Dress for the Chip You Want
John:
What are you hitting escape for most of the time, Marco?
Marco:
A lot of times I will use it to defocus a text field or something or cancel a menu or cancel a dialog box.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I use it all the time.
Marco:
Or I'll use it for autocomplete in text areas or in Xcode.
Marco:
I use it all the time.
John:
the main thing i use it for when i'm not like an emacs which i'm rarely in but anyway the main thing i use it for believe it or not is canceling drags i don't know if you two do this but i'm very often dragging things around in the finder and saying all the time and thinking better of it i'm like no and i just want that drag to be over and i love escape for that i do wonder when people who don't know how to do that what do they do when they have essentially a handful of files and they're like remember where they started direct because the finder's so weird about that like i didn't know i could do this this is amazing
John:
Oh my gosh, really?
Marco:
Yeah, what I do, I just try to carefully put it back.
Marco:
Oh my God, Marco.
John:
Escape, escape.
John:
That's why you had your escape key for it instead of escape.
John:
You don't have to.
John:
Because carefully putting it back used to be so much better.
John:
And now in the Finder, even if I try to carefully put it back, it's like, I don't trust it.
John:
It's like, is it going to move files up?
John:
It's like it was a list view window.
John:
Try putting files back in a list view window where you have a bunch of folders turned down.
John:
Escape.
John:
Escape says bail out of this drag operation.
John:
Works across the whole operating system, I'm pretty sure.
Marco:
oh man now this is life-changing this so this even like when you when you told me like a year ago to like because in order to get to my downloads folder i used to like click the stupid icon that brings up the stack and then like the keyboard shortcut yeah and you told me just hold down command option and click the download folder and it brings up the folder oh yeah the doc thing yeah
John:
yeah like oh my god that's so much better like that's yeah imagine if you configure it to do that on plain click imagine that i've been waiting like 17 years for apple to say you know it would be great if you could make that an option or a plist setting or something nope and so like it's ingrained in my hands i'm command option clicking on folders in the dock forever
John:
yeah thank god for that you still can't dock a folder alias by the way i filed that so many times they just keep closing it as like we don't care make an alias to a folder drag it into the dock try to drag something into that alias of the folder does the thing dragged go into the folder that thing's an alias up nope it just bounces back because it's like i have no idea what to do here it doesn't make any sense to me you dragged a file onto a folder icon i can't figure it out abort abort
John:
just put the file in the folder apple or don't let me put aliases to folders in the doc those are your two choices either one is fine current behavior is maddening anyway how do you really feel i filed it i file it they close it i should file every five years i should refile that bug not that anyone's working on the doc anymore that's that's a reasonable interval to to basically like bother them again about something yeah to watch your feedbacks just descend into the black hole you know
Casey:
We have one final reminder about ATP merch.
Casey:
John, can you tell us what should we be buying right now?
John:
We're buying everything.
John:
This is the last time we will be telling you about the ATP Holiday Store, which I know it seems ridiculous because it's only the middle of November as we're recording this.
John:
But like I said, we're trying to push the sale back so you have a chance of getting these things in time for the holidays.
John:
This sale ends on Sunday, November 17th.
John:
This is your last chance.
John:
If you've been putting it off saying, maybe I'll get something, whatever, you got to do it now.
John:
By the time you hear this episode, it may be within a day or two of the thing closing.
John:
So what do we have this year?
John:
Obviously, we have our gift memberships.
John:
And by the way, gift memberships are available all year round.
John:
We put them on holiday sale because it's the holiday season.
John:
You might want to give someone a gift membership.
John:
You might want someone to get you a gift membership.
John:
You can do that at any time.
John:
On the store page, if you're logged in, you'll see a link.
John:
um to to give you give you an atp gift membership or you can just tell people to go to atp.fm slash gift it's real easy they can do that at any time that's the one thing that lives past the end of the sale is the gift memberships you should still you know get them now by and copy the link now if you can't but anyway the actual merch so we have all our m4 stuff as we have discussed in the past several episodes the m4 series of chips that have been released for max are really good um
John:
Lots of people writing in to say, hey, I don't have an M4 Mac.
John:
I have like an M2 Mac.
John:
Can I get an M2 shirt?
John:
It's like just like going for a job interview or being in a job.
John:
Dress for the job you want.
John:
You may not have an M4 now.
John:
Dress for the chip that you want in your Mac because who knows when the M4 chips will be sold again.
John:
So even though you might have an M1 or an M2 or maybe an Intel CPU like some people.
John:
You should still get the M4 shirt because by the time you actually get an M4, maybe we'll be selling M6 shirts, right?
John:
So if you want a shirt to match your thing, you should get it.
John:
And like I said, this is a great line of chips, as we will discuss at further length in follow-up, believe it or not, for like the third week in a row, how great the M4 things are.
John:
And the shirts, they're just M4 shirts.
John:
But if you want to represent and show that you're representing one of the really good M chips, not just because it's the biggest number that's available, but this is a really good one.
John:
So M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max.
John:
t-shirts long sleeve sweatshirts you name it we've got it uh in black and also in a whole bunch of colors with the monochrome m4 logo on them and of course we've got our atp pullover hoodies uh in various colors as well we got the atp pixels uh product in a variety of different styles that's proven to be very popular um
John:
long sleeve t-shirt t-shirt sweatshirt all that good stuff and we have our plain old atp logo stuff uh with colored shirts and also the black shirts with the rainbow logo on it we have our zip hoodie which is very popular my family loves the zip hoodie when they destroy and or lose them they make me buy another one that's how much they like them it's one of the few pieces of branded merch that my children are willing to wear because the branding is discreet it's just a tiny little embroidered logo logo
John:
And otherwise, it's just a really nice, comfortable, high-quality hoodie, and that's what they love.
John:
We've got the polo available.
John:
Speaking of dressing for the job you want, or maybe dressing for the season you want because it's short-sleeve, we've got a whole bunch of mugs left.
John:
So if you want a Cobalt ATP mug, you know, maybe get two because people drop them and break them, and then they want a replacement, and we don't sell them anymore in that color or style, and they're sad, so always get backups.
John:
And we've got the ATP hat.
John:
So yeah,
John:
Yeah, this is your last chance.
John:
You're not going to hear about the sale anymore because by the time we record the next episode, the sale will be over and it will be too late.
John:
So get your stuff while you can.
John:
ATP.FM slash store.
John:
Maybe I should mention that.
John:
That's where you go.
John:
ATP.FM slash store.
John:
And if this was an actual podcast ad, I would have to read it a third time, but it's not.
John:
So I won't.
John:
don't forget to go to atp.fm slash store that's atp.fm slash store one more time this is just an exclusive offer for our listeners atp.fm slash store oh we didn't even mention that you remember if you are a member you get a 15 off discount code uh that'll be on your member page if you're already logged in uh to atp.fm when you go to the store page it will fill it in automatically but you can always go to your member page and copy and paste it
John:
We even make a little copy button so you don't have to try to select text in a web browser, which is always ridiculous.
John:
That's why these copy buttons are all over ATP.fm because I hate trying to select text in a web page.
John:
It's like the selection is all over the place and you get like a space at the beginning end and stuff.
John:
So we will give you a copy button.
John:
And if you want to become a member, just get a discount.
John:
It's totally worthwhile to do so if you can save more than the one month of membership costs.
John:
So there you go.
Casey:
And I will just pipe in very quickly and do my annual, I guess, biannual reminder, my common reminder that there is always, always like 50 people that say, oh, I forgot to do my order.
Casey:
But there's also a handful of people that legitimately say, oh, no, oh, no.
Casey:
I'm that person.
Casey:
It's me.
Casey:
I'm the problem.
Casey:
It's me.
Casey:
There's nothing we can do.
Casey:
Once the sale closes, the sale closes.
Casey:
So don't be that person.
Casey:
Don't be the one that has to come hat in hand, puss in boot style, looking up at me with your big gigantic eyes saying, oh, but Casey, I forgot this time.
Casey:
Don't be that person.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash door.
Marco:
I recently learned that was from a pop song, but I have already forgotten which artist and song it was.
John:
oh no what's from a pop song i'm the problem it's me oh yeah well it's a it's an obscure act you probably never heard of it oh god let's move on i might have gone to their concert depending on who it is i don't think you did you would you would remember it would i you would indeed your wallet would remember it yes it would oh what is it taylor swift yes yeah i definitely didn't do that that's not the type of thing it would slip your mind no i did see billy eilish though
Marco:
all right oh how was that honestly excellent like i don't really good was that i'm assuming that was not at your request so uh correct you bring enough people to fish concerts and eventually you got to go to a different one it's payback time well uh i am not surprised that that was a very good show honestly it was amazing i like i totally i totally get why she's so popular like there's very good reason it's very it was very good
Casey:
All right, let's move on before everyone writes us an email.
Casey:
And let's start with Jason Sims, who writes, Aperture was indeed developed from scratch by Apple.
Casey:
I guess one of us, John, I suppose, had said that it was a purchase.
John:
I just said I didn't remember.
John:
Remember we were talking about Apple's various pro apps, many of which were purchased from the outside, like Logic and Shake and stuff.
John:
And I said Aperture, I couldn't remember if that was a purchase or developed in-house.
John:
And we got a clarification, developed in-house.
Casey:
there you go well i appreciate it jason and then canceled in-house um with regard to the macbook pro eric roach uh reminded us to point out that the plain m4 macbook pro now supports two external displays at up to 6k or 60 hertz over thunderbolt or one 6k 60 hertz over thunderbolt and one 4k 144 hertz over hdmi
Casey:
The M3 MacBook Pro, by comparison, the plain M3 MacBook Pro, not the M3 Pro, not the M3 Max, but the plain one, supported only one external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz and required you to close the lid to use a second display with up to 5K resolution at 60Hz.
John:
I can't remember if we mentioned this on the thing's launch, or maybe we just, you know, it unfolded into our past discussions of the multiple display controllers on the M4.
John:
But just to reiterate, one of the big limitations that people didn't like about the plain M3 MacBook Pro was...
John:
It's not very good external display support.
John:
You just got one external display.
John:
And then halfway through the life of that product, Apple said, oh, here's a software fix to let you have two external displays.
John:
But you got to close the lid because we take away the internal one when we give you the external one.
John:
All those limitations are gone with the M4.
John:
You get legit two external displays, plus also still the one on the laptop, which is pretty much what I think should be table stakes for a bottom of the line MacBook Pro.
John:
And now it is.
Marco:
Yeah, honestly, that baseline MacBook Pro that just has the M4 and the M4 Pro chips, that is now a pretty good option for a lot of people.
Marco:
I think that competes well with the MacBook Air because it gives you the Pro screen, the Pro speakers, the port on the right side, the SD card slot on the right.
Marco:
It actually gives you a lot over the MacBook Air for not a ton more money, but
Marco:
You do kind of pay for it in weight and thickness, but that's a really good option for a lot of people now.
Marco:
And so I'm happy to see that product no longer be this weird asterisk that you try to convince people not to buy.
Marco:
That's a product now that I could actually see myself buying the equivalent in the future.
John:
And it starts with 16 gigs of RAM.
John:
And I don't know if we emphasized that when we first talked about it, but you just mentioned it in passing.
John:
These things in the past have had two ports only on one side, but now it has three ports.
John:
So one of the ports on the other side, you might think, well, who cares?
John:
You know, it's the bottom of the line one.
John:
How many ports do you really need?
John:
Two is fine.
John:
It's so convenient to have ports on both sides because you never know what kind of desk setup you're going to be sitting at, which side it's convenient to get the power cable from.
