Shove It Out the Back
Marco:
so my my play pop hits of every year took a very dark turn in the past week when we crossed roughly the year 2000 oh are you gonna be that guy all right tell me why i took a dark turn it became nearly impossible to listen with my child around oh okay i'll allow it i'll allow really was it foul language oh my god
Marco:
God, like, okay, so, you know, in the 80s, I mean, everyone singing love songs in the 80s was a creep and a stalker and potentially abusive, if you listen to the lyrics.
John:
You mean in real life or just in the song?
Marco:
In the lyrics.
John:
But sometimes that was intentional and it's artistic choice.
Marco:
Right, but it was a little bit more coded and subtle, and I feel like you could listen with an almost 10-year-old around, and most of the creepiness would go over their head, whereas when you cross the year 2000 approximately...
Marco:
F this, F that.
Marco:
Constant swearing.
Marco:
The N word all over the place.
Marco:
Really explicit sexual stuff.
Marco:
It's like, wow.
Marco:
It's like you can't listen.
Marco:
It's bad.
Casey:
It's funny you bring this up.
Casey:
I'd actually like to slightly pivot, if you don't mind, and talk yet again about how much I hate Apple Music.
Casey:
Because I know that there exist in Apple Music clean versions of many, many, many albums that are explicit.
Casey:
And maybe there is a way to say from the view of an album, like an explicit album, I would like the clean version, please.
Casey:
And if there is an easy way of doing this, I will be damned if I know how.
Marco:
I believe you mean darned?
Casey:
Yes, that's true.
Casey:
I would be darned.
Casey:
Oh, fork, I made a mistake.
Casey:
So no, I would be darned if I could find the way to go from explicit to not explicit.
Casey:
And the only guidance I've found on this is to go into... Well, actually, let me ask you, if you want to forbid Apple Music from playing explicit songs, where do you think you go to do that?
Casey:
And I will start with you, Marco.
LAUGHTER
Marco:
Oh, boy.
Marco:
Okay, so where that should be is in a settings menu in the music app.
Casey:
That is the correct answer, but that is nowhere near where it is.
Marco:
I have two other answers.
Marco:
I have the answer of where Apple says it should be and where it actually is.
Marco:
So where Apple would say it should be is in the iOS system settings app in the music section of that.
Marco:
Now, where it probably actually is...
Marco:
is buried in some web view that you have to access on your Apple iTunes account somewhere.
Casey:
Oh, no, it gets better.
John:
Wouldn't it be in parental controls?
Casey:
So I will award you half credit, John.
Casey:
Also, I did not make it clear, Marco, in your defense that I was thinking about macOS, not iOS.
Casey:
So I am not honestly sure where it is in iOS, but in macOS...
Casey:
It is in screen time, in the content and privacy section, where you can say for stores and apps and content that somewhere, I'm not looking at it right this second, but somewhere in there you can say, turn on content and privacy restrictions, and I would like to restrict the following.
Casey:
In screen time, because when I think about where I want to go so I don't hear the F word, I think about screen time.
Casey:
That's what I think.
Marco:
oh my gosh it's so preposterous it's a good thing the home pod sound really good because doing this through siri every day it's an exercise in am i the only person ever using siri like so often it'll reach it'll you know it'll it'll be giving a voice response now playing and then it'll stop itself and say something like let me try that again and
John:
You do that on the podcast too sometimes.
John:
That's okay.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
But like it crashes mid-sentence seemingly in some way or fails some way that it has to start its own sentence again.
Marco:
There's also been a number of years that I'm saying every morning play Pop Hits 2005 or whatever.
Marco:
And sometimes it'll say, playing Pop Hits 2006.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
2006 does not sound like 2005.
Marco:
It's not like it just misheard me.
Marco:
And I'll say, stop, and I'll say it again.
Marco:
Play Pop Hits 2005.
Marco:
And it'll say, now playing Pop Hits 2006.
Marco:
Now, almost every number it gets right, but maybe one out of 10, it'll just do.
Marco:
And like, no matter how I say it, it will not do it.
Marco:
And meanwhile, I can go, you know, fortunately, you know, when you have like an Amazon cylinder or something, your, your possible remedies, if it's mishearing you are much fewer.
Marco:
So at least here, when it fails, I can go to my phone and just find that, you know, go to Apple music, go to the Apple music app and go to search and type in pop it's 2005 and it brings it up and I just hit play and there it is.
Marco:
and i can you know beam it over to the home pods and it's fine but it fails in such weird ways i just i don't siri oh oh apple what what what are you doing with siri what where is it what happened and and can you please make it unhappen but anyway yeah so siri issues aside the home pods still do sound amazing um and and my home pods have i think for some reason stopped dying
Marco:
I mentioned a couple months back they were doing that thing where it would make a big bass pop and then it would restart one of them.
Marco:
That hasn't happened now in two months, maybe?
Marco:
So I don't know if that was somehow avoided in software.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Siri is still Siri.
Marco:
But that being said, yes.
Marco:
This music experiment is really showing me...
Marco:
pop music first of all when when we when we hit the present day our plan is to go back to the beginning of you know 1950 or 1960 um and do the same thing but saying rock instead of pop to see like the rock charts i think are what we actually want to be hearing most of the time yeah i
John:
I was going to suggest like and I'm kind of surprised that they were cursing.
John:
I was going to suggest to ask for sort of the top radio hits because then you get the radio edits.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like especially for the older times, like that's what people cared about was what's one of the top songs on the radio and everything on the radio was a cleaned up version.
Marco:
Even that I don't think would actually be what I want because issue number two that I keep having, which I'm sure everyone's had with you streaming apps, is that many artists have gone back and re-recorded their old hits so that they can fully own them or something like that or just to remaster them in a more dramatic way.
Marco:
The problem is that they tarnish the original recordings in the sense of the streaming services think that's what you want when you ask for that.
Marco:
For instance, when we blew through the 90s,
Marco:
Every time it wanted to play something off of the Alanis Morissette album, Jagged Little Pill, there were like three radio hits off that album.
Marco:
It was a great album.
Marco:
Not a single one was the one that we knew.
Marco:
Like not a single one was the version, the original version.
Marco:
It was all this like more recent version that sounds all different and wrong to us.
Marco:
iTunes match gone awry.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But I don't even own that one.
Marco:
Like I own the original one.
John:
I don't.
John:
I know.
John:
Like it's basically it's iTunes match happening within the thing.
John:
It says you ought to know.
John:
And it's like, oh, I can find you ought to know.
John:
And it finds the re-recorded version.
Marco:
right but it's but like in the playlist of top 1996 or whatever hits like yeah no it's messed up and we heard there were there were it wasn't just that album there were a number of albums where we would hear like like cheryl crow also recently like we would hear like wait a minute this is not the right version you hear within the first note you like because you you know you know these old songs so well you've heard them so much like you know instantly that this is a different recording this is not the original recording the matches and the buds and the clean and dirty cars right exactly all about it
Marco:
yeah so anyway that's so if if they if album music can't even keep that straight i have no hopes for like giving us somehow a radio safe version of these songs that i mean they're so over the top nasty like i can't even imagine there would be a radio safe version
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I'm trying so hard to like Apple Music.
Casey:
And what is it that Merlin says constantly?
Casey:
Like, I use this more than the people who make the service or I care about the service more than the people who make it or whatever.
Casey:
And it's so true.
Casey:
Like, I don't even feel like my needs from Apple Music are particularly esoteric or odd or interesting.
Casey:
But now that I have small children that are...
Casey:
at least slightly aware of the lyrics in which, you know, of the songs in which we were listening.
Casey:
I want to be able to say, you know, can I have only clean music and perhaps like, can I have only clean music for this listening session or, or on this output device, like the home pod in the kitchen, maybe that shouldn't be playing swear words.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
I don't mind them in my headphones if I'm walking somewhere, but you know.
Casey:
No, I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
And again, I haven't really played much with doing this on iOS, but on macOS, it is nigh impossible to go from the explicit version of an album to the clean version of an album.
Casey:
And if there is an obvious way that I'm missing, please reach out via Twitter or something because I would love to have a cheat coder.
Casey:
Heck, I would even take a stupid shortcut to do this if that's what it takes.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But for the life of me, I don't know how.
Casey:
Now, to be fair, I don't recall if this is a thing that you can do on Spotify or not.
Casey:
So maybe on Spotify it's just as bad.
Casey:
It's only been very, very recently that I found myself wanting to listen to, like, I don't know, Lil Nas X or something like that or The Weeknd and being like, ooh, yeah, there's some...
Casey:
Not so great colorful expletives in these lyrics.
Casey:
And so I haven't really tried this on Spotify either, but I feel like there's got to be an easier way on Spotify than going into screen time in order to change your content preferences.
John:
Right.
John:
This goes back to the data model we talked about before, like the idea that like there is an abstract idea of a song and that the song may have been recorded multiple times and that if it was recorded multiple times, there are different attributes of the different recordings, including which one was the first one, which one was on the, you know, which one was on an album versus a single version, because sometimes those are different and also explicit and clean.
John:
And like your data model has to express all those different ideas.
John:
including i think what the hardest one is to realize that this song that appears on an album on a single on another album on a best of that that is the same song but just different recordings right and then from within them deciding which one is the canonical one how many of them are clean how many of them are explicit and then once you have all that data in the data model then the final step is somewhere in your playback application you have to give access to that metadata by saying
John:
You know, hey, dingus, play me the clean version of the song.
John:
Hey, dingus, play me the original version of the song, the album version of this song.
John:
And if it doesn't know and says this song appears on two albums, album A and album B, which one would you like to hear?
John:
Like this, like I feel like this is an eminently solvable problem without AI, just plain old straight up reasonable data model, reasonable voice commands.
John:
You could get it done.
John:
But I when when you describe this, Marco, makes you think that Apple doesn't even have this in the data model.
John:
And if you can't do it in Spotify, maybe Spotify has it in the data model, but doesn't have it in the interface.
Marco:
Well, all I can tell you is that the early 2000s were terrible for pop music.
Marco:
Like, a noticeable turn towards, like, this isn't just not for me.
Marco:
This is just not as good as what came before, and it's clear as day.
John:
I'm not sure if people who are, you know, a couple years older than you would agree with that, because...
Marco:
I think a couple years younger than me would be more likely.
Marco:
Sorry, not older, younger.
Marco:
Sorry, I went the wrong direction.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
And normally, whatever playlist we pick for the day, like today we're on 2006, I believe.
Marco:
Whatever playlist we pick for the day, we do it mostly during breakfast and then adding stuff to school.
Marco:
And when I'm making lunch, I'll go over and tap the top of the HomePod so it resumes.
Marco:
And I'll hear, I'll keep playing it.
Marco:
And then maybe later of making dinner, I'll tap it again and play it for another half hour then.
Marco:
So usually I'll go through, that'll be like what we're listening to out loud all that whole day.
Marco:
And since the 2000 crossover, this has been the only time where we've been just not able to continue.
Marco:
After breakfast, we'll start at lunch and be like, you know what, let me just play some Almond Brothers.
Marco:
I can't deal with this dirty, horrible stuff anymore.
Casey:
All right, so real-time follow-up.
Casey:
I opened up Spotify on the desktop, and I searched for Montero by Lil Nas X, which is... By the way, it's a phenomenal album.
Casey:
Is this...
Casey:
If I say that a modern, reasonably well-liked album is good, does that have the same effect as a top-tier host buying a car?
Casey:
Did I just instantly make this deeply uncool by saying I enjoy it?
Casey:
I think I did.
Marco:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
Well, sorry, Lil Nas X. But anyway.
Marco:
Because now you're 40.
Marco:
Right.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
It's terrible.
Marco:
That's the boundary.
Marco:
I have only mere months until... Until you make things uncool.
John:
I have no idea.
John:
That's not the boundary for this particular case.
Marco:
I think I crossed the boundary when I was 16.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
Casey:
So, uh, earlier today I was looking at the show notes and I was scrolling through the follow-up section and that was seven hours ago and I'm still scrolling.
Marco:
So I believe it's called doom scrolling.
Casey:
After page 34, it became doom scrolling for sure.
Casey:
But in the defense of one Mr. John Syracuse, there is a lot to talk about with regard to the Mac Studio and the Mac Studio Display.
Casey:
To be clear, my Studio Display is not here and is not going to be here for another couple weeks.
Casey:
Woe is me.
Casey:
John, did we cover what you have or have not purchased?
Casey:
I don't recall.
John:
We cover what I plan to purchase, but the shipping dates are way out in the future, so we should just not bother to even ask me about this until like May or June.
John:
Nothing is coming to my house anytime soon.
Marco:
I will say in the intervening time between last episode and this one, in-store availability opened up.
Marco:
And there are some configurations that you can get in-store.
Marco:
The monitor is actually not that hard to find in-store in a lot of places.
Marco:
And even the Mac Studio computer, you can get the base model, of course.
Marco:
The two base models are in stock frequently in a lot of places.
Marco:
And then if you bump up the higher model to a few spec tiers here and there, some of those combinations are also available in person sometimes.
John:
So what if I want to get the 32-gigabyte version of the monitor?
John:
Do they have that in stock?
John:
No.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
We'll get to that a little bit later.
Casey:
You're jumping ahead.
Casey:
All right, so anyway, we've seen a lot of teardowns fly by of the Mac Studio.
Casey:
This is the Mac Studio section of the podcast.
Casey:
And one of the first things that set our corner of the internet aflame was that the Mac Studio has two SSD slots, and in many configurations, one of them is empty.
Casey:
So it's expandable, and you can add more, right?
Casey:
Right, right?
John:
this is why more people should be familiar with the mac pro because anyone who has a 2019 mac pro saw that and they're like oh yeah it's just like in the mac pro right um and if you're not familiar if you look inside your mac pro it's got the similar kinds of slots and if you get a mac pro with depending on how much storage you get from apple and the mac pro uh you know the slots may be filled or filled with different sizes of things it looks like you have multiple ssds but as you know when you buy a mac pro you
John:
You just get one, quote unquote, internal SSD, which may be made up of multiple chips.
