you shouldn't because it's complicated and it adds more effective range.
Marco:
Again, we're going to link again to this wonderful video by Monty over at Ziff.
Marco:
This is one of the, I think it's the place that invented the AugVorbis format.
Marco:
There's a wonderful video and blog post and series explaining
Marco:
Why you don't need more than 44.1 kilohertz and 16-bit audio to represent the entire – and that's CD quality – to represent the entire human hearing range in practice.
Marco:
There's lots of reasons why you don't.
Marco:
But for the purposes of this conversation, the reality is –
Marco:
Anything that is higher than that sampling rate of 44.1 or more precise than the 16-bit samples that we're storing there, that's beyond the realm of human hearing.
Marco:
That being said, things are more complicated.
Marco:
And there are certain areas where the differences in these things matter.
Marco:
So, for instance, people have all sorts of like crazy ideas about like they picture the sound wave as like the stair step thing with the samples.
Marco:
And they say, well, if you add more samples, the sound wave will become smoother and therefore it will better represent the source audio.
Marco:
In practice, for lots of reasons that I mostly don't understand about electrical engineering and stuff, that's not how DACs work.
Marco:
And in practice, you can perfectly represent that full curvature of those sound waves, and most DACs will approximately output the perfect sound wave.
Marco:
Like, it will be...
Marco:
way more perfect than you think, even with way fewer samples than you think, because of the way DACs work, because of sampling theory and everything else.
Marco:
Again, this is all very well covered in this ZIF.org video that we will link to.
Casey:
And also DAC is digital to analog converters.
Casey:
So if you think about it, these are being stored as bits and bytes, these audio files, but eventually it needs to be vibrating a cone to make a sound.
Casey:
So the DAC, the digital to analog converter, that's what gets you to something that you can play on a speaker.
Marco:
Also, a cone.
Marco:
Come on, man.
Marco:
Vibrating a film between two sheets of magnets.
Casey:
That's the way to go now.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, so that's a topic for another day, maybe.
Marco:
So anyway, we don't need more bits or a faster sampling rate than 44 kilohertz to represent everything we can hear.
Marco:
But it is more complicated than that in some ways in practice.
Marco:
So there's a couple of very small differences in the way that the DAC works, where if you have a higher sampling rate than 44.1, certain parts of the DAC's filtering stage can be made simpler.
Marco:
Cheaper components can sound better because they won't need as good of a filter or as sophisticated of a filter at that stage.
Marco:
Again, most of that is way above my head, but I do know that's a thing roughly based on how it works.
Marco:
So the reality, though, is that most of this doesn't really matter.
Marco:
What matters a heck of a lot more than the format that you are encoding the audio in is how the audio is mastered in the first place.
Marco:
Theoretically, we should in regular audio that we've had all this time, even compressed down to MP3s and AACs, we should be able to have really amazing high quality audio that you can't tell the difference from super high res lossless in regular 44.1 CD approximating MP3s and AACs.
Marco:
In practice, though, sometimes you get some kind of new format or some kind of new high-resolution release, and it does sound noticeably better.
Marco:
But that's not because of the format.
Marco:
That's because usually in that case, they've remastered or taken another recording of the audio and they've made it a better mastering for modern sensibilities and modern equipment.
Marco:
So they might have increased dynamic range compared to the super compressed loudness war of the 90s and 80s.
Marco:
They might have just mastered it on more modern equipment.
Marco:
They might have gone back to the original recordings and the original analog tapes and remastered them and remixed them and everything.
Marco:
That happens a lot, and if they happen to do that to an album and remaster it and re-release it in a high-res format, it will probably sound better than the original because they remastered it, but not because it's in the high-res format.
Marco:
If you take something that sounds really great that's a high-res audio format, and if you downsample that down to 44.1 kHz and 16-bit and encode it as a 256K MP3...
Marco:
I bet it will sound exactly the same to almost anybody.
Marco:
Because the reason it sounds better is because they did a better recording or a better mixing job to accommodate what people want these days with modern equipment and modern sensibilities and everything else, especially people who are going to listen very critically on high-end equipment.
Marco:
They master it for that, but if you take those high-resolution files and resample them down to CD quality...
Marco:
nobody will tell the difference i'm telling you nobody will tell the difference but because it does sound better because of the mastering differences in some cases there is demand for this the demand is real and you know there's entire services like title and um neil young's pano and and you know there's there's been inside entire you know things based on this there's a whole world of audio equipment it
Marco:
There's a whole world of high-end DACs, high-end headphones, high-end little audio players, many of these things of which I've owned or currently own.
Marco:
There's this whole world of all this high-res, fancy DAC stuff and a whole group of people who swear on loss lists and being required and everything.
Marco:
And so the thing is, even if they are not scientifically getting a benefit from this, there is a massive world of demand here.
Marco:
And Apple Music is pretty important to Apple.
Marco:
It's a pretty big part of their services play and they care a lot about music and it's always been kind of a cornerstone of the company.
Marco:
And this is an area in which other streaming services are competing with them and have been competing with them.
Marco:
And I don't think Apple wanted to be left behind.
Marco:
And I think they wanted to use their power in the industry to say, all right, we're going to do this great thing.
Marco:
And even if...
Marco:
there is not much scientific benefit to it.
Marco:
And we'll get to the Bluetooth question in a second.
Marco:
Even if there's no, there's not much benefit.
Marco:
The fact is there is demand.
Marco:
There's a lot of people out there who buy this stuff, who think they're getting something that sounds amazing because they are getting something that sounds amazing.
Marco:
Why it sounds amazing is not super relevant to them.
Marco:
And this is, this is the thing like audio files.
Marco:
I'm talking about the people, not the, you know, blobs of data.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
audiophiles really do enjoy and hear that quality regardless of why it's there why it's there doesn't matter really at all they they hear that quality and part of that quality is the mastering that's that's a huge part of it part of it is that they're listening usually on pretty good equipment that's the biggest part of it and and bigger than both of those things though is that they're paying attention when they listen and
Marco:
If you tell yourself, I'm getting something really special here.
Marco:
I'm downloading this giant file, and it's going to be the most amazing remastering of American Beauty I've ever heard.
Marco:
So this is going to be great.
Marco:
And so you put it on, and it's super lossless, and there's billions of bits flying at you from all directions, and you're really paying attention.
Marco:
You're listening attentively, and you're telling yourself, first of all, you're telling yourself, this is going to sound great.
Marco:
Because I did all these things and bought all this stuff to make it sound great.
Marco:
And then you are paying attention.
Marco:
You're making it a ritual.
Marco:
You're sitting down.
Marco:
You're saying, I'm going to listen to this and I'm going to pay attention to this.
Marco:
This isn't just going to be something where I shout at a voice cylinder and it plays in the background while I do something else.
Marco:
I'm going to make this a thing I'm paying attention to.
Marco:
So you're going to sit there and you're going to listen really closely.
Marco:
And you're going to say, oh my god, I've never heard the background symbols there before.
Marco:
There's a French horn tucked back there somehow.
Marco:
I'm hearing things I've never heard before.
Marco:
It's not because you had more bits or a smoother waveform.
Marco:
It's because you're listening attentively.
Marco:
And that's great.
Marco:
That's a great way to listen to music.
Marco:
And you really can discover new things that you never discovered before because you weren't really listening attentively and really making it an experience for yourself.
Marco:
But you can get that same quality from a CD if you can still find one.
Marco:
But the CD can do the exact same thing.
Marco:
In the digital world, a well-encoded MP3 can do the same thing.
Marco:
There's nothing wrong with that, and I think it's not right to look down on people for like, oh, you're only listening at 44.1.
Marco:
Well, mine's going to sound way better than yours.
Marco:
At the same time, people like me who are scientific skeptics of the higher-end stuff, we shouldn't tell those people that their opinion that it sounds great is wrong.
Marco:
They might be wrong about why it sounds great, but they are experiencing something great.
Marco:
And so I think, you know, when something like Apple's big thing happens like this, where they're going to do all this lossless stuff, that's great.
Marco:
You know, good for them.
Marco:
Again, there is demand for it.
Marco:
If people are demanding this and Apple provides it and the people think they're getting value out of it,
Marco:
Well, who am I to say that that's wrong?
Marco:
If they start making scientific claims about why it sounds good, I'll argue that for sure.
Marco:
But if they say this sounds great, and they think they're getting their value from it, fine.
Marco:
That being said, if you're looking to upgrade your setup, if you're looking to make things sound better and really get that experience out of music, first of all, you might not need to.
Marco:
Again, if you just sit down attentively and listen to something and just pay attention to it.
Marco:
you'll get a lot of value out of that just by itself, even in your crappy AirPods.
Marco:
You can listen on anything, and if you're really paying attention, you really will hear a lot, and it'll be a nice experience.
Marco:
Oh, and by the way, that's entirely why people like vinyl.
Marco:
Side note, that's going to get us all the email.
Marco:
that's why vinyl sounds so good to so many people it's because they are they have to by nature of the format by how much work it takes to listen to a record they have to be attentive they have to make it a whole thing they have to make an experience and they put it on and it sounds good not to mention there's you know nostalgia involved and everything but the reason why it sounds good is because it's an experience and they're paying attention to it and and they're telling themselves this is going to sound good that's why it sounds so good and
John:
And there's also the vinyl audio profile of not being able to have too much bass.
John:
And there's that background hiss that everybody loves and the quote unquote warmth.
John:
Like there is actually a sound profile to vinyl defined by the limitations of the media that people latch onto is that's the way I want songs to sound.
John:
Right.
Marco:
It's not distortion.
Marco:
It's warmth.
Marco:
It's not limited frequency range and incredibly limited dynamic range.
Marco:
It's, it's more, um, yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, um, and, and of course the other's mastering differences and everything.
Marco:
So anyway, this is great for people who want it.
Marco:
If you just want your stuff to sound good, buy a decent pair of headphones.
Marco:
you'll get way more out of that than you will out of like getting a 182 kilohertz DAC or something like that.
Marco:
Like don't, if you're looking at your audio setup, the DAC should be the last thing you upgrade.
Marco:
Like once you've burned all your money on first the transducers, whether it's speakers or headphones, that's the most important thing.
Marco:
And then a very far distant second of that is the amp that's powering them only to the point where you need enough power to power them.
Marco:
Otherwise, differences in amps don't matter that much.
Marco:
And then, yeah, the DAC should be a very distant third.
Marco:
But the very first thing you should do is go try to find a better recording of the things that you like, because that sounds better on every headphone and on every speaker and including your AirPods.
Marco:
Now, in the world of Bluetooth, by the way, which has been noted here, when audio is transmitted from your iPhone or whatever to your Bluetooth headphones, it's not transmitted in analog.
Marco:
Your Bluetooth headphones have little tiny built-in amps and DACs.
Marco:
And the way that the audio is transmitted from the device to the headphone is also not lossless.
Marco:
It's compressed.
Marco:
Early, early Bluetooth headphones had a terrible compression scheme called A2DP.
Marco:
That was the worst.