John:
Right.
John:
If you have a USB-C power thing, you're not using the MagSafe thing because MagSafe is still just on one side.
John:
Yeah, there's there's no there's nothing you need to excuse on the baseline one anymore.
John:
It's got a great processor.
John:
It's got more ports than it used to.
John:
It's got reasonable display support.
John:
It is really a better, more expensive MacBook Air.
John:
Of course, when the M4 MacBook Air comes out, we'll see how that model shakes up.
John:
But for now, it's a really impressive machine.
Marco:
Yeah, honestly, it's a great option for a lot of people.
Casey:
With regard to the Mac Mini, we have quite a bit of follow-up.
Casey:
And the bombshell that dropped, I think it was sort of mentioned during Quinn's teardown, which I think happened either right before or right after we recorded, but then it has become even more of a bombshell.
Casey:
The new Mac Mini has, quote-unquote, modular storage.
Casey:
So as it turns out, there are different setups and boards, and we'll talk about that in a minute.
Casey:
But all the different Mac Minis have their SSDs on removable boards, which...
Casey:
is not super duper.
Casey:
In fact, I would argue it isn't user replaceable unless you are really going spelunking, but it makes it a lot more replaceable than it ever had been before.
Casey:
So John, can you tell us more about this?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the modular storage, anyone who's familiar with the inside of recent Apple Silicon Macs will recognize the quote unquote modular storage.
John:
It's the same type of storage module that's used in the Mac Studio and also very similar to the one that's used in the Mac Pro, including even the 2019 Mac Pro, not even the Apple Silicon one.
John:
um it is a card that goes into a slot that has the you know ssd nand storage on it and that make you think great storage is upgradable on these things and technically speaking it kind of is uh we'll put some links in the show notes to uh someone demonstrating
John:
What it takes to upgrade the storage on a Mac Mini.
John:
It's Dostude1, which I think that name is not quite appropriate, but it's fine.
John:
The name is awesome.
John:
And also the same YouTuber has done upgrades in the past with Mac Studio SSDs.
John:
The short version is get out your soldering gun.
John:
You can't buy those little modules.
John:
They're not standard modules.
John:
It's not like an M.2 module or NVMe type thing.
John:
It's not standard at all.
John:
It's an Apple proprietary thing.
John:
you can't buy those Apple proprietary things.
John:
You can find a used one like an eBay or something and stick it in.
John:
But then in that case, it still feels like it doesn't work unless the NAND is actually blank.
John:
So what DASDU does is gets, either takes the one that came with it and desoders the NAND chips from it and then buys blank, no data, nothing on them NAND chips and re-solders them on top of the board.
John:
Or if you look at the Mac Studio SSD upgrade video from a year or two ago,
John:
We'll put a timestamp link in there.
John:
Someone made a custom printed circuit board by looking at apples and saying, I'm going to make my own empty printed circuit board like that.
John:
So you could, in theory, find that person in France who made that custom circuit board, buy it from them, find those blank Nans that Dostude found to buy somewhere, buy those, solder the two of them together, and voila, you have an empty storage module that will work in a Mac Studio, maybe a Mac Pro, and certain Mac Minis, which we'll get to in a second, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So it seems to me, like, at no point in this process is anybody hacking any security key or fooling some DRM encrypted or jailbreaking anything, right?
John:
It's just a question of how hard is it to get the parts.
John:
So it seems like if someone wanted to sell third-party SSD upgrades for the Mac Mini or the Mac Studio, I don't see why they couldn't do...
John:
What the person in this video did, which is find that guy in France and like buy his printed circuit board design and mass produce it.
John:
Find where that guy bought those blank NAND modules for because they're not like special Apple NAND modules.
John:
Or if they are, he found a place to buy them and then combine them, put them in a retail box and say, hey, guess what?
John:
Would you like to upgrade your Mac mini to a bigger SSD?
John:
We'll sell it to you for half the price that Apple sells it.
John:
I'm not quite sure why that market hasn't opened up.
John:
Maybe it's because there's not enough people who own these devices to make it worthwhile to do what I just described.
John:
But technically speaking, you'll see two YouTube videos where it is literally possible to upgrade the storage on your Mac using those little card thingies, which is good, I guess.
John:
But like I said, since 2019 with the Mac Pro, the little module things have been upgradable.
John:
It just hasn't been a thriving, I'm not going to say legitimate, thriving, normal third-party market for upgradable storage.
John:
You really have to be kind of like a do-it-yourselfer or someone who wants to use a soldering iron or someone who wants to cruise eBay for used parts and deal with all those things.
John:
And it's all sorts of weird caveats and stuff.
John:
So it's not ideal.
John:
But Apple, look, if you're not going to solder it to the board...
John:
a you should sell them separately yourself at your own ridiculous prices because at least that gives people an option of upgrading you know if you could buy an upgrade from apple at ridiculous prices at least you'd feel comfortable that i know this is going to work and b it would be great if you just let third parties build these things and sell them remember when third parties used to be able to sell parts that you can put inside max to make them better remember casey when you could buy third party ram and stick it in your mac there'd be no problems whatsoever did it make it better though all right
John:
I mean, for years, for people who are newer Mac users, for years and years, for a good sort of middle portion of, like, the recent Mac era, it was standard practice to tell people, if you were a tech nerd, oh, hey, buy this Mac, but buy it with the minimum everything, the minimum RAM and the minimum storage, and then when you get it, buy a third-party RAM upgrade and a third-party storage upgrade, and your total cost...
John:
Will still be less than if you had bought those upgrades from Apple.
John:
This whole expensive upgrade thing is not new for Apple.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
That was how I bought my first few Macs because I would never be able to afford the Apple upgrade prices.
Marco:
Like, you know, this is one of the things we very much lost going to the modern, like everything soldered on the board kind of era that like used to be able to just buy the base model and go on Newegg or Amazon and buy some components and stick them in.
Marco:
And it was fine.
John:
Yeah, and it's not, you know, entirely Apple being super evil by soldering all these things to the board.
John:
Like lots of things used to be replaceable.
John:
Cell phone batteries all used to be easily replaceable.
John:
They're not really anymore.
John:
Laptop batteries all used to be easily replaceable.
John:
They're not anymore.
John:
It's not just Apple.
John:
It's the industry.
John:
There's reasons for this.
John:
It's more reliable.
John:
It's smaller.
John:
It's thinner.
John:
It's more power efficient, yada, yada.
John:
But when Apple does make something like, say, a desktop computer where they have enough room to make removable storage and they choose to do so, like the Mac Studio, like the Mac Pro, and now also like the Mac Mini,
John:
If you're going to make modular storage, Apple, like give consumers the benefit of modular storage.
John:
Again, even if it's only Apple selling the upgrades at their own ridiculous prices, Apple would not be losing any margin.
John:
It just makes it more flexible.
John:
It's one of the benefits of desktop computers is they can be larger, take more power.
John:
You have enough room for removable stuff inside them.
John:
They didn't do it with the SoC.
John:
They didn't do it with the RAM.
John:
You know, that all makes sense given the way the Apple Silicon works.
John:
But they did do it with the storage.
John:
And it's kind of a shame for it to remain the realm of
John:
uh people who are comfortable desoldering chips and everything because it's it's not easy watch these videos it's not the type of thing you'll just do in two seconds it takes skill and care and you'll probably screw it up yeah i think this the benefit of these ssd modules being socketed now
Marco:
is not really for us to change them.
Marco:
It's to make it cheaper and easier for Apple to change them in the case of service.
Marco:
So if in four years your SSD dies, this is probably going to be a cheaper repair that Apple would have to do to repair it than replacing the entire logic board, which is what they would have to do before.
John:
Yeah, and David Shaw points out in the chat that for the Mac Pro, you can, in fact, buy Apple branded SSD upgrades at Apple ridiculous prices.
John:
So it's not unprecedented.
Casey:
Oh my good grief.
Casey:
Look at this.
John:
I mean, they cost what you would think they cost.
John:
They cost exactly the same as if you can configure the machine with it, which is to say six, seven, eight times the real cost.
John:
But you can buy them and you can be sure that they'll work because they're from Apple.
John:
Gracious.
Casey:
$2,800.
Casey:
$2,800 for an 8-terabyte SSD array.
John:
Or 2 terabyte for $1,000.
John:
That's how much storage costs, right?
John:
$1,000 for 2 terabytes?
John:
That's accurate, right?
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
No, is that not?
Casey:
Yet more reasons why the Mac Pro is trash.
Casey:
Am I right?
John:
Am I right?
John:
$1,000 for 2 terabytes.
Casey:
Mac Pro is trash.
Casey:
We can all agree.
John:
That module really does look very similar to the one that's in the Mac.
John:
I think it's probably exactly the same module that's in the Mac Studio and some Mac minis.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So from our friend Paul Haddad, who is one of the authors of TweetBot and May It Rest in Peace and Ivory and so on and so forth, Paul got a couple of minis, I think with the intention of returning one, if not both,
Casey:
And so Paul had some toots about this.
Casey:
Paul writes, the M4 Mini Pro SSD is faster at comparable sizes compared to the M4 Mini, the M4 Plane Mini, if you will.
Casey:
And there's some links we'll put in the show notes with different toots of his that demonstrate this.
Casey:
Paul continues, I use the SSD benchmark results from Tom's hardware for the 512 gig M4 Mac Mini.
Casey:
and compared it to my m4 pro mac mini with the same size ssd uh the m4 plane at 512 gigs from tom's guide is 3437 megabytes per second read 3017.3 right in comparison to the m4 pro that paul has uh which is at also 512 gigabytes at
Casey:
5,085.4 megabytes as compared to 3437 for read, and 5,397 for write as compared to 3,017.
Casey:
So again, 5085 instead of 3437, and 5397 instead of 3017.
John:
Yeah, so this was the difficulty of, like, we're trying to suss this out going back and forth on Mastodon.
John:
It's like, benchmarks are weird because you really kind of want to run the benchmarks on, like, the same machine or at the same time or in the same environment at the same temperature.
John:
It shouldn't be that big of a deal for storage, but...
John:
I'm not entirely sure what explains this.
John:
So very often you'll see different SSD sizes have different speeds because sometimes very larger sizes will have like four chips instead of two and you can read and write them all in parallel.
John:
And these speed tests are always like, what is the most fastest that I can shove on there?
John:
It's only kind of a realistic test if you're transferring individual very large files because otherwise the overhead of doing with all the individual file metadata will swamp the transfer rate.
John:
But it's just like, what if you care about like,
John:
copying huge video files or reading and writing huge video files you know in a video editor or something that's where you might care about this and there's you know black magic disk speed test try to measure this why would the same size ssd though be faster on an m4 pro than it is on an m4 i'm not sure what explains that is it a different nand chip uh does the m4 pro have more have a wider path
John:
uh to nand than the plain m4 i would love for somebody who is more intimately familiar with these to explain this it could just be that you know that benchmark test was run with uh you know the the the benchmark setup was different or uh they ran a different part of the test or something like that so that's why i put links in the show notes to these two results this is the best we could do because no one had these two machines sitting there someone had an m4 someone had an m4 pro we were collecting the results you know 3 000 to 5 000
John:
is a pretty big difference.
John:
And so if you care about that, maybe benchmark the machine you're planning on buying before you buy it.
John:
But practically speaking, if you're not doing anything that cares about the absolute fastest sequential read and write speed, you probably don't care too much about this.
Casey:
All right, then iFixit did their teardown, which is only like...