John:
So I think, what is my Mac Pro?
John:
I think I have a four gig, four gig, four terabyte SSD.
John:
And I think it's like two, two terabyte modules stuck in the little slots.
John:
So yeah, when you look inside the Mac Studio, it looks kind of like that.
John:
Very similar looking slots, very similar looking stuff in there.
John:
But the mistake people were making is thinking, is not being familiar with the Mac Pro and thinking, oh, those are slots where I can buy an SSD from Amazon and shove it in there.
John:
Uh, and I think physically you might be able to, but that's just not the way the Mac Studio or the Mac Pro works.
John:
Uh, the way it works is you're basically just sticking raw NAND chips in there.
John:
Not really.
John:
We'll get to the details in that in a second, but the storage controller is on the, the SOC or in the case of my Mac Pro, like somewhere else on the motherboard.
John:
Um,
John:
And unlike when you buy like a stick, like an NVMe stick or whatever, an M.2 stick, that has the NAND and also the controller to work with it.
John:
Like it's a complete drive basically.
John:
Whereas in the Mac Pro and in the Mac Studio, the drive is made up of these NAND modules, which on laptops are soldered to the motherboard, but in these ones are in little slots, driven by the storage controller that is in my case in the T2 chip or in the Apple Silicon things inside the system on a chip.
John:
um so you need both of those things to work and so it's not like you can buy an ssd and shove it in there they have and why do they have two slots well if you get like the eight terabyte config they probably put a four and a four right if you get a four they might do a two and a two if you just get a two they might put a single two in like they can fill them as needed um so it's not all that exotic or weird but if you expect it to be
John:
a place where you put a drive it's not think of it as like it's like they soldered it to the board but it's not soldered that's what it's like because if they were soldered to the board you're like can I rip those chips off there and buy a drive from Amazon it's like what do you mean a drive right now here's some more interesting details about this that Hector Martin posted to Twitter and he does a bunch of porting of Linux to Apple Silicon and so I figure he knows about these details because he's actually trying to get an OS up and running on it so I trust more or less that this is at least close to the truth here's what he said
John:
uh he says uh about the mac studios things uh as a quote-unquote ssd slots which is not really what they are if you want to play around with those storage modules in a studio you should know that one you definitely need to do a full dfu erase what does dfu stand for device firmware update yeah device follow-up yeah exactly
John:
And two, if you populate both slots, they definitely need to be the same size and they might need to be the same vendor.
John:
So the reason why you need to do a DFU erase is like, why can't I just like if I if one of those modules breaks, can I just take another one off and shove it in there?
John:
There's a bunch of reasons for that.
John:
One is that everything on those things is encrypted with a key that's managed by the storage controller.
John:
So, first of all, if you take those things out of one Mac Studio and put them in another Mac Studio, they won't work because they're encrypted with a key that that other Mac Studio doesn't have.
John:
Like, this is part of the security structure of the Mac.
John:
It's done on purpose, right?
John:
And second thing is, if you take one of them out and put another one, it's like taking, you know, half of the soldered NAND off of the motherboard of your...
John:
PowerBook, PowerBook, your MacBook, right?
John:
That's not going to work, right?
John:
Think of them as one drive just split up into pieces in the same way that you have multiple flash chips on the motherboard of a MacBook Pro.
John:
Again, these are the same.
John:
They're not like individual things, even though you can pull them out separately.
John:
So Hector continues, not sure if the top-level controller cares about mismatched NAND vendors, just pointing it out since it might.
John:
Apple sources its raw flash from different vendors.
John:
You can find the module-level controller firmware for each kind in the restore RAM disks.
John:
And then he posts a screenshot of a bunch of files on diskies, .bin files, that have names like...
John:
Samsung, MLC, 3D, SanDisk, IT, LC, and that's like multi-level, what is it?
John:
QLC, MLC, I forget what the acronym is for it.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like... Multi-level cell or something?
John:
Yeah, it's like how many bits they write to each cell and the more you add, the more tricky it is to do and the cheaper it is, right?
Yeah.
John:
It's got all these different things for Hynix, SanDisk, and every one of these things is like what he's calling the module-level firmware controllers, right?
John:
And so Apple, if you stick NAND in that matches one of these things, this is the little bit of firmware that will run on that NAND to do the job.
John:
Hector continues, if you populate a config that Apple would ship, I'd expect it to work given a full erase.
John:
And by the way, the reason a full erase works is when you do DFU and erase them entirely, it just wipes everything that's on them and puts new data on them with the security key that's in the SOC, right?
John:
If you try to do something weird, chances are it won't work.
John:
To clarify, the above firmwares are for Apple's raw NAND controller bridge, which is embedded on package with the raw NAND flash.
John:
That's the Toshiba Samsung Hynix bit.
John:
The top-level SSD controller is separate, right?
John:
So these are the little bit of controller firmware that runs on the little module with the flash chips in it.
John:
It's not like the quote-unquote SSD controller, which in Apple Silicon is in the system on a chip thing, right?
Okay.
John:
The raw NAND controllers are called S3E, S4E, which are ARM32 and run Apple MSPS firmware.
John:
And S5E, which is Apple custom ARM64 core running Apple MSF firmware based on RTKit.
John:
The top OSD controller is embedded in the M1SOC and is ANS2 and runs Apple storage firmware.
John:
So these are all tiny little ARM chips that are running their own little firmware thing needs to do their tiny little job.
John:
And so as Hector points out, yes, Apple puts freaking ARM64 inside each flash chip in your machine these days.
John:
That's how they roll.
John:
There's also at least 12 of those ARM64 mini cores inside the M1 Max.
John:
It has more ARM64 coprocessor cores than ARM64 main processor cores.
John:
One of those is ANS2, the Apple storage controller thing.
John:
so like in the little module with the NAND chips on it there's a little tiny ARM processor that's job is to just manage those NAND things but it's not a drive controller because the SSD drive controller that makes all that NAND appear as a single drive to the OS and everything that's in the SoC and that's another little ARM mini core alongside apparently 11 other little ARM mini cores in the M1 Max SoC that do various jobs inside the larger chip
John:
Obviously, those cores are not like computation cores to run your stuff.
John:
They're just little things to run.
John:
You know, that's why they call it a system on a chip.
John:
It's not just a CPU with a bunch of, you know, execution units and registers and stuff.
John:
There's other entire other little processes and they're doing their things.
John:
Right.
John:
And finally, Hector has one final tweet about like why Apple does this and what's the deal with their stuff.
John:
Apple's NVMe implementation is largely faster, lower power and has special encryption modes, including features for per file key selection, not available to standard NVMe SSDs.
John:
Apple goes custom because they want to do things better than the competition in certain ways.
John:
So if you go through Apple's big security papers, you can see how they have per file encryption keys, which is a feature basically inherited from the iPhone for an extra amount of security.
John:
And you can't do that without sort of complete understanding of the whole storage stack because NAND doesn't know about files and the SSD controller.
John:
doesn't know about keys for individual files, but making all this stuff works together, lets them have not just encryption keys for the whole drive, but also per file encryption keys as well.
John:
So it's actually fairly complicated and fairly cool, but it also explains after seeing all this and getting headache, I get why I can't buy something from Amazon and plug it in, because it's the wrong thing.
John:
Like an Amazon thing is, you know, an actual commercial drive or whatever, I keep saying Amazon, but it has the storage controller, NAND, everything all in one, and it presents an interface
John:
As a drive to the host computer.
John:
And that's not how the Mac Studio or the Mac Pro work at all.
Casey:
It's wild.
Casey:
It's really wild.
Casey:
But yeah, it seems like there... Because I watched a couple of videos.
Casey:
I forget who it was, but somebody posted a video about...
Casey:
Oh, let me take one Mac Studio and take the, you know, dismantle both.
Casey:
I'm sorry, take two Mac Studios, dismantle them both and try to swap chips back and forth between them.
Casey:
And they concluded, oh, this must be something that Apple is doing to, you know, try to fight against right to repair and blah, blah, blah, which on the surface is a reasonable explanation if you don't know any better.
Casey:
But as soon as you dig into this a little bit, you realize, no, no, no, this has nothing to do with right to repair.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
even though it is a kind of crummy offshoot that you can that it's a little harder to to do this on your own um but nevertheless what it's really about is just making as good a system as they possibly can like you said but yeah and it's physical security which historically has been almost non-existent if you have physical access it was very easy to get complete access now apple makes it much like just like with iphones much much harder even when you have physical access to an iphone it is non-trivial to break into it and
John:
the Mac's transitioning to Apple Silicon, or actually even beginning with the T2, that's what they've been trying to do with Macs.
John:
And what it means is you get things like, what do you mean my storage is cryptographically locked to my computer?
John:
It's like, yeah.
John:
I mean, you can erase it.
John:
You can go into DFU mode and erase it, but then you lose all the data on it, right?
John:
In the old days, you could rip a hard drive out of one PC, stick it into another PC, and voila, you've got everything, right?
John:
Can't do that on modern Macs, and that's a good thing.
John:
Well, the drivers would never boo, right?
John:
You'd have to, like, reinstall Windows on it.
John:
All right, let's just say a Mac.
John:
You could take a hard drive out of one Mac and connect it to another, and you would see the contents really easily.
Marco:
Yeah, and to be, you know, to, I think, characterize Apple's motives here, I don't think... When Apple does things that make it harder to upgrade or repair your computer or phone or whatever...
Marco:
I don't think they're doing it maliciously.
Marco:
I don't think they're doing it because thinking like, oh, if we make this one change, nobody will be able to buy cheap SSDs and put them in here or nobody will be able to repair this thing on their own or whatever.
Marco:
I don't think that's what it is.
Marco:
I think they just don't
Marco:
prioritize people self upgrading and self repairing enough like they don't design for it they don't think enough about it or they don't care enough about it or they let other factors override it so if they're able to make something that they think is better or that or that you know legitimately is better um in in a way that makes it harder to repair or upgrade they will choose that almost every time because they are it is a lower priority for them to accommodate repairs and and upgrades later
Marco:
Now, that's certainly worth debating whether that should be their priority, but that's, I think, where it's coming from, not any intentions of malice.
John:
Well, it's part of the product brief, really, because to give an example, the Mac Pro is the one Mac, I would say, that is designed to make things upgradable and swappable.
John:
There's numbered instructions with text and stuff inside the thing telling you how to add and remove cards, telling you how to add and remove RAM.
John:
It is explicitly...
John:
you know made to be to have parts of the inside of it upgraded and changed just not the ssds which are basically exactly like this and non-upgradable but you can add a pcie card and put as many ssds as you want in there and you can add you know seven ssd pcie cards with ssds all over them you can swap in and out hard drives you can access all the ram because they're on little chips that you can take in and out and they have instructions on how to do it
John:
Pretty much no other Mac is like that anymore, including the Mac Studio, which, as we've seen from the teardowns, and maybe we'll discuss in a little bit, doesn't even have user-accessible screws.
John:
You have to peel off the rubber foot on the bottom, even get to the screws to let you open it, right?
John:
Whereas my computer has a giant handle on the top that you lift up and twist, right?
John:
It's very different.
John:
But this is the only Mac that has, as part of its design,
John:
make this thing user accessible and expandable right every other mac is like that's not part of the requirements right and so when like you said marco when they come up like oh we can make the ssd faster and lower power by soldering to the motherboard do it oh we can make the ram faster by putting it all in one big system do it because it doesn't violate any of the requirements because the requirements of the system are not like let the user be able to upgrade the components
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Casey:
Now, moving on to the depressing part of the podcast for one, Mr. John Syracuse.
Casey:
You know, it's like you were talking about 2000 songs and hits.
Casey:
Tear John's heart into pieces.
Casey:
The Mac Studio is currently his last resort.
Casey:
But hey, this is bad news, John.
John:
So bad.
John:
Because if you look at the graph, it will unbreak my heart to what I did there.
Casey:
Oh, well done.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
that was probably late 90s wasn't it that's a great time i'm so bad with yours oh well done i am very proud of all three of us look at us go uh god by the way the songs i was complaining about were nothing like that uh anyway all right so max studio cooling and fan noise i heard your heart shattering into a trillion pieces john at least that's the way it was but it seems you've glued yourself back together uh how do you want to handle this you want me to start walking through this do you want to take take this
John:
I think I can take this.
John:
So to start, I remember reading Jason Snell's review.
John:
It was one of the first ones I reviewed.
John:
And he's like, it does make fan noise all the time.
John:
Fans are always running, you hear them, and it's noisier than I expected.
John:
And I think probably the next thing I saw after that was one of the Max Tech YouTube videos.
John:
And they were like, it's completely silent.
John:
I was like, well, I'll just wait to see.
John:
I'll wait to see how this shakes out.
John:
Because lots of people have different ideas of what is noisy, what is quiet, so on and so forth.
John:
So here are some facts.
John:
that gathered from various people looking at these things and taking measurements right um so from the max tech video which we'll link in the show notes um it seems like the fans on the max studio and there's two of them if you look at what like apple's intro video there's like two fans that pull air in from the bottom and shove it out the back right um they idle around 1300 rpm
John:
And according to TG Pro, an app that does like a fan measurement speed, we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
John:
According to the TG Pro app, it lists the minimum fan RPM on the Mac Studio fans as 1100 RPM.
John:
Now, this is a third party application.
John:
I don't know if that's actually true, but the point is the minimum is 1100 and they're idling at 1300.
John:
In the testing that MaxTech did, under what they consider full load, they tried to exercise the CPU and the GPU as much as possible.
John:
The SoC temperature maxes out around 60 degrees Celsius.