Marco:
But Bluetooth headphones back then were also such garbage that, you know, you couldn't really hear the difference because the headphones, like the actual speaker drivers in the headphones, were such garbage that it didn't really matter.
Marco:
As headphone design has gotten better and as higher-end headphones have gone Bluetooth thanks to market pressure, we've had better codecs.
Marco:
And there's a whole bunch of stuff over in the Sony and Android world.
Marco:
I forget what... Oh, the AptX and that whole thing.
Marco:
I forget what the newer ones are called.
Marco:
Over in iOS land, AAC, the codec, you know, like the MP3 successor kind of thing, AAC is usually the codec used to transmit audio from your devices to the headphones.
Marco:
I don't know what bitrate they use.
Marco:
It's probably some kind of, you know, maybe it's like...
Marco:
256k constant bit rate it's probably something like that um and and that would be fine to be totally transparent to almost anybody almost any of the time um but when you're listening over bluetooth like you're already getting it compressed it's already going to be very limited in terms of it's like you know it's not going to be past 44 or 48 kilohertz in all likelihood um it's not going to be you know better than 16 bit and
Marco:
The fact is that's all fine because if you are the kind of human who somehow has superhuman hearing, who can somehow hear the difference with frequencies that literally aren't there because they were cut out in the mastering stage, but somehow if you can...
Marco:
If you can somehow hear the frequencies that aren't really there, and if you can somehow hear the dynamic range that's more than 120 decibels of dynamic range or something that you can get from 16 bits, if you can somehow be way beyond that, you're not going to hear that difference through your AirPods.
Marco:
Or probably any headphones or speakers that you own.
Marco:
Like, unless you are in a laboratory, an amazing speaker design laboratory, you probably wouldn't even have the equipment that could even represent the additional differences in this to a point where you would notice them.
Marco:
And that's even if you had the amazing, ridiculous hearing.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Back off all the lossless stuff.
Marco:
It's not what you think it is, but well-recorded masters are.
Marco:
And if this is what it takes to get studios to give us well-recorded masters, okay, that's fine.
Marco:
I'll take it.
Marco:
Otherwise, if you want to enjoy your music, just pay attention to it.
Marco:
And that does wonders.
John:
I do wonder about the scenario.
John:
It's not clear to me what what they would do in this case.
John:
So you've got you've got your lossless audio, which, as you noted, like if depending on the recording may or may not have been remastered.
John:
But let's say it was remastered.
John:
Let's say the original version of this came out in the 90s and is super massively compressed.
John:
So everything is the same loudness and that loudness is loud.
John:
and they remaster it, and they give you one with more dynamic range.
John:
So the song actually has quiet parts and loud parts.
John:
Imagine that.
John:
But that's the lossless one, right?
John:
And you listen to it with your AirPods.
John:
But of course, the AirPods, as you noted, the signal going over the air is going to be compressed in AAC.
John:
Will they still essentially play the lossless one on your phone and then AAC compress it over the air to your AirPods so that what you will hear is essentially an AAC compressed version of the remastered song with better dynamic range?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
The way I understand it... Whenever people learn that the AAC is the codec used to transmit Bluetooth stuff from the iPhone to most of its headphones, one of the first questions you ask is things like, where does that conversion happen?
Marco:
Does it pass through unencoded?
Marco:
Does it transcode it?
Marco:
Does it decode it first and then re-encode it and send it over?
Marco:
And as far as I know, I don't have this confirmed, but as far as I know, the answer is yes, that it does transcode it because...
Marco:
it's sending an audio stream of every bit of audio on the phone.
Marco:
The phone might change the audio stream halfway through.
Marco:
It might, like, duck the music to, you know, ding a notification sound or something, or it might have to mix in some other sounds.
Marco:
So I'm pretty sure, at all times, it's decoding whatever you're playing and playing it as raw samples through the audio pipeline, and then it's encoding it as AAC at the last step on the way to the Bluetooth headphones.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I don't think there's any way to bypass that and send a pure bitstream to the headphones.
Marco:
Again, not that any of this would matter because you're not going to notice those differences ever, if not, certainly not on AirPods.
John:
So, I mean, the scenario I was getting at was like...
John:
Because you mentioned like lossless.
John:
So, you know, if it's if it's the way we get remastered, it's fine.
John:
But lossless has a cost in terms of essentially storage space because they're bigger.
John:
Right.
John:
There's a reason we use compression.
John:
Oh, they're massive.
John:
Right.
John:
And so if you just if all you want, it's like I just want the new masters because they're mastered better because they have more dynamic range because they're you know, they're just better.
John:
I just want to hear them.
John:
But I don't want to waste the space.
John:
It would almost be nice if Apple gave you an option that says, oh,
John:
Um, we know you don't have headphones that can support this and we know you don't even want the storage size.
John:
So here is the remastered one in a 256 kilobit AAC.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, cause why should you be denied that?
John:
Why should you have to flip the switch that says here, please use all my, you know, storage space on my phone to get this audio.
John:
Um, and by the way, the, the, uh, the qualities they give you, the options are for the lossless thing is you get CD quality, which is the first tier of losses, which is 16 bit, 44 kilohertz, right?
John:
Then you can also get 24 bit at 48 kilohertz.
John:
And then finally, you can get 24-bit at 192 GHz, which I think is the Pano level of stuff.
John:
But the 24-bit at 192 GHz, not only, you know, you can't listen to any of these things losslessly on your AirPods or whatever for the reasons we just mentioned, but to listen at all, apparently, to the 24-bit 192 GHz, you need a DAC.
John:
You need an external DAC because I guess the phone won't do that.
Marco:
Yeah, all of Apple's built-in DACs top out at 48 kilohertz, and that's pretty common.
Marco:
Any kind of device that's not made for audio files, generally the DAC is a 48 kilohertz at most DAC.
John:
Yeah, so you do need an external box because then the phone or the Mac or whatever it is that you're playing it on is just going to send the digital signal to your DAC, and it will be its job turning into an analog signal that goes to your headphones, etc.
John:
And by the way, if you're thinking, oh, I have AirPods Max, but don't worry, I won't use Bluetooth.
John:
I'll just plug it in with the cable and then I'll get lossless, right?
John:
Apparently you won't.
John:
Apple says that no, even when you connect your AirPods Max with a cable, you still don't get lossless.
John:
I guess it's just sending the same AAC compressed message over that wire instead of over Bluetooth in that case.
John:
We'll link to the tweet from it.
John:
This is from Apple to Micah Singleton.
John:
It says, AirPods Max also won't support lossless over the lightning cable, the company tells me, the company being Apple.
John:
So I wonder if that's like a software update or a firmware update they can fix or if it's just a fundamental limitation of the way the AirPods Max are created.
John:
It seems strange that I can imagine this being a limitation now, but it seems strange if the hardware is fundamentally incapable of supporting it.
John:
The great thing is, though, that Apple could just tell everyone that it supports it and no one would know.
John:
that's true because again the only way you can tell is with your magical golden ears or whatever and speaking of golden ears we didn't really touch on this but like we mostly talk about how cd quality is sufficient to you know encompass all of human hearing and most of the badness about cds is bad mastering and so on and so forth
John:
But we all know if we've been around for the early days of MP3, it's not hard, and Casey already said this, it's not hard to tell the difference between a low bitrate compressed audio file and a lossless CD quality file.
John:
Because we know the artifacts that we hear, the sort of crackle and sizzle and weird compression artifacts that we hear when something is heavily, heavily compressed.
John:
Back in the Napster days, people were encoding things at very low bitrates because bandwidth was low and disk space was low and, you know, things weren't the way they are now, right?
John:
I know I have a bunch of audio files in my iTunes collection or whatever we're supposed to call it now that are not encoded at 256 kilobits.
John:
Maybe they're 128.
John:
Maybe they're below 128.
John:
And even my old person ears can hear, okay, once you get below 128, especially if it's MP3 and especially if it was encoded by a bad encoder, I can hear that's not great, which is one of the reasons why I always like to have things on CD because then you can always re-rip them at higher quality.
John:
And that you effectively have the best quality version of that song that was for sale at the time.
John:
You know, setting aside remasters, you just want to get the file, uncompressed, CD quality audio, 16-bit, 44 GHz.
John:
And then you have to mangle it a little bit to get it onto your little iPod back in the day or whatever, right?
John:
and so lossless is not useless to you if you're if what you're coming from is a 96 kilobit mp3 from you know 2002 right because then that that cd quality lossless is a big step up now really what you should actually do is just take that cd quality lossless one and recompress it at 256 kilobit or maybe apple should do that for you you know and then you know get the benefit of that and that's where i get back to my question of like what if i want the remaster but i don't want the lossless i wonder if there'll be a way to and
John:
If these are DRM, oh, no, Apple Music always does DRM.
John:
I was so disappointed when I discovered this.
John:
Yeah, they're all DRM.
John:
When I was messing with audiophiles, what was it?
John:
Probably for the Rectives episode where we're listening to music.
John:
I'm like, great, I'll just grab this song and I'll be like, wait a second, what the hell is this song?
John:
I thought there's no more DRM in the iTunes store.
John:
But there's DRM on Apple Music, which is so dumb.
John:
I don't understand it.
John:
Like, if you buy it, you get it without any DRM.
John:
But if you subscribe to Apple Music, they put DRM.
John:
It's the same song.
John:
So you have to carefully fight with the music app to convince it, no, I purchased this song.
John:
Stop giving me the Apple Music version.
John:
Oh, here you go.
John:
Oh, you purchased it?
John:
Oh, here is your AAC file with no DRM.
John:
i'm assuming it's literally exactly the same file as the album music one is just drm or no drm always pick no drm but anyway if these were with no drm you could get the loss of the ones locally from apple music and then you could just recompress them yourself and then you would have your lossless remastered version of all the songs in a more compact size um
John:
I think what we're mostly talking about is who can tell about the lossless one.
John:
I think at 256 kilobit, that's probably the limit of adult or certainly older adult hearing where you'd really have to know what compression artifacts to look for.
John:
Maybe if you had some kind of weird industrial music or something with very unexpected frequency changes and you knew exactly which artifact to listen for, you could tell the difference between the uncompressed CD quality
John:
and the sort of standard Apple music quality.
John:
Um, but I do think that if you're coming from much, much worse compressed files, there is a benefit to be had to, to stepping up to this new modern format, which we called the CD, the quality, that quality of audio that was available in whatever, 1980 something, uh,
John:
We took it.
John:
I remember railing against us, maybe on hypercritical.
John:
We took a step backwards when we all switched to MP3 for its convenience because we had to smush the files down so small that the compression artifacts were there for anyone to hear.
John:
And it was a step backwards.
John:
And I'm glad we're sort of stepping forwards from that now.
John:
I still think it is a waste of everyone's bandwidth and disk space or storage space or whatever to actually be storing lossless files, especially if they're 24 bit 192 kilohertz.
John:
But hey, that's what floats your boat.
Marco:
You do you.