Casey:
five or six minutes long and you can see in here and this is what i was alluding to earlier that the ssd modules are different between the m4 mac mini and the m4 pro mac mini in fact the m4 uh module looks very very similar to the uh mac pro module that you were talking about earlier john and the studio module
Casey:
Is it okay?
Casey:
But the M4 Pro looks quite a bit different.
Casey:
But you can see the differences in their teardown.
Casey:
Additionally, there's actually... And this is super cool.
Casey:
No sarcasm.
Casey:
This is super freaking cool.
Casey:
Maybe this has always existed for other machines and I didn't realize it.
Casey:
But there is an actual support document that talks about how a user could replace...
Casey:
the ssd module and of course it says before you begin remove the following parts bottom cover antenna plate and fan which is not an insignificant process but they link to the instructions for each of these things and they tell you exactly how to do the ssd and i am here for this i again perhaps this was something that existed i didn't i wasn't aware but this is super cool it is worth looking at this uh write-up on apple's website just to see how well documented it is i'm
John:
Given a little bit of side-eye, though, because I've watched a lot of Mac Mini teardowns at this point, and the bottom cover, which is plastic, which is where the power button is, that bottom plastic cover, it has four little pin clip thingies that you have to unclip, and also glue, because why not?
John:
And I have seen at least one YouTuber crack...
John:
the plastic bottom while trying to pry it up with those little guitar picks sort of like little thingies like that iFix it uses.
John:
It is a thin plastic bottom cover.
John:
Why is it glued?
John:
The thing's not waterproof.
John:
Does it, like, do you need to glue it?
John:
Like they could have just screwed the bottom in, but then you'd have visible screws.
John:
So fine, you don't want to use screws.
John:
They use those little pin thingies.
John:
Are the pin thingies not sufficiently strong that they have to glue it?
John:
When you put it back, you're not going to glue it.
John:
No one, like, no one's going to buy a little stick of the special Apple glue and put it around the rim to glue the thing back together if you're doing it at home.
John:
Maybe if they repaired it in an Apple repair center, they would do that.
John:
But you're not going to.
John:
So getting the bottom off these things is, I feel like, needlessly unfriendly.
John:
iFixx didn't even make too much of a mention of it because they're so used to prying apart things that are glued together.
John:
And this is actually an easy one compared to opening up a phone or an iPad or something.
John:
But geez, like it's a it's a aluminum square with a plastic thing on the bottom.
John:
Just let me unscrew the bottom and take it off.
John:
or make it waterproof or something i don't know something something to defend against casey and all the strengths that he's going to spill on his mac mini um yeah so that that's kind of a shame but it is nice to give the instructions it's and it's pretty easy to get to once you pull out all the other stuff um one of the reasons i think the m4 pro module is different is because if you look at the the images from apple's repair guide or the teardowns you'll see that the m4 pro mac mini is
John:
is different on the inside the m4 pro soc is just plain bigger than the m4 right and therefore it has a bigger heat spreader on it and a bigger heat pipe and that bigger heat pipe leads to a larger copper heat sink with more fins kind of like on the mac studio when you when you got the lesser models you'd get a smaller aluminum heat sink and when you got the ultra you'd get a bigger copper one same deal here
John:
And the bigger SoC takes up a little bit more room so that the place where the SSD goes on the plain M4 is a little bit too narrow.
John:
So they put it kind of on the side in a skinnier little card.
John:
The connector is the same.
John:
Like the connector is exactly the way it was, but it's just it's in a different place and it's narrower.
John:
Right.
John:
So I fix it actually tried swapping them.
John:
and first they just took like an ssd from one m4 mac mini and put it into another m4 mac mini and that worked so if you have two mac minis and just one ssd you can swap it between them and it'll be fine but then they tried to put a plain m4 ssd into an m4 pro mac mini and it sort of fits like you can the connectors are the same and you can kind of shove it in there but they couldn't get that to work right so maybe that's not supportive for some reason or maybe the connector was just not connecting all the way because it was on an angle it wasn't clear they didn't detail their experience but
John:
These are two different modules, and if and when Apple does sell these modules, make sure you're buying the right one for your specific Mac Mini.
Casey:
All right, so we have a couple other things we need to mention.
Casey:
First of all, there are two NAND chips on the 256-gig model.
Casey:
I guess they're two 128-gig chips, one would assume.
Casey:
And additionally, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are on a separate PCB, which is a little baby circular one, which was kind of interesting.
Casey:
And that's the one that's mounted in the center of the fan, right?
John:
Yeah, on the very bottom.
John:
So the two NAND chips is important.
John:
I mean, it's...
John:
commonplace now but for a while back uh in the earlier apple silicon things uh they would ship the lowest end storage with a single 256 gig nan chip instead of two 128s and it would be roughly half the speed because you can read and write to both the chips at the same time and they they backtracked on that and fixed it and just to let people know going forward the mac mini also does not do that terrible half speed ssd thing so even if you get the base storage you get two 128s so it should not be a half speed drive
John:
it'll still be slower than the 512 and the one terabyte and all that other stuff but it won't be like as half as fast as it could be so that's great and the wi-fi and bluetooth being on a separate tiny little adorable circular printed circuit board just really highlights how what a shame it is that this thing doesn't have wi-fi 7 right because it's not like they need to do like a big revision to the board like at any time they could have just you know they could have designed the whole mac mini logic board and had it all ready to go and it's just a question of what
John:
little circular wi-fi bluetooth thing do we attach to it and that could have been at the last minute oh put a wi-fi 7 in there but it's not so i guess it means that the next version of this it should be easy for it to get wi-fi 7 and bluetooth 5.4 or whatever because it is entirely separate like it's literally it's such an adorable like quarter size printed circuit board that has all that stuff in it and it's just connected with antennas and wires and everything and it's i think it's at the bottom just so we can get away from the other components because all of the wireless stuff in this aluminum
John:
little cube thing is comes out the bottom where it's plastic where it's radio transparent so the you know the wireless stuff isn't nestled into the aluminum there's no like plastic lines like on old iphones on the top all the wireless stuff has to come out of the bottom so that's why the circuit board is down there but it does make it very modular
Casey:
All right, and then we had some questions with regard to external storage.
Casey:
Peter Welpton writes, in an effort to bypass the silly overpriced storage upgrades, the obvious move is an external SSD.
Casey:
What I've never really understood is, what is the best setup of files and libraries, et cetera, between an internal 256 and a larger external drive?
Casey:
How would you choose which data to put where so that you could get the best performance?
Casey:
And additionally, Dennis Lee writes, do you have a recommended best practice for how to operate a Mac with the base level of storage in a much larger secondary disk?
Casey:
Do you make symlinks between the file system and folders on the secondary disk, or do you just turn the secondary disk into the boot drive?
John:
So this is always tricky.
John:
It's kind of a shame that Apple doesn't sell the Mac Mini with an internal SSD so small that the only thing you really put on it is the operating system.
Marco:
Wait, please don't advocate for them to ship smaller SSDs.
John:
That would be an interesting thing that they could do.
John:
A little bit of the trouble of this is that...
John:
Some applications don't like it when their stuff is not on the boot drive.
John:
Some Apple applications historically have not liked it when their stuff was not on the boot drive.
John:
And you may be asking yourself, which applications is that?
John:
How do I tell?
John:
Is there some web page I can go to where Apple will tell me that I shouldn't put my photos library in external drive or it is supported and I can do that?
John:
Where do I find these answers?
John:
Okay.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I wish Apple was more upfront about that.
John:
At this point, it's Apple has done it so much.
John:
And so often it should be like in the get info screen on the finder that says just FYI, this thing really wants you to have its stuff on the boot drive.
John:
Otherwise it's going to flip out.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh,
John:
I think most applications don't care about this, but it's worth looking into.
John:
In particular, Photos is the one you probably care about if you have a big photo library because that's one of the biggest things a lot of people have on their Macs.
John:
And if you want to download originals from your iCloud photo library, you better make sure that it is supported in external drives.
John:
I don't actually know the answer because mine is on the boot drive, but I believe it is currently supported.
John:
I think maybe it's not supported to have it on like a NAS or something, but I think it's supported on an external drive.
John:
But anyway, that's one thing to look into is look at the applications that you use and how much data they have and see which ones you would like to be on an external drive and then check whether that is supported with the application vendor.
John:
Worst case, you could probably email support or something and find out for each application, hey, can I put your library, your data, your whatever on the external drive?
John:
Keep in mind that some applications do stuff like have cache folders and things that you don't get to pick where they live if the program is not very configurable.
John:
So they're just going to go in your boot drive whether you want it or not.
John:
And those might be big.
John:
So you really do have to figure out how much stuff you're going to have on your internal drive.
John:
But in general, I would say...
John:
In this scenario where you're going to have like boot drive and then bigger external drive on a desktop that's permanently connected, I would try to put everything on the external one if I could just so I wouldn't have to guess where things are and only put things on the boot drive that have to be there, right?
John:
Now, how do you accomplish that?
John:
Dennis's question.
John:
Should I make sim links?
John:
Should I make aliases?
John:
Should I make hard links to directories?
John:
How should I weave these things together?
John:
Should I do the weird overlay mount thing or whatever?
John:
It's going to be annoying.
John:
Don't use SimLinks.
John:
You'll be sad.
John:
Lots of programs don't handle them correctly.
John:
You're not going to get an answer from support about whether they do that or not.
John:
You just have to find a way.
John:
You just have to hope that your programs that you care about let you put your big stuff on the external drive.
John:
It's going to be annoying because your documents folder is going to be on the boot drive and you're like you don't try to move.
John:
There's nothing.
John:
Don't try to move your home directory to the external drive.
John:
Yes, you can do that, but you'll be sad.
John:
It's just not well supported by Apple and you're going to have to like fidget with stuff.
John:
So this is one of the reasons why people who have the money pay the stupid Apple tax to get the gigantic internal drive because dealing with it on an external drive is annoying.
John:
Um, the best case scenario is just data files that are there, right?
John:
So you, in that case, you can, nothing's ever going to be reading them except for yourself.
John:
And you can, you can put an alias in your documents folder to your external drive, or every time you save, you can just save and select your external drive from the open save dialogue.
John:
If it's all just like data files, like video files or whatever, that should all be fine on an external drive.
John:
But if it's like libraries or things that belong to stuff, like, uh,
John:
my itunes library for example it's not an external drive but it's also not in my home directory and so far that hasn't blown up in my face but every individual app has a different attitude let's say towards you trying to make it store it stuff somewhere other than where it wants to and you just have to make sure it's well supported so
John:
I don't mean to discourage people from doing this.
John:
It can be done, but it is going to be annoying.
John:
There is no seamless magic way where you can just have these merge and it just looks like one big disc.
John:
I'll just make a like transparent fusion drive out of my internal SSD.
John:
Like lots of things are technically possible, but they're just not well supported enough to recommend to somebody unless you're a nerd and you just want to do it because you think it's fun.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I understand the motivation behind this, but I don't think I would recommend it.
Casey:
I really don't.
Marco:
Yeah, the problem is like you are – if you're doing this, you are entering territory that the vendors of all your software mostly don't test or even use themselves very much.
Marco:
You know, Apple is one of many.
Marco:
Like you can tell – if you try to do this, you can tell that like, oh, no one in Apple does this.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It becomes very obvious very quickly.
Marco:
And there are some things that do work well.
Marco:
You know, John mentioned the iTunes library that I have found whenever I've needed to do that, that does work well.
Marco:
Photos, you can move your photos library.
Marco:
But I did have that problem a year or two ago when...
Marco:
It started taking up huge amounts of space on the internal drive for some kind of unclaimed or unallocated or untracked space usage.