John:
And I know we don't do Celsius around here, but I can just tell you if you've ever done anything having to do with PC cooling, 60 degrees Celsius is not hot.
John:
Like this is the maximum temperature where they're trying to say, can we put the CPU and the GPU maxed out all cores, everything at the same time?
John:
And they got it to max at like 60 degrees.
John:
That is extremely cool, okay?
John:
And during that stress test of maxing everything out, the fans stayed at 1300 RPM.
John:
So these fans apparently never change RPM.
John:
And even under max load at 1300 RPM, they can keep the thing at 60 degrees Celsius.
Casey:
And I'm sorry, for those of us who believe in good temperature units, that's 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
Marco:
honestly i'm a fahrenheit proponent but not with cpu temperatures because it is not describing an air temperature and so like the whole world describes cpu temps in celsius and it is actually useful because a hundred degrees celsius is roughly the limit of what you would ever want a cpu to reach and you should really keep it below that and so like the scale actually makes sense a lot i agree i'm just i'm just trolling for the fun of it no i completely agree with you
John:
yeah and so if you're if you're listening to this near an intel mac uh please go look at what your cpu temperature as you sit here idle listening to a podcast um like i it's if you max an intel mac to like use all the cores and some kind of stress test it will not stay at 60 degrees celsius chances are very good right well what is your what is as our lone just have dropbox running like
Casey:
That's all you need to do.
Casey:
And or Slack.
Casey:
What is your CPU running at right now, John?
John:
I had to launch TG Pro, and I will tell you, oh, there's an update.
John:
Well, I'm going to.
John:
I'm going to click install update.
John:
But while I click install update, oh, I have to change to Celsius, I think, because I might be in Fahrenheit.
Marco:
um where are the settings for tg pro and install and relaunch so while you figure that out i would say that it seems i mean i haven't been following the videos and everything on this yet but i am certainly disappointed to hear that there's audible fans but we know what these like because even even not talking about the m1 ultra version even just talking about the m1 max version people say it has the same you know approximate you know fan noise being you know noticeable and
Marco:
I don't know anything about the blowers they're using.
Marco:
I mean, it's probably some kind of weird custom thing that they made, but I would hope that they can actually spin slower than 1100 or 1200 RPM.
Marco:
And I would love to see that idle speed.
Marco:
You know, what does it sound like when it's like 800, 900 RPM?
Marco:
Because it seems like if they're able to keep that CPU at 60 Celsius, even under full load at the same speed.
Marco:
It's the same speed it idles at.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Then that tells me that they could get away with less cooling and therefore less noise when it's not under full load.
Marco:
And so, meanwhile, I sit here next to my desktop laptop, which, by the way, quick aside, I love the desktop laptop lifestyle so much.
Marco:
So earlier today...
Marco:
Earlier today, we were about to do a FaceTime session with our workout trainer.
Marco:
The session was like a half hour away, and I had a software update ready to go on the 14-inch that we normally would use for that.
Marco:
So I said, all right, fine, installed 12.3 or whatever it is, whatever we're on.
Marco:
I know system updates on M1 Macs are not fast, but surely a half hour will be enough time.
Marco:
Little did I know after you hit install, well, then it has to first prepare the update.
Marco:
And that took like 15 of the minutes.
Marco:
We now only have 15 minutes left.
Marco:
And I'm like, okay, I'm not going to reboot to after doing this because I know as soon as I begin this, it's going to take longer than 15 minutes because M1 software updates are very, very slow.
Marco:
Sure enough, it finishes the preparing stage.
Marco:
And then it shows me the, you know, do you agree to these terms screen?
Marco:
And I thought, aha, okay.
Marco:
I just won't agree to the terms until after the workout.
Marco:
So I just hid the window.
Marco:
Sure enough, a few seconds later, the computer reboots.
Marco:
So, by the way, you don't have to agree to the terms, turns out.
Marco:
So we'll see what that means if I get a knock on the door from Apple Legal in the morning.
Marco:
And then, of course, it blew way past the workout doing its random... I don't even know what the progress bars are indicating.
Marco:
When it's actually in the rebooted environment doing the software updates...
Marco:
it went through like four different progress bars.
Marco:
So it's displaying nothing.
Marco:
It might as well just be a spinner at that point.
Marco:
So it's not useful information.
Marco:
Anyway, so it was just so slow that I was at the last minute able to just take my desktop laptop off of my desk, unplug it, open it up, pop it open and use that.
Marco:
It's so nice having this dual laptop lifestyle.
Marco:
So this is one of the reasons why I am not envious at all about everyone else's Mac Studio results they're getting of, wow, look, I compiled Xcode 20% faster.
Marco:
I am so happy with my dual setup of dual laptops.
Marco:
And by the way, my 16-inch, that is my desktop laptop,
Marco:
I have never heard the fan.
Marco:
Not once.
Marco:
It is a much smaller volume of, you know, inner dimensions in there that it's keeping cool.
Marco:
It's much smaller fans.
Marco:
It should theoretically be much louder than the Mac Studio reportedly is.
Marco:
And yet it is dead silent with everything I've ever thrown at it.
Marco:
I've never heard the fan.
Casey:
I have only heard my 14-inch a couple of times.
Casey:
I think both of them were FFM-Pig related.
Casey:
But it's only been like twice.
Casey:
And I've had this thing, when did we get these?
Casey:
Like November of last year or something like that?
Casey:
Whereas if I breathed wrong on my Intel MacBook Pro, the fans would spin up.
Casey:
No, I don't want to continue to belabor this point because I feel like you and I have been gushing about the desktop laptop for a while now.
Casey:
But it occurred to me as we were talking that
Casey:
We were overjoyed this year when what ended up happening was the 13 Pro regular size didn't really have any compromises from the 13 Pro max size, right?
Casey:
Was it this year, last year, or both?
Casey:
It was this year, I believe.
Casey:
And we were overjoyed by that.
Casey:
And that, I think, is a reasonable expectation, that the two phones that are of roughly the same size, and I know with that size class, everything matters more, but two phones for roughly the same size have roughly the same capabilities, and that's really awesome.
Casey:
Never in a million years did I think I could say that about freaking computers.
Casey:
The Ultra accepted, it really is choose your own adventure, choose your own case when it comes to M1s.
Casey:
And I know that's not entirely true because you can't get a Max in certain places and so on.
Casey:
But amongst the kinds of computers that I would look at buying...
Casey:
I can get an M1 Max in a Max Studio, or I can get it in my 14-inch MacBook Pro, and they're the same.
Casey:
Like, never in a million years did I think I would be able to choose what case I wanted, but have effectively the exact same processor in any of them.
Casey:
I mean, I've been paying attention to computers since I was eight or something like that, so since, like, 1990.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And never has this been even close to an option in my lifetime.
Casey:
And it's just so amazing and so cool that we can have these really, well, unless you're John Syracuse, these no-compromise machines that you can take anywhere.
Casey:
It's just phenomenal.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, even like the year that I spent before the MacBook Pros using the M1 MacBook Air as my main computer for a lot of that time and then using the M1 Mac Mini, which is the same chip for the other half of it.
Marco:
Like the M1 MacBook Air, that alone, like that could have been my main computer the entire time if I would have gotten higher specs on it.
Marco:
And it's just like, I can't, I couldn't believe that computer.
Marco:
Like it was so incredibly good to have Apple's cheapest laptop online.
Marco:
be the best computer I'd ever used, and have no fan, didn't even have one, have this amazing performance, incredible battery life, it's super small and light, that's amazing.
Marco:
We're in such a good time right now for these computers, and that's why, so getting back to the Mac Studio, that's why it is kind of, I wonder, this fan noise thing seems like a pretty big downside to this, and I have to wonder,
Marco:
maybe this is adjustable in firmware.
Marco:
Maybe they set the idle RPM speed a little too high, and maybe they can bring it down.
Marco:
Again, I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe the blowers can't go that slowly, but they probably can, and I really hope that they consider that because we know what these chips do.
Marco:
We know from the laptops and from the Mac Mini.
Marco:
There is no reason why...
Marco:
a desktop with an m1 max not the ultra we don't know about the ultra yet we do know about that i'll get to that in a second okay but there's no reason why the m1 max in a desktop enclosure should ever be audible no matter what it's doing because on a laptop it's barely audible even under the most ridiculous load and it's inaudible under almost any other load so we know that if a laptop can do that inaudibly so can a desktop with the exact same chip now so john tell me about the ultra
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the question is, okay, well, you just told me all these things that idle is a 1300.
John:
And like, and again, I think this is another first.
John:
Can you think of a desktop computer whose fan runs at the same speed when it's under maximum load versus when it's idle?
John:
Like, what is the point of a cooling system if the fan is never going to change RPM?
John:
Like, you know,
John:
You would think you would tune the thing so like, yeah, when it gets hotter, the fans spin faster, right?
John:
But to literally be at 1300 RPM under full CPU and GPU running this weird benchmark that's synthetically designed to do that, it's like one of those benchmarks that does stuff off screen so you're not even delayed by the refresh rate of the monitor, right?
Yeah.
John:
that is weird so so what is the ultra like because that would be that was the max the ultra has no real difference in fan speed or temperatures than the max so they both the ultra and the max run around 1300 rpm when they're idle stay at around 1300 rpm and around 60 degrees celsius under full cpu and gpu load now obviously the ultra has a better cooling system it has big hopper copper heat stings that weighs twice as much it has
John:
extra heat pipes that the the max one doesn't have but it definitely seems like they tuned the cooling system so that both of those things that the fans run at the same speed and that the system on its ship stays at the same temperature obviously the ultra produces more heat but then the cooling system gets rid of more heat from it so that it's scaled to be like that so i totally agree with marco that if these fans are capable of running slower
John:
you should be able to run them slower and be just fine because obviously 1300 rpm is sufficient to keep and this is like i mean it's not an hour long test it's like a 10 minute test but even after 10 minutes at maximum load if the fans are still at 1300 rpm there's so much headroom for you to deal with this okay we'll put links to the max tech videos where they show these things now as i said before noise right
John:
Some people say it's noisy, some people say it's not.
John:
These blower fans, we'll get to this in a little bit too, but there's two of these blower fans in the Mac Studio 2, and everyone pretty much agrees that the Mac Studio, you can't hear the fans in.
John:
You can feel the air coming out the top of your hand over it, but you just can't hear it.
John:
Wait, you're referring to the studio display?
John:
Oh, sorry, yeah, the studio display.
John:
I hate the fact that they both have studio in the name, yeah.
John:
The studio display has two blower fans that look very similar to the blower.
John:
They're not the same, obviously, but the same style of fan, like where it pushes air sideways from the direction of the rotation of the thing, is in the studio display.
John:
And everything I've read has said...
John:
you can't hear the fans in the studio display unless you literally shove your ear on the top of the display but you can feel the air coming out right so there's agreement about what constitutes silent when it comes to the display but for the max studio computer itself max tech in their video describes it as quote completely silent whereas many other people say i hear the fan all the time as quinn nelson says on his channel this is a tweet actually
John:
Don't mistake this to mean the Mac Studio is loud.
John:
It's not, but the M1 Ultra Mac Studio is persistently audible at idle.
John:
It's louder than any Mac I've ever owned in recent memory, including Intel machines.
John:
So lots of opinions vary on this.
John:
How loud does it seem to you?
John:
Maybe you're doing it in a loud room.
John:
Based on the RPM, I feel like...
John:
If all these machines are idling at 1,300 RPM, these subjective differences have to do with the people who are listening to it and the rooms they're listening in.
John:
So here's this website, quietmac.netlify.app.
John:
This is made for John Syracuse.
John:
That purports to measure the noise levels of computers both at idle and when browsing the web.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
What this graph shows is, and what potentially unbreaks my heart, as mentioned before, is that the Mac Studio at idle comes in around 24 decibels.
John:
And the Mac Pro, the computer I'm sitting next to right now, comes in at 27 decibels.
John:
So what this is saying to me is at idle, the Mac Studio is quieter than my Mac Pro.
John:
i'm already sitting in a room with my mac pro i'm sitting like i can touch it with my hand it's not that far away so if i can live with that noise i'm hoping that my wife will be able to live in you know may or june or whatever the hell i get my computer with the noise of a mac studio which will be shoved back on her desk behind a bunch of crap uh
John:
and even if it's running at 1300 rpm the good news is that no matter what she does to her computer apparently it will always run at 1300 rpm and never get any louder and it will be quieter than my mac pro and if you compare it in this thing to like the retina 5k iMac that's 24 decibels so the difference between a 5k iMac which is what she's got now 23 24 decibels depending on what year iMac and what processor it is to 25 and i know decibels aren't a linear scale right so 24 is not you know
John:
25 is not 1 25th bigger than 24 or whatever like it's not a linear scale but it's not a huge difference between uh the noise level of these things and so i'm you know i'm inclined to think that i'm going to be annoyed from a philosophical perspective that why are you running the fans at 1300 rpm when clearly you can run them way slower and be just fine when the machine is idling
John:
But I do like the fact that it appears that the cooling systems on both the Ultra and the Max are tuned such that even under artificial benchmark kind of like loads that you'll never induce, even when playing a game, probably that they're not going to get much louder and that you're not going to get the hairdryer effect.
John:
And during all that time, it's not like they're baking the innards of this machine because everything is staying relatively cool.
Marco:
It's still, to me, it seems like some kind of either bug or mistake that, you know, on this quiet Mac site that the desktop Apple just released is the second loudest desktop they've released in years.
Marco:
Second loudest computer they've released in years at idle.
John:
I mean, it makes sense in terms of if you look at the top two, it's their biggest honking desktop thing and their second biggest honking desktop thing.
John:
Right.
John:
I mean, like you would hope like the laptops aren't on there.
John:
These are the separate desktop box type machine that nobody really buys.
John:
Right.
