It Isn’t a Big Grapefruit
Marco:
My iMac fan noise problem is worsening.
John:
Oh, so I guess you're buying a new Mac then.
John:
Probably a Mac Mini.
John:
No, he just needs to take it off of his desk, put it into a case, and carry it around on the street for a while, and then unpack it.
John:
That's what fixed it last time, right?
Marco:
Actually, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, the transportation to the beach did, I guess, dislodge enough dust.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
i don't know i'm i'm getting near the end of my rope here like i it's it's pretty bad like it's it's now audible most of the day uh even when it's ostensibly you know idle like when there's nothing in activity monitor or i stat menus showing that's actually using the cpus it's now idling at like 72 degrees celsius and like 13 to 1400 rpm fan speed which is not normal and
Marco:
And this isn't even just Catalina being Catalina because it persists through reboots too.
Marco:
So I'm just... This is the worst time in possibly a decade to need a new high-performance desktop Mac.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I did, actually.
Marco:
I actually looked.
Marco:
The trade-in value for my iMac Pro is almost $3,000.
Marco:
Wow.
Casey:
That's not bad, actually.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I was like, that's actually... I could just trade it in and just buy the highest spec Mac Mini with the new chip, which is like $1,700.
Marco:
But I would only then have 2 terabytes instead of 4, and I would have only 16 gigs of RAM instead of 64.
Marco:
And I'm a little...
Marco:
hesitant to go that route.
Marco:
And I'd have to go get my stupid LG 5K and bring it to the beach.
Marco:
No way in hell I'm ordering a second one.
Marco:
But I'll have to move that one here.
Marco:
So it would be kind of an ordeal.
Marco:
And then what I really want is
Marco:
ideally, is a new iMac.
Marco:
Like, I love the iMac, although, well, do I love the iMac?
Marco:
I mean, I've had now two, I guess, right?
Marco:
Did I only have one 5K before the Pro?
Marco:
No, I thought you had two.
Marco:
You had the one with image retention, and I don't remember if you ever got that fixed.
Marco:
I did eventually get it fixed.
Marco:
That one came out in, what was it, 2014, the first 5K came out?
Marco:
Yeah, around that.
Marco:
Something like that?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The iMac Pro came out in the end of 2017, and I had it for three years.
Marco:
So yeah, I'm pretty sure I just went straight from that iMac 5K, the first-gen iMac 5K, to the iMac Pro.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
In both cases, I loved them for a while, but they didn't age incredibly gracefully because of the all-in-oneness.
Marco:
The first one, I had a screen problem.
Marco:
It took a while for me to be able to go get a fix because I don't want to set my whole iMac in for repair for just the screen.
Marco:
The computer part was fine.
Marco:
If it was a Mac Pro, I could just unplug the monitor.
Marco:
The all-in-oneness there kind of limited its lifespan.
Marco:
And in this case, the all-in-oneness is limiting its lifespan as well.
Marco:
So maybe I should learn from this.
Marco:
I probably won't.
Casey:
what i ultimately like if there was an m1 based imac i would have probably already ordered it as we as we record and i've mentioned this before i i try to work on the show notes and get a pretty solid rough draft ready and i had already written you heard it here first marco is really starting to justify a new mac i think i will now change that to you heard it here first marco is really starting to justify a new mac pro
Marco:
I will not buy a Mac Pro.
Marco:
I would buy the 6K HDR display before I would buy the Mac Pro, which is funny because if I did that, what I would plug in the 6K HDR display with its fan to would be a MacBook Air that I have but has no fan.
Marco:
My monitor would have a fan and my computer wouldn't.
Marco:
You can't hear the monitor fans.
Marco:
Don't worry.
John:
I'm telling you, I'm sitting in front of it right now.
Marco:
I was looking up iFixit today.
Marco:
It's like, how do you open an iMac Pro?
Marco:
If I wanted to get in there and actually try to remove major dust buildup, how do I get in there and how risky is it?
Marco:
And the answer is, it's a pain in the butt and moderately.
Marco:
And so I don't know if I want to attempt that, especially in a dusty, salty air environment that's highly corrosive in a house that I have very few tools and no abilities to open IMAX effectively and cleanly.
Marco:
It's probably a bad idea.
Marco:
So I'm probably not going to want to attempt that myself.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Casey:
The end of the world notwithstanding, would it be cheaper to fly a Stephen Hackett to you to perform this operation and then fly him home?
Casey:
Let's think a little outside the box.
Marco:
Well, it would probably be more practical to just take my iMac, put it in the carrying case, walk it to the ferry, get on the boat, go across the bay, go to the nearest Apple store, drop it off, or I guess I could do mail-in, but that's a whole other ordeal, and have Apple do it.
Marco:
I'd be without it for a while.
Marco:
Then I'd have to take another set of...
Marco:
you know ferry and car trips and walking trips and you know to go pick it up in a few days whenever it was done so it would be an ordeal i'd rather not do it i mean really the most responsible thing to do here would just be to just deal with my stupid fan noise uh for the next whatever it'll be seven months maybe before there's going to be an imac pro or an imac with the m series chips in them but man this this is annoying
Casey:
I'm sorry, but I'm quite sure that the moment something that even vaguely smells like an iMac with Apple Silicon in it is released, I am sure that you will be the very first person in line to replace your poor, struggling iMac Pro.
Marco:
I have been very tempted to just switch to my Air full-time somehow, even though it only has one terabyte.
Marco:
I could use externals, I guess.
Marco:
I could make that work with some hacks and then just somehow solve the monitor situation, which would probably be on my next trip picking up my 5K and bringing it here.
Marco:
So maybe that's what I'll do, but I don't know.
Marco:
I don't love that option.
Casey:
What do you hate more?
Casey:
Do you hate fan noise more or do you hate that LG 5K?
Casey:
That's a good question.
Marco:
I really don't love the idea of buying the 6K monitor to have an unknown future computer.
Marco:
Like, what am I going to plug into that in a year?
Marco:
What if the most compelling computer for me in the next year ends up being an iMac again?
Marco:
Then I bought this giant monitor with all this money for, you know, only six months of use.
Marco:
And then like, that's, that's a pretty big loss and a pretty big waste.
Marco:
I think like I would have trouble swallowing that.
Marco:
Whereas if I just either had a Mac mini that I could plug in or something like that, or plugged in my MacBook air to the LG 5k, I don't like swallowing something about all of these plans.
Yeah.
Marco:
but i think using all of the hardware i already have that is like the lg 5k is just sitting in my house like in studio b doing nothing i could just use that and that's that's probably what i should do even though like i'll be grumbling the whole time looking at stupid monitor and it's terrible backlight leakage and it's giant ugly frame and the big ugly foot and all that stuff
Casey:
So, John, would you mind going to apple.com slash shop slash trade hyphen in?
Casey:
I'm curious, if you enter in, John, the serial number of your XDR, I doubt it will, like, magically make it through.
Casey:
And please do not, you know, share that, obviously, verbally.
Casey:
But if you just quietly enter in your serial number, I wonder what it would say.
Marco:
Actually, it does have an option for it.
Marco:
Under other devices, it says, what kind of device do you want to, you say displays, and it says recycle.
Yeah.
John:
right exactly that's recycling only which is not what you want you can recycle your display john which model do you i entered my serial number and it says which model do you have and now i have to pick other yeah i guess based on what you've told us today your mac is ready to recycle well i entered a display serial number so i don't know what you're talking about oh that's funny all right well it was worth a shot
Casey:
All right, shall we start with some follow-up?
Casey:
We have, oh, do we have follow-up today.
Casey:
It'll be a miracle if we get out of follow-up today.
Casey:
So let's start.
Casey:
Ryan Fegley writes, I had some duplicate, the same duplicate context issue as Marco this week, caused by an upgrade to Big Sur, I believe.
Casey:
D-duping the context, or D-duping in context didn't work, so I restored from a pre-upgrade iCloud backup on the iCloud website in a browser.
Casey:
I had no idea this was possible.
Casey:
Ryan writes, it works like a charm.
Casey:
It's good to know it's an option.
Casey:
So you log into iCloud.com.
Casey:
You click on your name in the upper right and then go to account settings.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
And then it says restore blank on the bottom left.
Casey:
Restore files, restore contacts, restore calendars, restore bookmarks.
Casey:
And apparently that's a way you can restore stuff, which is news to me.
Casey:
I had no idea.
John:
Yep.
John:
I filled in the details of this because I'm like, I remember being on iCloud.com, being able to restore stuff.
John:
And it was, it was a little bit of a trick to find.
John:
Like I wouldn't, you wouldn't think to go to account settings and then, then these, these links appear totally on the opposite side of the page, but they do.
John:
So you can restore, I think you can restore individual files.
John:
So, you know, like it's nice that this stuff is there.
John:
I don't understand why it's not on the Mac, but whatever.
John:
A second bit of follow-up related to this is that when I was doing this to confirm it, I opened up contacts, and guess what?
John:
I had duplicates of all my contacts, too.
John:
I'm like, wait a second, I didn't even upgrade.
John:
I didn't even upgrade to Big Sur.
John:
Why the hell do I have duplicates?
John:
And I said, oh, yeah, I didn't upgrade to Big Sur, but I just got an M1 Mac that runs Big Sur, and I made my account on it, and I logged in and connected it to my iCloud.
John:
So something having to do with Big Sur is really...
John:
Really excited about making duplicate contacts.
John:
I just used the dedupe feature in contacts and it fixed my problem.
John:
I have no idea why I had duplicates, but that's what I had.
Casey:
Cool.
John:
Lucky us.
Casey:
I don't seem to have that problem.
Casey:
Yeah, lucky you guys.
John:
Well, Casey, have you logged into a Big Sur, an official release Big Sur machine with your actual Apple ID yet?
Casey:
Yeah, because my MacBook Pro has been on Big Sur for like a week, maybe two.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, you lucked out.
John:
But me and Marco drew the duplicate straw.
Casey:
So sorry.
Casey:
All right, so accelerated TensorFlow for macOS probably just uses the GPU.
Casey:
If I recall correctly, we were surmising that maybe it uses neural engine.
Casey:
And apparently, that's not the case.
Casey:
There's a link to machinelearning.apple.com where they write, until now, TensorFlow has only utilized the CPU for training on the Mac.
Casey:
The new TensorFlow underscore macOS fork of TensorFlow 2.4 leverages ML Compute to enable machine learning libraries to take full advantage of not only the CPU but also the GPU in both M1 and Intel-powered Macs for dramatically faster training performance.
Casey:
Very cool.
John:
Yeah, and some people were saying on Twitter, like, oh, it's because the neural engine can't be used for training.
John:
But his Nash on Twitter says neural engine can be used for training as well, but it's limited in the type of operations.
John:
So ML compute framework uses the CPU and GPU because it's more generic.
John:
So yeah, TensorFlow did get a lot faster.
John:
It is seven times faster on the M1 Mac, but it's not because of the neural engine.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Max Lean writes that Marco said on... Oh, this is actually... This is a very good well actually.
Casey:
This is the kind of well actually I can get behind.
Casey:
Marco said in the podcast that Apple has never made memory controllers with support for ECC RAM.
Casey:
Admittedly, it has been a while.
Casey:
But the Power Mac G5 and XServe G5 both supported ECC RAM and the memory controller was made by Apple.
John:
Yeah, I should have thought of the Power Mac.
John:
When he said that, I was trying to pull something out of my head of whether they did it.
John:
And I remember the Power Mac G5 had ECC RAM, but I couldn't remember if Apple made the controller or if it was some Motorola or IBM thing.
But...
John:
We'll trust Max.
John:
He seems like he knows.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for sponsoring our show and hosting all of my servers.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Jonathan Dietz writes,
Casey:
It's important to keep in mind just how many different chips Apple is integrating into each M-series system on a chip.
Casey:
The CPU, the GPU, the PCH, T2.
Casey:
What's a PCH?
Marco:
Platform controller hub, I think.
Marco:
It's like what used to be called the Southbridge, I think.