Marco:
It was really weird.
Marco:
So it seems like you can do it again, but you're going to run into a lot of little annoyances and bugs and untested or under-tested conditions.
Marco:
And so you have to balance that with how much do you want to do this?
Marco:
How much do you need to do this?
Marco:
It will cost you something.
Marco:
So, you know, you gotta weigh all that when you're deciding.
John:
And speaking of cost, some other people also asked about performance.
John:
Is an external SSD gonna have worse performance than an internal one?
John:
And I thought I had an obvious answer to that, but then I just started to do some more research to get the numbers.
John:
And it's really weird, right?
John:
So the internal SSDs on Macs can be extremely fast.
John:
We read before some numbers about internal SSDs, the 512 internal SSD having 3,000 megabytes per second read-write, but then the M4 Pro had 5,000 read-write.
John:
You'll see them pushing up into 6,000 megabytes read-write on the bigger ones, right?
John:
Internal can be real fast.
John:
And so first you may be wondering, okay, so if internal can be up to 6,000 megabytes rewrite if I got a fast internal one, can I compete with that in external?
John:
So Thunderbolt 3 and 4 top out at 40 gigabits per second, that's 5,000 megabytes per second.
John:
So in theory, if you had a 5 or 6,000 megabyte per second internal, in theory...
John:
An external one, if it was the only thing contending for your Thunderbolt bus, could match the speed of an internal one.
John:
Like the bus wouldn't be the bottleneck.
John:
But keep in mind that these M4 things, these desktops have Thunderbolt 5, and that's 80 gigabits, and that's 10,000 megabytes per second.
John:
So the bus, the wire connecting your Mac main to the SSD, is not going to be the bottleneck most likely, right?
John:
But now the question is, what do I put at the other end of that cable that can achieve those speeds?
John:
And at first I thought, well, you probably can't find an SSD that's going to be as fast as these little NAND things that are real close to the CPU with those proprietary connectors because they probably just have a wider bus or whatever.
John:
And I looked up lots of benchmarks and you'd see people benchmarking their external SSDs and they'd be happy to get like 2,700 megabytes per second read write, 3,000 megabytes per second read write, where the internal ones were getting up to six.
John:
So I was like, wow, the external ones are like half the speed.
John:
That's a bummer.
John:
But then I found some reports of external ones that were faster that seemed to be close to the internal ones.
John:
so i don't know like again the the bus is not the the the bottleneck here it may be the so when you buy an external ssd you should buy a thunderbolt one if you buy a product that is a thunderbolt ssd that connects to
John:
with a Thunderbolt cable and uses the Thunderbolt like protocol connection stuff.
John:
You can buy that as a standalone product.
John:
You can also buy enclosures that support Thunderbolt that you plug in an NVMe standard NAND thing into.
John:
But then you're like, which enclosure do I buy?
John:
Which enclosure has the best performance that doesn't overheat, that doesn't throttle after a certain period of time?
John:
And then what SSE do I plug into that?
John:
There's a lot of it's kind of like buying an external back in the day when you buy the hard drive mechanism and the external case that it goes in.
John:
It's tricky.
John:
So if you care about the absolute fastest speed, it is easier to just find benchmarks for the built in one on the Mac that you care about and decide whether that is fast enough.
John:
But you can get very fast feeds on external SSDs, just maybe not the maximum that you can get on the internal ones.
John:
And I wish I could give you a more concrete answer about what is the source of the limitations.
John:
Again, a Thunderbolt 5, the limitation is not the bus.
John:
It's something else.
John:
Maybe it's contention for the bus if you have a bunch of other stuff going on.
John:
So I know it's not a satisfactory answer, but just like the answer is find benchmarks for the external SSD thing that you're thinking of buying, whether it is a standalone product or an enclosure and a thing.
John:
and decide if that benchmark satisfies what you think your needs are and after saying all this you may be thinking oh this is like you're saying it's so great you can do external storage you can't upgrade the ram but you can do external storage but now you're saying external storage is useless it's totally not like for normal stuff
John:
where your disk storage need is I have huge files, like say you're a video editor, you can fill like any disk or storage with just huge video files.
John:
Go out and shoot footage at 4K 120, you will fill anything.
John:
And those files can live on an external SSD that does 3000 megabytes per second.
John:
And you can edit 4K footage at that speed.
John:
Now, I'm not an expert video editor.
John:
Maybe they'll tell you that, yeah, but you'll run into problems when you do X, Y, and Z with very large products or very large resolutions or whatever.
John:
But for data files, if you just need a place to store huge data files, a big external SSD is great.
John:
And if you need every last ounce of the speed, maybe you can put your current project on the boot drive, edit it, and then put it back over there.
John:
But yeah, like for most storage...
John:
What you care about is having the space to keep your stuff, not that you're constantly going to be reading all of your stuff at 6,000 megabytes per second, so that you can't do external storage at all.
John:
And then, of course, if you really want to spend the money, I'm sure some vendor will sell you some insane external storage device that, you know, puts a bunch of SSDs in parallel and does get speeds that rival or exceed the lone single internal SSD because you can do the, you know...
John:
that whatever that thing is the mkbhd bought for his mac pro it's like a pcie card with like eight ssds stuck on it uh then you yeah then you might run into bandwidth limits but the good news is it'll go up to 10 000 megabytes per second in theory on thunderbolt 5 so external storage is still very useful but it is an x an additional complication which is why it's a shame that apple charges so much for its internal storage
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's becoming my number one bugbear is now that the base RAM is at least, you know, reasonable, the SSD prices are just from a different planet.
Casey:
They really, really are.
Casey:
I mean, well, and I guess I should also be thankful that they haven't raised prices, you know, and it seemed in a lot of ways, you know, things that should be more expensive because inflation haven't gotten more expensive.
Casey:
So there is a lot to be thankful for, but whoa.
Casey:
Man, are they ever making it up with these SSD prices.
Casey:
Gracious.
Casey:
All right, let's talk about the M4.
Casey:
Wes' campaign did the Lord's work and compiled a whole bunch of data on single-core Geekbench scores per gigahertz for the M-series chips.
Marco:
Is gigahertz the singular form of that unit of measure?
Casey:
Sorry, gigahertz.
Marco:
It's just one hertz, one gigahertz.
Casey:
Just one gigahertz.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
One ping only, please.
John:
uh anyways so uh yes uh there's a very fancy chart in the show notes and as well or there's a table as well as a chart um that that details i had to make the chart when people don't post a table whole numbers no one can look at that and know what it is you got to visualize it that's what charts are for it's for visualizing numbers humans are much better at looking at a bunch of bars of different heights than looking at numbers
John:
Even though it's like all the information is there in the numbers, it's just harder to see.
John:
So I made the chart.
John:
And you may be wondering, who cares about single core performance per gigahertz?
John:
It's just another way to demonstrate how good the M4 generation is.
John:
So what we mean per gigahertz is like, so these chips score a certain score on the Geekbench single core thing.
John:
We're just looking at this individual cores at this point here.
John:
um and whatever that score is you can also look at the clock speed that the chip was running to achieve that score and do some division and find out for each one gigahertz how much of the score that it achieved is attributable to that gigahertz right um and that matters because you might be wondering is the m whatever faster than its predecessor because it is like a quote-unquote better chip or is it just clocked higher
John:
Like, did they make changes to the CPU core, the individual CPU core that make it a better CPU core?
John:
Or is it just that changes to the processor now let them take essentially the same CPU core and just clock it higher, right?
John:
And to be clear, clocking higher is great.
John:
Back in the good old days, we used to clock things higher and they would just get faster and it was like free money.
John:
Those days are long gone, right?
John:
So just being able to clock them higher is great.
John:
And we will take every ounce of that that we can get.
John:
We would love it if the CPU never changed and they just double the clock speed every year.
John:
We would love it.
John:
There's no reason to like demand the CPUs be quote better at what they do in each clock cycle.
John:
But given that we can't keep doubling the clock speed every year, given that clock speed gains are hard fought and require process changes, and it just really is like pulling teeth to get those little bits of clock speed, it would be nice if the CPU could also do more in each turn of the crank in each one of those clock cycles.
John:
And if you look at the M1 through the M4, M1 Pro, M1, M1 Pro and Max, M2, M3, M4, and look at the performance per gigahertz, it has been increasing.
John:
The M1 had 738 Geekbench score per gigahertz.
John:
And then it goes 746, 756, 755, 759, 778, 751, 758, 763.
John:
It's going up, right?
John:
We went from 738 to 763.
John:
This is performance per clock.
John:
And by the way, obviously the clock speeds have also increased across that whole thing, which is why an M3 is faster than an M1, right?
John:
But now look at the M4's bars.
John:
They are 890, 889, and 896.
John:
It is a discontinuity.
John:
M1, M2, M3...
John:
barely eked out small gains in sort of architectural improvements and all the rest of their improvement has been from cock speed which again is great we love it and you know the m3 is certainly faster than the m1 just look at the benchmark also there's been like you know cache increases and stuff like that that also help a lot
John:
Yeah, but like there was cache increases on the M2 and on the M3 as well, right?
John:
And this is just single core, by the way, because multi-core is very different because these have different number of cores.
John:
But just looking at the individual core scores.
John:
Now, it could be that all of the additional performance per gigahertz is attributable to just massively big caches on the M4.
John:
But whatever it's attributable to be, it is a discontinuity.
John:
The M1 and M2, M3 were getting a little bit better per clock and the M4 gets a lot better per clock.
John:
Now we'll see, does this continue or do we get M5, M6, M7 that are also gradual, but it's just another way of demonstrating how much better the M4 is.
John:
And by the way, the M4 is also clock higher.
John:
That is not represented in this graph because this graph is intentionally ignoring clock increases.
John:
But yeah, the entire M4 generation
John:
is a pretty substantial leap over all of its predecessors in many different ways.
John:
We don't have a power chart in here, but lots of people who are testing these are amazed at how low power they are when they're doing nothing compared to their predecessors, which is also great.
John:
So buy those shirts.
John:
Get an M4 shirt.
John:
If you never get an M4 Mac, this is a good generation.
Casey:
So yeah, so Wes also notes that if you look at the iPhone Pro scores over the last few years, there's a similar major jump at the A18 Pro's performance per gigahertz.
Casey:
Whatever they've done to improve the performance of this latest generation of performance cores is really amazing.
Casey:
And then Ken Case points out, a fun discovery this week is that an M4 Mac Mini with four performance and six efficiency cores does a clean build of OmniFocus one and a half times faster than an M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 16 performance cores and four efficiency cores.
John:
Yeah, so that is a comparison of two chips that are very unlike each other.
John:
The lowest end M4 and the highest end M1 doing a real-world task.
John:
Ken Case runs Omnigroup, by the way, makers of lots of fine applications.
John:
And doing a thing that you need to do as part of your job.
John:
How long does it take to build this application that we develop?
John:
And after four generations of the M series chips, the slowest M4 is now substantially faster than the fastest M1 that was ever sold in a real world multi-core task.
Marco:
Yeah, this is, I mean, the progress we've made in processor performance is,
Marco:
just since the Apple Silicon era.
Marco:
Even if you only consider the Apple Silicon era within itself, not even considering how it compared to Intel.
Marco:
The M1 was not a bad chip.
Marco:
It was amazing.
Marco:
Yeah, the M1 destroyed everything before it.
Marco:
And even just when you look at what we have done since the M1, which admittedly that was, what, four years ago, a little over four years ago, something like that.
Marco:
So that was not... Four years is a long time in computers.
Marco:
But when you compare the gains we've had in the Apple Silicon era
Marco:
versus what we were getting in the Intel era for the previous 15 years.