John:
um and so i don't i don't think it's surprising that they're up there but it is surprising because the max studio is kind of small you're like oh did they make it so small so it's so hot in there they got to run the fans all really high all the time they don't have to they just do and by the way if anyone has this i believe if you get like tg pro you can put the fans on manual and i do wonder if you drag the little progress bar down to 1100 rpm like can you tell a difference in the sound or can you go below like to marco's point maybe they go down to 800 tg pro doesn't seem to think they do but you can put the fans on manual control and
John:
mess with stuff and i finally got the tg pro update the iMac pro right now is idling around 40 degrees celsius on the cpus and yeah mid 30s low 40s on pretty much everything inside my computer as it sits here idle while i record a podcast
Casey:
That's still pretty good.
Casey:
I mean, that's not bad at all.
John:
But I can make them go way up.
John:
I just run Microsoft Flight Simulator and all those fans will, the temperatures will go way, way up and the fans will get much, much louder.
John:
And it seems that on a Mac Studio, the fans will not get much, much louder no matter what you do to the thing because it just has cooling to spare.
Casey:
That is pretty incredible.
Casey:
So I'm glad your heart is unbroken and Tony Braxton is also glad.
Casey:
So both of us are very excited.
John:
By the time I actually get mine, maybe they'll change the fan firmware in a software update.
Marco:
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Casey:
We got a lot of feedback, and I don't know what the source of this feedback was, and most of it was not snarky at all, but a lot of feedback about why 5K?
Casey:
Like, why do people care?
Casey:
Why is this a thing?
Casey:
And I have an answer to this, but, John, it sounds like you perhaps had something you wanted to start with, and since this seems to be the John episode so far, if you would like to kick us off, and then I would like to add some things potentially at the end.
John:
Yeah, I saw a lot in this in a lot of Apple Studio Display reviews as well, particularly the reviews that were trying to say, you know, is this monitor a good deal, right?
John:
Because it costs $1,600, which to someone who doesn't routinely shop in the Apple world seems like a lot for a monitor.
John:
You're like, $1,600 for a monitor?
John:
I can get a good monitor for like $500.
John:
What are you doing?
John:
What's different about this?
John:
And I think those debates are the reason this 5K thing kept coming up.
John:
Even on Twitter, I was sort of like,
John:
thrown into a Twitter canoe, as they say, with a bunch of people who are arguing with each other about this.
John:
And inevitably, what it would say, it was like, yeah, $1,600 a lot.
John:
But there's really only, as Casey, you've pointed out on your website, there's not a lot of competition for this.
John:
The LG is like $1,300.
John:
And the LG has a lot of problems, as detailed in the show.
John:
Uh, and the Apple one is really well built and looks nice.
John:
And so the couple hundred dollar difference is reasonable.
John:
And like, and if you don't like either one of those monitors, what are your choices?
John:
And everyone would say, what are you talking about?
John:
That's not the only competition.
John:
Look at all these monitors and everyone say, yeah, but that one isn't 5k.
John:
And you'd come back to this question, but why do you care about 5k?
John:
So you're telling me the only monitor I can compare this Apple to is the one other 5K monitor and every other monitor doesn't count because you can't compare it?
John:
Because the prices are not proportional.
John:
Like if you go down to a 4K monitor, you can get a really good 4K monitor for way, way less.
John:
And not only that, you can get a 4K monitor with mini LED, with HDR, with high refresh, all of that for less than the 5K.
John:
So every one of these conversations about value inevitably saw people talking past each other until they realized they didn't agree on the premise that the only competition to a 5K monitor is a 5K monitor.
John:
And what I want to say about it in the context of ADP...
John:
is the reason we three individual people keep talking about a 5k monitor is because it is a thing that hasn't existed the only one out there was the lg and the one you could build into the imac and so we didn't spend a lot of time talking about 4k monitors because there's tons of them there's plenty of competition you have many different choices there's lots of different models with lots of different prices like i have one attached to my playstation casey's have them like
John:
That wasn't a problem area or a hole that needed to be filled, but there was no 5K.
John:
And the reason I speak for myself, the reason why I'm interested in 5K is because we have a 5K iMac since 2015.
John:
And as we said many times, once you get used to being able to see more stuff to have more points of resolution, if not necessarily pixels.
John:
it's hard to go back to a smaller monitor.
John:
It feels like a downgrade because we're accustomed in general over the course of our computing lives to starting off, I start off with a nine inch monochrome monitor and progressively as computers have gotten better and better, the screen that I look at every day has gotten bigger.
John:
Obviously this will stop at some point.
John:
It's not gonna be 7,000 inches eventually, right?
John:
But it has gotten bigger over time.
John:
So if you spent many, many years in front of a 5K monitor, the idea of getting a brand new Mac
John:
And having to go down to a 4K monitor isn't particularly attractive.
John:
It's not the end of the world.
John:
What if you get two 4K monitors?
John:
Isn't that better?
John:
Maybe you don't like two monitors.
John:
Maybe you don't have room for two monitors.
John:
Maybe you're just a single monitor person like I am.
John:
So once you get used to 5K, it's nice to have 5K.
John:
and apple made a mac with a 5k monitor but they never made a standalone 5k monitor and the lg was the only one so the reason why we keep talking about this is one it was a product that seemingly nobody made which is frustrating and two for me personally i've gotten used to 5k so it was frustrating that this is what i'm used to but my options are so narrow when i go to my next computer i mean it's what it's what drove me to buy this ridiculously price 6k monitor because hey
John:
It's even more than 5K.
John:
I would have been happy with 5K, but at the time, literally my only option was the LG or this, and I wasn't going to get that LG because I'm not as brave as Casey.
John:
So I got this dude with 6K, right?
John:
But now they have a 5K.
John:
That's why people are talking about it.
John:
And the people who are stuck on 5K, why do you care about 5K?
John:
It's basically people who have gotten used to 5K, probably by using a 5K iMac or maybe by using the 5K LG and going to anything smaller or going to 4K displays feels like to them either a downgrade or something they don't want to do.
Casey:
Yeah, it's tough because I think Mac users are a little bit different and cut from a different cloth than your average PC user.
Casey:
And that doesn't mean we're more right or anything like that.
Casey:
No, we are.
Casey:
We are definitely more right.
Casey:
Fine, fine.
Casey:
And so I think another way of looking at this is that, you know, especially when did the Retina MacBook Pros come out?
Casey:
2012.
Casey:
2012.
Casey:
God, was it that long ago?
Casey:
It sure was.
Casey:
Holy smokes.
Casey:
So when these Retina MacBook Pros came out in 2012, we got these incredibly, incredibly crisp displays.
Casey:
Just phenomenally crisp.
Casey:
And the same thing happened with the phones and the iPads and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But it was the first time that I saw any sort of computer monitor that was that crisp.
Casey:
That was what people sometimes call high DPI.
Casey:
And when you have...
Casey:
all of that data to make things so clear, but you put it in a relatively small package.
Casey:
So, I mean, what was the original sales pitch of Retina?
Casey:
You get four pixels where you would previously have only had one, if I remember correctly.
Casey:
Do I have that right?
Marco:
I mean, that is what happened.
John:
I don't know if that was the sales pitch.
John:
The sales pitch is you can't see the pixels anymore.
John:
They're so small that your eye can't resolve them.
John:
That's what makes it a Retina display.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And so, you know, this was true on the iPhone, it was true on the iPad, and then it was true on Macs.
Casey:
And so, you know, from 2012, Mac OS, or it might have even still been OS X at that point, had phenomenal high DPI support because they were, you know, making computers that had these ridiculously high DPI displays.
Casey:
And as of years ago now, and I haven't personally tried this recently, although I have friends that still run Windows and they say it's not great.
Casey:
As of actually, John, you might even have opinions about this.
Casey:
But as of years ago now, Windows high DPI support was rather trash.
Casey:
Like it would work in some places, it wouldn't work in others.
Casey:
And it was kind of messy.
John:
Well, I can tell you my experience with it because obviously I'm running Windows on a high DPI screen here.
John:
Windows itself does pretty okay.
John:
It has adjustable resolution and you can basically make it look even more flexible than Apple.
John:
It's probably the same flexibly.
John:
It's more straightforward than Apple because I hate those stupid little things where you have five different choices and it's like...
John:
you know default scaled and it's like just tell me what the ratio is so i don't anyway windows is straightforward with that but here's the problem with you using windows on a high dpi monitor just because windows the os has reasonable scaling and handles it well and i'm running windows 10 and i said windows 11 is even better because windows backwards compatibility is like their religion
John:
Tons of stuff that you run on Windows has no idea that it's running in a high DPI monitor and just plain shows itself at 1x and everything is microscopic.
John:
I think I was playing like Valorant or something, like a fairly modern game.
John:
uh and like the riot game launcher thing shows itself at 1x with retina pixels it was so small i'm like my nose was practically touching the screen i couldn't see anything because it has no like they just don't expect to run especially gaming things because gaming you don't game on a retina monitor that's why most gaming monitors on pcs they have these resolutions when you look at them like oh it's an awesome monitor you're like no that's not points that's pixels you're like oh well for a mac user that's not how we want to do things but for a pc gamer
John:
retina is not something that you crave really and so games never expect to run at high dpi and sometimes they just don't care and they just show themselves microscopic and you wouldn't think that's a big deal but if you're old and don't have great vision being able to use the tiny windows controls on a like 1x window being displayed on a 2x retina display is actually really difficult and i can tell you very frustrating it's literally like you're reading an eye chart so
John:
Yeah, the overall experience is something to be desired, but it's mostly not the fault of Microsoft because they get it right in the OS.
Casey:
So if you start from the premise that you want something that's high DPI, that changes your requirements quite dramatically.
Casey:
So when I was going on a search for a retina monitor when I was still at my jobby job, we landed on a bunch of different options, and that was covered in a post of mine from 2017.
Casey:
And at the time, there was a 24-inch 4K monitor, and that's actually the one I'm looking at right this very moment.
Casey:
And it was about $300 then, it's about $300 now.
Casey:
And that worked out just fine.
Casey:
It's not a fantastic monitor, but it's fine.
Casey:
And it's cheap.
Casey:
I mean, $300 is a lot of money, but given everything else we're talking about right now, it's pretty cheap.
Casey:
There was at the time a Dell 24-inch 4K that was a little more expensive and a little bit better, like a little bit better color reproduction, so on and so forth.
Casey:
That has been discontinued to the best of my knowledge.
Casey:
And there was a 27-inch Dell 5K monitor, which has also been discontinued.
Casey:
So we have the LG 24-inch 4K.
Casey:
There's also the LG UltraFine 4K, which at the time in 2017 was like $700.
Casey:
I don't know if that is the case anymore or not.
Casey:
And then you had the LG UltraFine 5K, and that was like $1,300.
Casey:
I think it was like $1,500 or $1,600 when it was brand new, and then they dropped the price shortly thereafter.
Casey:
And that was it.
Casey:
That's all you could do.
Casey:
Because in my personal opinion, if you cross above about 24 inches with 4K resolution, you start to get out of retina because you can start to see the pixels.
Casey:
And yes, this is the first worldiest of first world problems.
Casey:
But that's the whole point is that you want to have a setup where you can't see the pixels, where it really does look pixel doubled and everything is retina.
Casey:
And so my rule of thumb that works for me, and a lot of people like to argue with me about this, maybe you feel differently.
Casey:
But for me, anything over 24 inches, you really need 5K.
Casey:
Well, all of these monitors that people love to cite as being way more expensive, or excuse me, way less expensive and way more inches and so on and so forth.
Casey:
I don't want that.
Casey:
More inches is...
Casey:
bad in this context like that is the opposite of what i want there are cases where i do want that this is the opposite of what i want in this context and so so people will say well why not have this 39 inch curved monstrosity that's you know ridiculously large and looks stupid in my opinion well aside from the fact that it's aesthetically not great i don't want that much space unless i have you know like an 8k resolution monitor which would be unaffordable yeah
John:
What you want is more in Apple parlance.
John:
You want more points.
John:
You don't want more inches.
John:
You want more points.
John:
And when we say points, it's the abstract unit that Apple uses to measure things on screen.
John:
They try to display everything at a fixed size in points.
John:
The number of pixels may vary.
John:
In an Apple simple case, if you have a retina monitor, two pixels of length is equal to one point in length.
John:
And if you have a non-retina monitor, one pixel is one point.
John:
But in that monstrosity, it's 32 inches.
John:
the point resolution of that in retina parlance is you take the pixels you divide by two and that's how many points wide it is and then that's how you would see that the width of that giant really wide monitor in points is less than the width of the 5k in points not in inches but in points because that's how everything is measured and when we say we want retina we don't want a monitor where one pixel equals one point we want a monitor where as casey said in 2d parlance
John:
Four pixels equals one point.
John:
A little square.
John:
One, two, three, four, and a little square.
John:
That is one point because that allows the edges of things to be drawn using pixels, which are half or quarter the size of a point.
John:
Again, I keep switching from 1D to 2D depending on how you're measuring it.
John:
And so that's what Mac users are looking for, because all of Apple's Macs with built in displays are within that range.
John:
They have a DPI range that puts them in that sort of retina ish range.
John:
And the point size of things, you know, the number we shop for them based on how many points, because how many points is how much stuff you can see on screen.
John:
You can do non native scaling modes and get essentially more points of resolution with the same pixels.
John:
But just starting from the native res of saying, at native res, in retina mode, here's how many points wide it is.
John:
And you can go up or down a little bit in either direction by scaling.
John:
But that's the native res.
Marco:
When people who don't care about retina, which there's a lot of those people, including among Mac users, but when people who don't care about retina enter this discussion...
Marco:
You keep telling them over and over again, what I want as a retina carer is this DPI range in this size range.
Marco:
And every single time they're like, well, what about this?
Marco:
And it's not that.
Marco:
And it drives you mad because you're like, okay, I literally want this very specific set of conditions.