Casey:
Ah, right.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
T2 functions including storage controller and the Thunderbolt slash USB 4 controllers.
Casey:
It's also worth noting that decent SSD controllers like the one in the T2 have their own memory interface for DRAM cache.
Casey:
With the M1, the storage controller is connected directly to the system fabric and shares the unified memory pool, meaning performance is no longer limited by PCIe x4 connection to the host processor or cache size.
Casey:
Eliminating the need for both integrated and discrete GPUs, as well as consolidating the two or three different memory subsystems, has a lot of upside for Apple.
Casey:
There's a spreadsheet that we'll link in the show notes.
Casey:
There's a fancy chart that, if we remember, Marco will make the show art for this chapter.
Casey:
With regard to RAM, good old DDR4 DIMMs are the only way to scale capacity.
Casey:
Apple will likely go with four HBM2E stacks.
Casey:
What in the world does that mean?
John:
A couple of people were talking about HBM.
John:
We'll talk more about that in the next bit here, but high bandwidth memory.
John:
It's not a great acronym because what does that even mean?
John:
What does high mean?
John:
What happens when the next memory interface comes out and it has higher bandwidth than supposed HBME or whatever?
John:
Then you call it ultra high bandwidth 4K.
Casey:
yeah yeah super speed yeah we know so anyway so apple will likely go with four hbm2e stacks for up to 64 gigs of crazy fast on package memory with the m1x but would need to tack on an additional eight channel ddr4 interface for any hope of parity with the intel xeon or amd epyc is that supposed to be epic platforms
John:
That's how I pronounce it when I read it.
Casey:
It's also worth noting that regardless of memory type, the highest density DRAM dies currently available are only 16 gigabit or 2 gigabytes.
Casey:
Increasing capacity means adding and paying for more dies.
Casey:
There's no way around that.
John:
So I did actually make the image that's in our show notes here is perfectly square for the purposes of show art.
John:
So Marco, please make this graph.
John:
Because I spent so long making this stupid graph because I do not know how to use spreadsheets to graph things and they make me so angry.
John:
For this one, I...
John:
i i always go to numbers because i see like jason snow makes his graphs and numbers i'm like oh apple's nice everything's gonna look nice i'll use numbers to make it but i cannot figure out how to do anything in numbers and so then i go to excel grudgingly and i also don't know how to use excel at all but somehow i'm able to do it in excel so i i do what i need to do in excel and then i import i save the excel spreadsheet and then i import the excel spreadsheet into numbers and then the graph appears in numbers like that
John:
And I still can't even reverse engineer it.
John:
I so don't know how to graph things.
John:
And I would say spreadsheets are also terrible at graphing things, especially time series data, where spreadsheets have no idea what time is.
John:
They just think, oh, this is the first column, this is the second column, the third column.
John:
No, but they're time values.
John:
They're separated by time.
John:
Can you graph them over time?
John:
And it's like, nope.
John:
you know i know you probably can excel geniuses will tell you how anyway i don't like them um so this graph what this graph shows is related to something we we discussed um and jonathan sent us this giant spreadsheet filled with all sorts of information um about various different silicon things cpus gpus so on and so forth
John:
we will put a link to i put the spreadsheet i copied most of the spreadsheet and cleaned it up a little bit and put it into google sheets and we will put a link to that in the show notes it's publicly viewable so you can look at it it's way more data than we're going to go into here but the one graph i wanted to pull out was related to our previous discussion is how much bigger can apple make the system on a chips and we were trying to look up die sizes and we didn't know them off the top of our head and you know and so this is why he was replying with all his info
John:
So here, this graph shows, and someone should paste this into the chat room for chat people.
John:
It shows the die sizes of lots of different CPUs and GPUs and stuff.
John:
Way at the left end of the spectrum here is the A14 and A13.
John:
And the A14 is actually smaller than the A13 through the magic of process shrink, even though it's got more stuff in it.
John:
And the A14 is 88 millimeters square, right?
John:
Way on the right side is like this weird...
John:
data center machine learning GPU that's just massive, and it's 826 millimeter square.
John:
But right next to that, the second to biggest bar in the thing at 700, that's the 28 core Xeon in the Mac Pro.
John:
So the A14 is 88 millimeters square, and the 28-core Xeon is 700.
John:
So there's a lot of room for these chips to get bigger.
John:
But the M1 is around 120.
John:
This is an estimate.
John:
So from 120 to 700, that's currently the range from Apple's smallest Mac chip to its biggest one.
John:
Actually, there may be an Intel one that's smaller, but I doubt it, right?
John:
So how much bigger can the M1 get?
John:
uh you know especially regards to like how much cooling capacity can it absorb well if you've got a 28 core uh you know xeon in your mac pro and it's able to cool it with that fan boy you can you can make the m1 a lot bigger and a lot hotter before you run into any cooling limits
Casey:
It is darn near impossible to get an image out of Google Docs.
John:
My goodness.
John:
Copy the link to the – what do you call it?
John:
Because that has the image in it.
Marco:
Just screenshot it and then paste it into a spreadsheet and then save that into a Word document.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I put the Google Docs thing.
John:
The Google Docs has – it has the Google Docs version of the chart, which I also probably wouldn't know how to do.
John:
But because I imported it again, it figured – I just – I don't like graphing.
John:
Actually, I do like graphic.
John:
I just don't like these programs.
John:
The way they think about graphic is not the way I think about it, so we clash.
Casey:
Andrew Bunner writes, I work in the computer vision space, and one thing that we think about is how we can make giant ConvNet training jobs faster.
Casey:
What on earth is ConvNet?
Casey:
I'm assuming that stands for convolution, but who knows.
Casey:
Okay, good talk.
Casey:
Here is Cerebras, and they claim to have made a single-die ML accelerator that is about 8.5 inches square.
Casey:
I have no idea what the yields are or if it is even good, but the chips is an example of how big these things can be.
Casey:
It's 56 times the size of the largest GPU.
Casey:
And so the largest GPU is 815 square millimeters with 2.1 billion transistors.
Casey:
21.
Casey:
thank you sorry about that 21.1 billion that's that's totally what i said cerebras is 46 225 square millimeters with 1.2 trillion transistors and 400 000 cores my word you have to look at it it's it's basically like you know the silicon wafers you see where it's like a big circular thing and then on it they print a bunch of different chips this is like just use the whole wafer for one you
John:
quote unquote one chip and i mean obviously it's not one shop obviously it is many of the same things over and over and over again but it's hilarious can you imagine if this was your target like and every single one of them had to work the yields must not be good but if you want to know how big can you make a silicon thing you can make as big as the whole wafer if i guess money is no object and obviously if the cores are simple enough or whatever but yeah
John:
46,000 millimeters square.
John:
So again, M1 is 120.
John:
Big Xeon is 700.
John:
This one is 46,000.
John:
That is utterly bananas.
Casey:
All right, this is a wall of text, John.
Casey:
Do you really want me to read all this?
John:
I mean, I can take a shot at it by paraphrasing because I think I understand the major points.
John:
This is a lot of tests.
John:
This is from Wade Dragasas, and he's got a lot of info about memory buss.
John:
And we've talked about memory in the M1 and the unified memory architecture and bandwidth and so on and so forth.
John:
So his first bit is, he says, I've seen it repeatedly stated the M1 has 60 gigabits per second of memory bandwidth and that it's three times that of any MacBook Pro.
John:
The M1 does in fact have 60 gigabits of memory bandwidth, but the 16-inch MacBook Pro has 40 gigabytes of bandwidth.
John:
So it's about 1.5x, not 3x.
John:
and he gives all the math on this thing and it looks like it makes sense to me so i think people doing a 3x were maybe just not keeping in mind that a double data rate memory sends on the leading and trailing edge so you have to double it right so that's why it's it's not uh 6x so it you know it's not to diminish the m1 again they just in the cheapest macbook air you can buy it has 60 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth which is faster than the 40 in the most expensive intel macbook you can buy right
John:
It says what's novel here is the frequency being on package and not having all the single interchange latency.
John:
Apple's been able to increase the DRM bus frequency by 220% versus the 6-inch MacBook Pro.
John:
While this increased bandwidth is the most touted consequence of this, it also reduces memory latency, and that's more likely the main contributor to performance, right?
John:
So we're talking about more of the benefits of the...
John:
of the ram being on package you can clock it faster it's closer quote unquote closer by and you have less latency and so on and so forth so there's some more speculation about what do you do in the mac pro and the imac pro when you need more memory um
John:
So first, on the topic of like, wow, the on-package memory has such amazing bandwidth or whatever, high-end CPUs today typically have at least eight channels of DDR4 authoring 400 gigabytes per second of bandwidth.
John:
So the big Mac Pro and other big computers have way more memory bandwidth than the on-package memory.
John:
On-package doesn't make it magical.
John:
Like if you throw money and buses at it and huge banks of RAM, you can get large amounts of aggregate bandwidth from doing that, right?
John:
And soon DDR5 will be out, which will basically double the bandwidth again.
John:
in the show notes to the Wikipedia page for memory interface bandwidth numbers.
John:
Wade says, I doubt Apple can push the frequency much higher.
John:
They're likely limited by signal integrity, if not thermals.
John:
So to get into the ballpark, they'll need to increase the number of channels and therefore chips about eightfold.
John:
But by using regular DDR instead of LPDDR, which is what they use in the on-package RAM, that amounts to just eight channels and chips.
John:
Very possible from all angles.
John:
So what he's saying is basically, if you put, right now we have those two little on-package chips in the M1.
John:
Say you make room for eight of them.
John:
Say you put like, I don't know, put them all around the edges of it or whatever.
John:
That's not a ridiculous.
Marco:
Or stack them or something.
John:
Yeah, and they're talking about 3D stacking in a little bit.
John:
But yeah, it's not ridiculous that they could do that.
John:
That still leaves the capacity angle.
John:
It's likely impractical to fit terabytes of RAM onto the CPU package for the foreseeable future, but I think there's a presumption being made that Apple cares about large memory systems.
John:
This is the point that Marco brought up in a couple of past shows.
John:
Apple trumpeted the 1.5 terabyte support of the current Mac Pro because they could.
John:
It came for free from Intel.
John:
Well, not free, but you know what he means.
John:
How much do you think that capability actually means to their customers?
John:
So what Wade says is, what I actually suspect...
John:
Is that they'll simply go with on package only placing the capacity limit on something on the order of 128 gigabytes.
John:
And I think the performance will be astounding thanks to the same kind of three times higher clock frequencies, et cetera, not to mention all their performance advances from the rest of the system.
John:
So that's like this is what we're talking about.
John:
Is it feasible?
John:
How much could you get on package if money is almost no object?
John:
128 gigabytes probably feasible but it would be really fast 128 gigabytes and here is the here's wade is obviously well steeped in the ways of apple here is his justification i believe that apple believes that they can get away with this by focusing on the end results utter domination over intel in any and every performance benchmark which they can trivially achieve from anywhere they are i mean they're already achieving with the freaking macbook air so no problem there um if pushed they'll use their typical line of
John:
We just couldn't find a way to achieve the performance we wanted by doing it the old-fashioned way.
John:
I find this plausible and in keeping with Apple's attitudes.
John:
I don't think it's a slam dunk just because the Mac Pro's whole role is to have tremendous capacity and limiting that just cuts you out of the, as Marco said in the last show, just totally cuts you out of certain markets where people just need more RAM.
John:
But those rumors of a half-size Mac Pro or like an iMac Pro that maxes out at 128 gigs of RAM that has these characteristics, that would be fantastic.
John:
And that is, you know, an extremely Apple-like and a very likely machine that they could make.
John:
um so that was the end of wade's comment i have a few of my own to add for because we got so much feedback about here's how i think we can make bigger and better and faster macs uh based on arm chips lots and lots of people this is the most popular thing that people suggested is how about you just put two m1 chips in there remember when macs used to have multiple cpus i mean hey my power mac g5 had two of them my mac pro had two of them uh why don't you just stick a second one in there um i think
John:
This is unlikely for a couple of reasons.