Marco:
With Intel chips, you were lucky if you were getting maybe 5% to 7% per year faster.
Marco:
You were not getting this kind of gain.
Marco:
So this has just been an incredible run so far.
Marco:
And I'm sure it's going to ebb and flow in how quickly things progress over time.
Marco:
But we're just in a really great era right now.
John:
Yeah, and if you look at Intel, by the way, Intel now is getting a TSMC to manufacture all our parts of its chips because it can't, its process isn't as good.
John:
So the Intel chips are like, there was all this noise about them being competitive when we talked about the Qualcomm chips being competitive.
John:
All those Intel chips and Qualcomm chips when we were talking about them, they were all comparing themselves to the M3.
John:
And we always knew the M4 was coming.
John:
And it's like, OK, well, it's fair to compare it to what's on the market because they're comparing their chips to what you can buy now.
John:
And you can only buy M3 Max now.
John:
Well, that time is over.
John:
You can buy M4 ones now and they're amazing.
John:
So too bad for Intel stuff and for Qualcomm stuff.
John:
They had their brief moment in the sun when they were within shooting distance, within whatever the expression is, within punching distance of Apple's then best line of chips.
John:
But the M4s are here now and they have...
John:
jumped out ahead fairly comfortably in all measures that anyone cares about and obviously it's not just the socs everything has to do with the m4s the all the architectural changes the although it is you know the memory controllers and the storage stuff is related to the soc as well but it's it's everything about these computers um that you know that's how far we've come you wait for four generations of soc and the slowest one is faster than the fastest uh original series chip so we're
John:
we're making good progress it's great to see uh it's still it's hard fought right it requires billions of dollars in new process and lots of difficult uh chip design and lots of you know it's not as easy as it was back in the old days when we were just cranking up the clock speed and you just get faster those days are long gone but that's why it's so great to see that it's not like oh the m1 came along and it was amazing and then it just kind of plateaued after there nope they're still making good gains uh
John:
Uh, whatever brain drain happened from when all of the Apple Silicon people left to form Nuvia and that got bought by Qualcomm.
John:
Apparently it has not been enough to, uh, completely cripple Apple's ability to make good chips because the M4 chips are great.
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Casey:
So we've had fits and spurts of news over the last, I don't know, month, maybe two months about some sort of home device that Apple was flirting with.
Casey:
And we had the biggest, I guess, like summary and a little bit of new news from, as you would expect, Mark Gurman.
Casey:
This was yesterday as we record this.
Casey:
There's a lot to read here, and I apologize for that.
Casey:
But I think all of this is interesting and is a pretty good summary.
Casey:
And also, like I said, some new information.
John:
It's not just a summary.
John:
This is the way I characterize it.
John:
We've talked about this HomePod with a screen for, I think, more than multiple months.
John:
I think it's been a long time we've been talking about this.
John:
A lot of time we talked about it specifically about the robot arm that's going to make the screen point towards you or whatever.
John:
And that was all like Apple's planning a product.
John:
It's like a HomePod with a screen that might have a robot arm.
John:
Let me tell you about it.
John:
But this dump from German here is like, all right, that time is over where we talk about a vague product that Apple has.
John:
Let me tell you about the specific product that Apple is going to release.
John:
And this has tons of details that have not been in there before.
John:
I mean, he might as well have included like a name and a product shot.
John:
Like this is a lot.
John:
That's why we've included all these details.
John:
Because this is, you know, when you read the German stories that it's like, Apple might be looking at this and looking at that.
John:
And then you read the German stories is like, here's what's coming out, you know, next week.
John:
And he tells you everything about the machines.
John:
This reads like that.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So let me start reading.
Casey:
The device has a roughly six inch screen and looks like a square iPad.
Casey:
There's also a camera at the top front, a rechargeable built in battery and internal speakers.
Casey:
Apple plans to offer it in silver and black options.
Casey:
The product has a touch interface that looks like a blend of the Apple Watch operating system.
Casey:
And the iPhone's recently launched standby mode.
Casey:
but the company expects most people to use their voice to interact with the device hardware was designed around app intents a system that lets ai precisely control applications and tasks which is set to debut in the coming months the product will be marketed as a way to control home and client home appliances chat with siri and hold intercom sessions via apple's facetime software it will also be loaded with apple apps including ones for web browsing listening to news updates and playing music
Casey:
Users will be able to access their notes and calendar information, and the device can turn into a slideshow to display their photos.
Casey:
Apple's already planning a more expensive follow-up version, because of course they are, with a robotic limb that can move the screen around.
Casey:
The higher-end product could be priced at as much as $1,000, which if you follow Jason Snell's math, which is double whatever you think it will be, then it's $2,000.
Casey:
The display-only device will be $5,000.
Casey:
far less than that, and approaching the cost of competitors' products.
Casey:
And for reference, the Echo Show 8 is priced at $150, while the Echo Hub is $180.
Casey:
The Nest Hub Max costs $230.
Casey:
Apple's designed different attachments for the device, including ones that affix the screens onto walls.
Casey:
There will be bases with additional speakers that can be placed in the kitchen.
Casey:
We've got the Playdate dock all over again.
Casey:
On a nightstand or on a desk.
Casey:
The screen device, which runs a new operating system codenamed Pebble,
Casey:
too soon, will include sensors to determine how close a person is.
Casey:
It will then automatically adjust its features depending on the distance.
Casey:
For example, if users are several feet away, it might show the temperature.
Casey:
As they approach, the interface can switch to a panel for adjusting the home thermostat.
Casey:
That's very clever.
Casey:
development apple discussed launching an app store as part of the device but it recently decided to exclude this feature at least in the initial version that sounds familiar uh the product will be a standalone device meaning can operate almost entirely on its own but it will require an iphone for some tasks including parts of the initial setup apple hopes it can sell multiple units of the device to consumers who will place them around the house and use them several times a day
John:
So that is a product.
John:
That is a product that is less than, I guess, let's just say less than $1,000, according to this rumor, because I don't know if it's going to be $200 or $150, but less than $1,000.
John:
No apps, no app store.
John:
It is an appliance in the sense of...
John:
The HomePod, I guess.
John:
You don't buy apps for your HomePods, right?
John:
You just put them in your house.
John:
They do a thing.
John:
They hopefully are inexpensive.
John:
And the thing that they're going to do is it's going to be a screen that lets you do home stuff and maybe look at some photos and maybe do FaceTime stuff.
John:
And that is, I think, a pretty reasonable product.
John:
Lots of the rumors were so concentrating on that robot arm and thinking it's going to be like in your kitchen table in front of you and turning the screen around.
John:
But it's like, this is just...
John:
People say, oh, it's like an iPad I hang my wall.
John:
So what?
John:
Well, first of all, iPads are super expensive.
John:
And second, iPads don't have software that lets them do the things that this thing is going to do.
John:
This is really like, think of it as like Apple's Ecobee or something similar to that.
John:
Or I guess the Echo Show is kind of similar as well.
John:
But like, I like the idea that this doesn't have apps initially because it forces Apple to say, make this product useful with just the stuff that it comes with.
John:
You should be able to fiddle with all your home stuff and see what the temperature is and adjust your thermostat.
John:
And it's neat that you can also talk to it and have it do voice assistant stuff and it can show pictures of your family.
John:
And I guess you could do FaceTime if you had it on the kitchen counter or something.
John:
But really, I just see this as being sold as like in a fancy house to control house stuff.
John:
You'd have a couple of these hanging around and it would be.
John:
nicer than an ecobee nicer than a nest integrated into apple's ecosystem uh and it opens the door for potentially apple to sell devices that connect to this and do interesting stuff so far apple hasn't been interested in that they don't sell the thermostats they don't sell the smart lights they don't sell so they just you know they're they do home kit and they support matter and thread radios and all that stuff but they don't sell devices that connect to this but if this is not an app store play
John:
but is instead just an electronic product you buy from Apple to solve a problem for a single price one time, that, at this point, is actually kind of novel and refreshing, which is maybe sad, but that's how I feel about this.
John:
I'm like, yeah, a less than $1,000 thing that's not a full-blown iPad, that I don't want to be a full-blown iPad, that just does home stuff, that does it in a nice way with a pleasant interface with no ads, that never asks me if I want to reorder something I just ordered from Amazon, I give that a thumbs up.
Marco:
I have two major concerns about this kind of as presented.
Marco:
Number one, this is exactly the kind of product that Apple historically has kind of put out there and then neglected and then it died.
Marco:
You know, I think the entire HomePod line you can look at and say, hmm, that's the predecessor to this.
Marco:
How's that going?
Marco:
If it kept working, though.
Marco:
Well, that's a big if.
John:
I kind of hope that my Ecobee thermostat doesn't keep getting updated and doing weird stuff.
John:
I just want it to do exactly what it does now forever and not break.
Marco:
Well, here's the problem, though.
Marco:
Number two thing I'm worried about is this sounds like it depends a lot on HomeKit and HomeKit accessories and the market of HomeKit accessories and how good they are and how healthy that ecosystem is.
Marco:
And that's not a great thing I would depend on.
Marco:
You know, I have a bunch of HomeKit stuff.
Marco:
It's a mixed bag.
Marco:
And over time, it does not seem like it's going in a great direction.
Marco:
It seems like, again, it seems like it's kind of one of those things that's been put out there.
Marco:
And then it just kind of sits around.
Marco:
And we see a story play out with HomeKit that we see a lot with Apple, which is...
Marco:
They declare a certain standard.
Marco:
That standard ends up being more expensive or harder to implement than people making their own standards or other computing standards.
Marco:
And as a result, there's not much of an ecosystem there.
Marco:
It's a handful of partner brands and not much else.
Marco:
That's what we see with HomeKit.
Marco:
And HomeKit adds to it the other problem of Apple not caring that much about it.
Marco:
So the Apple Home app is kind of a mess.
Marco:
HomeKit itself is bad.
Marco:
kind of spotty here and there.
Marco:
It's not nearly as reliable as dedicated systems like the Philips Hue systems or Lutron Caseta where they kind of have their own protocols.
Marco:
Those are way more reliable.
Marco:
You don't see a lot of HomeKit products being released.
Marco:
You don't see that ecosystem really thriving.
Marco:
So whatever this product is, like Herman's talking about, this square wall pad thing, whatever this is,
Marco:
controlling home devices should probably not be a major reason why people would buy this because i think that's going to be disappointing and and probably neglected now the other parts of this you know from from a technical point of view as soon as apple released standby mode on the iphone we were all saying like why isn't this just like an ipad that you can stick somewhere and it'd be like an appliance you know it seems like they made this system on the iphone which is like
Marco:
This whole environment where you're kind of running these blown up but small information density widgets in kind of this like appliance-y kind of mode.
Marco:
That is indeed screaming out for like more products to expand what that does.
Marco:
But even that, Apple put it out there and kind of didn't do anything with it after that.
Marco:
They put it out and kind of walked away whistling like a cartoon character.
Marco:
Are they going to invest more in that?
Marco:
Is it going to work better?
Marco:
Is it going to have better capabilities?
Marco:
Is it going to be a little bit easier to develop for because standby is not super easy to develop for?
Marco:
And then we're moving into the AppIntense system that this is allegedly based on, which, again, that's part of Apple Intelligence.
Marco:
That's part of the plan for the next year part of Apple Intelligence, where it will hopefully be able to index and then start operating on AppIntense that are apps exposed.
Marco:
But
Marco:
That, first of all, is an API that doesn't exist yet for an area of iOS, which is intense, that historically has been very limited, a little bit buggy, very hard to develop for.