Marco:
This small number of monitors satisfies these conditions.
Marco:
And literally everything else you've ever told me about does not.
Marco:
And I don't understand.
Marco:
It's not like these specs are hard to find.
Marco:
It's not like these are somehow unreasonable things to want in a monitor.
Marco:
What could be more natural to the specs of a monitor than its physical size and the number of pixels it has?
Marco:
Those are pretty basic specs.
Marco:
And yet, it seems like the world keeps showering us with options that we should like that are totally outside of the specs that we want.
Marco:
It's like, no, you don't...
Marco:
Did I not speak it correctly?
Marco:
Did I not communicate?
Marco:
Are we having a communication issue?
Marco:
Why would you think if I say I want this, why would you think I would want that?
Marco:
And it's crazy.
Marco:
It's maddening.
Casey:
Yeah, I imagine you've written two different posts across four years about this very issue and how many suggestions you've gotten.
Casey:
You know, Marco, I know you're interested in a four-door electric car, but have you heard about two-door V8 Mustangs?
Casey:
I think you would really like them.
Marco:
How about this motorcycle?
Marco:
I was like, no, that's not even close.
Yeah.
John:
And by the way, the reason why we want this, like, well, but why do you want that thing?
John:
It's dumb to like that thing.
John:
I haven't ever had it, and I think it's fine.
John:
I like my monitor better.
John:
Why don't you... Why do you want that thing?
John:
Basically, we've been trained by Apple to want it, because Apple has shipped monitors with most of its computers for a long time, and...
John:
you get accustomed to looking at things like that.
John:
And it's the same thing with the size thing in terms of like, I had a monitor that had this many points on it and going to one with fewer at native res feels like a downgrade because either I have to scale and things are more blurry or I just don't get to see as much.
John:
That feels like a downgrade.
John:
In the same way, if you're accustomed to Apple computers since 2012 coming to you with retina, you know, retina DPI monitors with a given number of points,
John:
Going back to non-retina from that doesn't feel... It doesn't even feel like a lateral move.
John:
It feels like a downgrade because you're used to years and years of not being able to see the pixels and suddenly you can see them again.
John:
And it feels kind of like, you know, going back to your Palm PDA after using an iPhone.
John:
It doesn't feel like...
John:
It feels worse.
John:
It doesn't feel like an advancement.
John:
If you never got used to Retina and have only used non-Retina Macs, maybe you don't even care when you see your first Retina Mac because at this point we're all old and we wouldn't, but like we're used to Retina.
John:
We're used to 5K resolution from having 5K iMacs, from having laptops that have Retina screens in them for all these years.
John:
And although it may not be what you're shopping for, it's what we're shopping for.
John:
And it's such a tiny market getting back to the studio display.
John:
It's why the studio display looks so much more reasonable because it has so little competition.
John:
And this competition is so bad that in the abstract, it may still seem outrageous.
John:
But practically speaking, if you go out there looking for something with these specs, there are so few choices.
John:
And the Apple studio display looks like, according to our tastes and many other people's tastes,
Casey:
actually the best choice does it mean it's super awesome and a great value no but if your choices are that limited and you really want these things it's slim pickings and this is the best one yeah and another great example is you know i've gotten used to having the blackest blacks on my oled displays on my oled tv on my oled iphone and and i
Casey:
I do prefer to have that kind of super deep black in the same way that you guys have it in your – what is the technology in the XDR that does this, the backlight technology?
Casey:
It's just mini-LED.
Casey:
It's the same thing.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So in your mini-LED displays, like the – I almost said cinema display.
Casey:
The studio display does not have particularly black blacks.
Casey:
And that is annoying.
Casey:
But for me –
Casey:
for me, that is like a tertiary or what is a quaternary priority for me.
Casey:
My number one priority is a monitor that works.
Casey:
My second priority is one that's about 27 inches and that's 5K.
Casey:
And like anything else is subsequent to that.
Casey:
Like I, in my personal list,
Casey:
good speakers are above black blacks.
Casey:
I'm not saying you have to agree.
Casey:
That's just the way I look at it.
Casey:
And so it's like you said, John, I mean, there really aren't many options.
Casey:
And if you look at the post I wrote at the very, very end of last year, you know, your options were the 24-inch 4K, which I've got right here, the UltraFine 4K, the UltraFine 5K, and the Pro Display XDR.
Casey:
Literally, that was it.
Casey:
And now you've got one more slotted in there, which is the studio display, which is a touch more expensive than the UltraFine 5K.
Casey:
And
Casey:
by any reasonable measure, is way, way, way nicer.
Casey:
Because I can tell you, even though I am an LG 5K apologist, even after my crummy experience with it, the speakers on this are hilariously bad.
Casey:
The stand makes the speakers look like they're high fidelity.
Casey:
like there's so much around the panel itself that is so bad like the webcam is fine um which is apparently better than the studio display is at least as it exists right now um but but like the speakers suck the stand sucks the service sucks like everything about the 5k other than the panel sucks and so for 300 hell yes i'm gonna go for the apple version hell
Casey:
hell yes I am, because that's going to be so much nicer.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
If it breaks, you know what I do?
Casey:
Instead of shipping it to frigging city of industry, you know where I ship it?
Casey:
In my car to the Apple store that's like 10 minutes away.
Casey:
Don't be creepy.
Casey:
So it's so much better in every measurable way for the things that I prioritize.
Casey:
But you may feel differently, and that's quite all right.
Marco:
We are brought to
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Once again, this is a new IT community for IT professionals at community.jumpcloud.com.
Marco:
Thank you so much to JumpCloud for sponsoring our show.
John:
All right, so some details on this monitor that have come out in the week since we last recorded.
John:
So the first is, this is just a tip from a friend that I don't know if this is just a one-off thing, but at least watching for it.
John:
When he hooked it up to his Mac, it defaulted to 1920 by 1080.
John:
He was like, why does this look all fuzzy?
John:
And I have not heard of this happening to anyone else, so maybe this was just a one-off fluke.
John:
But if you get up an Apple Studio display and you hook it up to your Mac and it looks a little weird, just hop over to the display preference brain and make sure it's set to 2560 by 1440, which is the native retina res, because it might not be.
John:
uh another one of the uh weird foibles of this monitor is that it probably comes with a very short thunderbolt cable the thing that you use to connect the monitor to your computer the only thing that connects the monitor to your monitor to the computer it looks like it's about three feet or maybe one meter for metric folks or whatever which is not particularly long it's perfectly fine if you're connecting it to like a laptop that's sitting next to it but if for example you had a mac pro and it was sitting on the floor
John:
That probably wouldn't reach.
John:
And if you look at Apple's prices for like their braided Thunderbolt cables, they're outrageous.
John:
So if you want to get something cheaper, maybe look at OWC or something, you can find more reasonably priced Thunderbolt cables.
John:
You can even use a DisplayPort cable if you can get that cheaper as well.
John:
But of course, it depends on what you're connecting it to.
John:
uh and also all the accessory stuff won't work like the camera and the usb port so maybe yeah don't do that just get a thunderbolt like a two meter thunderbolt cable is probably going to be like 50 bucks i know but it still just seems very expensive right okay so speaking of cables uh the power cable on i was looking
John:
I was actually looking at this last week before we recorded.
John:
I kept trying to find photos of, like, the back of the Apple Studio display.
John:
And the only one I found was really small and blurry.
John:
I'm like, oh, what I wanted to see was, is the cable permanently attached or not?
John:
And I found a photo of the back of it without the cable.
John:
So I'm like, well, it must be unattachable.
John:
And I saw, like, three little dots inside it.
John:
I'm like, that must be the plug, the little, what is it called, Marco?
John:
NEM, whatever.
John:
What is the one?
John:
Oh, yeah, like the C13 or whatever it is.
John:
Yeah, the little triangle-y three hole.
John:
Anyway, that's what I thought it was, but it was a really small picture.
John:
So now we know what the deal is.
John:
The cord is, quote-unquote, non-removable, but you can remove it.
John:
And so we have a picture from Apple's repair manual for the tool they apparently give to the Apple stores or whatever on how to remove this.
John:
And it's basically like...
John:
A giant barrel with a handle for leverage and you wrap the cord around the barrel and then you push down on the stick that's coming out of the barrel and it sort of, you know, presses against the back of the stand.
John:
What it's doing is basically pull exactly straight out of the monitor really hard and it will come out.
John:
We'll have a video to Matt Panzarino of TechCrunch doing that to presumably his Mac Studio display.
John:
it's a pretty violent process, right?
John:
It does.
John:
It does come out.
John:
It is not like a normal plug connector.
John:
It's more like, I mean, you can do this on your home pod too.
John:
Like lots of things you can pull the cord out of.
John:
Like it's not attached by tiny little wires.
John:
There is an actually connector.
John:
So the thing you pull out has three holes in it and it is connected to a thing with three metal pins and,
John:
So it's not like you're breaking it to pull it out, but boy, it's almost like you're breaking it.
John:
You probably wouldn't want to do it unnecessarily.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the reason this comes up is no one wants a permanently attached cord because why do you have this expensive monitor?
John:
What if your cat choose to do the cord?
John:
Do you have to get the whole monitor replaced?
John:
The answer is no, you won't have to get the whole monitor replaced, but you probably will have to bring it to an Apple store because it's not like you can go buy this cord.
John:
Like this is a part.
John:
It is not a, oh, I'll just go to the store and buy a power cable.
John:
That won't work.
John:
Whatever this thing is, it might not even be proprietary, but whatever it is, it's not the type of thing you're going to find.
John:
at a store that you can just buy and plug in there.
Casey:
So imagine, John, just hypothetically, if you had a desk that had your computer and a couple of displays on it and maybe one or two other things that might need power, and then you had off to the corner of the room, and it's not a very big room, but in the corner of the room, you had a Synology and a Mac Mini and a Switch and an Eero and things of that nature, and you wanted all of those things to be on the same uninterruptible power supply.
Casey:
Then what you might end up doing is realizing that most of the equipment that needs to be in the UPS is off in the corner of the room, and you would need just a couple of longer cables to reach to the desk.
Casey:
Imagine if you had, I don't know, a need for maybe a six-foot power cable instead of a three-foot power cable.
Casey:
And on the LG Ultrafine, this is all just hypothetical, John.
Casey:
On the LG Ultrafine, you can just swap out whatever that plug, Marco always knows, I never remember it, whatever that plug type is for like a six or 10 foot version of it.
Casey:
Easy peasy.
John:
I don't think this is, I'm not sure the power cord is three feet.
John:
The Thunderbolt.
Casey:
No, I understand.
Casey:
I understand.
Casey:
But whatever the length of the power cable is.
John:
I think this cord is six feet or two meters or whatever.
Casey:
Six feet is potentially too short.
Casey:
Hypothetically, hypothetically, hypothetically.
John:
You can always buy another UPS.
John:
It's okay.
John:
I gave you permission.
Casey:
But I actually don't even have a plug.
Casey:
Hey, don't talk to me about lack of plugs.
Casey:
Actually, that's true.
Casey:
I take it all back.
John:
My dining room has literally one plug.
John:
Not one plug with two places to plug in.
John:
One plug.
Casey:
Gosh.
Casey:
And it is not an inconvenient place.
Casey:
If we don't have a better post show, remind me about an adventure I went on recently.
Casey:
But anyways, yeah, I have the UPS in the corner.
Casey:
And I need easily six feet, maybe closer to 10 to get to the back of the monitor between the length of the wall and then going up the back of the desk.
Casey:
And so I'm going to have to get like a stupid extension cord just from the monitor.
John:
You can buy, the other end of the cord is just, you know, regular in the US, just a regular US plug.
John:
So it's okay to buy a sufficiently heavy duty extension cord.
John:
It will be fine.
John:
It is a lot easier than extending the Thunderbolt cable, let me tell you.
John:
And it'll cost you a lot less money and you can buy it in a hardware store.
John:
yep all true statements so more details on the studio display this time from jason snell uh talking about the mounts as we said last week you can't you have to pick them out when you buy it and they're not interchangeable but jason says just like in the past while apple says that the display's mounts are not user serviceable it's my understanding that if you take a studio display to an authorized apple dealer and pay a fee they should be able to swap on a different mounting element and of course the way they'll probably swap that is they'll replace the entire back of your display at a cost that you probably will not want to pay but
John:
technically it is possible just like with the imax i believe in the past so uh if you make the wrong choice and decide you want to go with the visa mount and you you bought the one with the stand or something it is possible but again probably not for a price that you want to pay but how desperate are you going to be
John:
And then Jason also posted a screenshot once the studio display embargo went up that is showing a little dialog box that says, your display was restarted because of a problem.
John:
So that is a thing that might happen.
Marco:
Do you think like, you know, getting into that angle of it where they have this basically this entire iOS stack running on the monitor and it can have its own software updates on the monitor, it can reboot itself, it can crash.
Marco:
All the stuff with the camera that I'm sure we're going to get to in a second.
Marco:
Like, do you think this was over engineered in the sense that do you think they should have gone with all of this iOS based processing and complexity in the monitor?
Marco:
Because the XDR does not do this.
Marco:
And frankly, I'm really kind of happy about that.
Marco:
I'm very happy that when I plug in my monitor, it's just a monitor.
Marco:
And there's a relatively small amount of things that can go wrong with that.
Marco:
And it always kind of just wakes right up.
Marco:
My monitor does not display its own ellipsis icon or animation when it's itself booting up.
Marco:
I kind of like things to be...