Marco:
yeah and that's that's kind of like a good summary of this whole thing like this is not going to actually sound better for the reasons you think and it is a massive waste of space and everything but there is demand for it and and if that's what you want great just don't try to tell me why it sounds better because you're probably wrong but if you enjoy enjoy it
John:
And speaking of that, there's nothing in this press release that I've seen that particularly makes any promises about remastering.
John:
Because they do say, oh, all 75 millions of the tracks will be lossless.
John:
That makes me think they're just taking... Because surely they have the lossless versions of these before they compress them, right?
John:
So that makes me think...
John:
Unless otherwise specified, when you just say, please give me the lossless version of this, it is literally the exact same song.
John:
Not a remaster.
John:
Nothing changed about it.
John:
It's just the exact same song, but we didn't run it through our normal compression thing.
John:
Because at various times, I think they've upped the quality of what's available to purchase and also through Apple Music.
John:
And they're just recompressing their same lossless masters that they had of this song.
John:
So I'm not sure how many, if any, of these things will actually be remastered or whether that will be distinguished in the increasingly...
John:
broken interface that is the Apple Music application.
Marco:
Yeah, well, and this is part of the reason why, I mean, look, they've been doing remastering of things for years.
Marco:
I mean, there was the old, like, master for iTunes.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
And they've, you know, they still, like, I don't know how much Apple's directly involved, but they still have...
Marco:
you know there's lots of stuff all over apple music and the itunes store that is like you know remastered versions of older stuff you know that's that's that's been a thing uh for a long time now um so you know that i think i think this was actually a fairly easy thing for them to deliver as a feature because they already had so much in place they already had their own lossless codec which making a lossless audio codec is not hard because it's a pretty simple pretty simple math to do it and there's
Marco:
extremely diminishing returns in space to do anything complicated.
Marco:
So you're basically encoding the difference from one sample to the next as the smallest number of bits you can.
Marco:
That's basically every lossless format.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Because anything else is a waste of computational resources.
Marco:
And they all max out at roughly 50% average compression ratio.
Marco:
Anyway, so to do this for them is not that big of a deal.
Marco:
And the other sad part about lossless stuff is that
Marco:
while there is demand for it from from you know a lot of people they think they're going to really need it and and know the difference but it's off by default and the reason why it's off by default is because it's huge and in the reality of the world people are going to try it for like you know if they if they know to even go turn it on in settings they're going to try it and they're
Marco:
Or that burned a ton of my battery or a ton of my disk space.
Marco:
And then they're going to turn it off.
Marco:
It's one of those things that people think they want a lot more than they actually end up wanting or using.
Marco:
Because in practice, it's so much more ridiculous in practice.
Marco:
When I buy my Live Fish concerts from livefish.net,
Marco:
there was one season that they did like one tour that where I pre-ordered it.
Marco:
They offer every download in, um, in flack and in high res flack.
Marco:
And then also just an MP3.
Marco:
And usually I would just buy the MP3s though.
Marco:
I think they're like two 56 K I think constant bit rate, but anyway, they're great MP3s and I've never heard a difference.
Marco:
Anyway, there was one tour where I thought, Oh, I I'm so into this.
Marco:
And this was like, you know, years back before I knew better.
Marco:
And I thought, I'm going to buy this one in flack, really treat myself and I'll start doing that.
Marco:
And it took up so much disc space.
Marco:
They were so big that I ended up doing what John said earlier.
Marco:
I ended up just recompressing them all as MP3s and just like burning all the flacks to like a Blu-ray disc and putting in the closet and forgetting about it because like I really didn't need or want the reality of what that meant in practice.
John:
Speaking of Blu-ray, though, this is another, regardless of the merits of this particular feature and the trade-offs of it, this is another decision Apple has made with sort of the march of technology and data formats that is really beneficial to their brand.
John:
They did it once before when they started rolling out 4K movies in iTunes by basically saying, hey, if you purchased this movie five years ago and you purchased the HD version, guess what?
John:
Now you've got the 4K version.
John:
No extra cost.
John:
You don't have to buy it a second time.
John:
Right.
John:
And here they are with music saying, if you want lossless, this doesn't cost any more.
John:
If you want any of the songs that you have, you know, you subscribe to Apple Music and you want to listen to the losses.
John:
Fine.
John:
They're yours free.
John:
It's all part of your subscription.
John:
Right.
John:
That brand builds brand equity.
John:
That makes people have confidence in.
John:
spending their money on media from apple because it's basically saying so far twice uh you know when the format has changed apple has not seized that as an opportunity to make us rebuy everything compared to cassette vinyl cd super audio cd dvd blu-ray where in the physical world i mean for obvious reasons you had to rebuy everything and it was a you know a huge windfall like part of the you know the huge amount of money the music industry made was when everyone was replacing music they had already purchased and they're buying it again on cd
John:
But in the magic of the digital download era, you don't have to do that.
John:
There is no physical media.
John:
You can actually just say, oh, that movie you bought a long, long time ago, there's a 4K version now and you've got it for free because you paid us for it once.
John:
And so here you go.
John:
That's a smart move in their porn, especially from a company that is currently undergoing some...
John:
Some, let's say, brand cachet loss with the ongoing trials and everything else.
John:
Good move for Apple for rolling this out for free.
John:
It's a strong competitive move and it makes people feel more confident locking themselves into the Apple ecosystem by buying stuff from them.
Marco:
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Casey:
Let's talk about some hardware rumors.
Casey:
This is obviously ramping up in the ever-increasing time, or decreasing time, I should say, that we have before WWDC.
Casey:
And I don't think we spoke about on the show, or if we did, it was only obliquely, that there was apparently a ransomware leak at a supplier of Apple's.
Casey:
And so a hacker group called Revil, R-E-V-I-L, had apparently blackmailed the Apple supplier Quanta.
Casey:
And they said, hey, if you don't pay us a whole ton of money, I think via Bitcoin, then we're going to start leaking some of the stuff we stole from you.
Casey:
And guess what?
Casey:
They started leaking it.
Casey:
And we don't know if it's real or not, but it's looking good.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
How do we want to how do we want to approach this?
John:
I mean, I think we could just these are things mostly we've talked about.
John:
But like, you know, I think you did a good job of framing this is like, it's probably real.
John:
But who knows, you know, hacker groups demanding ransom like this could this could all be fake based on the rumors, because in the end, the information here is not new.
John:
But assuming they're real or even close to real or even if they're just mock-ups, it gives us a good idea of like visualizing the rumors we had before.
John:
And so we'll start with the MacBook Pro.
John:
We talked about this on past shows.
John:
The rumor is flatter design, SD card slot, HDMI port, you know, all the things that we wanted, right?
John:
MagSafe coming back.
John:
And so whether these are real leaks or just renders of graphics,
John:
the information I just gave you, I think it's a good visualization.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes so you can look at these pictures too.
John:
What might this product look like?
John:
As we talked on past shows, hey, if it's got flat sides, how do you pick it off the table?
John:
Well, the two side view mock-ups show, as we noted last time we talked about it, very prominent feet.
John:
That's one way you can solve it.
John:
Let's put some big feet on these suckers.
John:
So then, yeah, the sides are flat, but the feet are pretty big, and so you can still get your fingernails under it and lift it up.
John:
And then it shows if these things are so super thin, how do you fit HDMI and SD card slots on there?
John:
How tight is it?
John:
Uh, it's pretty tight.
John:
I mean, I look at the HDMI port and I think, yeah, that's, uh, that's pretty much as thin as you can make anything that still has an HDMI thing in the side of it.
John:
Uh,
John:
And then also for the screen, you know, the squared off edges, the screen looks very squared off as well in this picture.
John:
It looks like imagine that the the tie book, the titanium power book, but with the screen like a quarter.
John:
thickness it looks almost impossibly thin and you know and because it's flat-sided it's not tapered or anything like the current one it looks it's uh the aesthetic uh is kind of working for me as a sort of slab-sided notebook that is also impossibly thin that has very prominent feet unfortunately the magsafe bit is mostly just the line drawing thing and we can't really tell we can see which hole they're trying to say is magsafe and it's this
John:
hole that doesn't look like any of the other ports but uh i can't really tell how the magnet thing is going to go into that where are the magnets how different is it from the mag safe we knew before so many questions love whether we're going to be still be able to charge with usbc or whether it will just be mag safe uh you know but but either way i think these mock-ups based on the rumors this is a plausible uh you know a plausible version of those rumors and
John:
And, you know, as we said before, this is what we all wanted.
John:
Fix the keyboard, put the ports back on the thing, give us back MagSafe.
John:
I, you know, I still sometimes have trouble believing they're actually going to do this because it is such a reversal from all their past decisions.
John:
But we'll emphasize again, I think this is the right decision.
John:
I really do hope they make a machine that's like this, especially with an amazing ARM processor in it, which we'll get to in a little bit.
John:
I think it will be a great product.
Marco:
yeah i really you know like where there's smoke there's fire there sure is a lot of smoke around like these new port changes and i am so looking forward to this i mean you know so the only real downside is that it's going to if this is correct it's going to lose one of the usbc ports um but i think so it's going to go down to three usbcs one hdmi one sd and a headphone jack and a max safe
Marco:
I love where this is going.
Marco:
I think having only three USB-C ports is fine if you don't need to use one for charging anymore.
Marco:
Right.
John:
They're really embracing the idea that, look, one of those ports is always just going to be used for power anyway.
John:
So now it literally is only used for power.
John:
Right.
Marco:
And if you also have a built-in HDMI port, which they do, built-in SD card, this is going to remove a lot of the need for dongles for a lot of people.
Marco:
And
Marco:
a little detail that i love it sure looks like the headphone jack has moved back to the left side finally am i right god because as i've always harped on that's the side it used to be on for a reason
Marco:
that most headphones where the cable only goes into one side, usually it's the left side.
Marco:
Not to mention the fact that the majority of people who use mice next to their laptops are usually using them on the right side because most people are right-handed, and the headphone cable coming out on the right side always gets in the way of your mouse.
Marco:
so it's there's lots of good reasons to put it over back to the left where it was for years and so i just i'm so happy to see these kind of changes this looks like it's going to be incredible i i also see like from the leaked um like schematic looking drawing you can clearly see the area where the inverted t arrows still remain on the keyboard and you can clearly see a row of function keys that are also bigger um similar to the to the um
Marco:
The MacBook Air render rumors things that we'll get to in a second.
Marco:
It looks like the function key row is full height again, as opposed to being like the weird kind of half height that it's been.
Marco:
So, you know, it looks like the keyboard is still as good as it ever is.
Marco:
And man, this having all the ports back, I hope this is real.
Marco:
And the more that comes out about it, the more it seems like it is real.
Marco:
And it's going to be spectacular.
Casey:
You know, I have a question for you guys.
Casey:
I can't remember if we talked about this when we were talking about the rumors earlier.
Casey:
If the tradeoff is that you can only charge via MagSafe, which I don't think they would do, but if the tradeoff is you can only charge via MagSafe...
Casey:
I don't know if I would want that because I wouldn't now.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Because I have so much USB-C stuff in my life.
Casey:
And as an example, like today I went and worked at a local park and I used this backup battery and hub that I really like.