Marco:
And now you're launching it allegedly or developing or kind of relying on that ecosystem, which is difficult, buggy, and not well-supported, and largely non-existent so far.
Marco:
Integrating that with Apple Intelligence, which is not – it's barely existing so far.
Marco:
That's in its very early days.
Marco:
Trying to build upon Siri, which –
Marco:
So far, we're still waiting for it to get good.
Marco:
It hasn't yet.
Marco:
And a quick aside here.
Marco:
I think it was a huge mistake to launch the Siri UI redesign with the colorful border around the screen.
Marco:
before it is the Apple Intelligence version of Siri.
Marco:
They should have paired those things together because what people see now is, oh, Siri's different.
Marco:
This is the update.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
And then you ask to do something and it still sucks.
Marco:
And then you think Apple Intelligence sucks.
Marco:
I think that was a terrible marketing move to split that off.
Marco:
The colorful border should indicate this is the new Apple Intelligence Siri.
Marco:
And if that Siri isn't ready yet, we shouldn't be seeing that colorful border yet.
Marco:
Anyway, that's an aside.
Marco:
So going back to the square pad wall thing.
Marco:
It seems like this is a product in this, you know, Mark Gurman conception, which I'm sure is incomplete and missing a lot of the point and way less cool and missing some of the features.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
But in this version of it, what I'm hearing is here's a product that we're kind of not sure where this fits in a lot of people's homes, lives and budgets being built upon a bunch of products.
Marco:
kind of unreliable or often neglected parts of Apple's tech stack and business.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm a little wary of this product the way it's described so far.
John:
I kind of like it because the competitors are so terrible.
John:
Like, for example, when I was visiting my brother out in California, they wanted something in their house that could just show like their calendar.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, their Google calendar, whatever they were using.
John:
But it was like somewhere convenient in the house, like in the kitchen or on the wall or whatever, just so they can keep track of stuff.
John:
They don't have to like look on their phone or scroll or whatever, because calendars are big.
John:
You need to see lots of stuff.
John:
That type of appliance, a relatively inexpensive compared to like an iPad, thing that can just show your calendar and like the weather and the time.
John:
People buy those that do literally nothing else.
John:
They don't have any apps.
John:
They don't have any features.
John:
They don't control any home stuff.
John:
All they do is show their calendar.
John:
It's not even interactive.
John:
You can't even interact with it.
John:
It just shows your calendar and the events and the time and maybe the weather and...
John:
And it's like, you know, $100 and it's some weird Android tablet and they buy it and they're happy with it.
John:
Like the fact that it doesn't have apps, I think is key for this product.
John:
I hope it never has apps because I just want it to be a inexpensive in Apple land, which probably means like $299 or whatever.
John:
But still like a thing that's not an iPad, a thing that is...
John:
inexpensive compared to an ipad that just does a limited number of things and looks nice and doesn't have ads on it and doesn't constantly want you to buy things and you know isn't doing weird creepy stuff or whatever it has good security it's not selling any of your information and it just does something boring right i think there's a market for something like that i've always wished apple would make one of these things because a lot of the third-party ones you have questions of like is this just constantly gonna be selling me things is it you know
John:
listening to hear what TV shows I'm watching and it's selling that information to some data broker or whatever.
John:
Apple is a company that I trust to do a simple thing that just shows the time and the weather, shows the family calendar, shows a slideshow of, you know, photos of my kids when it's idle, right?
John:
And if as a bonus, it can also control my HomeKit enabled thermostat or
John:
something that's great right and you know setting aside how good home could's going i don't have a lot of experience with home stuff but it seems like there is no with the exception of lutron which is like flawless and works perfectly but is not a sort of smart uh like smart app platform or anything i don't think they have anything equivalent to the the big thing with the screen with the exception of sort of infrastructure stuff that's amazing everything that tries to do something nicer um
John:
uh ends up being kind of like flaky or annoying or just sort of not up to apple standards so i think apple should have a product like this and yes they should also make the home kit stuff better and they need to deal with that and they need to actually use all the thread radios that are shipping every other devices by the way uh the mac mini also has a thread radio i don't we don't even mention it anymore but like apple everything apple sells has thread radios
John:
What is it good for?
John:
What is it being used for?
John:
Who knows?
John:
Someday it will be super important.
John:
But anyway, Apple does need to shore that up.
John:
But setting all of that aside, just a little cheap screen that's not a hand-me-down iPad that comes with mounting hardware that you can stick somewhere in your house that looks nice and does a simple thing, I think that's a good product.
John:
I question why Apple – not question.
John:
I'm kind of amazed that Apple is building it because –
John:
I currently don't see the services revenue angle, and it seems like everything Apple makes needs to have that angle, but this has no apps, no cut of percentage of developer stuff for it, presumably no subscription other than maybe iCloud they can integrate into that.
John:
It's just a thing you buy that's nice that does something in your home, and I long for products like that that are not junked up, and I hope that's what this is.
John:
If it's not what this is and they get all tied up with a robot arm thing and try to picture this as the ultimate...
John:
home kit console for a fantasy house that doesn't actually exist outside of apple's little model home where everything is controlled by home kit and it all works yeah because you know in real life people have ring doorbells people have google security campbells people have all sorts of different stuff and this thing is not going to help you like integrate that heterogeneous smart home and clarify it all and connect with home like that's not this product right but in that case i'm just like can you at least show me a calendar and a clock in the weather and maybe i'll buy it
John:
The bar is low, is what I'm saying.
John:
For stuff like this, the bar is really low.
John:
It's hard to find stuff like this that is actually nice.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I've never had any of the screen-based assistants in my house.
Casey:
We did have...
Casey:
The original, very tall, tubular echo.
Casey:
We have a couple of echo dots that we almost never use, to be honest.
Casey:
In fact, there's one in our primary bedroom that about the only time it ever gets used is for me to tell it to clear my notifications after a delivery from Amazon.
Casey:
Or occasionally Penny will go to sleep in her bed in the bedroom while we're downstairs watching TV.
Casey:
And so I will do a drop in up to the bedroom to tell her to come downstairs and go pee before we go to bed.
John:
We've got one of those dots too, by the way.
John:
And it is basically the Amazon has delivered something light.
Casey:
Yep.
John:
And I like it for that function.
John:
i like that i can when it lights up let me know that there's a package and i mean i i won mine for free in a work contest so i didn't even pay for it but it keeps working and when i tell it to clear notifications it does every time and when i do my little uh three voice assistant competitions from the uh the dining room table it participates gamely so
Casey:
well worth the zero dollars i paid for it go team uh but yeah i don't know i've never had like i said a screen-based one in my in my house or my life and i have some friends or we have some friends that are local and we'll be at their house from time to time and they have i don't even know the name of the device but it's a amazon device that is a screen that looks roughly the size of a laptop screen you ever take a little bit
Casey:
And it seems to me like it's a rotating billboard of stuff that I am deeply uninterested in.
Casey:
Now, that very well could be that that's how they set it up.
Casey:
And maybe I would set it up differently and better or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
But based on that one experience, no thanks.
Casey:
That doesn't mean that this doesn't have a place in my life, particularly if it's done with a little more taste, which I assume Apple would.
Casey:
But knowing what little I know now, I don't...
Casey:
feel like I have a need for it, but that's also the same thing I say about every freaking device that Apple ever makes, so here we are.
Marco:
I think your experience with seeing a lot of mediocrity in the Amazon products with screens, that mirrors I think almost every report I've ever heard about them.
Marco:
I even had the very first Echo Show that was the very first Echo with a screen.
Marco:
I actually bought one and returned it within one day of having it because what we very quickly learned with the Echo Show series is that
Marco:
You can't trust Amazon with a screen.
Marco:
They just use it to promote stuff at you.
Marco:
You're literally paying them money to have them advertise and yell in your face.
Marco:
And that's not a great product experience for most people.
Marco:
You can turn off some of those things, but then they'll just add new ones and opt you in because that's a wonderful trick that for some reason is legal.
Marco:
So what we see is like we see the failure modes of these products.
Marco:
In Amazon's case, the failure mode is they just use it as an advertising channel to to spew ads at you in various forms, whether it's promoted news stories or direct actual just ads, like whatever it is, they're spewing stuff at you that you don't want.
Marco:
In Apple's case, the failure mode will be unreliability and neglect.
Marco:
So we have to see like, you know, I think I will trust Apple.
Marco:
For the most part, not absolutely, but for the most part, I trust Apple not to be as egregious as Amazon in spamming us with stuff we don't want.
John:
When you walk into the room and there's a new Apple TV Plus show filling the entire screen, we'll know they've failed in this regard.
Marco:
Hey, how about a sports team score that I don't care about?
Marco:
You know, you can catch this right now on Apple TV Plus.
John:
That is a user interface failure.
John:
Apple's not trying to sell us anything with those sports scores.
John:
They're just scores.
John:
They're just annoying us in ways that we could not figure out how to stop without extreme effort.
John:
So that is not that's just bad UI in there.
John:
But the Apple TV Plus shows, I think, is an example of them being like.
Marco:
because they put them in the keynotes now it's like hey we while we've got your attention did you know there's a new tv show coming out on the service that we want you to subscribe to or you know you know you can also see them in various ways they have eroded the user experience on ios over the over the years uh to do things like harass you with notifications and full screen takeovers and stuff for things like if you haven't bought apple music if you aren't an apple music subscriber
Marco:
and you try to use the music app, good luck with that.
Marco:
If you don't buy AppleCare for your phone and you go to the settings app, good luck with that.
Marco:
They do advertise at us, and they are getting more and more shameless about it.
Marco:
And so I would expect a product like this to not be immune to that.
Marco:
But I think it would be a vastly different level lower than what Amazon does with their Echo Show series.
Marco:
So anyway, we see this kind of product line.
Marco:
The problem with...
Marco:
Google also has their own versions of this, and I don't have any experience with them.
Marco:
John, your Google things don't have screens, right?
John:
No, I was just looking at the Nest Hub Max, which looks very much like what Apple is competing with.
John:
It's the more expensive one.
John:
It's like a little Android tablet on an angle on a little stand that probably does all the things that Android tablets do, but in a more limited, homey version of it.
John:
That definitely just looks... I mean, Google's not going to be advertising to you as much as Amazon is, but it's like a Google ecosystem version of this, and I feel like that is probably...
John:
apple's target is the nest hub max with its functionality but it'll be in the apple ecosystem as well so if you just did want something to show you your google calendar maybe the nest hub max is the answer but i haven't actually used it so i don't know how annoying it is and how flexible it is yeah i mean you know i don't know anything about it we'll see i don't haven't really heard anything about people who use those so i don't think there's a lot of them um but i would suspect that might suffer as many kind of you know side google projects do from probably from a lack of attention but
Marco:
That's just speculation.
John:
And Google is a little bit more invested in the ad ecosystem than Apple is, let's say.
Marco:
Sure, sure.
Marco:
But I do think Amazon historically is the most egregious at spamming you through their Alexa products, through the Echo products, like with extra commentary that promotes some stuff you can do, with extra content, extra things showing up on your screen.
Marco:
So, you know, we know what the Amazon products, how that fails.
Marco:
Apple just seems like if they're going to do this again, we don't know much about this, obviously.
Marco:
But if they're going to do something like this, it seems like it rests on a lot of assumptions about subsystems that work better than they do.
Marco:
a lot of architecture and infrastructure that doesn't seem to exist yet or is barely being deployed in the form of Apple intelligence into a market of hardware that is not nearly as good as Apple purports it to be or wants it to be with HomeKit stuff and relying on a market of software in the form of apps and app intents and things like that where like
Marco:
How do we know apps are even going to take advantage of App Intents?