John:
I mean, it is related to my next line item, which says low effort Mac Pro.
John:
Some people think this is low effort.
John:
Hey, don't worry about all this of making the M1 bigger.
John:
Just make like a little bit bigger M1, like an M1X and use that in like your iMac or whatever.
John:
And then on the Mac Pro, just put two of them or four of them in or something.
John:
Symmetric multiprocessing, where you have multiple CPUs that each have their own caches, but share a central pool of RAM, like the setup that had been used on past Macs.
John:
it's kind of a pain because as you can imagine, we talked about the cache hierarchy last time, all these CPUs have to sort of keep on the same page, so to speak, pun pun, about what the deal is with memory.
John:
So if they pull something from memory and it's in there like L3 or L2 or L1 cache or whatever, and someone else wants that piece of memory,
John:
It's like the CPUs need to communicate with each other and say, oh, you know, I'm in the middle of changing that.
John:
Or you don't know that I changed that because it hasn't been written back yet, but I have a changed version of that in my cache.
John:
Or if someone changes a piece of memory, they have to tell all the other CPUs, hey, if you have this in your cache and validate it because I just changed it.
John:
And that, you know...
John:
that process, there's overhead to that process.
John:
It's not particularly efficient.
John:
It's the same overhead when you have multiple cores and you keep jamming into the same chip, not the same overhead, but it's a similar type of thing.
John:
But the more integrated the thing is, the easier it is for you to make a very efficient way to do that.
John:
That's why within a single CPU, it is easier to deal with cache and validation than it is with two entirely different chips on separate parts of the board that have to do that same task, but they're farther apart, have more latency, and they can't optimize the way they do this, especially if it's like,
John:
uh you know two-way or four-way now you have to handle even more cases it's kind of a pain so i don't think apple do that because i think the performance is worse and i think the complexity is pretty annoying it's not actually that low effort and speaking of low effort i was thinking of this last show this is one of the first notes i put in for next week's show what does a low effort mac pro look like i don't mean this to be insulting but like
John:
What if you needed to make a Mac Pro to serve the same needs as the current Mac Pro, but you just didn't want to spend some ridiculous amount of money to do the cool things that Wade was saying, where you make this giant chip that has, you know, 128 gigs of on-package RAM and this amazing performance, and it's just this amazing bespoke beast that just has inside of it little bits from, like, the A14, but in general is this huge beast.
John:
What if you didn't want to do that because it's just too much money?
John:
How do you make a Mac Pro with sort of the parts on hand?
John:
Let's assume you have...
John:
something that's like an M1X that is beefy enough to be in an iMac or whatever.
John:
And you're willing to do that level of work.
John:
The low effort Mac Pro is rip out the on-package RAM and use an AMD GPU and ship it.
John:
Because you've got the M1 quote-unquote system on its ship.
John:
The RAM is in a bunch of DDR DIMMs.
John:
And the GPU is from AMD, your trusted partner for GPUs.
John:
And you write drivers for the AMD GPU.
John:
And you use the RAM in those giant banks that have tremendous bandwidth because it's very expensive and there's 12 slots and there's huge DIMMs in them.
John:
And you're done.
John:
Like, that's it.
John:
That's a low effort Mac Pro.
John:
It would have better CPU performance than the current Mac Pro.
John:
It would have equal capacity.
John:
And, you know, the new AMD GPUs are actually giving NVIDIA a run for the money lately.
John:
So you're basically done.
John:
Like, that's a great Mac Pro.
John:
The things that are bad about the current Mac Pro is the CPU is slow, right?
John:
The GPU is actually as good as whatever you can buy and stick in there.
John:
It's as good as you can make it, right?
John:
Apple does not have anything that competes with the top end NVIDIA or AMD GPUs.
John:
And the integrated GPU, as amazing as it is for an integrated GPU, does not compete with the big external ones.
John:
So the low effort Mac Pro, I just want to throw out there, is still an option.
John:
Like we keep talking about all these fantastical things they can do.
John:
But they can also make a low-effort Mac Pro.
John:
I don't think it's a bad machine.
John:
I think it's a machine that has a cooler, faster CPU, but has all of the same capacity.
John:
And thanks to the wonder of interchangeable parts and slots, the boring old, hey, I've just got a bunch of PCI slots, suddenly you can put a 6800 XT in there, which is an amazing new GPU from AMD.
John:
And Apple likes AMD, and they just have drivers for it, and you're done.
John:
I know the whole thing we've been talking about is Apple's never going to use.
John:
They're only going to have Apple GPUs from now on.
John:
They're only going to write their own drivers.
John:
Big Sur doesn't even ship an ARM version with any drivers for any GPUs other than the Apple integrated one.
John:
Like the writing is on the wall that you're never going to see a third party GPU in, you know, Apple Silicon based Mac.
John:
We don't know the answers to those questions yet.
John:
All I'm saying is the low effort Mac Pro.
John:
is right out there as an option it is entirely technical technically feasible and i think it's actually still a good product even if it's a little more boring i think the the lowest effort mac pro would be just keep it on intel and i know this is not like a i know like this is not the solution anybody wants and and i'm pretty sure apple's not going to do this no no i mean they said they're going to fully transition the transition will take two years they didn't have an asterisk that said except the mac pro which will never transition
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
So if they hadn't said that, I would possibly think this might be even further out.
Marco:
But yeah, they did say that.
Marco:
But truly, the lowest effort would be just keep shipping Xeon workstations at the high end.
Marco:
But again, that's not their style, and that's not what they're going to do.
Marco:
I do also think that they're going to keep having slots, and they're going to keep having interchangeable modular architecture.
Marco:
And so the way you do that...
Marco:
is not by making some giant monster CPU that also has a bunch of GPUs on it.
Marco:
The way you do that is by retaining some amount of modular expansion slots, whether it's RAM or cards or both.
Marco:
Most of the feedback here was actually very interesting to me because most of the feedback...
Marco:
was way above my head, way above my knowledge and expertise from people who really know what they're doing in this area.
Marco:
And it was really, really nice to hear quite how large these other processors in the industry are that we use or that people can use.
Marco:
And so we know now that Apple can make a really giant M series chip if they want to, that has tons of CPU cores, tons of GPU cores, as long as you can pay for it.
Marco:
I mean, like those, the 28 core Xeon W that's in the Mac pro is like a 3000 or $4,000 CPU.
Marco:
And granted those are like, you know, Intel's prices.
Marco:
There are some profit margin there that Apple would be able to absorb into their total product price, but still like,
Marco:
you know, you're talking thousands of dollars in manufacturing costs just for that CPU.
Marco:
Um, but while most M computers, like most of the M based Macs, I think are going to have no expansion possibilities whatsoever internally.
Marco:
Like, you know, you're going to, you're going to see similar things to the M one, you know, soldered on Ram that's, that's on or near the package, only GPUs that are built into the package that are built into the, into the, actually on the chip, um,
Marco:
I'm not expecting to see any kind of other thing than that.
Marco:
Now that I've heard from all these listeners and now that I see how big chips can get and still be part of kind of mainstream products, I now no longer think they're going to kick the GPU off the CPU.
Marco:
I think GPU stays on and the only question is how you physically interact with memory in a short, fast way.
Marco:
Even on the iMac you think that?
Marco:
I think so, too.
Marco:
I think even on the iMac, I think we're going to have one giant chip.
John:
I think seeing the benchmarks of the M1 in various scenarios, because people are just really benchmarking the heck out of it these days, the M1 wins everywhere until a real GPU comes walking along.
John:
You're like, well, who cares about that?
John:
I don't care about gaming.
John:
There's a bunch of video apps that do a lot on the GPU, and you'll take a slower, crappier Intel Mac and put a decent GPU in it, and it suddenly becomes twice as fast at like 8K video rendering or whatever, right?
John:
So, you know, it doesn't mean that Apple won't make that GPU, but they don't have anything that competes with that so far.
John:
And I do wonder if they have the will to do that in it.
John:
Especially given that AMD's new GPUs, because when it was just NVIDIA, like we know that it seems like Apple's just totally on the outs with them.
John:
They're not going to do anything.
John:
But the new AMD GPUs on their new architecture, it's the same architecture that the new consoles use as well, but bigger and beefier.
John:
They're really good.
John:
And so in a top end iMac, if someone buys that, they're not going to want it to be slower than their current iMac.
John:
And a lot of the tasks are GPU bound.
John:
So I'm pretty well convinced that there has to be a discrete GPU in the top end iMacs.
John:
Otherwise, the ARM-based ones will be slower than the current iMacs for these kinds of tasks.
John:
Now, again, Apple could make that GPU, but we don't even have a hint of them doing that.
John:
So I'm leaning pretty heavily towards a discrete in the top end iMac.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, maybe.
Marco:
I didn't realize there was that big of a performance gap.
Marco:
So yeah, that's very possible then.
Marco:
But regardless, I think almost every other Mac has everything in or around the package, no separation of anything.
Marco:
And then only at the very high end, I think that's when you get separation.
Marco:
And it doesn't make sense.
Marco:
Again, it doesn't make sense for the Mac Pro to exist if there aren't expansion slots.
Marco:
like it and apple really i think very strongly communicated that that was the direction they intended to stay now that they like rebooted the mac pro they got it back on track that that pros like i think they're going to keep expansion slots so i i still think that's going to stay in that product but i would be very surprised if any other mac had any kind of expansion or nearly any kind of separation between the components at this point
John:
Final bit of follow-up on the making Macs bigger, faster, stronger.
John:
Something to keep in mind with regard to die size, cooling, and everything else is that TSMC, who manufactures Apple systems on ships, TSMC is not Intel.
John:
TSMC continues to make process advances.
John:
The latest story was about the TSMC achieves major breakthrough in two nanometer manufacturing process.
John:
So to recap, the A14 and the M1 are at five nanometer.
John:
two nanometer would make for even smaller and more transistors and even less area it'd be pretty amazing um and this headline confused me because someone sent this link and it was like they achieved major breakthrough in two nanometer manufacturing process comma risk production in 2023 and you have to parse like
John:
Are they trying to like, you know, in headlines, when you leave out articles or whatever, you leave out certain words for for compactness, for the tradition of trying to fit things on the printed page.
John:
Are they saying they risk like but risk production in or are they saying risk production with parentheses around it as an as a compound noun?
John:
in 2023 and what is risk production so i looked it up uh and i found a couple definitions put a link in the show notes i think one of the plain english ones from tuna fish on hackers news was risk production means that the foundry says okay we think everything is fine now but we make no guarantees that it will work customers then have the option of purchasing super expensive wafer starts you have to look up what starts means because it's in a whole other lingo thing
John:
Super expensive wafer starts that might or might not work.
John:
You might luck out and have lots of great next-gen chips months before your competitors, or alternatively, you might get five working chips out of each $10,000 wafer.
John:
So that's what risk production means.
John:
So 2023 is the time horizon when conceivably, if you wanted to be on the bleeding edge, this would not be Apple, although for really low volumes, who knows?
John:
conceivably at very low volumes at high risk you could get two nanometer parts out of tsmc which means that the 2024 mac pro you know all the numbers we gave you about die sizes and everything like that that's that's why in the graph where we pointed out that the that the a14 is actually smaller than the a13 despite having more stuff in it
John:
uh again that five nanometers shrinking down to two nanometers doesn't mean they're going to be half as big for the same amount of transitions but it means they're going to be smaller so you know we're we're back on we're not it's not that we're back on the morris law curve because you know morris law will end we've discussed this before
John:
But whatever curve we were on with Intel, we're not on that one anymore.
John:
So expect every couple of years to have maybe for the next couple of rounds to have a process shrink and to have that process shrink ripple across Apple's products and really sort of give us continuing benefits.
John:
That was another one of the questions of a lot of the feedback we got is like,
John:
Can we expect this level of advancement with the M2, M3, M4?
John:
First, the easy answer is no, because you went from Intel that was stagnant to ARM, which is not.