Casey:
And I'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
And so what I did was I plugged my laptop into this battery, but then put it in hub mode such that I could also plug my phone into the, into the battery and I can tether to my phone via USB rather than Bluetooth or wifi or anything, which I, which I kind of like.
Casey:
And, and so that was one USB connection, the USB-C connection from the battery to the computer.
Casey:
And then the battery also connected to the phone.
Casey:
And, and I don't know, I feel like with USB-C chargers just littering my house,
Casey:
I don't think I would want a MagSafe only lifestyle.
Casey:
I definitely would love the option of MagSafe for sure.
Casey:
And I would give up a port, a USB-C port to get it.
Casey:
But I don't think I would want to live in a MagSafe exclusive world anymore.
John:
Yeah, I'm totally with you on that.
John:
You know, the solution is obvious here.
John:
It's called a dongle.
John:
If you get a MagSafe dongle, then you can still use USB-C.
John:
And all your charging infrastructure will work.
John:
It's very easy to adapt.
John:
And the tradeoff is, okay, so I don't have to have a dongle for SD.
John:
I don't have to have a dongle for HDMI.
John:
But I do have to have a dongle if I want to fit into the USB charging infrastructure.
John:
But again, I think...
John:
It doesn't seem like there's any particular reason for them not to support it because even in like USB, being able to charge through a USB-C port, it seems like it's intrinsic to their ARM architecture basically because it comes from the iPad Pro where that was first introduced, you know, where you could charge something through USB-C and have it be an ARM processor.
John:
like it almost seems like it would take work for them to make them to make that not work just because the architecture of all their laptops for so many years has been yeah we have a bunch of usbc ports and you can charge through any of them um so we'll see what they actually do and like as marco pointed out and the reason i was confused by that thing
John:
You really have to zoom in to see that in this mock-up, one of the ports is supposed to be MagSafe.
John:
But again, this is just a mock-up, and it's literally just the USB-C size and shape hole.
John:
I would imagine that the MagSafe port will not be the exact size and shape of a USB-C port for many good reasons.
John:
Uh, so I don't think that's going to be a problem, but yeah, you will have to have some kind of dongle if they, if they make that bad decision, but honestly say that's, say they do that and say, okay, it's just mag safe only all of the other things they're doing right down to the thing that I forgot, which Marco had pointed out, which is like, Hey, guess what?
John:
No touch bar either.
John:
it's net net it would still be such a massive improvement over the current models and then you only have one thing to fix in the next three years instead of fixing the keyboard hey people don't like it that you can't charge through usbc so for the next revision of this let people do that and now you're done you have not a perfect laptop but basically like the top seven demands of your users have been met like it's a this is would be such a turnaround for this product
Casey:
Yeah, and it makes me wonder, and I know we've talked about this before, so I won't belabor the point, but it makes me wonder, like, what happened to make all this suddenly possible?
Casey:
Like, who left, and I know there's an obvious potential answer there, but who left or who got demoted and promoted and so on and so forth such that all of a sudden all of our dreams are coming true?
John:
we need more lawsuits to happen so we can get these depositions right there's discoveries we can find out because this this court case is nothing about that but i don't now i don't really care who proposed what app store rules and made what deals with netflix now i want to know how why did it take so long to fix the keyboard and how did someone apparently as far as we can tell from these rumors finally win the argument and say could we make our laptops good again
John:
easy there easy there and so the next one we gotta go through this the next one is uh uh macbook air rumor right so the macbook air we have now it's the m1 macbook air it's great it's an amazing machine but it is in fact the old macbook air with all its insides ripped out and replaced with just amazing new insides and removing all the fans which is great but given this new design that we just described and also given the design of the new imacs the rumors here are essentially the imacification of the macbook air so square
John:
square it all off, give it to us in colors, put touch ID on the keyboard with, with the, I mean, it's already there obviously in the current one, but like making it look like the keyboard on the IMAX where it's the little white full size key with the circle in it, right?
John:
White bezels around the screen, like whole nine yards.
John:
If you look at these mockups, you're like, yep, if someone turned an IMAX into a MacBook air size computer, it would look like that.
John:
Uh,
John:
I still question the brand identity of MacBook Air in a world where it is not wedge-shaped, but things change, and colors can cover up for a lot, and it's not like this thing isn't going to be thin enough, because if you look at the mock-ups anyway, it's like, again, literally as thin as it can possibly be to fit the port on the side, and the difference is in this case, it appears there's no HDMI port, but it's just USB-C.
John:
which again makes sense for the macbook air but basically make a flat-sided laptop whose flat side is just big enough to fit a usb c port and then put an impossibly thin screen on it put it in m1 inside it give it to us in colors with a full size keyboard with an inverted t with real function keys and touch id on it and
John:
Yeah, this seems like a great product.
John:
My only question about these mockups, and I'm assuming this mockup is based, this is from John Prosser.
John:
We got a rumor monger on YouTube.
John:
My only question about this is the bottom view.
John:
And I think this is based on the rumors.
John:
The rumors are that instead of having four feet on the bottom of this thing, there would be two rubber strips that look like skis.
John:
And I can't for the life of me figure out what the point of that would be.
Marco:
i can guess i mean part of it is i think they want to like if if the again that's a big if like how accurate these these renders and mock-ups are um but part of it might be to give it a little bit more elevation off the desk you want something a little bit thicker and maybe that maybe that would be weird with feet or maybe with standard feet they would like they would get hit and fall off more easily
Marco:
And I don't know, like, to what degree the current feet fall off in practice.
Marco:
Maybe this is also just a way to increase the reliability of them staying in there, to just make them bigger and have it be, like, you know, two large pieces instead of four little pieces.
John:
Yeah, there's more glue surface area.
John:
Like, the feet do come off.
John:
Like, I know from people who work at Apple stores that sometimes the feet do come off.
John:
They're just glued on, and they'll just glue new ones on.
John:
But in my personal experience, I've never lost a foot on an Apple laptop opinion.
John:
You know, it is just glue.
John:
And I know a lot of people like their their Apple Watches delaminate from the glue.
John:
And that that's a more troubling thing.
John:
But yeah, more glue surface area makes some sense.
John:
I still question whether an entire ski would be that because like the four points.
John:
are more likely to have a pleasing seating effect on a slightly uneven surface than four skis, because the four skis give ample opportunity for imperfections in the surface you're on to translate through to your laptop, right?
John:
Obviously, three feet would be the ideal one for not wobbling.
John:
That's why we have tripods, not quadrupods for cameras, right?
John:
But, you know, with a laptop where you're typing on it, a tripod arrangement of feet would not be ideal as you hit the control key in the lower left corner and your thing tips over, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
But I also don't think two skis is the ideal one.
John:
So anyway, it couldn't just be a fashion thing or a design thing.
John:
I don't see any sort of reflection of this.
John:
I think someone has pointed out that if you look at the underside of the feet on the new iBacks, that they have strips or something like that.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
It's a minor feature, but I'm still a little bit baffled as to...
John:
What the thinking is and whether Apple, if they introduced a computer that's like this, would even mention, oh, and by the way, it's got the best feet ever.
John:
I mean, Steve Jobs would do it because he would some some minor detail like this would only get on the thing if Jobs thought it was a good idea.
John:
And if he thought it was a good idea, he'd have some rationale.
John:
So he would mention it.
John:
But in the modern Apple, was he a foot guy?
John:
Wow.
John:
In the modern Apple, they tend not to mention something like this at all on stage to just say these are great laptops.
John:
And then when you ask them later about the feet, they'll just be like, you know, I don't know.
John:
It's our new design.
John:
Anyway, I think my big question about this is wedge or no wedge.
John:
Or if this is not even a MacBook Air and they just call this a MacBook and keep the air wedge shaped.
John:
i'm not quite sure but i'm totally ready for colors to come like the imax you know the reviews have all shown all the different colors i think they're great they're fun they should totally do that with uh the lower level laptops i mean i think they should do with all the laptops but they're thus far they're uh they have kept the colors to the lower end products even in the iphone realm even in the ipad realm and been more subdued in the pros which
Marco:
you know that's a reasonable distinction most people buy the the low-end ones anyway so it means that most people will be getting colors i really hope that so first of all i love the colors that sounds great and if it's anything like the imax it's probably going to be pretty great you know still a little pastel-y for me but hey i'll take it um but i really hope that they don't change two things about this number one is
Marco:
it better not have a fan because having the fanless computer is amazing.
Marco:
So that's big number one.
Marco:
And number two, I really hope they don't make the battery much or any smaller.
Marco:
Dr. Drang had a good blog post about this last week.
Marco:
Basically, as I've been very happy with it, so has he, that basically because of the way that they designed this first-generation M1 MacBook Air, where, as you mentioned, John, they basically just...
Marco:
didn't change the externals at all from the previous one and just stuffed a way lower power usage processor in there didn't change the size of the battery didn't change the size of the case didn't change the weight like everything else did the same so by sticking a very low power usage processor in there we got this amazing battery life to the point where i love like like if i like go somewhere for a weekend or if i have to like go home for a day or something
Marco:
I don't usually have to plug in my laptop the entire time I'm gone.
Marco:
Like I can, if I take like a multi, like a weekend trip somewhere, I can treat my laptop more like I would treat an iPad where I probably will not need to charge just unless I'm using it heavily.
Marco:
And that's wonderful.
Marco:
And it's so great to have it just like I have it sitting around the house and sometimes it spends the night over on a countertop somewhere where there isn't a cable and it's not plugged in.
Marco:
And the next day I can go use it and it's fine.
Marco:
Sometimes it spends on a charger and that's fine, but you know, it doesn't have to.
Marco:
And that's wonderful.
Marco:
It's such a great place to be.
Marco:
It really does dramatically improve the everyday usability of this product.
Marco:
So I hope that this first generation one is not some kind of fluke because they were reusing the old industrial design.
Marco:
I hope that at least again, if they want to make the higher end, higher powered ones, you know, a little more aggressive on their, on their battery, battery to weight ratio, fine.
Marco:
But,
Marco:
But I hope something in the lineup, and I think the Air is a good place for it because it's so low-powered, something in the lineup should have the ridiculous battery life that the current MacBook Air with the M1 does.
Marco:
It's such a great experience.
Marco:
I really hope that this new MacBook Air doesn't just shed the, quote, excess battery in their terminology and cut the battery life in half because, oh, it's too long now, and we have to get it back down to four hours or whatever.
Marco:
Please don't do that.
Marco:
I really, really hope.
Marco:
that whatever they are trying to do to make this thing thinner and lighter as they are always pushing to do, please stop at the point where it comes to cutting the battery very much from the current one.
Marco:
I would love for them to keep it the same.
Marco:
I think that's a little too much to expect.
Marco:
I can't imagine they would keep it the same, but at least don't cut it by much, please.
John:
Well, that gets us back to the wedge, though, because the advantage of not having the wedge is not only is there actually, you know, all of the things being equal, not only is there actually more volume for the battery, but even if you cut down the volume by making the fat end thinner, which it looks like in these mockups they're doing, it's just much easier to buy batteries that are uniform thickness.