Marco:
How many apps are actually going to adopt this new API?
Marco:
How many apps are going to want to be controlled headlessly through Siri and Apple Intelligence without making you go into the app and see all the apps promos and stuff?
Marco:
There's a lot of faith going into this product from the way it's described here.
Marco:
That I'm not sure I would have a lot of strong confidence in.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
This remains to be seen.
Marco:
I do see the market for a dashboard type of thing.
Marco:
But I don't know that that's this.
Marco:
But I guess we'll find out.
John:
I mean, if the price is low enough, all your concerns really don't make that much of a difference because it's like, well, think of it this way.
John:
Do you currently have an old iPad that you use to listen to music in your kitchen?
John:
Well, this is a cheap version of an old iPad that you use to listen to music.
John:
If you subscribe to Apple Music and that's how you listen to music, you already subscribe to it and you're currently using an old iPad in your kitchen, this will probably be cheaper than that iPad was when it was new.
John:
It will come with that little speaker stand thingy, which presumably will have better sound than your iPad speakers.
John:
And it's designed for this.
John:
It's got a little stand.
John:
You don't have to prop it up on something.
John:
Maybe it's even waterproof.
John:
No, it certainly won't be.
John:
But, you know, you can dream, right?
John:
And you can do FaceTime from it more easily because it will have that, you know,
John:
center stage camera or whatever thing and maybe the robot like even if it does none of the things that you were just worried about you don't use it for any of that you literally use it as the the equivalent of those radios that used to be mounted to the underside of cabinets and kitchens you remember those it's like oh yeah fm radio like that's what this is for the modern area and it is 100 a straight up replacement for in apple households that are bought in on the apple ecosystem that old kid ipad that you have in the kitchen to look at recipes and listen to music
John:
right and that's like if it's if it's 299 there you go if it does nothing else its entire life except for those things when your old ipad breaks or some kid knocks it over or it finally dies or the battery swells or something your replacement is not to go look for a used ipad or try to take one of your kids all once your replacement is to buy this thing so like i said the bar is really low if this thing really is 199 or 299
John:
It doesn't have to do everything under the sun.
John:
All the dreams about App Intense and Siri eventually getting good and controlling your magic home kit house where everything works.
John:
It doesn't have to do any of that.
John:
Still, it's worth the money if it actually is cheap.
John:
Now, the $1,000 one with the robot arm, now maybe it needs to do something more useful and we'll see how that goes, but...
John:
All my hopes are pinned on this thing actually being inexpensive and doing the things that an old iPad is currently doing in people's kitchens.
Casey:
I don't think it'll be inexpensive.
Casey:
Other than that, I'm with you, but I don't think it'll be inexpensive.
John:
Yeah, pricing is one of the most difficult things to, you know, get rumors about because they can change that at any time.
John:
But, I mean, this is ballparking and it's saying the expensive one is $1,000 and the other one is trying to match competitors that cost in the low hundreds.
John:
So we shall see.
Casey:
I mean, I think it's very clear that the correct way to price it is to be competitive with your competitors.
Casey:
Or if you're going to do the Apple thing and go up market a bit, then you need to be in spitting distance of the competitors.
John:
$299 is in spitting distance.
John:
The most expensive one on this list was $230, so $299 is the expensive one.
Casey:
I agree, but I fear that the HomePod people are going to get there and be like, well, we have all this sweet tech.
John:
Well, the speaker stand will also be $299.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
But even whatever onboard speakers there are, not the Playdate dock, if you will, but the onboard speakers, you know the HomePod people are going to be like, you know, we have all this sweet-ass tech that we can just drop in there, lickety-split, and it's going to be great and also $1,000.
Casey:
But it'll be great and sound amazing in the kitchen.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
i i'm i'm hopeful that this is cool i love the idea what did he say something like um when you're at a distance it'll just show the temperature and very little else and as you approach it like uh shows you controls for the hvac that's very slick and that's the kind of affordances and design that that we love from apple the thoughtfulness that we love from apple
John:
that's what every nest and echo b thermostat has done forever yeah like every smart home thermostat does that but presumably they have a larger higher resolution display and the standby mode and widget stuff they can do smarter things like my you know my ecobee does that as well but like that's why i have hopes for the price of this thing because my ecobee thing was not expensive and it has it i can do voice assistants with it it does apple's voice assistant uh it has the proximity sensor uh
John:
I mean, granted, all it does is control my heating and cooling, but it works with HomeKit, it works with its own app, and it was cheap, and it continues to function, and I'm perfectly happy with it as long as it keeps doing exactly what it's doing.
John:
And that's my hopes for this product, that it will be like that, which, like I said, is unusual for modern Apple because everything seems to have a play or an angle or some kind of integration, and this could just be a straight-up
Casey:
useful electronic gadget that you can buy from apple that differentiates itself from its competitors by being higher quality and being less annoying with ads we'll see i'm certainly interested even though like i said i don't feel like i have a need for this in my life and our kitchen doesn't exactly have an overabundance of space unless you're mounting it on the wall and then if you're mounting on the wall then you got power to it unless you do the recharging dance which you know mark alluded to magnetic and stick to your fridge
Casey:
Well, except our fridge is, you know, stainless steel fridge.
Casey:
It's mostly not magnetic or whatever, you know, whatever the situation is where most of it isn't magnetic.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
If it's cool enough, I will find a reason to buy it.
Casey:
It's for my work, you two.
Casey:
You see, it's for my work.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
But yeah, I mean, I'm interested for sure.
Casey:
And I love the idea of Apple starting to get back into home stuff.
Casey:
I mean, as we've all lamented many times, even though I really do like my Eero setup, and they are past sponsor, I would love to have Apple, you know, take a crack at this, at home networking, which I don't think they have any interest in, to be clear.
Casey:
But, you know, them starting to do stuff in the home, it gives me hope.
Casey:
You know, so you're saying there's a chance.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Even though I don't think this is something that I'm seeking, I am definitely cautiously optimistic about it.
Casey:
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Casey:
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Casey:
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Casey:
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Casey:
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Casey:
Thank you to Tail Scale for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
All right, you want to do some Ask ATP?
Casey:
We haven't done that in a few minutes, I feel like.
Casey:
We'll start with Andrew Slay, or maybe Andrew Slay.
Casey:
Anyways, this person writes, we are all relieved that minimum RAM has been increased to 16 gigabytes across new Mac models.
Casey:
But we know this is tied to Apple intelligence.
Casey:
As a potential purchaser, should I be concerned that half this RAM is quote-unquote spoken for by AI, and I will still need to upgrade further to get the 16 gigs to use myself?
Casey:
Or do I have the wrong mental model of how RAM works?
Casey:
You know, it's funny this is brought up because I can't speak for how it works for artificial intelligence stuff, and maybe one of you can clue me in on this.
Casey:
But I feel like the thing that gives me even more pause is the quote-unquote video RAM, because that's also shared.
Casey:
You know, this seems to be—and interrupt me when you're ready if I'm speaking, you know, untruths—
Casey:
I feel like we're sharing RAM between not only the system, not only Apple intelligence, but also video, the graphics card.
Casey:
And that is starting to get spread kind of thin.
Casey:
That being said, I don't think it's really spoken for in the way that Andrew Slay is thinking of.
Casey:
So what's the reality here?
John:
I always think about the unified memory architecture where there's no dedicated VRAM.
John:
I always think of that when I hear people say that, well, you don't need more RAM on Apple Silicon because Apple Silicon uses less RAM than Intel for hand wave reasons.
John:
Right.
John:
No, you actually need more.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The source of that urban legend is essentially that the original Apple Silicon Macs were amazing.
John:
Their SSDs were fast, the CPU was fast, and they could get away with swapping in ways that the older, slower Intel Macs with older, slower SSDs and older, slower RAM could not.
John:
And so people started to believe that Apple Silicon Mac somehow need half the RAM of an Intel Mac.
John:
And it may be true that Apple Silicon Mac with half the RAM could run circles around an Intel Mac, but it's not because there was anything magical about Apple Silicon that said, oh, it doesn't need RAM anymore.
John:
You still need RAM.
John:
Yeah, just everything else was so much faster that you would overall probably still be faster.
John:
Oh, you would absolutely be faster.
John:
And it's what made people ran benchmarks.
John:
They're like, how is this 8 gigabyte M1 MacBook Air beating this 32 gig Intel thing?
John:
It's because the Apple Silicon is amazing.
John:
The SSDs are fast.
John:
The RAM was fast.
John:
They were really good.
John:
But it doesn't mean you don't need RAM.
John:
But anyway, setting that aside, I wouldn't worry about...
John:
uh apple intelligence stealing all the ram first of all most of the apple intelligence things that apple has shipped and announced shouldn't be doing anything with your ram if you're not using them so if you're worried about ram at all don't fire up those llms and ask them to do a bunch of stuff for you and they are not going to be there like reserving 16 gigs for themselves which technically they could you know
John:
You can wire pages down or whatever, but nothing that Apple really does in their operating system would ever do something at that scale.
John:
So do not worry about that.
John:
It has more RAM so that if it needs to, it can use a whole bunch when called upon to do so, but it will not be sitting there hogging half of your RAM doing nothing, right?
John:
And second, even when you are doing stuff,
John:
presumably whatever you're doing with apple intelligence will be kind of like bursty oh i'm gonna do a thing now where i want you to generate an image for me or fix this writing and then you'll be done with that and then it will go away and hopefully apple have written these things in such a way that you get that ram goes back into the free pool when that's that process exits and is done doing whatever it was doing and now you're back to your you know working with your mac the way it is i and finally
John:
of all eight gigs is probably too little they doubled it they didn't just make it nine or ten so i think they have enough headroom that it's not like i mean remember that you're doing apple intelligence stuff on phones that their entire ram is eight gigs and you're worried that the apple intelligence alone is going to use eight gigs that's not going to happen right so
John:
I would not worry about this.
John:
It's not the wrong mental model of how RAM works.
John:
I think it's just not the right scale for thinking about how much RAM Apple intelligence is going to use and how long it's going to need it and when it's going to need it.
John:
16 gigs is good, even with Apple intelligence.
John:
And like I said, if you worry about it at all, first of all, I think, I mean, in the current operating system, you can literally turn off Apple intelligence as a toggle switch in settings.
John:
I don't know what that switch does, but it makes me think that it's like, look, if you don't want any of this stuff, you don't have to use it.
John:
And presumably that would say RAM.
John:
But even with that toggle switch on, if you don't call upon it to do anything, if you don't ask it to revise your writing, if you don't try to generate an image, if you don't ask it a question...
John:
it's not going to be taking up a lot of RAM.
John:
And you can convince yourself of that by booting any modern Apple Silicon Mac that has Apple intelligence and just boot into the finder and then pull up activity monitor and look how much RAM is being used and compare it to like the previous version of the operating system without Apple intelligence.
John:
I don't think you're going to see a big difference.
Casey:
Henry Sivanen writes, what's blocking Apple from upgrading the studio display with the kind of backlight tech that MacBook Pros have to enable HDR?
Casey:
My understanding is that the studio display has constant backlight behind LCD and MacBook Pro has by zone variable backlight behind LCD.
Casey:
Apple clearly already has the firmware that knows how to drive the MacBook Pro LCD and backlight layer in combination to produce an HDR result.
Casey:
What's preventing Apple from putting a MacBook Pro-style backlight and firmware in the studio display form factor at the studio display price point?