John:
But you also shouldn't expect the M2 to be like 3% faster than the M1.
John:
right we're on a better curve than we had been but we're there's not going to be another leap where the m2 is seven times faster or whatever right so things are looking up but keep your expectations in check but don't forget shrinks will happen and shrinks are good do you think a wafer start is kind of like you know how like i i think don't the silicon wafers start out as like a big log and they get sliced do you think a wafer start is like like the butt of the bread but for the silicon log
Casey:
No, I think it's more like a sourdough bread starter.
Marco:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
Where you have to, like, grow it for a while, feed it additional silicon every day.
John:
It's neither one of those things.
John:
I didn't put the link in the show notes for wafer starts or starts in silicon manufacturing, but you can look that up as well.
John:
But risk production was a new one for me.
John:
That's why I put it in the link, so...
John:
One final bit about ARM Macs, this is not about making them faster, but just to note that Alexander Graf, this story has already gone around a lot today, but from earlier in the week, has successfully virtualized ARM Windows on Apple Silicon using QEMU plus a bunch of patches.
John:
So as we know, Microsoft does not officially support any of Apple's ARM applications.
John:
macs with windows despite the fact that microsoft itself uh has a version of windows that runs on arm and they have their own hardware that runs on arm but their hardware sucks because it doesn't use apple silicon and so if you run arm windows on an m1 mac in this qemu virtualization environment it's about twice as fast as the fastest uh actual native windows arm hardware you can buy because apple silicon is better so
John:
It's still, you know, as we said back in the ARM Mac introduction, the ball is in Microsoft's court.
John:
Technically speaking, there is nothing stopping Windows from running natively on ARM Macs except for Microsoft, which has thus far not decided to support them.
John:
I feel like Apple wants...
John:
microsoft to support windows and max just because for the same reason apple put that time and energy into boot camp because it's saying some of their customers find valuable and it makes max more valuable and more versatile uh so i hope those two crazy kids work this out because i really do want windows on our max
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Marco:
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John:
and for sponsoring our show uh marco we haven't had a chance to talk about your new toy and oh the time the time all right we do have to do ask atp that stinks all right there was there was i did push one follow-up item about multi-chip modules down to next week but uh i think you can't avoid it any longer casey the public needs to know about the uh iphone mini
Marco:
well if you'll notice what i named this topic was marco's mini reviews plural oh you got the mac mini too right i got it no not yet no we'll see they're currently the uh the build to order mac minis are currently saying that they're going to ship in january in late january at that uh so yeah maybe not maybe that plan is not going to happen but uh no my mini reviews are for my iphone 12 mini and my home pod minis that's right so many many things
John:
Or as Merlin would say, many, many things.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Oh, poor Merlin.
Marco:
I'm from Ohio, too.
Marco:
I get it.
Marco:
Just not that part of Ohio.
Marco:
Anyway, the HomePod Mini is where I'll start.
Marco:
Everybody seemed a lot more excited about this product than I think is ultimately deserved.
Marco:
And it's not to say that it's a bad product.
Marco:
It's a fine product.
Marco:
There are a couple of places that I have enjoyed HomePods.
Marco:
Um...
Marco:
let's say the smallest rooms in my house in in the you know for the past however long the home pod's been out about year and a half or two and a half years whatever it's been um i've enjoyed the home pod for that purpose but it's a bit big uh and it's a bit expensive to to waste in the smallest rooms of your house and so the home pod mini is actually really good for that like i i have swapped it in for that role and it is fantastic for that
Marco:
And it's also good in contexts where what you're mostly going for is the voice assistant and not necessarily like music listening or where the quality of the music being played isn't that important.
Marco:
But I don't think anybody with that list of qualifications is buying HomePods of any size.
Marco:
The whole reason you buy HomePods is that they sound pretty good.
Marco:
And if you really wanted like
Marco:
the voice assistant part as the primary role of it you're probably going to want an Alexa device instead because they're generally better at that anyway I had two HomePod Minis as a stereo pair two HomePod Maxis I guess as a stereo pair and also a new Amazon Echo and
Marco:
And then I also tested out all of them as... I only had one Echo.
Marco:
I also tested them out as just mono single speakers.
Marco:
Unplugging one of each thing and unconfiguring the stereo pair and testing it just as mono.
Marco:
The HomePod Mini is this tiny little ball about the size of a grapefruit.
Marco:
It's $100.
Marco:
The current, which is actually like a brand new generation of $100 Amazon Echo, like the main middle-of-the-road Echo, is also $100, also a ball, but much larger, more like it goes from a grapefruit up to like almost a little bit bigger than a softball, I think.
Marco:
Grapefruits are bigger than softballs, right?
Yeah.
Marco:
It isn't a big grapefruit.
Marco:
It's one of the smaller ones.
Marco:
Maybe a large orange.
John:
Is the Amazon one like a crystal ball, like a fortune teller?
Marco:
Actually, it's almost like the original Magic 8-Ball.
Marco:
Grapefruit and softball were wrong.
Marco:
It's more like large orange and Magic 8-Ball.
Marco:
is it bigger than a bread box anyway the hell's a bread box um and whereas the home pod like the full-size home pod is about two-thirds the size of a trash can mac pro um so if only there was some common unit of measurement we could use to express the size of things in a way the listeners can understand oh well
Casey:
Well, you say that, but then we would use inches and everyone would complain and moan about how backwards Americans are.
Marco:
Yeah, it's just, it's a millihomepod, a kiloihomepod.
Marco:
We'll do it in plonk lengths.
Marco:
Plank, plonk, I don't even know how to pronounce it.
Marco:
Anyway, what you might expect is that the sound quality goes up proportionally with price, and it doesn't.
Marco:
What you might expect instead is the sound quality maybe goes up proportionally with size, because really when you have HomePod Mini,
Marco:
amazon echo ball thing and homepod maxi all in a row it is like kind of like you know small medium large there it's a nice size ramp and that is pretty much true that is effectively how this how the sound ramps up because you know speakers at same thing with microphones by the way you really can't defeat physics after a while you can play some tricks you can be really clever but
Marco:
But if you're trying to have a point source emitting sound that is not extremely close to your ears, you're going to have a hard time making that sound good if the point source is really small or really far away from you or a very small source in a very big room or some other kind of large difference in the physics between the ratios or the proportions or the distances that you're trying to go.
Marco:
Or it doesn't move a lot of air, right?
Marco:
Is that another factor?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You know, sheer displacement here.
Marco:
Like, cause it's, you're dealing with a physical thing.
Marco:
You know, sound waves are physical compression waves.
Marco:
You have to, you know, at some point physics is going to win.
Marco:
I don't have a current gen Echo Dot.
Marco:
But I bet if I had a Dot, I bet it would fit in right below the Mini in size and sound quality.
Marco:
But the Dot costs like less than half or about half of the Mini's price.
Marco:
And I bet it isn't half as much worse.
Marco:
Similarly, the Amazon Echo costs exactly the same as the HomePod Mini.
Marco:
Actually, when it's as it frequently is on sale, it costs significantly less.
Marco:
And the new...
Marco:
you know, whatever, what did I say?
Marco:
Magic eight ball sized Amazon echo sounds significantly better than the home pod mini.
Marco:
So it's the same price.
Marco:
It sounds way better.
Marco:
And the voice assistant is way faster and way more reliable and way better.
Marco:
So ultimately, if you're looking to spend a hundred dollars on a voice assistant speaker thing, um,
Marco:
The Amazon Echo is a way better choice overall than the HomePod Mini.
Marco:
That being said, the HomePod Mini is a HomePod, and therefore, you know, it uses Siri instead.
Marco:
To many people, that's a feature, not a bug.
Marco:
To me, it's kind of a wash.
Marco:
They're both idiots in different ways.
Marco:
It's like the three of us.
Marco:
So, it's...
Marco:
It's not an amazing home run product.
Marco:
And if you compare the sound from the Mini to the full-size HomePod, it's clear as day.
Marco:
Like, oh yeah, the full-size HomePod sounds way better.
Marco:
Especially where the Mini especially falls down, it's a massive difference in bass.
Marco:
The Mini basically has no bass whatsoever.
Marco:
And the regular HomePod has surprisingly good bass for its size.
Marco:
Because the regular HomePod is still, in the world of speakers, is still small.
Marco:
In the world of smart speakers, it's maybe medium to large, but in the world of speakers as a whole, it's quite small, and it competes very well with stereo speakers that are much larger than it, especially when you have two of them.
Marco:
So I think, ultimately, the regular HomePod sounds like it's twice as good, and it's about twice the size.
Marco:
unfortunately it's nearly four times the price officially and so i think if you can actually have the home pod the full-size home pod at its frequent sale price of 200 ish dollars that's a fantastic buy and that is totally rational and sensible as twice as much as the home pod mini because it's about twice as good as for the home pod mini itself like where it's left it's kind of
Marco:
The size kind of suggests its quality pretty well compared to the other ones.
Marco:
If you have a role in your house that you want to fill with a very small smart speaker that is not that expensive and is not that good sounding, but where that might not matter or you might not care, it's a good buy.
Marco:
I'll give it that.
Marco:
But that's a lot of ifs.
Marco:
And if you want something to play music in your kitchen or something, the Echo is going to be better for that, or the full-size HomePod.
Marco:
As with the other HomePod, if you can afford two of them, it is great, and it's way better than just one.
Marco:
However, even in a stereo pair, the HomePod Mini is not a real winner with sound.
Marco:
It doesn't make up for its lack of bass or the rest of it being kind of okay.
Marco:
Whereas a stereo pair of the full-size HomePods...
Marco:
really does sound quite good in almost any room.
Marco:
I would strongly suggest if you have a role in maybe the smaller rooms in your house where you're mostly playing podcasts and you don't care about sound quality, yeah, go for it.
Marco:
It's nice.
Marco:
It's inexpensive.
Marco:
If Apple would have made the HomePod Mini the size of the current Amazon Echo instead, it wouldn't have been as small.
Marco:
But people don't really need these things to be super small.
Marco:
So did they make it super small because Apple, even though nobody was really asking for it to be quite this small, if it's going to sound quite this mediocre?
Marco:
Or did they make it this small because at $100, their profit margins wouldn't allow them to...
Marco:
give it like two drivers because like one of the reasons it sounds so bad is that it doesn't have a separate woofer and tweeter it has only one driver and then it has these quote passive radiators on the sides to kind of enhance base response i think i don't know i don't know enough about speaker design to know what those do but every other speaker in this price category has multiple speakers inside there's usually a subwoofer and a tweeter or a woofer and a tweeter at least
Marco:
And so if they prioritized size here, I think that was the wrong move.
Marco:
If they could have shipped something with better speaker drivers and maybe more of them at this price point, I think they should have.
Marco:
But ultimately, that could have just been a price decision as well.
Marco:
It's a fine product, but it's not competitive with the Echoes at similar price points.
Casey:
So a couple of things that I wanted to touch back on.
Casey:
First of all, you had made mention that you don't have an Echo Dot.
Casey:
We have year old Echo Dots, so it would not at all surprise me if these are now out of date.
Casey:
But I can tell you with a fact, they sound like trash.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Which is fine.
Casey:
I mean, if we're going to put on music on the Echo Dots, it's because we're trying to get like multi-room going and we just want seamless music throughout.
Casey:
And we only have these upstairs.
Casey:
So, you know, we just want seamless music throughout the upstairs.
Casey:
We are not listening, you know, like what is it, the Maxell or whatever it was called that I've mentioned before, the advertising with guys with his hair blown back.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
we're not sitting there listening and really paying attention.
Casey:
We just want some ambient stuff on.
Casey:
And for that, it's fine.
Casey:
But they sound like garbage, unequivocally.
Casey:
The other thing you said is that the HomePod Mini has no bass.
Casey:
And
Casey:
That alarms me greatly because I am not that much of a kind of guy, but my understanding of your music preferences is that they are not particularly bassy, generally speaking.
Casey:
And so if you're saying with your comparatively tinny music preferences that they're not very bassy, someone who likes something that is less fish and more, I don't know, like bassy, that could be quite the deal breaker.