John:
right it's easier to manufacture that it's easy to fill the space right so even if the overall battery volume is lower not having to do the weird scalps multi-part battery where you're sacrificing you're sacrificing space by essentially not making a wedge-shaped battery by doing the scallop batteries because
John:
You know, they touted that as like, oh, we have these little scallops, like these little terraces, like we're farming for rice.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, little terrace type things because the batteries are essentially flat and you have to get multiple ones and chain them together.
John:
And you're just wasting space and all of those little terraces and scallops.
John:
Right.
John:
If it literally is flat, you can fill all the available space with a conventional flat battery.
John:
And that gives me some hope that there's a fighting chance of this thing.
John:
will potentially match the m1 macbook air's uh power efficiency especially if if you know this i don't i didn't read too much in the rumors i don't know if this is rumored for like next year or something like especially if it comes out later and it's like a you know tsmc's three nanometer process or something so you get some power savings and then even though the battery gets smaller you match the uh the battery life
John:
um we'll see you know it could be it could be that this the m1 macbook that everybody loves does end up being like this slight aberration and that it was just so over over provisioned on battery the next ones are a little bit lower but i have some hope that if these rumors are true and this really is the air and it really doesn't have the wedge anymore that's good for battery possibilities
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Marco:
Also, regarding the timing, and this I think might lead us into the next thing, I expect the MacBook Air, the next one, to have the M2 processor.
Marco:
And I don't expect the M2 processor to come out until this fall or winter.
Marco:
And maybe even spring.
Marco:
They could be on a one-and-a-half-year cycle for all we know.
Marco:
But most likely this fall or winter, I would expect the M2 because I would expect it to be based on the A15 cores that will come in this fall's iPhones.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The other stuff that we're about to talk about, which will presumably be using larger core, larger versions of chips, I would expect those not to have the M2.
Marco:
I would expect those to be effectively, whatever they're going to call it, I would expect it to be an M1X, which is more M1 cores onto a larger die.
Marco:
And we'll get to that in a minute, but...
Marco:
you know i've heard a lot of people speculating on different podcasts and stuff about like you know would it be weird to have you know the the the bigger higher end products using something in the m1 series of chips and then have the m2 come out and it's like the small chip again for the next macbook air and i think no that's not weird in fact that's almost always how big chips are made if you look at like the intel zeon line the zeons that have the really high core counts you
Marco:
Usually, it's not the current generation core when those come out.
Marco:
It's like last year's core or two years ago's core that they have gotten good enough at manufacturing that they can now start making larger and larger chips with it.
Marco:
And they're doing the big, large chips using the slightly older core design.
Marco:
as they're starting to get good at making the new design in smaller sizes.
Marco:
And then eventually that will scale up to make the next generation of big chips.
Marco:
So the bigger chips usually are like a half generation, at least behind the smaller chips.
Marco:
And that's, again, that's one of the reasons why like Intel's newest core designs tended to come out first in small laptops.
Marco:
And they would slowly bring it up the line with like the bigger chips that have more cores and the bigger integrated GPUs and stuff like that.
Marco:
So what I expect to happen here, I don't expect to see this new MacBook Air until the fall at least, fall or winter.
Marco:
What I do expect to see before then is the bigger laptops and possibly the Mac Pro Mini or the Mac Mini Pro, which sounds like they might be two different products in addition to the Mac Pro Mac Pro, which is different.
Marco:
But I expect what we're about to see is the M1X line, and I'm very excited about this.
John:
I'm not sure that I would put too much stake in how Intel has done things.
John:
Like the realities of silicon manufacturing are true, but those are mostly tied to the process and not to the products, right?
John:
So if we assume, you know, like the first five nanometer chip is not going to be like your Xeon type scale thing.
John:
It's like you said, it's going to be a smaller laptop chip or whatever.
John:
So Apple's first crop of five nanometer chips were in fact the low power M1 that's put in their low end products, right?
John:
If they don't change the process for the big chips and they say...
John:
now that we've done this process for a while that you know these this big honking chip for our mac pro it's also going to be a five nanometer chip uh but now we just have more experience with the process and this was designed from the beginning to be a five nanometer chip and you know like i can see that happening and it not lagging behind in terms of the core because you know if the m2 core is also targeting five nanometers
John:
There's no reason that can also be the core that is in the big chips.
John:
We'll see.
John:
The Intel approach, it's what we're all used to.
John:
But I think a lot of it also has to do with decisions of how Intel paced its product cycle to its process jumps.
John:
And that pacing isn't necessarily the only way you can possibly do things.
John:
And Apple is essentially one step into a potential plan, which is...
John:
You know, five nanometer chip, the M1 in the low end products.
John:
Our next five nanometer chip is the M2 in our big products because now it's a more stable process.
John:
But we'll see.
John:
But like when you mentioned the M1X, like as we'll get to in a second, X seems insufficient.
John:
as a modifier to delineate the difference between the M1 chip and the slightly more powerful version when it was like, oh, the whatever chip and then whatever X chip would be in the iPad, right?
John:
It's like the phone chip, but it's got a couple more cores.
John:
Maybe they need to add a few more Xs.
Marco:
Well, then you get into problems and you add multiple Xs.
John:
I agree.
John:
I mean, that's why they had an SE30 and not an SEX.
John:
Right.
Marco:
M1 XYZ.
Marco:
That's problematic, too.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this is the rumors for the higher-end products, right?
John:
What are they actually doing?
John:
More concrete details in the high-end.
John:
They have a bunch of code names called...
John:
jade c chop and jade c die and i don't really understand these code names i'm sure they make sense to somebody later on they'll have ones i can tell you it's right there in the name we'll get to it read what read the next sentence it makes total sense where it says to c die and for c no no no before that we'll get to that too
Marco:
what's what is spec'd so for the new so this is a rumor from from mark german and bloomberg uh i think yesterday um so for the new macbook pros apple's playing on two different chips codenamed jade c chop and jade c die both include eight high performance cores two energy efficient cores for a total of 10 and will be offered in either 16 or 32 graphics core variations right there there's your reason they're binning based on gpu failures but why is it called chop and die
Marco:
maybe chop is the one that has half the graphics cords disabled but that's not chopped off they're still there well why is one called die i don't know well because it's a large die i don't know see maybe c is is for cent for 10 although that's more of a hundred prefix but who knows regardless like i think it's right there in the name
John:
Well, I mean, here's the thing.
John:
I don't think they're binning 16 versus 32 cores.
John:
Binning is like, okay, one or two cores are dead.
John:
Binning is not half the cores don't work.
John:
Like, that's the difference between 16 and 32 cores.
Marco:
Well, if they're making massive chips, like, I bet that's what it is.
Marco:
I bet if they're offering the same processor with either 16 or 32 GPU cores,
Marco:
I bet it's a binning thing.
Marco:
We'll find out.
John:
I mean, when it comes out, we'll find out.
John:
I have never in the industry heard of something where literally half, and it's not just like ones or twos, like 16 cores.
John:
Like, oh, well, we can only... Half the time when we make this ship, you know, like, boy, that...
John:
maybe i'm wrong maybe this is this is the type of thing happens frequently but just the the idea that there would be literally 16 of your 32 graphics cores that they would use the die space for it like for the square millimeters inside the case of the computer especially a laptop but say yeah we're going to disable them because the odds of all 16 being bad is very low maybe three or four are bad but like why would they not enable it to be like a 28 core gpu or something
John:
I don't know.
John:
Again, these are just rumors and we'll see.
John:
The other important rumor is that part of this is 64 gigabytes of RAM, which is an appropriate amount for a MacBook Pro and I think would satisfy everybody.
John:
But let's just talk about this chip here.
John:
Eight high performance cores, two efficiency cores for a total 10 and 16 or 32 graphic cores and 64 gigs of memory.
John:
assuming it's again on the five nanometer process and we know how big the m1 is you can just take that shirt that you all just ordered and take those little you know again it's not it's not exactly to scale but you can say all right well we know the counts for all the elements in the m1 scale it up linearly you know how much how much bigger does this chip get this is a for this is a much bigger chip than the m1 right the gpu alone going from eight cores to 32 in the big one and then the ram
John:
we talked about before about various schemes of trying to sam you know layer the ram on top of each other or whatever the ram takes up a huge portion of the m1 because it's you know it's off to the side there like and cranking that up like this is a bigger a much bigger chip amazing you know it'll be amazing for performance because we know how fast the m1 is imagine if you had something with eight of the power cores and then the efficiency core is just whatever thrown in there so
John:
i think this is a perfectly appropriate chip for a laptop as i noted many times we've discussed this in the past i see no reason for discrete graphics even on the highest of high-end macbook pros and this rumor seems to be saying that that's what you're going to be getting is quote-unquote apple integrated graphics but we again we know how fast the eight core gpu is on the current ones if you want to know how fast a 32 core one would be because of the massively parallel nature of gpus you
John:
you can mostly linearly scale it up and say it'll be four times faster.
John:
So that's looking good to me as an appropriate use of die space and power for a MacBook Pro.
John:
I would be perfectly happy with these specs.
Casey:
You know, it feels like, and I'm saying this based on no facts, but it just feels like the M1 chip was really an iPhone or perhaps iPad chip that was just used in way, way, way more places.
Casey:
And the way this is described is it sounds like this is perhaps a scaling up of the M1 as we know it today.
Casey:
But it's the first time we've gotten a chip that really was truly designed for a computer, was designed for so much RAM, was designed to have a really good GPU.
Casey:
It feels like we're now starting to see signs of the first honest-to-goodness computer or traditionally defined computer chip that Apple has made.
Casey:
And I am here for it.
Casey:
It sounds great.
Casey:
I have to commend you two.
Casey:
We've made it more than five seconds into this topic without bringing up what's supposedly going in the Mac Pro.
John:
I mean, in all fairness, that's next.
John:
There's one little in-between thing of rumor that they're going to put one of the higher-end chips in a Mac Mini, which I think would be a good idea.
John:
And by the way, Casey, to your idea of a chip designed for a computer, it's also in many ways, and again, we've discussed this in past shows, a chip that's designed to be cooled by a fan.
John:
Because you know what?
John:
When you get into the high end, maybe having no fan is not your top priority.
John:
Maybe you want to grind through those renders a little bit faster.
John:
So this chip is going to be bigger.
John:
It's going to be hotter.
John:
It's going to take up more power.
John:
And there's going to be more powerful fans cooling it.
John:
And that's what you do on high end devices.
John:
So I'm happy to see them sort of like turning the dial up and saying, look, we have cooling capacity.
John:
It's a 16 inch laptop.
John:
We can put fans in there.
John:
We've done it before.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's not going to be as hot as the big Intel chips were, I would hope, but it's going to be way hotter than the M1 in the current 13-inch MacBook Pro because that's what you do on a Pro machine.
John:
So I am here for it.
John:
I am ready for it.
John:
That chip looks great.
John:
And if you want to put a more powerful one in the Mini, there's plenty of excess cooling capacity in that Mini.
John:
They kept the huge power supply from before.