John:
simple like that if they can reasonably be um do you think it was a mistake to design this with with such complexity well so let me let me go through some of the details of the complexity you're talking about so we can sort of put some parameters on that and say what what actually is inside there and how bad is it uh and uh martin posted on twitter a picture of uh extracted from uh the studio display firmware showing uh
John:
like an icon on the screen with an exclamation point and a url that says support.apple.com slash display slash restore for a restore per se i mean this is not a thing that happened to him but like for you know if your monitor to your point mark or if your monitor something goes wrong with all this crap they put in there might i have to go restore my monitor by going to a url that's the thing you can do so
John:
The story underlying this is that people discovered pretty quickly that Apple Studio Display runs its quote-unquote firmware is version 15.4 with the exact same build number as iOS 15.4, which is very suspicious, making people think that it is just plain running iOS.
John:
The operating system it runs, according to Guy Rambeau, reports itself as just Darwin OS, which is not much of anything.
John:
But if the build number is the same as iOS and the regular version is the same as iOS, it's probably running iOS.
John:
And in terms of the complexity you were describing, many people, if they got, I guess, the early batch of manufactured ones or whatever, when they got it out of the box, they were prompted on their Mac for a, quote-unquote, display firmware update.
John:
Because not all of them came with the version that the reviewers got, like the latest, latest version, whatever it is, build 19E241.
John:
Some of them came with an earlier version.
John:
And the update for the display, it looks like an iOS update.
John:
It's 632.4 megabytes for the firmware, for your quote-unquote firmware for the display.
John:
People don't remember when the iPhone first came out, it was also described as having firmware.
John:
And when they would update the operating system on the iPhone, it was a firmware update.
John:
Eventually, they figured, okay, we're not going to call it firmware.
John:
We're going to call it iPhone OS and eventually iOS and so on and so forth.
John:
And so the people who dug into this figured out, well, what's in there?
John:
But we already knew there was an A13 in there.
John:
I mentioned last time the A13 is better than what's in the Apple TV, so the thing doubles in Apple TV.
John:
But it doesn't have everything in there.
John:
It doesn't have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth or whatever.
John:
But we do know that it has the A13.
John:
And of course, we could have surmised that...
John:
The A13 is useless without some kind of storage, flash storage, because what would the A13 do?
John:
How does it boot?
John:
It has to have storage somewhere.
John:
How much storage does it have?
John:
64 gigabytes.
John:
64 gigabytes.
John:
So this has a better system on a chip than the Apple TV, and it has as much storage as the big, expensive Apple TV.
John:
64 gigs.
John:
Uh, and how much of that 64 gigs is taken with stuff?
John:
Not a lot.
John:
People like looked at the file system output and it's like taking, it's just the operating system on there.
John:
It's taking like, I don't know, two gigs of that 64 gigs or whatever.
John:
As Gruber said, effectively, there's a base model ninth generation iPad in there in a 13 with 64 gigs of storage, just sitting inside your monitor.
John:
Now, as Joe Pensuo pointed out, my 11-year-old, this is Joe talking, my 11-year-old Thunderbolt display also has firmware updates.
John:
It also definitely crashes.
John:
Still a great external monitor.
John:
So he put a screenshot of a Thunderbolt display, firmware update.
John:
I have one of these monitors.
John:
I used it for years.
John:
It's non-retina, but it's 27-inch.
John:
Was it 5K?
John:
I forget.
John:
maybe the thunderbolt display no it was not retina 24 inch maybe yeah it was it was 27 inch but it was not retina yeah okay that's right it's it's it's 5k size and points like it's the same point resolution as a 5k monitor but it was non-retina but anyway it it has firmware updates and it can also crash uh and he put a screenshot of the firmware update it is 923 kilobytes so
John:
632 megabytes versus 923 kilobytes it's probably running like an ipod cpu and yeah so this is all right so this is the thing that people don't think about because it's the magic of language when we say firmware oh i had a firmware update for my what's a who's he thingy oh there's just some kind of firmware that it runs we don't like to think of that as like
John:
Oh, this thing is a general purpose computer with an operating system.
John:
But of course they are.
John:
In the same way we don't like to think about tiny ARM processors on our flash memory chips in our Mac Studio and other tiny ARM processors inside the M1 that are doing other little jobs.
John:
Anything that seems like it's got computer-y type chips in it and does a thing probably has some kind of software and operating system that makes it work.
John:
and so our you know our stupid uh xdrs right inside them is not just a display panel there's also a bunch of circuit boards that run the essentially the usb hub and the display controllers and a bunch of other stuff so inside there are various little chips little little turing complete machines that run software uh and we don't think of it as like a full-fledged computer but it's performing the same function
John:
If you make custom chips that run, quote-unquote, custom firmware to do the minimum functionality required to do your thing, that certainly costs less money.
John:
I'm not going to say it takes less power because that's not necessarily true, and we'll get to that in a second.
John:
The updates are smaller because the software that needs to run is probably very minimal, but it is a lot more work to make because you have to make it do exactly the thing that you want it to do.
John:
And you usually have to build it up from, if not nothing, from some sort of foundational pieces that exist in the industry or are part of some chipset or whatever.
John:
The obvious reason that Apple put an A13 and a 64 gig thing in here is because Apple knows how to make those, can manufacture them.
John:
They're a well-known thing.
John:
It's already got an operating system that runs on them.
John:
And that operating system is thoroughly debugged, well-tested,
John:
Does everything they needed to do, which we'll get to in a second.
John:
We talk about the camera center stage, running the sneakers, spatial audio.
John:
They already have an operating system that does that.
John:
And they already have hardware that runs that operating system.
John:
Why did they choose the A13, not the A12 or something down or whatever?
John:
Maybe they don't make those smaller chips anymore.
John:
Maybe they needed the A13 to be able to do all the things they did, but it is a known quantity that already does everything they did.
John:
In some ways, it would be stupid for them not to put an A13 in there.
John:
And yet, as a customer, when you get a 600 megabyte update for your monitor, like, what is going on here?
John:
And it also seems like it's a waste that they're doing that.
John:
Now, having had several peripherals over the years for Macs and other things that have had hardware and firmware that has been buggy, I am mostly comforted
John:
not by the 600 megabyte outbyte, but by the fact that the stuff that is running inside this monitor is not weird one-off stuff that may be awesome or may suck.
John:
It is iOS running on hardware that iOS has run on.
John:
So I have some confidence that A, it will work and be reliable, and B, that if it doesn't work, it will get its bugs fixed because it's part of the iOS, presumably part of the iOS update cycle now.
John:
especially with the same build number.
John:
It's not like they build a custom version of the US just for the monitor.
John:
I think every time iOS gets updated, it will include updates that help this monitor because this is really like a little iPad running in there that's running a display that doesn't take touch and it runs the camera and it runs the speakers and it does whatever else it needs to do and it runs the thing where it talks to the Mac.
John:
And although that seems ridiculous and wasteful and expensive, it's already a pretty expensive monitor that A13 probably costs Apple 30 bucks or whatever for the whole thing.
John:
And it's super low power because the A13 is built on a fairly modern process and it was built to be inside a phone.
John:
So it's not like they're putting a, you know, a giant hot CPU in there that's a waste of energy and is, you know, causing the thing to burn up and the fans are silent and everything.
John:
So...
John:
I have mostly made my peace with this, but boy, is it weird.
John:
And, you know, as many people, I was pointing out, oh, this could be a standalone Apple TV.
John:
At this point, it could also be a standalone Mac because I found the specs of this.
John:
That A13 is faster than, yeah, it is faster than the 27-inch Retina iMac.
John:
right from 2020 so if you have an intel imac from 2020 with a core i7 uh the a13 that's in your monitor is faster than that in single core performance that is utterly so you could just make that monitor a complete mac now again i haven't seen the teardowns yet but i'm pretty sure there's no wi-fi chip there's no bluetooth chip or whatever but there is usb input output there is storage there is a camera there is speakers
John:
It's a little bit absurd, but in the grand scheme of things, I endorse the decision to do this if it means that we get on that iOS update train and that this monitor has more of a chance of being liable over long term.
John:
Because as pointed out by Joe who wrote in, the Thunderbolt display from 11 years ago, it also had a little mini OS and firmware and it could crash and that got abandoned way sooner than iOS will.
Casey:
It's wild.
Casey:
And I think we have a little bit more we need to go through.
Casey:
But I do want to answer the question, is this too complicated?
Casey:
But before we get there, Mark Christian writes, I set up my new studio display today and noticed that it caused an Ethernet device to show up under system information, which is odd since the display doesn't actually have an Ethernet port on it.
Casey:
I would assume, and I think Mark himself had guessed later, that this is about sending firmware updates back and forth to the monitor.
Casey:
But do we have any idea what this is about?
John:
Yeah, I mean, obviously, that's another thing people are asking.
John:
Why does the Mac do the firmware updates for the monitor?
John:
The monitor is a full-fledged computer.
John:
It could do it itself.
John:
But the monitor doesn't have...
John:
it isn't actually like it doesn't you can't just boot it by itself it does boot when you turn on as margo alluded to earlier when you turn on the monitor it boots ios essentially but it doesn't show an apple logo when it's booting like your ipad or your iphone would because that would be confusing because the mac also shows an apple instead it just shows a three dots thing
John:
um but yeah there's because the mac runs the firmware updates for the monitor it has to have some way to send the firmware to the a13 and it's 64 gigs of storage inside the monitor and so what it appears to do if you look at it is it's basically a usb ethernet adapter inside there and so it presents an ethernet type interface using its existing usb hub thing and that seems to be the way the mac and the thing communicate with each other you know
John:
And I feel like, again, this is an advantage of having a full-fledged iOS thing running in there.
John:
I think we've touched on this in past episodes.
John:
What was it?
John:
The lightning to HDMI adapter or something like that?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
It was like an adapter.
John:
You'd plug it into your iPhone and you'd be able to output to a TV through HDMI.
John:
Yeah.
John:
that had a full operating system that would boot, like it was a faceless plastic dongle, but you'd plug it in and it would boot an operating system as quick as it could, start it up and do an H.264 encoder or whatever.
John:
If we never told anyone that, they would just think this is an adapter and either works or it doesn't.
John:
But it turns out the things that we ask Adapter to do are often complicated enough that you need a real Turing-complete machine in there that runs software, and it turns out Apple has a bunch of those,
John:
uh and they have an operating system that runs on them and it's all well tested and they probably already have software to do the stuff and so you know we need some hardware and we need to have an h264 encoder and we need an operating system that can run it and we need software that knows how to do that it's like they've got that so they just take a shrunken version of it and shove it in a dongle so the fact that it is inside a monitor is probably less ridiculous than it is in a dongle and by the way don't cut open your lightning connectors because there's little chips in there too
Casey:
It looks like I'm looking at this panic teardown of the lightning digital AV adapter.
Casey:
It also had two gigs of RAM, apparently.
Casey:
I had forgotten about that.
John:
I guess we haven't talked about how much RAM is on the A13, but I think the teardowns will show us.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And that brings us to our next section of the notes, which is, as we previously mentioned, it has 64 gigs of on-board storage, which is, I know we talked about this a moment ago, but golly, that is just bananas.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And why 64 instead of 32 or 16?
John:
Probably just because, like, they're used to manufacturing A13s with 64 gigs of flash.
John:
Maybe it was economical.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Maybe it's there for extra storage for games.
John:
Again, we'll debate it just like the Apple TV.
John:
Yeah.
John:
What is it there for?
John:
For caching?
John:
I don't know.
John:
So you can do snapshots of the last 18 versions of the operating system that have been put onto it?
Marco:
Yeah, it's literally just like, here's what they had the most of in the parts bin.
Casey:
Yeah, I was going to say, I think this was just about making it easy to make many, many, many of these same chip.
Casey:
And presumably, I don't know anything about scaling at this level, but presumably by just making a gazillion of the exact same thing, it's actually cheaper than making like an A13 with two gigs of RAM or whatever they would need alternatively.
Marco:
Well, they wouldn't want it to not be able to update its software because there wasn't enough free space.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, and apparently, according to MacRumors, only two gigs of the 64 gigs is being used as of right now.
John:
Oh, yeah, and I think, did I have a thing in here?
John:
Like, someone saw, like, so what is this thing running all the time?
John:
What processors?
Casey:
It's in the show notes under Guy Rambo, and it says, here's what the studio display OS runs most of the time.
Casey:
Interesting processes include T-Con Control D, which possibly drives the panel itself, Core Speech D underscore Darwin for Hey Dingus, and Apple Darwin Camera D for the camera system.
John:
Yeah, so that's how, you know, how would you make the monitor run?
John:
We might have to make a few new demons, or maybe some of these already exist in iOS, because it's not like we know the names of the various processes that are in iOS, because it's not like we're running PS on our phones and iPads all the time.
John:
But that's what it's doing all the time.
John:
And it's probably not breaking a sweat.
John:
But, you know, hopefully, well, getting into the next section, maybe we'll make it break more of a sweat, because the one...
John:
Apple product scandal brouhaha.
John:
We haven't had one in a while, but now we've got one again, so it feels like things are back to normal.
John:
Most of the reviews of the display said, oh my goodness, the camera is terrible.
John:
You can see lots of people posting pictures of it.
John:
Joanna Stern, the Wall Street Journal, had a good video review.
John:
You can look at the different webcams of comparing this to other webcams that are built into other monitors to the ones that are built into the MacBooks.
John:
Um, you know, the verge has a big article on it and Apple basically sent the same statement to all of these that said, I don't think I have a direct quote from here, but like, uh, we've found situations where the camera is not working as we expect, we'll be sending a software update.
John:
Right.
John:
But the point is that all the reviews came out before the software update is still not out as we're recording this, right?
John:
It's not the update that we just described.
John:
That's just an update to bring older manufactured monitors up to the new one.
John:
But everyone who did a review had the latest and greatest quote unquote firmware.
John:
Um,
John:
And what they're complaining about is that it doesn't look as good.
John:
It doesn't even look as good as Apple's other hardware with an identical camera.
John:
I'm pretty sure this is the same camera that's used as a front facing camera in one of Apple's iPads.
John:
And so you can do a direct hardware to hardware comparison.