Yeah.
Marco:
yeah i mean again this if you care at all about music sound quality this is not a product for you period like end of story that's it and and you know generally like in the world of smart speakers they don't sound great you know because again part of the physics mentioned earlier is every one of these speakers and the whole industry of like sound bars which i also hate sound bars i
Marco:
What an amazing branding for such a stupid concept.
Marco:
But anyway, the soundbar problem, which is the same problem that almost every smart speaker has, is that they try to play tricks to defeat physics, to try to make a wider soundscape, basically.
Marco:
You know, to simulate having multiple speakers in the room when you're actually broadcasting sound just from one point.
Marco:
And so you have to do things like try to bounce the sound off the walls or in the corners or whatever.
Marco:
And while that's a real thing, you can indeed bounce sound that way.
Marco:
In practice, it doesn't work very well in most rooms.
Marco:
And it's not nearly as good as just having two different speakers that are just one at the left and one at the right.
Marco:
It's not nearly that good.
Marco:
Similarly, all these speakers try to somehow sound okay while broadcasting from one single point in a room.
Marco:
Oftentimes that can't be like the ideal space that you want, maybe want to put a speaker if you cared about sound quality.
Marco:
So like, you know, you're dealing with these compromised physics situations here.
Marco:
And so all smart speakers kind of have to be graded on a curve.
Marco:
And so from that point of view, you could use the HomePod mini and okay, convenient and fun, fine.
Marco:
But if you're going for convenient and fun, I honestly, I would go for the Echo again.
Marco:
Like, unless you really love Siri over Alexa for a particular reason that's very important to you.
Marco:
So it could be privacy.
Marco:
It could be maybe some of Apple's integrations.
Marco:
AirPlay 2 is a big one.
Marco:
And I love AirPlay 2.
Marco:
And even though the latest release of iOS has made it incredibly buggy.
Marco:
Thanks.
Marco:
Thanks, HomePod Mini.
Marco:
But if you don't have a significant reason to prefer HomePods specifically...
Marco:
it's not a great product because even by the grading on a curve that you have to do for smart speakers.
Marco:
And even though the regular home pod, the full size home pod almost eliminated that curve.
Marco:
Like you don't have to grade that on a curve.
Marco:
You can just create it as a nice speaker and it does pretty well for its price point, especially at the discount price point.
Marco:
Um, but the home pod mini just doesn't like it doesn't, it's not a great product.
Marco:
It's a cute, small product that is fine, but it's,
Marco:
Apple, I think, cut a few too many corners on this one, and they should have gone a little bit higher.
Marco:
And even if they had to make it cost $129 instead of $99, if it could have had significantly better drivers in there and maybe two separate ones, that would have gone a long way towards sound quality.
Marco:
And if it made it a little bit bigger, oh well, nobody cares.
John:
I just want to add that while you were talking about this, my wife messaged me to say, quote, Siri sucks.
John:
Now, here's the thing.
John:
Is she listening to the show live and wanted to chime in about the fact that Siri is not as good a voice assistant as the Amazon Echo?
John:
Or is she just living in my house where Siri exists and occasionally does things that annoy us?
Marco:
it's no there's no way to tell because very often people in our house will have complaints about siri that are unrelated to listening to a live podcast so yeah siri's still got some catching up to do yeah oh and we've we've fired our sonos stuff and and it's so good it's i'm so happy without the buggy it sonos makes some good products the sonos amp is awesome like i love the sonos amp it's it's a stereo speaker amp with airplay 2 with it with tv inputs and analog inputs it's wonderful
Marco:
I love my Sonos amp.
Marco:
That is what drives my TV speakers.
Marco:
The reason I love the Sonos amp is that it doesn't have any smart integration.
Marco:
And where the Sonos products really fall down is the ones that integrate the Alexa support and try to make these combo voice-controlled smart products.
Marco:
I don't know what it is about that integration, but it's buggy.
Marco:
All the reviews, people were complaining about the Alexa integration being buggy.
Marco:
And I thought, oh, maybe that was just beta 1.0 software issues.
Marco:
And maybe they've made it better now, multiple years in.
Marco:
No, they haven't.
Marco:
It's still really buggy.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
The Sonos Move, I feel the same way about.
Marco:
We have one of those.
Marco:
I just want to sell it now.
Marco:
I want out of that entire ecosystem.
Marco:
Anything in that ecosystem that has voice support, I want out of it.
Marco:
So I'm just going to be unloading those things probably.
Marco:
But the Sonos AMP is wonderful.
Marco:
uh because it it keeps it dumb it it lacks both the buggy alexa support and any reason to ever use sonos's apps for anything so it's great like i just use it as my tv speaker and it's an airplay 2 destination it's wonderful and that's it well that took a lot longer than i expected so let's do some ask atp we have to the iphone mini i i think i actually might have less to say about the iphone 12 mini all right go ahead
Marco:
all right so i got my my kind of red iphone 12 the the back of it is not even close to red uh but that's okay i never look at the back the sides are red and they are delightful and every time i see the aluminum sides of my phone it just makes me smile i love the way this phone looks
Marco:
In the hand, it feels fantastic.
Marco:
In the pocket, it feels even better.
Marco:
I have been using it without a case so far.
Marco:
I have the Apple case.
Marco:
I figure kind of, you know, maybe just like if I can ever travel again, I'm probably going to want a case or maybe I figured I might try it for like a week and see what I like better.
Marco:
the screen size is great on the mini you know i i don't feel like i've lost any screen real estate because i didn't like they they did just shrink the 10 10s and 11 pro screen to fit this size now so like screen real estate wise it's the same they just made the pixels smaller now on the small pixel side
Marco:
between the 12 mini, which is shrunking the pixels and my new MacBook air, which I'm running at its default resolution.
Marco:
Whereas compared to my 16 inch, I ran at its native resolution, which is larger pixels.
Marco:
I'm looking at everything a little bit smaller now and I'm starting to feel, Hmm, I'm 38 and a half now.
Marco:
Uh, I've never worn glasses.
Marco:
Uh,
Marco:
But I don't have many years left of not needing any vision correction and having good uniform vision.
Marco:
I can kind of feel it slightly slipping away.
Marco:
And as I am using these two new devices that have more dense screens than what I was using before...
Marco:
I'm noticing that.
Marco:
I'm noticing like, hey, this is a little bit harder to read than it might have been a few years ago.
Marco:
Even though what I've just done is go back to the density of all the phones before the X. That's what this density is.
Marco:
It's the same density that the 6 and 7 had.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I am kind of thinking like this might be a one year thing because I might have issues with just looking at very small things, you know, within the next year or two.
John:
You can crank up the Zoom though, right?
John:
Didn't ask you during setup which size you prefer?
Marco:
Well, I can, but then I lose screen real estate and then I'd be less willing to lose that possibly.
Marco:
But I mean, we'll see.
John:
I mean, but you still keep the good hand feel and the good pocket feel, right?
Marco:
yeah maybe i'm kind of hoping that um that maybe maybe in in future revisions they might reduce the weight of the of the middle pro line a little bit because like they're so dense and heavy and i feel like i got worse this year anyway um so otherwise though like it feels wonderful grip wise i'm still getting used to not having a leather case because this is the first time i haven't had a leather case since the 5s
Marco:
i i'm still getting used to like picking it up off you know with the edges and having i kind of still feel like i'm going to drop it all the time um so that's another reason why i might try the case another reason is that in my previous caseless days the phone would rest flat because there was no camera bump now there's a camera bump and so with no case the phone does not rest flat
John:
Yeah, it's infuriating.
John:
That's one of the main reasons I use a case these days.
John:
I demand that it both lay flat and not make me nervous about scratching it.
John:
But laying flat, yeah, that's why I really was upset by the Apple leather Pro Max case, which adds a bump on the bump.
John:
So even when you get the case, it doesn't lay flat.
John:
I was afraid that would be true of all the cases, but apparently not on the non-Mac size of Apple cases and certainly not on the Sene case that I'm using.
John:
Laying flat is a major feature.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
And also just like having a little bit of that tackiness grip when you're on a Surface.
Marco:
Like, I think I'm ultimately...
Marco:
probably going to go with a case but i want to try cases a little while longer because it just feels so good and it looks really good again like i love the red uh aluminum edge i absolutely love it i like it way better than any of the other colors performance wise battery wise the battery is uh noticeably lower like as everybody said yeah i do get less battery life it has not been a problem yet and ultimately if i'm going to like ever travel with this phone which
Marco:
Honestly, it's probably not going to be a whole lot of that.
Marco:
But if I'm going to ever travel with this phone, I would probably want some kind of like MagSafe battery.
Marco:
If Apple would make that, that would be awesome.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't think anyone else has made one yet, but that would be great.
Marco:
Like a little like thing you just stick on the back for charging in your pocket sometimes, but not all the time.
Marco:
That would be wonderful.
Marco:
but that doesn't exist yet so we'll see i haven't actually tried magsafe yet i've just been using my regular chi charger that i've that i've been using for years like on my nightstand um so i haven't tried that yet uh because ultimately what i want for magsafe is something that is stationary on the nightstand that like i don't want their weird little travel wallet they unveiled for way too much money yesterday like i don't want that i don't want just like the loose cable i want like a dock that
Marco:
That is basically a magnetic Qi charging stand or pad or whatever.
Marco:
That's what I want.
Marco:
And I don't know that there's a lot of those on the market yet.
John:
But anyway.
John:
That's another issue with the Mini with dock-like things.
John:
If you have a dock that's made for quote-unquote normal phones, the Mini is so small that depending on your luck, it may be that the coils don't align as well because the Mini is shorter.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So either it doesn't charge as fast because it's misaligned or in some of them it just won't charge at all because the thing thinks it's misaligned and won't charge it.
John:
I don't think this is a big problem.
John:
Panzer posted about it when it first came out.
John:
But it is something to keep in mind because the Mini is so different than the average size phone.
John:
If you just have a generic phone charger or even worse, a charger that is custom made to fit like a Galaxy Note or some other huge thing, be careful and think about it before you buy it.
Marco:
Otherwise, other than the battery being a little bit low and having a dilemma on whether I want to use a case or not, otherwise I'm loving this thing.
Marco:
It does feel a little bit like going back in time in the sense that...
Marco:
It is so much smaller and lighter and you do have less screen physical size.
Marco:
And so for things like watching video and stuff, it's like slightly worse than the, than the big phones.
Marco:
But ultimately, you know, we're talking about what a half an inch or something, or like a one inch screen size difference.
Marco:
And,
Marco:
That's a lot proportionally, but you're still watching video on a tiny screen.
Marco:
If you're trying to decide whether you want to watch video on a tiny screen or a tinier screen, they're both massive compromises compared to a TV or even a laptop.
Marco:
That almost doesn't matter at all.
Marco:
Camera-wise, so far...
Marco:
I have not missed the two X camera that much.
Marco:
I have taken pictures where I have zoomed in digitally, but usually not to the full two X and the digital zoom has been good enough for my, like, you know, 1.4, 1.6 kind of rings.
Marco:
It's been good enough for that.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
there had been some pictures where, you know, we take pictures like around a dark dinner table.
Marco:
Like we took our Thanksgiving dinner pictures around our dark table and Tiff had her max and I had my mini and her pictures did look better.
Marco:
They did have a little bit more detail, but I had to like zoom in and like, and really look for the difference.
Yeah.
Marco:
and so from my point of view as as a much more casual iphone photographer like i don't i don't i'm not a pro iphone photographer i barely post on instagram i i am you know i don't shoot raw i don't use halide or any of the fancy apps that people who are really good at this stuff use i just you know shoot with the built-in camera and occasionally tweak the photos a little bit and occasionally post some of them to instagram but even then it's pretty rare
Marco:
And so from my point of view, the one X camera is great and digital zoom when I need it so far has been okay.
Marco:
Uh, if there were a two X option on this size, no question I would pay extra for that.
Marco:
I would definitely take that, but there isn't.