John:
I forget how many watts over a provision that power supply is, but there's also plenty of room there for more cooling as well.
John:
So...
John:
If they want to charge even more for a Mac Mini and put one of these better MacBook Pro chips in there, that'll be great.
John:
And then finally, for the Mac Pro, now they add more Jade 2C die and Jade 4C die.
John:
Here's where things start to get a little bit wacky.
John:
Your choices are 20 or 40 computing core variations made up of 16 high-performance cores or 32 high-performance cores and then also 4 or 8 high-efficiency cores.
John:
Eight high efficiency cores seems excessive to me.
John:
What are you doing in the background that you need eight cores for the, you know, I don't know, we just had room and we just kept putting efficiency cores until we ran out of room.
John:
These are huge core counts.
John:
This is a huge chip, but here's where it gets super interesting.
John:
According to this rumor, again, the chip would include either 64 core or 128 core options for graphics.
John:
Pfft.
John:
It doesn't say where those would be, but again, remember.
Marco:
It's right there in the name.
Marco:
You're killing me.
John:
The M1.
Marco:
Jade 2C die and Jade 4C die versus the other one, which is called Jade C die.
Marco:
Hello?
Marco:
It's right there in the name.
John:
They're multiplying the same chip.
John:
I understand, but here's the thing.
John:
All right.
John:
We know how big eight GPU cores are.
John:
That means we probably also know, again, same process size, assuming similar cores, how big 128 of them would be.
John:
Just make the diagram.
John:
Just start seeing how big this thing is going to be and start thinking about.
John:
And again, assuming they didn't really mention anything about the RAM here, that the RAM would also be there.
John:
Like if the RAM ceiling is higher than 64 gigs and they use a similar design of like, let's see if we can wedge this all into one package like the M1.
John:
this is a huge chip.
John:
And what I started to think about was, all right, is this, is this sufficient computing?
John:
The cores were fine because, you know, the top end Xeons are what?
John:
28 cores.
John:
And these cores are like faster than the Xeon cores.
John:
And so if you're going to have 40 of them,
John:
your multi-threaded compute, you're fine.
John:
Like, that's... We know that will be fine.
John:
I'd buy it.
John:
The GPU has always been the big question because you can put, you can put like 400 watts of GPU in the Mac Pro and, you know, do your... Plus, not to mention the afterburner card and all that other stuff, right?
John:
And so, to compete with that, you would want to at least...
John:
Let's say we just want to match the highest end single GPU.
John:
Forget about where people have four GPUs inside their Mac Pros, right?
John:
Because you can get two GPUs per card and you can put two of those cards in there.
John:
You've got four GPUs, right?
John:
Can we even match a single of the current high-end graphics card?
John:
And it's hard to tell because...
John:
gpu cores are not comparable to each other you can't just count cores and benchmarks are notoriously difficult especially involving games which is a lot of what people care about or whatever but if we just want to go i just want you to go like back of the envelope like is it plausible that the chip in this rumor could be competitive with the best single gpu that's out there today so we looked at the nvidia rtx 3090 which no one can buy because everyone's buying them for bitcoin or whatever but
John:
assuming you could get one of these the theoretical 32-bit floating point teraflops of this is 35.58 teraflops again teraflops is not a way to measure gpu performance just think theoretically like ballpark capacity wise what is the computing potential of this thing it doesn't mean you're going to get that in any real world application and again games are fiendishly complicated and you know but anyway just i just wanted to try to ballpark it
John:
To compare that, the 8-core GPU in the M1 gets about 2.6 teraflops of floating point 32.
John:
So 2.6 versus 35.
John:
That's the gap between the M1's GPU and the best single GPU you can buy today.
John:
So if you do the math and figure out what would it take, again, assuming the GPU cores are exactly the same as they are in the M1, which is not necessarily the case for whatever era this chip is supposed to be coming out in.
John:
But if you just say, hey, I've got the M1 GPU cores, I've got eight of them.
John:
How many do I need to get to 35.58 teraflops?
John:
And in theory, if you had a 110 core M1 style GPU, you could hit or exceed 35.58 teraflops, right?
John:
So a 128 core M1 style GPU...
John:
could be faster than an nvidia rtx 3090 right now if you've ever seen an rtx 3090 the card is huge it's not it's not a small thing and it's huge because first of all the chip is huge second of all it produces a huge amount of heat and third of all you've got to get that heat away in some way and it's just the gpu oh my god it doesn't have any it doesn't have anything else in there it's just the gpu and and associated vram all right but
John:
I start to think about, okay, you're going to have... I don't know if it's 5 nanometers, but anyway.
John:
You're going to have 128 GPU cores, which, according to this back-of-the-envelope math, is plausibly a match to the current fastest single GPU thing.
John:
And you're going to put that...
John:
maybe this doesn't say in the same package in the same neighborhood as your 40 core cpu and maybe also in the same neighborhood as your 64 possibly 128 gigs of ram they say this thing is going to be you know half size or a smaller than the current mac pro and i can believe that
John:
But it seems to me that 90% of the case is going to be taken up with this gigantic city of chips and its associated cooling solution.
John:
Again, GPUs are nice because you can just multiply it out.
John:
It's embarrassingly parallel, as they say.
John:
There's always more pixels.
John:
You can literally scale almost linearly by adding more execution cores.
John:
It's more complicated than that when you get into more complicated 3D stuff.
John:
But just for raw compute power, it's just like, bring on the pixels.
John:
I will just scale up.
John:
uh and for the cpu it's like well what workload am i going to get this guy exercise all 40 cores but we can do it right but just just start laying that out again you know use the artwork from the shirt and just start laying out these pieces and figure and how big is your sim city start to get and you're like okay now let me just measure the edges of this wow
John:
That's a lot of chips.
John:
That's a lot of transistors.
John:
That's a lot of power.
John:
That's a lot of cooling.
John:
I'm not saying it's unplausible because, hey, this case sitting next to me is huge.
John:
It has the cooling capacity to cool something like this, but it is going to be a technical marvel.
John:
Now, the other thing to keep in mind is this rumor is of a computer.
John:
This might not come out until next year.
John:
And at that point, what is the fastest single GPU then?
John:
And we still haven't addressed the idea of what about a Mac Pro that has four GPUs in it.
John:
Granted, each one is not a 3090, but still four of them, it's a problem.
John:
And then the afterburner card and what they're going to do with that.
John:
And the final thing I'll throw in here, this is a rumor that was, not a rumor, this is a real thing.
John:
A real thing about Mac OS releases.
John:
Mac OS 11.4 beta now supports the AMD Navi RDNA 2 graphics cards, which are basically AMD's
John:
graphics cards that are remotely competitive with the aforementioned RTX 3090.
John:
They're actually pretty good.
John:
Like the 6800, 6800, actually the 6900 XT.
John:
Those AMD cards are competitive with the best from NVIDIA, right?
John:
So, you know, NVIDIA, this is like a leapfrog between the two of them.
John:
NVIDIA leapt ahead.
John:
AMD has more or less caught up.
John:
The NVIDIA cards are still ahead in a lot of important areas.
John:
But these are very competitive cards.
John:
Their support for these cards in macOS
John:
which is great and all, but Apple doesn't sell any of these GPUs.
John:
And if these rumors are believed, Apple is not going to sell any of these GPUs on their new ARM-based Mac Pro.
John:
So what's the deal with this?
John:
And the rumor that comes along with this is that the Mac Pro will, in fact, be revised between now and when the ARM one comes out.
John:
And the revision will essentially say, OK, well, we've got a new Mac Pro.
John:
Maybe we'll use a new Xeon and a new socket.
John:
with a new motherboard maybe will they'll apple will start selling these amd cards uh because apple doesn't add gpu support to mac os for the hell of it they're certainly not adding it for the hobbyists who can now buy to 6800 and stick it in their mac pro like apple doesn't care about those people at all so seeing the fact that mac os support you know this mac os 11.4 beta supports these cards makes me think
John:
that we might be getting a, I don't know if you want to call it a speed bump update, but it depends on what they do, a revision of the Intel Mac Pro before the ARM1 comes out.
John:
And unfortunately for the ARM1, these are powerful GPUs.
John:
If I can put two 6900 XTs in an Intel Mac Pro,
John:
That's going to be faster than 128 core ARM chip, right?
John:
Because the 128 core GPU in the ARM thing was able to keep up with or exceed a single NVIDIA 3090.
John:
Two AMD 6900 XTs.
John:
You'd have to have like a 250 core GPU to compete with that.
John:
So I still wonder what Apple's plan is, especially if Apple themselves bumps the Intel Mac Pro to keep up with the times and to let it support faster GPUs and maybe even giving it a faster CPU.
John:
So this is still the most, obviously, as Casey knows, the most intriguing aspect of this whole thing for me is how does Apple take a phone chip and just rubber stamp it out until the point where you've got something that's competitive with the current Intel Mac Pro.
John:
Granted, there are very few applications that need or can even use this power.
John:
But for those applications, that's the whole point of the Mac Pro.
John:
It's for the people who can actually use this type of power and want it.
John:
uh and so if you take it away from them and say well now the mac pro is half the size but by the way if you've been you know rendering that 8k footage now it's going to be slightly slower for you but hey everything's smaller now so isn't that great uh people aren't going to like that so apple has his work cut out for him um
John:
i can't wait to see what monstrosity they roll out on the stage at some point with these number of cores and when they start benchmarking it i mean they maybe they could spend the whole time just talking about the cpu performance it's just going to be phenomenal if if the current m1s are any indication but boy the gpu stuff that's going to be a hard road for apple uh and i'm pretty sure this one's not going to be fanless oh no
Casey:
The bad news is that the shirts that were just on sale are the last ATP shirts we'll ever sell.
Casey:
The good news is that now we're going to be selling ATP blankets because that's the only way we're going to fit the diagram on there.
John:
I can't draw anymore, right?
John:
Well, the good thing is I can just copy and paste the cores, I suppose.
John:
That's actually a marketing problem for Apple.
John:
Apple rolls out a chip with 40 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores.
John:
Do they bother showing a diagram of that?
John:
It would just look like static.
Marco:
I mean, in reality, that's not one chip.
Marco:
Well, no, but if it's one package.
Marco:
Well, we don't even know that necessarily.
Marco:
We don't.
Marco:
The beauty of this strategy, like it's all becoming clear now, and it's kind of amazing.
Marco:
they're going to only be making two chips.
Marco:
Like, at any given time, for the most part, they will have two chips.
Marco:
One of them, what's currently the M1, will power the MacBook Air, the low-end Mac Mini, the low-end iMac.
Marco:
And, uh, is that it?
Casey:
The MacBook Pro, did you say that?
Marco:
Oh, yeah, and the low-end MacBook Pro, right, okay.
Marco:
And the iPad.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, and the iPad, right, of course, and the iPad Pro, right, okay.
Marco:
The other chip they make will be a larger core count version of that, and that will power the high-end MacBook Pros, the high-end Mac Mini if that product ever exists again, the big iMac, and then they'll put two or four of them into a Mac Pro.