John:
Here's the iPad with ostensibly the exact same camera hardware.
John:
And I'll look at myself in that camera and I'll look at myself in the studio display.
John:
And everyone was saying that they thought they looked worse, that it was sort of
John:
washed out and over noise reduced low contrast sometimes he'll describe it as grainy i have to admit after looking at lots of these things sometimes i found it hard to tell which image they were trying to tell me was the bad one because they look different from each other but neither one of them was clearly worse to me than the others and jason snell said when he tested it in his you know environment lighting condition and everything that it didn't seem terrible to him except for in one application that was not doing that was like clearly doing something different than the others and
John:
I think the bottom line with this is for $1,600, we kind of expect there to be a better hardware camera in there setting aside the software issues.
John:
It seems like a cheap move to put...
John:
very inexpensive camera because remember it's not like this is the same camera that's like on an iphone it is the front facing camera on an ipad ipads already have often lesser cameras than iphones and almost always the front facing one is lesser than the back facing one right for 1600 i feel like it should at least have the back camera of a recent iphone and it doesn't um and then beyond the hardware
John:
Okay, then you have to do all sorts of processing.
John:
Like their decision to use a super wide angle camera, which is what they did for center stage.
John:
It's like a very wide angle fisheye type camera.
John:
And the way center stage works is not by moving the camera.
John:
It just crops a different portion of a very big fisheye camera and then unwarps it and everything, right?
John:
The decision to do that further reduces the resolution because you're only ever seeing a crop.
John:
And if you saw the whole resolution, you'd look all weird and fisheye and everything.
John:
So you don't want that.
John:
And so it's really...
John:
they're hampering the hardware they didn't put great hardware in there to begin with it's not terrible but it's not great and then they're making it be even worse because it's a fisheye type thing and it's using center stage and so what that comes up with is a camera experience that is less than people expected people's mac they're saying my macbook pro that i just got which has a camera that fits within a little tiny skinny lid it looks better than this the 400 iphone se front-facing camera it looks better than this the ipad that ostensibly has the same hardware it looks better than this
John:
And Apple says, oh, there's some kind of software problem because there is a ton of software processing going on.
John:
And by the way, all that software processing is happening in the monitor on the A13.
John:
Your Mac is not doing that.
John:
So this is a way to get center stage, even if you have an Intel iMac or an Intel Mac or whatever connected to this, because all that happening is happening in iOS running on the A13 inside the monitor.
John:
and that's why you need a monitor update and not a mac os update to solve this problem because whatever the problem is with aggressive noise reduction or bad lighting compensation or whatever the heck is wrong with it uh that has to happen inside the monitor and it'll be another 600 meg update so it's it's disappointing but i have to say having you i mean i'm on a 2015 imac with this built-in front-facing camera that one's not great either if this is an upgrade for that
John:
i'll take it right i think it should be better but you know the other thing is i have a fairly expensive 4k logitech camera on top of my xdr i don't think that camera looks very good either i mean i just don't have good lighting in this room most people don't like it's not i mean it looks okay it's 4k but like
John:
you know you only look i don't have a ring light i don't have multi-source lighting i just it's not good lighting for video so i spend all this time on zoom calls and i see myself i'm like this is not flattering lighting conditions i'm not in a studio it is only and that's part of the reason why apple does all this processing because they're trying to make people in their normal houses which are not you know television studios trying to make them
John:
trying to make it look okay trying to be able to be able to see their faces so they're not completely hidden in shadows so they don't look terrible and that's a hard job and it seems like they're not doing doing it very well with the studio display but like if they put a 4k camera like this logitech one in there
John:
I don't know how much it would change my experience of Zoom calls because my main barrier to looking good on Zoom calls, aside from my actual looks, is the lighting conditions that I am in.
John:
Like, I don't have good lighting here.
John:
Anyway, I'm not excusing it.
John:
I'm just saying, like, for me personally, this is not a big deal.
John:
I'd much rather have a credit built-in camera that's slightly better than the 5K IMAX than no camera at all.
John:
But people are absolutely right to say there's no reason that on $1,600, A, we shouldn't have better hardware, and B, even if we don't have better hardware, it should at least look as good as the same hardware in other Apple devices.
Marco:
Yeah, but I think the current explanation of like, okay, something is wrong in software, so they will issue an update, I think that is...
Marco:
Very plausible.
Marco:
When you look at the same comparisons, that seems very plausible.
Marco:
But I think also, as you mentioned earlier, I think the choice to do center stage on this was itself a bad move.
Marco:
Because, again, the way that works is it has the super wide camera and it crops in.
Marco:
Now that works okay on an iPad, I'm sure.
Marco:
Although, you know, reviewers have often said like, yeah, the way it kind of like has like drift around and follow you doesn't always work very well.
Marco:
So that's, that's a problem for sure.
Marco:
Um, but when you think about on a display, like on a 27 inch display on your desk, um,
Marco:
the distance the camera is from your face is probably significantly further than if you were using an iPad with FaceTime on a table or something, or in your hands.
Marco:
It's a much longer distance to go, usually the way most people set up displays in desks, to go from the top of the monitor to their head compared to an iPad in their hands.
Marco:
You figure the amount of cropping it would have to do on that same sensor is probably more.
Marco:
And so most of the quality problems of this camera are not going to be solvable in software.
Marco:
What I suspect is that it's just cropping more.
Marco:
And therefore, you have way less sensor area to work with.
Marco:
So it's going to be way noisier.
Marco:
And it's going to have to over process in software, which is what we're seeing.
Marco:
The images people are posting, the sample images and everything, what they're posting,
Marco:
It's exactly what you'd expect from something that is just working with very little resolution and a very bad signal to noise ratio.
Marco:
And it's having to really, you know, denoise like crazy blur things.
Marco:
You know, really you get that smeary, you know, watercolor kind of effect.
Marco:
That's the effect of just over processing because the signal is just too bad physically.
Marco:
Like you can't you're not getting enough light.
Marco:
You're not getting enough pixels.
Marco:
That's what you end up with.
Marco:
And I think this is where like the, the parts bending aspect and the, uh, or, you know, the part reuse aspect and, and also just the, the marketing consistency, I think here where I think they really wanted to put center stage in this and they wanted so badly to put, to say that, look, we now have center stage on the Mac and here's how great it is.
Marco:
I think they wanted to do that so badly that they didn't think to consider, well, wait a minute.
Marco:
Is this even, first of all, is center stage necessary on a, any stationary desktop computer and
Marco:
And then second of all, is the physical difference of where the camera is compared to an iPad?
Marco:
Is that is even going to work in that context?
Marco:
And of course, and you can say, like, why don't they put, you know, a bigger camera, bigger sensor?
Marco:
I understand why they didn't.
Marco:
It's clear when you look at the form factor of this monitor.
Marco:
they probably can't fit much in that bezel without making the bezel bigger.
Marco:
And that looks ugly.
Marco:
And people would say it looks old.
Marco:
So it makes sense why they have like a little skinny camera in there.
Marco:
And, you know, certainly my XDR with Logitech magnetic camera on top of it, which frankly, John, you're nuts.
Marco:
It looks awesome.
Marco:
Like...
John:
the logitech but that's what i'm saying it's not the camera that's bad it's the lighting conditions that dominate it doesn't matter how good a camera you have it it's not like a full frame sensor behind yourself i mean i'm in a dim room constantly in shadow it's not going to be able to rescue that especially since it doesn't have as far as i'm aware any kind of processing to try to help so what i'm seeing out of the camera is more or less what the sensor is seeing you know yeah no that's that's fair but like like i used to put a photo booth to show mine
Marco:
This thing looks incredible.
Marco:
This is the best webcam I've ever seen anywhere ever.
Marco:
But it's also huge.
Marco:
And that size lens and presumably whatever sensors behind it, that would never fit in the bezel of the studio display.
Marco:
Not even close.
Marco:
And so I understand why they wanted to put something small in there.
Marco:
And so putting an iPad camera in there makes some sense.
Marco:
But
John:
but using the ultra wide angle ipad cameras that are made for center stage that i think was the wrong move and i don't think any software update is going to make that really good well so that's something i didn't see in a lot of the reports because a lot of people are saying i mean gruber even said like oh here i'm using the ipad with ostensibly the same camera and it's in the same lighting conditions in the same room at the same time here's the ipad and here's the studio display but one thing he didn't mention is
John:
are these two things the same distance from me?
John:
Which gets to your point.
John:
Was he holding the iPad closer just because it's natural to hold the iPad closer?
John:
Like, was he holding the iPad between, like, in front of him in his hands, but well in front of where the studio display is?
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Or did he push the iPad back to be in the same plane as the studio display to try to get an apples-to-apples comparison?
Marco:
I'm not sure about that.
Marco:
I can't even reach the top of my monitor from where I'm sitting.
Marco:
Like, if I don't lean forward, if I'm just sitting straight up, I cannot reach the webcam.
John:
Well, you're very small, and it's a big monitor.
Yeah.
John:
so the next thing about center stage though i think the use of center like the use of center stage for for a desktop mac a lot of people are saying exactly what you said it's like well aren't you sitting right in front of a thing why do you need center stage to track people's faces around or whatever i think the use of center stage is aspirational and forward looking for because i think in many real scenarios when you're using the camera on a desktop
John:
display, sometimes you have more than one person sitting in front of it.
John:
There's probably one desk chair in front of your desktop computer, but when other people come in to say hi to the relatives or you just want to sit and have a call or you're on Zoom meetings with multiple people, parent-teacher conferences during COVID times, very often my wife and I have both been sitting in front of her iMac on Zoom calls, right?
John:
and it's sometimes difficult to get us both into the frame and everything and so that's where center stage can help and the second thing is if you're not within the range of the non-center stage camera it actually is fairly difficult especially with apple stupid stands to reposition the camera that is built into your giant desktop display to point at a person oh here somebody just came oh i can't see them they have to crouch down because it's not like you can just grab the neck of your imac g4 or grab the monitor and just point it towards them
John:
Apple's monitors do not move that way on their stands.
John:
They're not fully articulated.
John:
And so it actually is kind of tricky to do that.
John:
So it would be great if we had good cameras with high enough resolution to be able to tolerate that crop, because I think center stage is the right choice for a big desktop display.
John:
But with a camera with low resolution, whether you have to crop in even more on it and it's not even a good camera, that is maybe not the best choice.
John:
Now, as I saw some people post, you know, with all these Apple blobs about like whatever the scandal of the day about some hardware flaw or whatever is or some product flaw.
John:
eventually someone comes in and is just sick of seeing it all and they're like you know today i'm learning that people care what they look like on their webcam like you know basically saying like who cares what you look like can they see your face can they see who you are can they see your expression you know like it's not a beauty contest or whatever but that obviously if you're listening to a tech podcast you probably care about like the the progress of technology and the progress of technology is cameras and sensors and stuff should get better over time and to marco's part spin comment
John:
Apple has a part spin filled with much better cameras than this.
John:
And yes, some of them are a little bit bigger and maybe they wouldn't have fit into the thing.
John:
I do not repeat Apple.
John:
Don't listen to this.
John:
Close your ears, Apple.
John:
I do not want them to put a notch on the next version of this so they can fit a bigger camera sensor.
John:
if apple you would like to reach into your parts bin and use like the back camera from the iphone 13 or two of the back cameras from the iphone 13 on the next version of this make a camera bump a vertical camera bump i give you permission because it'll be smaller than this logitech thing it's on top of my display right now do not i repeat do not put a notch on this monitor you'll never hear the end of it at least for me
John:
um but it is possible to you know not make the bezels bigger right up but just have a bump for the camera or whatever and eventually technology will catch up when they be able to fit a much better quality camera with center stage in the top of their monitors 10 years from now i'm hoping or maybe 20 knowing apple i'm hoping this problem will be solved but for now
John:
They give you a not-so-great camera on your $1,600 monitor.
John:
The good thing is, if you hate that camera and never want to use it, you can buy this Logitech 4K camera for a great expense and plug it into your Mac because it's a Mac, not an iPad, and you can replace the front-facing camera with one of your choosing.
John:
It also comes with those microphones, although most people didn't comment about that.
John:
They said that the tri-microphone system on these displays is actually pretty good.
John:
So maybe you would just use camera from Logitech and the microphone from the monitor or from your AirPods.
John:
Again, these are all great things you can do through the magic of having a Mac and not an iPad.
John:
Sorry, iPad people.
Casey:
All right, I'm getting sleepy.
Casey:
So let's speed run through the latest Mac Pro rumors.
Casey:
I figure if I set an alarm for, set a timer for like an hour and a half, then you should be done at that point.
Casey:
Is that fair?
John:
You can make it less than that, I think.
Casey:
Okay, go ahead.
Casey:
The clock is ticking.
John:
Last week, I talked about my pessimistic nightmare scenario for the Mac Pro.
John:
Like, oh, all these things they said, they can make a machine that's like this, and that machine is dumb and doesn't make any sense, and I really hope they don't do that.
John:
And I described a bunch of different rumors from different videos saying, oh, they could take two M1 Ultras and stack them on top of each other, but then there was this rumor tweet about them being alongside, and it didn't make any sense, and we didn't, you know, whatever.
John:
Things change fast in the Mac Pro rumor world.
John:
So this week, I just wanted to touch on the new optimistic rumor for the Mac Pro.
John:
This is, again, from MacStack.
John:
The previous MacStack video was like, they're going to take two M1 Ultras and put them on top of each other.
John:
Like, nope, never mind.
John:
That's not going to happen.
John:
I misread the patent.
John:
Here's the new rumor.
John:
And this new... I'm saying it here.
John:
It's optimistic.
John:
So a lot of this stuff is going to sound fantastical.
John:
It's going to sound like things that I've said that I would really like but seem unlikely.
John:
But take it or leave it.
John:
Here it is.
John:
We'll put links in the show notes to the video.