Marco:
And so ultimately I do like the size a lot, even despite that.
Marco:
Um, finally the speaker is,
Marco:
seems to be like some of the reviews try to try to say that the speakers were kind of comparable between them they're not the speaker on this one is a little bit lower volume and a little bit worse than the bigger ones but it's not a big difference uh it's it's not a difference that i would consider fatal and i use the speaker a lot mostly for podcasts because it sounds like an echo dot for music so anyway um ultimately i'm very happy with it
Marco:
i'm a little scared that no one's buying it because when i look at my stats in overcast there's not a lot of 12 mini compared to the other ones so i'm a little worried about that this might be like a one-off thing and like they might not make another one next year or ever if that's the case if this is not like a regularly updated product line i'm
Marco:
I'm not going to hang on to this forever.
Marco:
I don't love it so much that I would do that.
Marco:
If next year the lineup is similar but without a mini option, I'll just go back to the smallest pro like I have for the last few years.
Marco:
But if this is still an option next year...
Marco:
I'll probably take it because it just feels so good.
Marco:
It's so light.
Marco:
It's so small, but it's not too small.
Marco:
It doesn't feel too cramped.
Marco:
I haven't had problems with the keyboard accuracy or anything like that.
Marco:
It doesn't feel too small.
Marco:
It's just right on that edge, but it's not.
Marco:
So ultimately, I'm very happy with it.
Marco:
And yeah, we'll see how the rest of the year goes.
Marco:
We'll see what I think about it.
Marco:
If I travel with it, I'm sure the battery life will be a hit there.
Marco:
We'll see how the lack of the 2X camera plays out over the year.
Marco:
But for at least this year, I'm very happy with it.
Marco:
I'm very happy with the almost red color that I picked.
Marco:
And yeah, I guess I'll keep you posted on my exit interview, at least at the end of the year, to see what I think then.
Casey:
I think I survived this.
Casey:
You're not making me feel that much FOMO, which we all know for me, but a small breeze that can get me right into the FOMO side of the world.
Marco:
You haven't felt one yet.
Casey:
Yeah, well.
Marco:
Just wait.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
So far, I'm not feeling terrible, terrible amounts of FOMO.
Casey:
So I consider this a success.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And there's so many ways to make websites these days.
Marco:
And many listeners of our show can code your own CMS.
Marco:
I can.
Marco:
I've done it.
Marco:
But most of the time, that is not worth doing.
Marco:
Most of the time, you want to outsource the creation and the hosting and the editing and the support of websites to specialty platforms.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP like for real this time.
Casey:
Matthew Taylor writes,
Casey:
I understand the question, but I have a few problems with this.
Casey:
First of all, anyone I've heard, read, spoken to who has one of these says that the fans almost never kick on, first of all.
Casey:
Second of all, if you don't want fan noise, buy a MacBook Air.
Casey:
That'll fix the problem for you.
Marco:
It's nearly the same computer.
Marco:
right oh by the way oh my god just a very quick update on how i am liking my macbook air i love it so much it you know what i love so much about it not the color the color i think was a mistake i got the gold probably a mistake it's i could have told you that yeah but but it does do one thing though
Marco:
It makes it look new and different.
Marco:
Because while I know the gold has existed for a couple of years in that product, then for even more years before that on the 12-inch, although that was a different gold.
Marco:
But anyway, I've never had it.
Marco:
So it's new to me.
Marco:
There's never been one in the house even.
Marco:
So that is new.
Marco:
So to me, if you don't get a weird color on this product, you can't even tell what it is.
Marco:
You can't tell that it's this radical, new, cool thing.
Marco:
And for many people, that's a feature.
Marco:
But for me, I kind of felt like, you know, I kind of want this radically different, new, awesome thing to look different, to look new.
Marco:
I'm so tired of space gray.
Marco:
Space gray is, I'm way, way over it.
Marco:
Silver is what I probably should have bought.
Marco:
But I've had silver laptops now for how many years?
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It's a great color, but it just made it look and feel older, I think.
Marco:
So I'm very happy that I got this weird gold, orange, pink, whatever it is color because it looks different, even though I actually don't like it in certain lighting.
John:
But in certain lighting, I do.
John:
You got to get some skins.
Marco:
No, I've tried that.
Marco:
I've been down that road.
Marco:
It's not for me.
John:
If you put a paper-like thing on your iPad, why not put a skin on your MacBook Air?
John:
Although finding one that won't clash with the gold is a problem now, but you did that to yourself.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Congratulations, you played yourself.
Marco:
But one other thing, it doesn't have a touch bar on it.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
I'm so happy.
Marco:
I love like, hey, you want to turn on the volume?
Marco:
Just tap one tap, not two.
Marco:
You don't have to wake it up first and then find where the button is and then drag it down.
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
One tap on a button.
Marco:
Boop.
Marco:
Volume's down.
Marco:
You want to increase the brightness?
Marco:
Oh, boop.
John:
One brightness.
John:
Don't make people tell you about the tap drag gesture because they're going to.
John:
I know about the tap drag.
John:
You still have to tap it to wake it up.
John:
I know.
John:
I know that you know, but people don't know.
John:
I'm saving you.
John:
I know.
John:
And also, by the way, don't write in to tell me what to bread boxes.
John:
I know.
John:
My grandmother had one.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Also, don't tell me about a better touch tool and how much better it makes the touch bar.
Marco:
I've tried that too.
Marco:
Still hate it.
Marco:
So anyway.
Casey:
You know what?
Casey:
Can we explore that just briefly?
Casey:
Can we explore that briefly?
Casey:
Because when I got my MacBook Pro six months ago, which was the first touch bar to be in my own home,
Casey:
Um, first of all, I don't have particularly strong feelings about the touch bar.
Casey:
Like I don't think it adds anything, but it doesn't actively piss me off.
Casey:
Like it does a lot of people I know, including you, Marco.
Casey:
Um, but I thought to myself, well, you know, I should use better touch tool for doing cool stuff.
Casey:
And I think we spoke about on the show, you know, that one of the things I did was put like a little emoji representing, uh, whether or not the garage door was open on the, on the touch bar, not because it needed to be there, but just cause I thought it was a neat thing to try.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And it worked.
Casey:
But I personally found Better Touch Tool to be extremely unreliable and very crashy and just did not work well with the touch bar at all.
Casey:
Now, it very well could have been user error.
Casey:
And honestly, if it was, I don't care because I don't think I care enough to go digging and figuring out why this was the case.
Casey:
I know other people have had very good experiences with Better Touch Tool with the touch bar.
Casey:
But for me, it just felt like a pile of hacks that just wasn't really for me.
Marco:
and and so those of you who are better touch tool fans i respect that but i don't know i don't know how you do it yeah i mean in all fairness the touch bar is very buggy and crashy and i'm reliable even stock uh but yeah i am so happy with this laptop not having a touch bar to me is like not having a fan like it's just it's wonderful it's like here's this thing that occasionally annoyed me and now it's just gone wonderful i hear you
Marco:
And I was thinking, too, like it's probably going to have a longer lifespan because there's no moving parts.
Marco:
Like, you know, I'm having this problem with my iMac being filled with dust after three years.
Marco:
Laptops have that problem, too.
Marco:
Many people frequently have problems with their laptops, like where the fans spin up like crazy way more than they did when they were new.
Marco:
And some of that's, you know, because of weirdness and, you know, maybe thermal compound degrading.
Marco:
But some of that's also because stuff is really full of dust in there and it's hard to get it out.
Marco:
And so when you eliminate the fan, you eliminate not only the noise and annoyance of that, but so many problems that could occur in the future as you use this machine for years and years that I think ultimately the main limiting factor of this is probably going to be the battery lifespan, not anything else about it unless it gets damaged because there's just nothing about it to really go wrong.
Marco:
And that's yet another feature of the Air.
Marco:
And again, you look at the lineup and going back to this Ask ATP question that I really interrupted.
Marco:
Sorry, Casey.
Marco:
I'm with you.
Marco:
If you're looking into the MacBook Pro, the current one, the 13-inch kind of mini MacBook Pro, and you're worried about the fan noise, just get the Air.
Marco:
I mean, even though people have said that it's really hard to make the fan turn on, if that's going to be a main priority for you, just get the Air because it's nearly the same computer.
John:
yeah i don't think it's about the fan turning on like i would i don't recommend getting the air if you want a macbook pro if you want a macbook pro get one you like the reports basically say that even though the fan is spinning it's spinning so slow that you can't even hear it if you have a 2015 macbook pro and you're annoyed by fan noise don't use that as as a way to measure how you're going to feel about the the macbook pro with the m1 in it just get the macbook pro with the m1 in it
John:
All reports have said, if someone just tells you it's fanless, you won't even know.
John:
Because even when people are running benchmarks for 10 minutes, it was like Gruber was saying he literally could not hear it.
John:
He put his ear right up the thing.
John:
You know, running a benchmark, he couldn't hear it, right?
John:
The fan is in there, and it is spinning, but it's spinning so slow.
John:
that it's not going to be anything like your dust-filled 2015 MacBook Pro.
John:
So if you want the M1-based MacBook Pro, just buy it.
John:
If you want to be sure you're not going to hear a fan, get the air.
John:
But I don't want to steer people away because all the reviews have been unanimous in saying, like, yeah, it's got a fan, but don't worry, you won't hear it.
John:
It's not like the fan on your current Intel MacBook Pro.
John:
also to actually answer the question before we move on oh yeah you can get software to turn off the fans in fact you can uh i forget which app i use but i did it on my mac pro i can stop all the fans on my mac pro which is not advisable don't do you can watch the temperatures just go up right um but yeah you can do that but don't please don't do that
Marco:
Now, I have a question.
Marco:
So the way those programs like like Kubrick, like the way those used to work is, you know, they would interact somehow with the power management unit of the computer.
Marco:
I don't know how I don't know what mechanism they could do that.
Marco:
But I would expect, first of all, I would expect all that to be different on the on the M1 base max, possibly not to be available at all for software to modify.
Marco:
Or if it is available, it will probably be a while before the apps are updated to support it.
Marco:
I mean, they update pretty quickly.
John:
Remember when we were going through this with my Mac Pro?
John:
It took a while for any app to support fan control.
John:
But eventually, because it's the Mac, you're not limited in the same way you are on iOS devices.
John:
So yes, it is an M1 and it's new and they'll have to come up with new stuff.
John:
But they will do it.
John:
There's nothing that's stopping them.
Marco:
Unless they don't have access to it.
Marco:
Unless there is no API they can call to modify that on the M1 architecture, which is possible.
Marco:
Anyway, so I'm curious though, John, because the way those used to work is they were able to adjust the minimum speed so they could speed the fan up, but they couldn't slow it down beneath what the unit wanted to run it at.
Marco:
If temperatures reached a certain level, the system would enforce its minimum speed no matter what you told these apps to do.
Marco:
So all these apps could do would be to increase the speed so that maybe you could – the reason why it's called CoolBook is you could run your laptop cooler by having the fan blow faster.
Marco:
So you're saying that with your Mac Pro, it was able to actually lower the speed beneath what it would normally be?
John:
So I didn't play the full game of chicken to see, hey, what happens if I just leave it like this?
John:
But you could put it into manual control.
John:
I think the app I was using was TG Pro.
John:
You can put it into manual control and it basically gave you sliders.
John:
And you'd hear what the fan level is at now and you'd move the slider down and it would get quieter.
John:
And then you'd watch your temps start going up.
John:
So clearly, whatever I'm doing, I'm making it be below what it would want to go because the temp would start climbing and climbing.
John:
And then I just put it back into automatic because I didn't want to see what would happen.
John:
I didn't want to find where the limits are on my very expensive computer.
John:
But I'm pretty sure that it really was bringing the fans down to below where they wanted to be.
John:
you know it could be that the default mode is above the minimum to your point like maybe there's a minimum and they don't run at the minimum they run like in the middle but it did give me a slider and you could slide it all the way to the end and it did make it quieter and it did make the temperatures go up but please don't do this to your computer especially an m1 macbook pro just get it and just tell yourself there's no fan in it and see if you ever hear it
Casey:
As another quick aside from the Ask ATP that will never end, I recorded using prior sponsor channels.