Marco:
But they're still only making two different versions of these chips.
Marco:
There's the low-core efficient one that goes into all the low-end products, and then there's the big pro one, and you just put one of them in most products, and in the Mac Pro, you put two or four.
Marco:
And I think the way this goes is very straightforward.
Marco:
I think they just keep making those two chips, and they keep revising them over time to use whatever the newest cores are, whatever the newest core counts are.
Marco:
And then the main challenge here is...
Marco:
they have to design all the interconnects and all the different technologies involved in having a system that has two or four of those for the Mac Pro, but that can be the very last one they release.
Marco:
And until then, they're just building up from the bottom here, but I think that's where we're going here.
Marco:
I think it literally is just, you have these two different chips used in different products in different ways, and that's it.
Marco:
I don't think the Mac Pro is going to have one giant die with all this stuff on it.
Marco:
I think it's literally just, there's going to be two or four of the MacBook Pro chips.
John:
At a certain point, it can't be one die just because manufacturing sizes or whatever.
John:
So, I mean, the M1 isn't one die, right?
John:
So, obviously, they're going to have to break things up.
John:
But I don't think there'll be like four MacBook Pro chips separated by a few inches on a giant motherboard with an interconnect because that's just not going to fly in terms of the CPU cores alone, let alone the GPU stuff, right?
John:
So, they have to find some way to package these.
John:
And it could be, hey, we have a cluster of CPU cores over here plus the RAM.
John:
And then over here, elsewhere, we have the GPU stuff.
John:
And we have an interconnect for the RAM or whatever.
John:
But I don't think it's going to be like rubber stamp out four of these and make a magical interconnect.
John:
Because that magical interconnect is a very hand-wavy thing.
John:
And it's not like...
John:
you can't really have the GPU cores of four widely separated CPUs cooperating in an efficient way.
John:
If you actually want to, if the math, the back of the envelope math that I just did, if say, well, let's just assume it scales linearly.
John:
Once you add an interconnect like that, you're not getting a linear scaling anymore because the interconnect overhead is going to kill you.
John:
Right.
John:
So I do think that there is going to be a clustering of like components for efficiency purposes.
John:
But I do wonder how they're going to square this with like, how many dies is this?
John:
Where do you put them?
John:
Like we mentioned before, like whether the GPU could be on a card or something, you know, GPUs can be on cards like they've been there before.
John:
Like we're just stuck in this mindset that the GPU has to be on the same die as the CPU because that's how the M1 does it.
John:
But again, when you start doing the math, it's like, well, is that even plausible for a 128-core GPU to be on the same die as anything else, really?
John:
So I think fancy, cool interconnects are certainly a factor here.
John:
And I think Apple has a bunch of... Do they have a bunch of patents on that?
John:
There's some sort of...
John:
in uh asymmetrical ram hierarchy interconnect stuff that we talked about in a past show that was some apple patent filing that could factor into this but it really is a a packaging problem like a physically speaking where do we put all this stuff and by the way how do we cool it right and
John:
Because you can't just spread it all out and just have like, oh, I'll just put a bunch of these little tiny chips five inches apart.
John:
It's like a connection machine.
John:
That doesn't work for... Do you remember the connection machine?
John:
Nope.
John:
Anyway, it doesn't work for the applications they're doing.
John:
And part of the massive speed boost of the M1 is the fact that everything is jammed into not just the same package, but a lot of it is on the same die.
John:
And they get huge wins from that.
John:
And we've mentioned the unified memory architecture and all that stuff.
John:
So...
John:
i don't think they're going to want to give up a lot of those advantages i think they want to retain as much as they can unfortunately this rumor doesn't have a lot of details it just says core counts and it just you know it doesn't tell us where are they and how do they work but um this is like this is getting me excited because anything that comes out that's remotely like this in any way no matter how they do it is like if the gap in performance between this rumored thing
John:
And the fanless M1 MacBook Air is going to be so massive as compared to in the Intel era where, you know, the single core performance of the most expensive Mac Pro was destroyed by, like, a really good 5K iMac, right?
John:
Like, we're not used to these gaps opening up like this because, you know, especially for the GPU stuff, like, this Mac Pro is really, really going to...
John:
differentiate itself in every possible way of computing from the lower end computers just because it's not as I'm hoping it's not going to be at a deficit using like worse CPU cores and it's going to be using so much more of them and especially because you know thus far the GPUs have been pretty weak in the low end ones
John:
This is really going to, you know, make a huge difference.
John:
And so hopefully that will help make the high-end platform even more attractive.
John:
Like everyone is just falling over themselves about, I was just listening to Cortex recently.
John:
They were saying they had to edit some big logic file on the M1 Mac because the iMac Pro was choking on it, right?
Yeah.
John:
And that, you know, it's like I have to use the $999 computer because my $5,000 Intel iMac Pro couldn't handle it, right?
John:
Imagine what's going to happen when it's not like the smallest ARM chip Apple has ever put in the Mac.
John:
Imagine when it's something with 40 of those cores and 64 gigs of RAM and 128 core GPU.
John:
That's going to make people want to buy a high-end again.
John:
So I'm excited.
Marco:
By the way, I don't remember the connection machine because when it came out, I was four.
John:
Yeah, you can watch PBS and they tell you about the history of supercomputers.
John:
Is my recollection right?
John:
If you look at what the motherboard looks like, it's literally just like stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, just the same little thing over and over again.
Marco:
Yeah, it looks like it's just like rows and rows and rows of identical-looking weatherboards.
John:
Yep.
John:
With a lot of connections.
Marco:
It was an appropriately named computer.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Remote, and Aftershocks.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at hp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Casey:
Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
So in part of the house construction on the screened-in porch, I've noticed that it seems to be a Wi-Fi dead zone for reasons I don't entirely understand, if I'm honest with you.
Marco:
I recently learned through some recent construction that wood blocks Wi-Fi significantly more than I previously thought.
Casey:
Maybe that's it then.
Marco:
So given how many layers of stuff there are between the interior of your house and the exterior of your house, much of which is wood or insulation or whatever else, there's a lot of layers there.
Marco:
And so you'd be surprised.
Marco:
It doesn't have to be a metal wall to block Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Just density in general does a pretty good job of blocking Wi-Fi.
Marco:
And so getting Wi-Fi from in your house to out of your house is surprisingly difficult.
Marco:
You really generally need to have access points.
Marco:
pretty damn close to the door or the wall, or ideally, outside.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I don't have any of those things.
Casey:
I do have one Ethernet drop in the porch because I knew I would probably want to work out there.
Casey:
And, you know, it's not unusual for me to be slinging, you know, big media files around.
Casey:
Well, I guess that's not work, but for, you know, other personal stuff.
Casey:
So anyways, so I do have an Ethernet drop, but I don't want to have to use it.
Casey:
And I found that like phones, laptops, iPads, nothing would work on the screened in porch reliably.
Casey:
And I was using an Eero system and they are a many time past sponsor.
Casey:
But I was using a fairly old Euro.
Casey:
I don't recall exactly which generation it was.
Casey:
I don't think it was the original, but it was the one that came after.
Casey:
So this is, you know, several years old.
Casey:
And so I decided, you know, maybe I'll just go ahead and upgrade my Euro.
Casey:
And I got the new Euro Pro 6, which I paid for.
Casey:
I don't think I paid for any of the Euros I'd had before, but I did pay for this one.
Casey:
Um...
Casey:
I got my Eero Pro 6 and I went to replace my Eero that was, you know, the router with this new Eero Pro 6.
Casey:
And both the one that I was replacing and the new one, you have a USB-C power input and they both have two Ethernet jacks or receptacles or what have you.
Casey:
So I, you know, unplug, well, I do the little dance in the Eero app and it says, okay, you know, I want to replace, you know, such and such Eero.
Casey:
It says, okay, unplug the original Eero.
Casey:
remove it, plug in the new one.
Casey:
So I did that and it said it was supposed to flash white.
Casey:
And what I saw was like kind of beige, but I thought now I'm probably, I'm probably being weird.
Casey:
That's probably white and I'm overthinking it.
And,
Casey:
And it kept flashing relatively quickly, this like beige-ish color.
Casey:
And I plug it in and it just sits there for forever.
Casey:
And the app is like, dude, I don't know what's going on.
Casey:
Do you want to try to, you know, because I think what happens is it like phones home to Eero and says, hey, I'm serial number, you know, one, two, three, four, five, you know, is somebody looking to set me up?
Casey:
And it didn't work.
Casey:
And so it said, okay, well, you can type in the serial number by hand and we'll try to set it up that way.
Casey:
And I did that and it was like, nope, I don't know what's going on.
Casey:
And so I thought, well, you know, maybe it's that thing with Verizon Fios.
Casey:
I think you both have talked about this in the past.
Casey:
Certainly I've talked about this in the past where it used to be years ago that if you switched whatever your router was, you had to call Verizon in order to get them to like do whatever magic on their end to get the connection to work with this new router.
Casey:
And I had also noticed there was an issue a couple of months back, which I think I like tripped the circuit breaker that the ONT was on or something like that.
Casey:
And I had gone through the online troubleshooting, the automated online troubleshooting on the web.
Casey:
And it actually did get me to fix my problem, much to my own surprise.
Casey:
So I go to the web, I do the online troubleshooting and it does some tests and it basically does a shrug and says, I don't know, you're going to have to talk to us.
Casey:
Okay, fine.
Casey:
So I call and I'm talking to the very nice gentleman on the phone saying, oh, I just got a new router.
Casey:
You know, I think I need a new IP address.
Casey:
Can you just, you know, restart the ONT or do whatever magic you need to do?
Casey:
And he was kind of like, okay, whatever.
Casey:
And he says, well, you know, I'm looking at your ONT right now and there's nothing, it's not connected to any router of any sort.
Casey:
I'm thinking,
Casey:
I literally removed the Eero that was there, and I plugged the exact same crap into the new Eero.
Casey:
What could possibly be going wrong right now?
Casey:
Like, how is this my fault?
Casey:
It was my fault.
Casey:
Do you want to guess how?
Casey:
I will start with Marco.
Marco.
John:
Hmm.
John:
Just start with me.
John:
I already have a guess.
Casey:
I figured you would know because this is a long segue into John doing some things with his network.
Casey:
So I will let you answer the question, John, but Marco, do you have a guess?
John:
I don't.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
John, do you know?
John:
From your little preamble, I think my guess is wrong.
John:
I was going to say you didn't plug the Ethernet cables into it.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
That is something I would probably do.
John:
That would do it, though.
Casey:
Yeah, that would do it.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
As it turns out, it was indeed flashing yellow.
Right.
Casey:
I thought it was flashing white and I was seeing things wrong.
Casey:
No, it was flashing yellow.
Casey:
The reason it was flashing yellow is because the power supply was not appropriate.
Casey:
It was giving like an incorrect voltage or whatever.
John:
You didn't swap the power supply, you used the old one?
Casey:
No, it was all USB-C.
Casey:
Why should I bother?
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
You should know from all of the MacBook stuff that just because it's USB-C doesn't mean it's correctly sized for your laptop.