John:
You can take a look at it.
John:
And the rumor is...
John:
don't worry it's an m2 not an m1 yes the m2 will be ready so and there's going to be four m2 max size types of things and they're going to be next to each other and they're going to be connected with that daisy interconnect so that they're all connected with each other and how can they all be connected i thought there was only connections on one edge ah that's the m1 you're thinking of this is the m2 yes i said the m2 and there's four of them and they can be connected together and they have ram all around them
John:
How are they going to deal with the RAM situation?
John:
There's not going to be enough room for 1.5 terabytes of RAM.
John:
The rumor there is, oh, there'll be a huge amount of RAM shoved around these things.
John:
In fact, it might even be HBM3, which would cost $24,000 for a terabyte of it.
John:
Maybe not.
John:
But either way, there'll be a bunch of really fast RAM, even if it's just LPDDR5.
John:
But also, there's an external RAM controller, so you can have RAM in slots.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that RAM and slots will be slower and more distant, but it'll act as a kind of a RAM hierarchy.
John:
128, 256 gigs of really, really fast RAM next to these 4M2 Max things that are all tied together.
John:
And then an even bigger pool of like a terabyte of RAM and DIMMs that is slower, probably even slower than it is in the current Mac Pro Xeon, but it will be there.
John:
How are they going to deal with GPUs?
John:
The rumor here is, oh, there's actually a GP, what looks like might be a standalone GPU from Apple, codenamed Lifuco.
John:
And the codename for the M1 chip was apparently Tonga, and Lifuco is a smaller island in the kingdom of Tonga.
John:
And the idea is like, oh, it's a bunch of GPU cores, but it doesn't live inside the M1, it lives outside it, as in an Apple-branded separate GPU.
John:
So the Mac Pro would have four M2 Maxes, a bunch of RAM around it, maybe some external RAM,
John:
slots that can take gpus and those gpus to add on to the massive amount of gpus that are in the system on chips those gpus would be apple gpus made from apple gpu cores that would go in slots to augment the gpus that are already built into the thing that is the optimistic mac pro rumor which is like just take everything that has ever been mentioned that sounds cool and say yeah they're going to do all of that
John:
oh and by the way it'll come out in september or something so uh yeah i don't i don't think that's a lot of stuff it'd be nice but that seems optimistic it has the benefit of saying that it the timeline doesn't make sense but the technology makes sense because we can't figure out how they're going to put four m1 based chips in there apple said it's done with the m1 based things the m2 we know is coming and
John:
if you take four m2 maxes and they are able to connect in a four by four grid with these new daisy connectors and everything like the rumors say and you could have an external pool of ram and apple could make its own external gpu these are all plausible things the only thing that doesn't make any sense is the timeline but hey those are the two rumors you heard the pessimistic one last week you're the optimistic one this week now we just gotta watch the calendar and see what we get
Casey:
That's it.
John:
That's it.
Casey:
Three and a half minutes, John.
Casey:
I'm impressed.
Casey:
You made it.
Casey:
Talk fast.
Casey:
That's the secret.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Collide, JumpCloud, and Caseta by Lutron.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atv.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental 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, so that's K-C-L-I-S-S, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
Casey:
I spent today like kind of cleaning up.
Marco:
I had like finally shipped the next version of Overcast to the App Store.
Marco:
It's being released on Friday.
Marco:
Finally shipped it.
Marco:
And so I've been cleaning up, catching up on paperwork, email, and my digital cleanup things.
Marco:
Cleaning all the files off my desktop and archiving all the old ATP episodes that I had still sitting on my desktop instead of in the archive drive where they belong.
Marco:
So going through all this stuff.
Marco:
And I decided I'm finally going to set up Synology Backup.
Marco:
And I'm not going to do it in any kind of weird, complicated, convoluted way where I can use Backblaze.
Marco:
I'm just going to pay for B2 storage per gig.
John:
oh well because i i saw that like what i actually need and want to back up on it do you mean b2 or synology's things because b2 is backblaze's thing yes but i mean like rather than using backblaze's like regular backup client where it's unlimited you know oh yeah yeah no you're so you're gonna do what i do which is i pay for b2 storage and my synology backs up to it
Marco:
Yeah, because what I actually need from B2 is going to end up being something like $40 a month.
Marco:
It's like 8 terabytes roughly, which is about $40 a month.
Marco:
And you know what?
Marco:
I'll just pay that.
Marco:
I'd rather pay that than have to deal with something that is much more complicated than that.
Marco:
And I've been doing those complicated solutions for years now, and I'm done with them.
Marco:
I do not want to do them anymore.
Marco:
So I'm just going to pay the $40 a month or whatever it ends up being to back up my massive Synology collection to B2.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the reason I mentioned Synology is I think don't they have like C2 or something that's there?
John:
So you should compare prices because both of them are just straightforward.
John:
You pay per byte that you store and just compare the rates.
John:
I think Synology might have its own thing.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
And there's other things like Glacier and stuff.
Marco:
And I don't like Glacier.
Marco:
I've used it before.
Marco:
I really don't like it.
Casey:
Wait, so tell me why not.
Casey:
I'm not arguing, but tell me why not.
Casey:
Because the restore times are ridiculous.
John:
And the way Glacier used to be implemented terrifies me.
John:
So I don't like to think about it.
Marco:
Because I keep bouncing between these two locations, I was looking into options for synchronizing the two synologies, the really ancient one in location one and the tiny little new one in location two.
Marco:
So I think I set up what the app on the synology is called Cloud Sync.
John:
and that is backing it up to b2 but that says that it's it offers a two-way sync option so could i set up cloud sync on both of them and have them synchronized that way and back up at the same time so i have two my two synologies syncing uh one of their volumes bi-directionally to each other but they're sitting next to each other connected to the same ethernet switch now that that probably means this would also work over the internet because it's probably just tcpip and assuming i set up all the networking that would work um
John:
so but the problem is the problem with all synology things that case can relate to i don't remember what the name of the app is that i used to say because they're all called some variation on sync cloud drive well and synology drive does this like it but i tried i looked into setting that up and it was so much more complicated and i couldn't get it to i can tell you the the sync thing that i'm using
John:
Every time I make a modification to the drive that I know is syncing, I get like an email that says like, oh, or a notification on the Synology.
John:
The Synology drive sync had a problem.
John:
Because like it doesn't like it when you change files out from under.
John:
It's like, what kind of syncing system is this?
John:
I'm like, I know.
John:
the file was probably partial when you went to sync it or it got yanked out from under you while you were in the middle of syncing but don't tell me that just deal with it and re-sync and it does like it eventually gets the disks to be right but it it gets upset every time it happens and again i wish i could tell you which feature of the umpteen features in synology that does this that i'm using but i set it up in 2013 and i don't remember
Marco:
For whatever it's worth, also, I would almost never be changing the contents of it from a different location.
Marco:
The other location would most likely be read-only.
Casey:
Yeah, so the problem, as much as I love Synology, and I love my devices, I have a small collection of them at this point, but as much as I love the Synology... Everyone mail Casey your old Synologies as well.
Casey:
That's not a joke.
Marco:
All your old 5Ks and all your old Synologies, mail them to Casey.
Casey:
Bring them on, baby.
Casey:
Synology's Achilles' heel is that they are the worst at naming things.
Casey:
And they love, they love to regurgitate old names as new things.
Casey:
And just have, like, Synology Drive has meant 15 different things across five different years.
Casey:
Like, it's preposterous.
Casey:
To more directly answer your question, so I know that there are ways to have basically live syncing between synologies.
Casey:
That is not what I am doing.
Casey:
And it sounds like John would be a better tutor for you if that's what you're looking to do.
Casey:
And I think it is.
John:
If I can remember what the hell the app was that does that.
Casey:
If you can remember what the hell it is.
Casey:
For what I'm doing is I'm just making a cold storage backup from one Synology to the other, and that's using hyper-backup on both devices.
Casey:
There's a hyper-backup server and a hyper-backup client.
Casey:
But on the server side, which is the cold storage side...
Casey:
It is not easy to get at the files.
Casey:
They're not just like sitting on the file system like what I think you would prefer.
Casey:
So my solution is not helpful for you.
Casey:
And to go back a half step on a quick tangent, there is Synology C2, and it is $60 a year for one terabyte.
Casey:
How big is your backup set?
Casey:
Did you say two terabytes?
Marco:
About eight.
Casey:
Eight terabytes.
Casey:
Okay, so yeah, you're screwed just like me.
Marco:
Yeah, forget it.
Casey:
Because that's $55 a month or $550 a year.
Casey:
For me, sitting at about 12 terabytes right now, it's $800 a year, which is a lot of money.
Casey:
Like for that money, I would just buy another Synology, send it to you and do this duplication.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like it's just not worth it to me.
Marco:
What's also, by the way, what's also really nice about using B2 is that it like I can use like, you know, on the desktop, I have the, you know, the wonderful app Transmit by Panic that has B2 as one of its storage.
Marco:
And when you when you just back up to B2 with the cloud sync thing.
Marco:
It's not doing anything strange with the file structure or anything like that.
Marco:
You can just go and open up the bucket and browse the files.
Marco:
They're right there.
Marco:
And so anywhere I am, if I happen to be away from home and not able to reach my Synology and I need a file off of it, I can just open up Transmit and log into my B2 bucket and the files are just sitting there.
Marco:
So that's really nice.
Marco:
And anything that's like super complicated or managed in a higher level way might not necessarily do that.
Marco:
Like when Arc does stuff, for instance, you know, the wonderful backup app Arc for Mac.
Marco:
Arc has its own whole file structure.
Marco:
And like there's there it's kind of an opaque structure if you're just like trying to use something like transmit, like you'll never find what you need.
Marco:
Whereas this, the files are just sitting there in folders.
John:
While we've been talking here, I've been going through the Synology UI trying to find the place where I sync my two Synologies to each other.
John:
I did find the B2 one that's in CloudSync.
John:
It's not in Storage Manager.
John:
It's not in Control Panel that I can find.
John:
I'm still looking for it.
John:
Maybe it's in FileStation?
Casey:
No, it wouldn't be in FileStation.
Casey:
Do you have HyperBackup installed?
Casey:
That would be...
Casey:
I would guess that's where it would be, but that might be exclusively Synology to Synology backup, so I'm not sure.
Casey:
But anyway, so I'm looking at B2 for 12 terabytes, which again is roughly my backup size, and no downloaded data for month to month, which is probably what it would be.
Casey:
It's $720 a year, which is a lot of money.
Casey:
I mean, that's $60 a month.
Casey:
I mean, after a couple of years, I might as well just have a different Synology.
Yeah.
Marco:
This is one of those things where I'm just going to throw money at it because I don't want to actually deal with multiple complex convoluted options anymore.
Marco:
Because again, that's what I've been doing.
Marco:
I had my crazy iSCSI setup.
Marco:
And then there's things that you can try to hack the Synology to run...
Marco:
you know the backblaze it's like i don't want to do any of that i don't want to deal with any of that i don't want to maintain it i don't want to deal with it when it breaks i i just want this to work and i think the b2 option is going to do that for me and for 40 bucks a month for eight terabytes fine just fine i'll do it
John:
I found it back where it says I have a new idea.
John:
I'm like, I should just look for one of those emails that I described with the sync.
John:
And the email says, shared folder sync has failed.
John:
Please check the DSM log, blah, blah, blah.
John:
I have a million of those messages.
John:
So it's shared folder sync.
John:
So I'm hot on the trail here.
John:
Where is the shared folder stuff hiding in the UI?
John:
You should know this.
John:
It's the shared folder control panel.
Casey:
There is a control panel.
John:
There you go.
John:
Control panel, file sharing, shared folder.
John:
And then there is...
Casey:
There is a high availability package for Synology that you might end up using if you wanted to do a primary, secondary style setup, Marco.
Casey:
If you wanted to make the one on the mainland your secondary and the one near you your primary or something along those lines.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I know there's ways to do this.
Casey:
The problem is, again, as much as I love Synology, they change the mechanisms for doing this and the apps you use on the Synology for doing this as often as you change computers.
Casey:
And so it's impossible to keep up with what is the current best advice for these sorts of things.
Casey:
But honest to goodness, as much as I'm slamming Linus tech tips, like the video they did on this, which I don't think is exactly what you want, but it's worth, you know, it's like a quick, it's a relatively quick video.
Casey:
You really should dig that up and see if they answer your question because I think that might help.
Marco:
Yeah, I probably should.
Casey:
I mean, the easiest answer, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, is just put it all on B2.
Casey:
But that's solving backup, but that's not solving local availability.
Casey:
If you don't care about local availability, then yes, that's the easiest answer by far.
Casey:
Just do that.
Casey:
The problem is I don't even – I think – what is it?
Casey:
Cloud Sync to put it in B2?
Casey:
I don't even know where you put it, how you get it there.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
cloud sync this is why i keep making backups of my synology config because i have no idea where this stuff i know it's called shared folder sync i'm in the shared folder control panel i can't find anything that has to do with sync if i ever had to set this up again god it would take me so long to i would suggest that hyper backup definitely seems like a better solution to what you're doing especially since i can't find where i configured share folder sync but i know it's happening because i get the emails when it complains whenever something changes
John:
And I know it's working because it does eventually sync them because then I will look at the two different synologies and I say, yep, they have the same contents in that shared, quote unquote, shared folder, which is really the top level and entire volume.
Casey:
So on Hyper Backup, when I choose or when I go to make a new backup destination, I get rsync, I've got Web Dev, OpenStack Swift, whatever that is, and then Cloud Service, Dropbox, High Drive, Azure, S3, Hubic,
Casey:
uh high cloud s3 rack space jd cloud in google drive i do not see b2 here but i know there is a way to get on to b2 they may have their own package for all i know i'm not even sure um but there's there's got to be a way to do it i'm almost sure of it