Casey:
I recorded a couple of things, a couple of the holiday specials off ABC, and I was running them through Final Cut Pro in order to take the commercials out.
Casey:
And I rendered them.
Casey:
These are like 45-minute, maybe an hour, 10-minute total sessions.
Casey:
television programs and they were 720 the source was 60 frames per second which i did not keep and i cranked it back to 30 i believe but i was rendering them out of final cut pro there were no like fancy transitions there was no weirdness to them i did render them as hevc on my imac pro one of them took literally like six or seven hours i have no idea why i nothing else was going on on my computer that was abnormal and
Casey:
And after that was done, I very nearly bought myself a new Mac Mini.
Casey:
This is preposterous.
Casey:
Now, I know I'm a media pack rat.
Casey:
I know I have very esoteric and peculiar needs when it comes to media stuff.
Casey:
It is unusual for me to be going into Final Cut Pro and doing these sorts of things.
Casey:
But I don't know why it took so long.
Casey:
People are already unloading in the chat.
Casey:
What about hardware encoding?
Casey:
What about hardware encoding?
Casey:
What about hardware encoding?
Casey:
Yes, it has hardware encoding.
Casey:
I know it does.
Casey:
I have no idea why Final Cut Pro, or yeah, it's not Final Cut Pro 10, it's just Final Cut Pro now.
Casey:
I don't know why it took so darn long, but I started it around lunchtime and it didn't finish until around dinnertime.
Casey:
I have no idea why, but oh my goodness.
John:
Was it using the hardware?
John:
Because I think the hardware is not infinitely capable and I'm not sure under what scenarios Final Cut will choose to use the, you know, the HEVC encoder that's in the Intel CPU versus not.
Marco:
One of the big things is that if it has 10-bit video coloring, that it can't use the T2.
Casey:
And that may have been, in fact, I think that might have been it now that you say that.
Casey:
But either way, I have encoded, like, you know, H.264 stuff I've re-encoded as HEVC in order to save storage space on the other end.
Casey:
So if it's something that I'm, you know, it's not critical to me that it's in the original form factor in which I downloaded, or the original codec I downloaded it in.
Marco:
You mean ripped?
Casey:
Uh, it's...
Casey:
It depends on what we're talking about.
Casey:
I take your point, but it depends on what we're talking about.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I can do, I can usually on the iMac Pro get anywhere between 1x and like 3x with the CPU doing HEVC encodes.
Casey:
And this was like one-tenth X and maybe it was the 10-bit thing.
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
Well, I mean, you'll know because if it's using the T2 acceleration, the CPU will be almost idle.
Marco:
Like you'll be able to see it in iStat menus.
Marco:
Like the CPU is doing almost nothing.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I don't know, whatever.
Casey:
It was just, it was hearing all these people saying, oh, I can render in Final Cut Pro so fast.
Casey:
It was quite the sales pitch for me getting a new Mac, which hand to God, I do not want a new Mac.
Casey:
I don't want a new MacBook Pro right now.
Casey:
I probably will soon.
Casey:
I do not want a new iMac right now.
Casey:
Probably will soon.
Marco:
All right, listeners, you hear it or hear.
Marco:
So which do you think happens first?
Marco:
Who caves, me or Casey?
Marco:
Okay, now hold on.
Marco:
Which of us has a different Mac or desktop first?
Casey:
Well, so that's actually a very interesting question because sitting here now, I really don't have any need or desire, he says with little confidence, to change my iMac.
Casey:
I really do think, though, as soon as there's a 4.13-inch MacBook Pro, it's quite likely I'm going to pull the trigger real soon.
Casey:
And you already did.
Casey:
I mean, you've already lost that fight in the laptop department.
Casey:
So, I mean, I already won.
Marco:
Yeah, well, but like, I mean, me buying new laptops is a given.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
But desktops, that's an event.
Casey:
That's also true.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
All right, we should probably get back to Ask ATP.
Casey:
How long ago did we start this?
Casey:
Brian Hoffman writes, can you guys explain what you don't like about Apple News?
Casey:
Is it just the UI or is there something more?
Casey:
Your comments over the last few years brushed it off as almost an obvious tall pile of garbage, but for me, it's become my go-to news source.
Casey:
I'm also looking to Apple One and News Plus articles.
Casey:
Yes, the UI could be improved, but so could photos.
Casey:
Just wondering.
Casey:
You know, I don't ever touch Apple News unless I end up there by accident because somebody posted a link there.
Casey:
I don't know how to...
Casey:
describe it but i know that there are affordances in apple news that are different from the standard way ios works like i think swiping back actually gets you to a different article if i recall correctly so if you do like a left to right swipe i would expect you to go back to the prior screen but it's like oh no no here's the here's another article for you
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Like, I don't want that.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
Every other app on my phone, when I swipe from left to right, it goes backwards.
Casey:
And you're just sending me to a different article, which I guess is kind of backwards, but that's not what I want at all.
Casey:
Additionally, like sharing, to me, if I'm going to share a link with somebody, I want to share the canonical version of that link, which 99% of the time is the web.
Casey:
I don't want to share a fricking Apple news article.
Casey:
Like if you're going to share something, share the web version, please.
Casey:
And thank you.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I just, I don't, I just don't care for it.
Casey:
I don't like it.
Casey:
Half the time I end up there, it's for a paywalled article and I don't even know it until I land there, which I guess isn't any different than the web, but I just, I don't care for it.
Casey:
John, why don't you tell us what is wrong with Apple news?
John:
the second bit is what you got the content in apple news is content from web pages and it should be viewed on the web the reason everyone has animosity towards apple news is when we see an apple news link we're like oh i don't want to tap that and launch into a dedicated app for this special kind of url that is worse than a web browser that is more annoying to use than a web browser and makes the article look worse and you know that article in most cases came from the web to begin with and it's like a worse version of the article on the web now granted
John:
The web is annoying too.
John:
That's why we run ad blockers and everything on our devices, right?
John:
But in general, the open web with URLs that are all interlinked to each other as viewed by a web browser is the proper forum for web data, not a special dedicated reading application.
John:
Even things like RSS readers that read a newsfeed from a site,
John:
show a web view for the full article or launch a web browser depending on your preference that's the right way to do this if if people were sharing links on twitter and it was like a net newswire you know nnw colon slash slash we'd be annoyed by that too because that's not the right way to do it if it's a link if it's a url and it's a web page take me to the web page don't take me to an apple news app that embeds a web view that shows a weird version of that web page apple news bad
John:
Now, I understand people who are like, okay, but I like having a dedicated app for this one type of web page.
John:
Fine, good.
John:
Don't share those links with the public.
John:
I can get your own little private place where you go to see things, but don't send, especially if it's like Twitter, if you want to send it to someone through messages and you know they're also a diehard Apple News user, fine, go for it.
John:
But if you're writing a tweet out to the world or you're putting a link on your web page, do not make an Apple News link.
John:
That's no good.
Marco:
Yeah, I feel very similarly.
Marco:
And you mentioned earlier, Casey, like you don't like how you swipe back and instead of like going logically back in the hierarchy or the history, it goes to some other article.
Marco:
And that's just that feels wrong because you're looking at the content and you're it feels like a web browser, but worse.
Marco:
And if you're going to read web content, read it in a web browser.
Marco:
That's what it's for.
Marco:
And if you do anything else, if you try to replicate a web browser-like experience in an app that is not a web browser, you're going to get all the details wrong.
Marco:
And you're going to have capabilities that are wrong.
Marco:
One of the things I love about web browsers is you can just pop open some new tabs, or you can hit Command-F and find stuff on the page real fast.
Marco:
There's all sorts of things that are built in.
Marco:
that you don't even think about because they just have been in web browsers forever and we use them every day.
Marco:
But you don't necessarily think like, oh, I need this feature until you're in something like Apple News and you want that feature and it's not there.
Marco:
Or you expect it to behave a certain way and then it behaves some different way.
Marco:
And it just feels wrong and it has limitations and weird behaviors that just make it feel either limiting or wrong or both.
Marco:
If you're reading web content, the web browser is the best app to do that in most of the time.
Marco:
And anything that forces people out of that with some weird automatic behavior like Universal Links do on Apple stuff, it just feels wrong and it's frustrating and it's annoying and it can really disrupt your flow or anger you or both.
Marco:
So I don't like things that should be in a certain format that are forcing you into their format for business reasons.
Marco:
There's a reason why if you look back at the sponsors of our show and you look at the sponsors of other podcasts, one of the little rules that we try to enforce whenever reasonably possible is –
Marco:
We don't like taking sponsors from services that are subscriptions of some kind of product where you pay per month and you get a box full of dog toys or whatever.
Marco:
And it's like, well, I don't really need a subscription to dog toys.
Marco:
And that feels like if you want to sell me dog toys, why don't I just order dog toys when I need dog toys?
Marco:
I don't actually need a subscription to that, right?
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't like when certain things are, like, forced into a subscription for business reasons where it doesn't really make sense.
Marco:
And that's kind of how I see apps like Apple News.
Marco:
Like, this is forced into this app for Apple's business reasons.
Marco:
Not because it's better.
Marco:
Not because News wants to be in this weird special app that takes over this certain type of link and that, you know...
Marco:
It kind of makes it hard to behave normally as a web browser.
Marco:
They're not doing that because it's better for you, the customer.
Marco:
In some ways, it might be, but in most ways, it's either just more limited or more annoying.
Marco:
They're doing that because it's better for them.
Marco:
It serves their strategic interests or their business interests, and that's why that is the way it is.
Marco:
I don't like...
Marco:
that kind of thing like if something is is better or native to a certain way of doing things or a certain platform or a certain type of app for viewing or consuming it i want it in that kind of app i don't i don't want to have it in some weirdo special thing like that's why i don't listen to podcasts on youtube like i use a podcast app because that's what podcasts want to be in and it's way better and that's it works the way you expect and that's it
Marco:
um and so and you know that's why every every like major podcast or every major audio platform is now adding podcasts for reasons and they're trying to cram it in like oh you use our app to listen to this particular show that we just bought and oh if you have this particular type of fridge you can listen to our podcast this podcast production company we just bought that can only play on our fridges it's like no i don't nobody wants that and
Marco:
And if you have the option of not doing that, I generally don't want to take that option.
Marco:
So I like for things to be in the place, in the app, whatever it is, where they make the most sense, where they are native and where they can be full featured and follow expectations.
Marco:
And Apple News breaks a lot of that.
Marco:
And that's why I don't like Apple News.
Casey:
Kevin Duran writes,
John:
On an infinite timescale, you know, you get the heat death of the universe.
John:
You don't get a warm-based SECs, unfortunately.
John:
This is an interesting question because it – I mean, what Kevin is pointing out is just a general trend in this part of the technology sector, which is as we are able to make smaller and smaller transistors, as the process shrinks or whatever –
John:
you need to spend those transistors on something and it turns out that if you can suddenly fit something that used to be an external chip into the you know the cpu or whatever for example putting the memory controller into the cpu putting a gpu into the cpu like this process of taking chips that used to be elsewhere on the motherboard and putting them into uh not an even bigger chip but a chip that is more or less the same size but now you can fit more stuff in it has been going on for decades and will continue to go on
John:
it doesn't mean as this process has happened it doesn't mean that suddenly you have zero you know it's just a motherboard with one chip on it because you get other chips that are elsewhere like the you know the cell modem or whatever oh you can integrate that like so this this process will continue but and it may eventually get to the point where essentially you have one chip in certain devices and then just analog stuff outside of it if we're not already there in some scenarios but it's not a new trend um and to give an example that we should put this link in the show notes it's
John:
An acronym from my childhood that I also found in my schooling at various points is VLSI.
John:
Do you know without looking it up what VLSI is?
John:
Very large scale integration?
John:
That's right.