John:
If you use, like, your MacBook Air, your iPad Pro adapter to power your 16-inch MacBook Pro, that's not going to work.
Casey:
I mean, I can.
Casey:
It just doesn't work well.
Casey:
And so here...
Casey:
Here it turns out that I'd never swapped the power adapter because I thought, why bother?
Casey:
And as I'm on the phone, I realize that's the problem.
Casey:
And so I say to the guy, oh, wait, I think this is my fault.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I swapped the power supplies.
Casey:
And sure enough, it worked no sweat.
Casey:
So that was my dummy moment for the day.
Casey:
My bad.
Casey:
But yeah, I'm talking to you via my fancy pants new Eero and it's all working great so far.
Casey:
So including on the porch from my literally like 20 minutes of testing earlier.
Casey:
So, so far, so good.
Casey:
But John, you've been rejiggering things recently.
Casey:
What are you up to?
John:
I just changed my network and got everything working.
John:
So, of course, that means it's time to screw stuff up again.
John:
I actually had a need this time.
John:
Like we've been using we have a finished room in the basement and we've been using that more and more often as another private space where you can be on Wi-Fi essentially.
John:
The problem is the basement doesn't actually have any Wi-Fi and it is the basement.
John:
um so people would go down there and you could do stuff but if you try to do like a zoom meeting or something sometimes the signal wouldn't be that great or whatever i'm like oh i can solve this i've got a mesh network i should just buy another euro thing again euro past sponsor of the show so on and so forth but i should just buy another euro thing and stick it down there and so like i'm gonna go to the euro website see what they got uh what thing should i buy it's
John:
Like, well, I could buy the super cheap thing and just plug it in and it would work fine.
John:
But, you know, I don't want to buy it, like, because you get, like, one of those beacons or whatever, you know.
John:
That's older tech.
John:
Like, there's newer stuff that's out.
John:
So maybe if I'm buying something additional to my Eero network, maybe I should buy one of the fancy ones with Wi-Fi 6 just because, yeah, it wouldn't do me any good now maybe.
John:
But, like, eventually maybe I'll slowly replace all of my Eeros.
John:
So if I buy one Wi-Fi 6.1, then another one, then another one, I'm like, eh.
John:
I don't know.
John:
And the other thing I had to keep in mind was even though the Wi-Fi signal was not great in my finish room in the basement, that's the same room that has my Synology in it.
John:
And that's wired, right?
John:
My Ethernet takes a visit to that room thanks to the magic of drop ceilings and basements.
John:
And so I have wired Ethernet in that room.
John:
And I actually considered, well, maybe I don't need an ear at all.
John:
Maybe I can just have a wired Ethernet snake over to the desk in that room and people could use that.
John:
But I'm like, oh, no one wants to plug into Ethernet.
John:
People want Wi-Fi, right?
John:
so i decided i needed a wi-fi thing and that means i couldn't use a beacon because if you don't know the euro beacons just plug into the wall but they don't have any ethernet ports on them so i needed an euro with ethernet on the back and so i'm looking at the your various options and they have a bunch of these different size and shape little white things you know and being me being somewhat like marco in this regard i'm like well if i'm gonna buy any of these things honestly what's the difference in price between the lowest end and the highest end one with ethernet it's not that much why don't i just get the best one
John:
I'm like, oh, but I'm going to add an Eero Pro 6 to my existing network of these ancient Eero's because I have like, kind of like Casey, it's not like the original one.
John:
It's Eero Pro, but it predates, you know, Wi-Fi 6.
John:
I think it might even predate 802.11ac.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's pretty old, right?
John:
And then the beacons are slightly newer because the beacons didn't exist when I first bought this stuff.
John:
So what I did without much...
John:
time and effort was to convince myself all right i should just wipe the slate clean and buy an entire new setup with just uh euro pro sixes for the whole house oh wow see i did the i did the cheap man approach which was i replaced my euro pro i think that's what i have i think you're right
Casey:
I replaced the Eero Pro with the Eero Pro 6, and then I moved the Eero Pro to be in place of an original Eero that was across the house.
Casey:
So basically it was a trickle down, just like I plan to do with my Apple TVs, if it ever freaking ships, is it just trickled down.
Casey:
So I am still a two-wired Eero house, but one of them is the Fancy Pants brand new one.
Casey:
And the other one is a more modern one, the one that was running, you know, that was the router.
John:
um but but is it's now in like as an accessory a remote accessory if you will yeah i just decided to go for the whole thing because like originally i was like well i don't even have any devices that support wi-fi 6 or even 802.11 ac but that long since has changed like we all have new devices now they all actually do support these things why don't i just do that and and by the way you can mix and match these things if i wanted to i can continue to use the beacons i could continue to use my era pro like if i really wanted to
John:
But, you know, it's a question of how good a signal I was going to get.
John:
So I bought the new, you know, Aero Pro 6.
John:
I used our ATP code, which for some reason still works, even though they were a sponsor months and months ago.
John:
So I got free overnight shipping.
John:
This is not an ad for Aero.
John:
Well, it's going to sound like one in a second.
John:
I was in the same situation as Casey.
John:
I was like, really, you just got your network working.
John:
And now you're going to literally replace every component of it?
John:
Does this seem like a good plan to you?
John:
Because like, again, my Eero is my router now, right?
John:
It's not just my Wi-Fi.
John:
It's my router as well.
John:
And it was so painful for me to get everything set up for my old thing.
John:
How do you replace the thing that is your router?
John:
Right.
John:
I'm like, oh, that's risky.
John:
Like, am I going to have to manually enter all my config again?
John:
Am I going to have to redo all the stuff that I had to do to get it set up?
John:
Are my smart outlets going to stop working and then replacing everything else?
John:
I was just dreading this.
John:
And I looked at the support document like, well, they make it sound easy.
John:
So anyway, the things arrive.
John:
First mistake.
John:
When I ordered these things, like I know what Eros look like.
John:
The original Eros was like a white rounded rectangle with a little light on it and Ethernet ports in the back.
John:
Right.
John:
and then i got the beacons which are even smaller they just have a plug they plug directly into the wall they just look like a wall wart right this is my conception of euro so i go to their web page and i'm looking at these various little rounded rectangle white plastic things and i'm like all right well i'll get the fanciest one right now i'm gonna be the marco and buy all the fancy stuff and just replace everything right
John:
on the web page and in the link that we'll put at euro.com slash compare they compare them and you can look at the features and compare them to each other or whatever right and they also have about midway through the page a little diagram showing them each of like here's here's the size and they have dimensions height and width and they show the ethernet ports and i'm looking at these diagrams going like okay great they all have two ethernet ports that's what i need that's fine let me just do that
John:
What I did not look at is the eye chart text that is next to the dimensions that says, here's how big these things are.
John:
So I get the Eero Pro 6.
John:
The box comes.
John:
I don't think anything of it.
John:
I open it up, and it's like I'm in The Hobbit all of a sudden, the Peter Jackson movie, like forced perspective.
John:
Like suddenly I'm Frodo Baggins, and everything is scaled up proportionally to make me seem like I'm Hobbit size because it looks like my existing Eero, but it's like 75% bigger.
John:
it was like comical because if you have something that's 10 times bigger it's not comical but if it's just slightly bigger like you give someone like when you go to those like science museum things and you sit in a chair that makes you feel like kid size because the chair is scaled that's what it felt like these things are comparatively comically huge it looks just like my old eero but it's it's it's just it's just too darn big i'm like oh what am i gonna do with these giant bricks well it turns out it's not that bad because i have places to stash them but fire beware
John:
They're not, even though on the webpage it looks similarly sized, they're not.
John:
And the Pro 6 ones are way bigger than the old Pros.
John:
They're just very large.
John:
Again, comically large.
John:
They're exactly the right amount larger to be... I don't think they're that big.
John:
big they're exactly the right amount larger to be funny because if they were like 10 times bigger it wouldn't be funny and if they were one percent bigger it wouldn't be funny but they are the the exact funny size just like in the hobbit of all the props made to be a little bit bigger to make the normal human size actors seem like hobbits that's what these things are right but anyway getting back to the replacement thing i followed the procedure of saying like i'm about to replace the gateway like the literal heart of my network right that runs everything in my house and
John:
And I'm going to do this by taking my phone app and go, all right, I'm going to replace this.
John:
And it's like, okay, do this, do this, do this.
John:
I did it.
John:
And it's like, you're done.
John:
Yep.
John:
What?
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
Like, you know, I said, unplug it, plug it back in.
John:
Literally everything worked.
John:
There was no step three like the old iMac commercial.
John:
It was like unplug the thing, plug in the new one, and here you go.
John:
And everything's exactly the way you had to be.
John:
This is the magic of Eero and them installing all this configuration in the cloud and Amazon spying on me and whatever.
John:
I know all the answers, but bottom line is...
John:
This is something anybody could have done.
John:
No technical expertise required, especially if you're not too clever like Casey and don't realize that, you know, because I think a regular person would assume take out the old device and put in the new one.
John:
The new one does, in fact, come with a power cord.
John:
So I did that, and everything just worked.
John:
And I was so suspicious and like, that can't possibly have worked.
Like how it...
John:
how could that i'm going around i'm like turn on the lights with my voice and i'm checking that everyone's got everything i'm like that's amazing and so then i just ran for the rest of the house pulled the beacon out of the wall put in a new one plugged it in said now you're the new beacon and it's like okay i am you're the beacon now dog
John:
right and i i replaced my two beacons with with the things and then i took my old euro pro and i brought it down to the basement and i plugged it in the ethernet and i said now you're part of the network too and i plugged you into ethernet and when initially when it initially connected it was like okay i'm part of the network too i'm like hey but why are you still connecting by wi-fi you're plugged into ethernet i couldn't i couldn't get the thought through my head before the little icon changed in the app and said now i'm plugged into ethernet
John:
Like it was the most seamless networking upgrade experience I've ever had in my life.
John:
And I already knew that, unlike Casey, that you don't have to call Fios.
John:
Like they don't do that Mac address validation stuff anymore because I'd already just replaced my Airport Extreme with the Euro.
Casey:
Well, which is why I thought I wouldn't have to.
Casey:
And then when the thing was like, no, I don't have internet.
Casey:
What should I do?
Casey:
Then I thought, oh, I guess that really is still a thing.
John:
You're lucky you got any light on the thing because I'm amazed like if it was undervolted or whatever, that it wouldn't just be yellow light, but like nothing would happen.
John:
But yeah, you don't need to call Fios, at least in my region, and it seems like also in Casey's region.
John:
Everything just worked, and I completely replaced my network, adding one more wired node to a new location, and it was 100% seamless, and I was just absolutely amazed.
John:
again this is not an ad of euro they have been a past sponsor i did use my own code to get free overnight shipping but uh this is the reason i recommend euro to my relatives and i have in fact bought several you know euro setups both for myself and for my relatives so i don't have to hear about their wi-fi let's just say look just do this you literally won't need me follow the instructions that are in the box you can get it set up plug these things into your house somewhat widely separated ta-da internet