John:
And this is kind of like the high bandwidth memory.
John:
If you make up a name like this, like very large scale integration, that sounds impressive.
John:
At least they didn't say ultra or whatever.
John:
But they did say very, very large scale integration.
John:
A term coined in the 70s.
John:
The idea was that you take a bunch of what used to be district components, transistors.
John:
I don't know if you've ever seen a little black little pencil eraser thing with three metal leads coming out of it.
John:
You take a bunch of what used to be a bunch of transistors on a board, and you can combine all those transistors into one thing that we call an integrated circuit.
John:
So all those little transistors used to be there, and now they're in one thing.
John:
That's very large-scale integration.
John:
They, they burned that term and now we can't use it for like, but just for the idea of an integrated circuit of not having separate transistors.
John:
Right.
Marco:
So see also VHF and UHF.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So, so this consolidation trend will continue as long as we are able to make smaller and smaller transistors.
John:
Eventually we won't be able to make smaller and smaller transistors and this trend will stop.
John:
And who knows, maybe we'll use DNA based computing or something.
John:
I don't know.
John:
There's other, other avenues we can go on, but transistors will not get smaller forever because physics, um,
John:
but for the foreseeable future uh we will continue to spend our transistor budget uh on putting more stuff into the one main chip which we now call a system on a chip but honestly like when when intel integrated the memory controller oh it's not a system on a chip but we're certainly putting a lot more stuff in this chip and like we cross the threshold and you say oh now it's a system on a chip you know whatever the arbitrary definition you want to say well when you put this in then it becomes a system on a chip but
John:
Yeah, we're going to see more stuff going in.
John:
Or the other direction you can go is, well, you can just keep making the GPUs bigger because you can basically make GPUs bigger forever and spend all your transistor and power budget on it.
John:
But it is advantageous to have more and more things integrated.
John:
This is another question, by the way, of like we've been talking for a couple of years now about Apple making its own cell modems for its phones.
John:
Which is a difficult thing to do, and they started on it many years ago, and they bought Intel's business for doing that, right?
John:
And we fully expect, if not in the next iPhone, and certainly the one after that, that Apple won't be using chips from Qualcomm for its cell modem, it will be using its own.
John:
Could that be integrated into the system on a chip?
John:
Maybe, but there are analog components to cell modems that may not be easy to fold in, so it may still be a good idea to have it outside.
John:
But those are the type of things that you can imagine being sucked into that.
John:
And as for discrete components being internal combustion engines, no, because there will always be discrete components because it doesn't make sense to put literally every single thing into the system on a chip.
John:
We just talked about DRAM last time.
John:
Because DRAM is manufactured in a slightly different way,
John:
it doesn't make sense to try to do sort of, you know, the manufacturing system you use for the logic and then a separate manufacturing system you use for the DRAM to try to put that on the same die.
John:
It's not always going to make sense to do that.
John:
So there will almost always be components, even if it's just like the stuff that's like...
John:
all the capacitors and the analog components for the power supplies that are outside the system-on-it-ship, that's still going to be out there.
John:
Even if it looks like it's dwindling, as we pull more things into the system-on-it-ship, we come up with new ideas to put in that board space.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Bombas.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You too can join.
Marco:
Not, you know, you too, the number two.
Marco:
You also can join at atv.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-D-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
John:
if you're listening to this now and you're just now you weren't paying attention earlier but now you're composing that email to tell me what a bread box is just stop i knew it when it was coming out of my mouth mike i can hear i can hear the tweets going now you don't know what a bread box is you've never seen a bread box here's a photo of the bread box on my countertop right now why don't you have a bread box
John:
you're missing the point of the joke it's silly it's silly that the thing we use for 20 questions and charades or whatever to to uh assess the size of things is a bread box which despite you knowing what it is and despite my grandmother having one is not the first object that springs to mind about it for size comparisons but for whatever reason what what bread box got it 20 questions right is that the the context in which you know bigger than a red box
Marco:
I believe so, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, because, like, is it bigger than a bread box?
Marco:
Like, that's the, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
What do we want to talk about?
Casey:
Do we want to talk about Slack?
Casey:
There was a request in the chat room to talk about Tesla, which I really, really don't want to do because I can't handle the feedback.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
What did Tesla do besides the weird tequila thing?
Casey:
Full self-driving is real, man.
Marco:
It's real.
Casey:
Full self-driving.
Marco:
I think it's been real like 10 times.
John:
They put a big mission to accomplish banner behind it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's real, it's real, and it's in beta.
Marco:
Oh, great.
Marco:
That's something I want to beta test.
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
You're already beta testing it, Marco.
Marco:
Bad news.
Casey:
Honestly, I haven't kept up with this.
Casey:
A couple of people have mentioned this.
Casey:
Frankly, the only people I've heard about it from are Tesla owners.
Casey:
This hasn't even made my sphere outside of Tesla people being like, ooh, I've got full self-driving now or whatever.
Casey:
I'm not even sure what's different, to be honest.
John:
This is the first I've heard of this story, but I haven't been paying attention.
John:
The last thing I saw about full self-driving is a bunch of angry Tesla owners saying that it's the worst $5,000 or whatever they ever spent and they're super angry about it.
John:
And that made me happy because they're learning that the thing they have in their car now will not drive the car for you.
Casey:
I love that you're saying that.
Casey:
Meanwhile, TKizzy in the chat says, it's pretty impressive.
Casey:
It's a limited beta.
Casey:
So is it good?
Casey:
Is it bad?
Casey:
Who knows?
John:
Drive your own car, people.
John:
Until the car drives itself.
John:
And don't trust Elon when he tells you that it does, because he's been saying that for many years now.
Marco:
There's been so many asterisks on it, and there still are.
Marco:
Every time they make progress, they do something that's very technically laudable.
Marco:
It's very impressive, but it still isn't full self-driving, which is what the feature is called.
Marco:
And every time they get one step closer to that...
Marco:
They call it full self-driving.
Marco:
It's like, well, okay, can it actually drive with no interaction from here to there, no matter what I mean by here and there, no matter what it encounters in the meantime?
Marco:
No, it can't.
Marco:
Okay, well, then that's not full self-driving.
Marco:
It might be something else.
Marco:
It might be great.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
That's what full self-driving means.
John:
It's not great because the closer it gets to that without reaching it, it's the uncanny valley, the more dangerous it becomes.
John:
Because the more it lulls the user into thinking that it really is, they really can take a nap.
John:
But they can't.
John:
Do not nap.
Casey:
That's the thing.
Casey:
All kidding aside, what level are we talking about?
Casey:
Because to me, if this isn't at least level four, which is defined as you can take a nap, then it's not self-driving.
John:
I thought that was level five.
John:
I thought level five was you can take a nap.
Casey:
No, this isn't level five.
Casey:
That's what I thought too.
Casey:
But then I was corrected that this is not level five.
Casey:
So this is very much not full self-driving.
Casey:
This is full-ish self-driving.
John:
Right, but you were saying four is you can take a nap, right?
John:
But that's not four, is it?
John:
I don't remember.
John:
We went over this many years ago.
Casey:
I'm looking at it right now.
Casey:
Level four is quote-unquote mind off.
Casey:
As level three, but no driver attention is required for safety, e.g.
Casey:
the driver may safely go to sleep or leave the driver's seat.
Casey:
All right, so what's the difference between four and five?
Casey:
Steering wheel optional on level five.
John:
But but that's that.
John:
See, that doesn't make sense to me.
John:
I guess we should have looked into these levels earlier because like if you don't need to pay attention, then why does that need to have a steering wheel?
John:
I mean, I suppose you could say, well, if you remove if you can manually drive it, it's only level four.
John:
Oh, here we go.
Casey:
Here we go.
John:
reading i should just keep reading that's that's the that's the trick you guys however self-driving is supported only in limited spatial areas like being geofenced or under special circumstances so that's like it only works on the highway so here's the thing if it says that no attention is required that's not true because if you fall asleep and it ends up running it gets off at a highway exit and then comes to a dead stop in the highway exit and you're asleep in the car because it's like well i'm i'm i've
John:
I've exited the area where I know how to drive, so it's time for you to drive, driver, and you're snoring.
John:
That's not good.
John:
And it's dangerous for the car.
John:
I mean, even if all the Teslas pull over after the exit and say, well, all our drivers are asleep, but we can't drive any farther.
John:
Anyway, I don't like level four.
John:
Level five or bust, and so far it's all been bust.
John:
yep and i don't know it didn't like somebody in the chat is saying oh well it means level four means you have a few minutes before you have to take over so it could like wake you up or whatever yeah so this is this is like the it's like the worst version of like don't worry uh you'll be needed soon but not now but you don't have to pay attention but you do have to be wakeable but like oh it's like how many it's like trying to get kids up for school it's like look either you're gonna either either you're gonna drive me there by yourself or i have to be involved in the process
Casey:
It seems so preposterous to me.
Casey:
And I, oh my God, please don't email me.
Casey:
Please don't email any of us.
Casey:
I don't care.
John:
A reminder to everyone listening that if you think that the car can drive for you, but at any moment you will be called upon to take over,
John:
You can't do that.
John:
No one can do it.
John:
No human can do that.
John:
It is against human nature.
John:
It is against the functioning of your brain.
John:
It is an incredibly dangerous situation.
John:
Drive your car until it can drive for you.
John:
There is no way you can maintain that level of vigilance over a long car trip.
John:
Your attention will wander.
John:
You will not be ready to take over in time and you will die.
John:
Don't do it.
John:
Hands on the wheel.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
A thousand percent.
Casey:
And please, for the love of God, please don't email us.
Casey:
Please, please.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
I'm telling you, I don't care.
Casey:
And I know this sounds rude.
Casey:
I realize that this sounds rude.
Casey:
I am genuinely so thankful when we get feedback because it means that you're listening.
Casey:
It means that you care enough to correct us or to give us new information, except the Tesla people who are all the worst.
Casey:
So I don't care.
Casey:
Don't email me.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
I love you.
John:
Are you including Marco in that?
John:
He's one of those Tesla people.
John:
Not that he drives anywhere anymore.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
But I have to acknowledge, I think of all the customer, I don't know, communities or groups that I'm in by the things I buy or like, I think being a Tesla customer is the worst one of those things.
Marco:
Because the rest of the community is so bad.
Marco:
How about fish?
Marco:
And I know lots of people who own Teslas who are not part of the fan base.
Marco:
They're like me.
Marco:
They own it and they like their car.
Marco:
but they don't participate in the community or fan base aspects of it i mean frankly that's pretty much how i am with fish too it's like like i i'm not i don't go to the shows i'm not super into like any of the communities around it i don't know anything about smoke the pot i do yeah i don't do any of the drugs i don't like i just listen to the music and that's it and i love the music and that's where that's where my interaction ends and
Marco:
And with Tesla, I love driving the car.
Marco:
It's a great car.
Marco:
That's where my interaction ends.
Marco:
I do not want to talk about Tesla on Twitter with people.
Marco:
I don't want to follow what Elon Musk is doing in his side projects.
Marco:
I don't want to do any of the experimental features.
Marco:
I've never used summon even because like here's another thing that here's another way I could destroy my car and it achieves a benefit I don't need.
Marco:
So no thanks.
Marco:
I don't I won't try that.
Marco:
Thanks.
Marco:
Like I just I don't care.
Marco:
I just don't care.
Marco:
It's a great car.
Marco:
I love driving it.
Marco:
That's the extent of the involvement that I want with this brand.
Marco:
And that's the relationship I have with the brand of scissors that I buy.
Marco:
When I need scissors, you know what I do?
Marco:
I buy some scissors.
Marco:
And I don't know a damn thing about the brand.
Marco:
I just know I like these scissors and I buy them.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
That's how I am about my car.
Marco:
I like this car.
Marco:
It's a great car.
Marco:
don't care at all about the company don't want to argue about it don't want to talk about all their weird you know side projects they're doing and their beta features that almost kind of sort of fully work like nope don't don't care about that i just like the car it's a great car i like driving it