Casey:
I think you just answered your own question.
Casey:
Is the backlight plane hard to scale up despite TV scaling mini-LED backlight to even larger sizes while staying less expensive than Pro Display XDR?
Casey:
Are the LCD layers substantially different in the two cases?
Casey:
And that's the hard-slash-expensive part to scale up.
Casey:
Surely Apple wants the entire lineup to do HDR eventually.
Casey:
Why isn't there, why isn't Apple there yet with the studio display?
Casey:
A quick aside, which just made me think about this.
Casey:
Um, I went to the Apple store today just to look and I succeeded in just looking, uh, the new Mac mini freaking adorable and very light, but freaking adorable.
Casey:
So cute.
Casey:
I kind of want one.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
But the MacBook Pros, I brought my M3 MacBook Pro and sat it next to the M4 MacBook Pro and cranked up the brightness in both.
Casey:
And granted, this is inside an Apple store, so everything's freaking, you know, it's like the sun is shining in there anyway.
Casey:
But it was noticeably different how much brighter the M4 MacBook Pro was.
Casey:
I wouldn't say it's night and day, but you can tell the difference.
Casey:
It just occurred to me just now, I didn't think to look or ask if there was a nanotexture one, but just the brightness alone made me jealous.
Casey:
Jealous enough to spend thousands of dollars to replace my one-year-old one?
Casey:
Absolutely not.
Casey:
But jealous nevertheless.
Casey:
With regard to Henry's question, I think...
Casey:
John, you're probably best suited to answer, but I'm going to take a stab at it.
Casey:
I think it is expense in no small part.
Casey:
I think the technology is probably, to Henry's point, there.
Casey:
It's just, for whatever reason, and I don't know why, and maybe, John, you can fill me in, it's got to be really freaking expensive.
Casey:
Also, Apple seems to forget that they make displays because they haven't updated your beloved XDR in like 15 years in the studio display since it's been released.
Casey:
So somebody should remind them that these exist, and maybe we'll get answers.
John:
The answer to Henry's question, what's blocking Apple from upgrading the studio display with the kind of backlight of the MacBook Pros?
John:
Nothing.
John:
Absolutely nothing.
John:
There is nothing stopping them.
John:
They could keep the price the same.
John:
They wouldn't, but they'd probably make it more expensive.
John:
But no, this tech exists.
John:
They put it in their laptops.
John:
It's easier to put it in a giant display like that because it's bigger and you have more room for all the stuff.
John:
they could do it and it would probably be more expensive because it would be a better display and you know whatever but they absolutely could nothing is stopping them that's what's so frustrating they just haven't decided to update the displays yet when they do update them presumably they'll get all this stuff but right now kind of like the mouse and the keyboards we're just not updating them it's like nope it's just we sell the studio display we sell the xdr it's
John:
Price is the same as it's always been.
John:
They do exactly what they always did.
John:
Someday, maybe we'll update them.
John:
If you are a longtime Apple fan, you know that they don't update their displays very often.
John:
They just don't.
John:
Why don't they?
John:
It's incredibly frustrating, but they absolutely could.
John:
There's not some...
John:
super expensive difficult to do things you there's plenty of pc monitors that do all this stuff that are way cheaper than the studio display because they're pc monitors obviously when apple does it it'll be more expensive nothing is stopping them that's what's so frustrating and we're all just we're just out here waiting it's like well
Casey:
they'll update it someday and when they do we can buy it but in the meantime this is what they have to offer take it or leave it all right yep uh then ryan tierney writes your recent discussion on launchers made me wonder what is a power user hack you can't live without or customization which makes all other macs feel broken for me it is a multi-button mouse where i have assigned shortcuts for enter copy paste and command tab to move back to the last app
Casey:
I have RSI, and so I try to minimize my use of the keyboard, and this lets me navigate through tasks with the mouse dramatically faster.
Casey:
And I was thinking about this, and I'm sure that there are answers to this question, but I'm struggling to think of what they are.
Casey:
I am a big believer in hot corners.
Casey:
I've been trying to teach myself to use the gestures on the magic trackpad instead for much of the same things that I use hot corners for.
Casey:
But old habits die hard.
Casey:
Also, I'm an diehard Alfred person, so I feel like a computer's broken without Alfred.
Casey:
And I guess rockets, which I will probably forget to link in the show notes, but it's a thing where you can basically type out the name of an emoji and it'll just insert wherever your cursor is.
Casey:
That's about all I can think of.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, what have you got in terms of power user hacks?
Marco:
The ones that trip me up the most when I'm on someone else's computer, there's two.
Marco:
The second worst one is the lack of a clipboard manager.
Marco:
Because I've been using LaunchBar's clipboard management for so many years now, so often I will treat the clipboard like a stack.
Marco:
If I need to copy and paste two different things into two different fields from one place to another, I will go to the first one and hit Command-C.
Marco:
Then I'll go to the second one and hit Command-C because that will stack them up in the Clipboard Manager.
Marco:
Then when I go to the destination, I'll paste the first one.
Marco:
Then I'll use the key to invoke the Clipboard Manager to go down one and paste the second one.
Marco:
Well, if you don't have a Clipboard Manager...
Marco:
It works until you go to the second one, and then you're just like, oh, wait, this is just broken.
Marco:
It's just gone.
Marco:
The thing you copied before, now it's literally just gone because the other one overrode it.
Marco:
So that is one thing that trips me up for sure.
Marco:
But the biggest thing by far that trips me up almost immediately upon using any other computer, during the original touch bar era, when the escape key was in the touch bar,
Marco:
I remapped escape to be the caps lock key.
Marco:
So when I use a Mac, when I want to hit escape, I hit caps lock.
Marco:
You can do this.
Marco:
You don't need a third party app to do this.
Marco:
You can do this right in the keyboard.
Marco:
It's called the modifier keys section and settings.
Marco:
Now, when I go to any other computer, I constantly hit caps lock instead of hitting escape.
Marco:
nothing trips me up faster than that and i i suppose i could train myself back to the escape key um i just haven't had a reason to yet and it's so much faster to have your pinky right there hitting that key that then you know then reaching up to the escape key like it's much better like if you don't have a good use for caps lock map it to something that you use a lot it's really nice until you use someone's computer but until that moment it's really nice and escape is a good one
John:
speaking of remapping my key i understand why you arrived at escape but i always kind of like the fact that escape is in the upper left because it's kind of like the escapiest place on the keyboard like at a corner you know what i mean um like when i was in uh college uh the uh
John:
I believe it was Sun, the Sun-branded keyboards that came with your Sun computer had control where Kaplox is, just like it was literally that was the control key on the keyboard.
John:
If you do anything with control a lot, like Unix or you're doing Emacs stuff, setting aside the meta key, just having control where Kaplox is,
John:
That was so convenient and so natural that I really got used to that for a while.
John:
But then I stopped using Sun computers and didn't bother remapping.
John:
And a lot of people do it to this day on Macs.
John:
Like Marco said, it's built into the operating system.
John:
You can go to system settings and remap cap locks to be control and live my life from the 90s with Sun keyboards that had a control key over there.
John:
It's really nice.
John:
It's much more comfortable than reaching the control key.
John:
It's less important on Macs.
John:
This is one of the things I love about Macs that I do not understand why people
John:
don't appreciate more i don't hear more people praising it um for people who are into unix uh mac uses a command and to a lesser extent option for its uh keyboard shortcuts copy is command c paste is command v the command is right key is right next to the space bar it's great
John:
That leaves control essentially free for all the Unix stuff.
John:
So all of these people who are using Windows and like, oh, how do I copy in my terminal emulator without sending control C?
John:
We don't have to worry about that.
John:
It's such a clean separation.
John:
It's so beautiful.
John:
It's one of those things that you can't fix once it's broken, like in Windows.
John:
I have all these hacks about like setting your settings.
John:
So when you hit control C, it knows when it's copy versus it knows when it's sending sig into your thing.
John:
Like it's just such a hassle that we just don't have to deal with.
John:
And I love it.
John:
Right.
John:
But anyway, if you do use control a lot, not having control way down in one of those escapey corners of the keyboard, it's nice to have it on cap locks.
John:
um that said i don't remap my keys i think part of it has to do with me using apple extended keyboard uh for a long time apple extended keyboard too um that cap locks key was the old style cap locks key that stuck down you'd go click and it would stick halfway down click it and pop up you can't really map that to control physically speaking it's not it's not going to work the way you want it to
John:
so i guess i got into that habit for a while as well my answers to this question of things that i can't live without marco got one of them i think probably clipboard manager is my number one because i do exactly the same thing and i've lost data that way like i've yeah copied something and then it's just like scrolled away or closed the tab or whatever and then i've copied something else and then i've gone to pace and realized oh that first thing i copy it's gone forever right i can't even use my classic mac ram snooper thing that i would run in panic and
John:
They would scan through all of RAM to find a thing that I had previously copied that saved my bacon many times.
John:
Memory protection makes that more difficult.
John:
That's probably my number one.
John:
Quicksilver is probably close number two.
John:
I've talked about that in past episodes.
John:
It's in a period of stability right now.
John:
But like I said before, Spotlight is now good enough and fast enough.
John:
that i can mostly get along without it i obviously all my stuff all my quicksilver stuff isn't there but using it just to launch stuff is reasonable my the apps that i make so i make a switch glass in front and center those two apps
John:
are there because they make the mac work the way i want it to work i want the window layering to work like it did in classic mac os or when you click one window belonging to another application all the windows of that application come to the front instead of just the one that you clicked unless you modify or click on it and then just the one that you clicked comes to the front that's what i want when i'm on someone's mac that doesn't have that first of all chances are good if i'm on someone else's mac everything's freaking full screen anyway and it's some tiny little laptop and it's just madness right
John:
like even my son my the way my son uses a computer because like he didn't really use computers at all he was just an ipad kid until he got his laptop for like high school and college and because it's a tiny laptop screen he does everything full screen he uses spaces he three finger swipes between them that's how he uses a computer he finds it very efficient every time i have to do something on his computer i pull everything out of full screen so i can get any work done and see more than one window at a time and he thinks it's madness and i think what he's doing is madness and i try to tell him
John:
This is fine when you're on a 14-inch laptop, but someday, if you're lucky, you'll have a really big screen, and if you make all your apps full screen, it's inefficient.
John:
We'll see how that goes.
Marco:
Someday, if you do all your homework and brush your teeth every day, you'll have a big screen like me.
Marco:
You can get a real monitor instead.
John:
It's looking at the world through this tiny porthole because he went from an iPad to a laptop that was similar size to the iPad screen.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So it kind of makes sense.
John:
But yeah, front and center and switch glass.
John:
I literally wrote those apps, not because they were going to make me tons of money and they absolutely did not.
John:
but because i want them to be on my computer because i previously i was using drag thing for both those functions drag thing did a bunch of stuff more stuff as well but james thompson stopped making drag thing so i had to replace it uh and it's not like i can't live without those things and they're not really hacks because the front and center thing some people don't even want unless you're a real old school mac user although i still think it's
John:
Even if you just run it in modern mode, where by default it works the normal way, having a modifier click to pull all the windows forward instead of having to go into the dock icon is actually kind of cool.
John:
But anyway, that is an invisible thing that runs in the background that I...
John:
It's not that I can't live without it.
John:
I wouldn't want to live without it on my Mac.
John:
If I'm on someone else's, I know I'm on someone else's that can deal with it.
John:
And then Switch Glass is even more narrow.
John:
It's like, why do you have a list of running applications somewhere else on your screen?
John:
That's what the dock is for.
John:
There's your running applications.
John:
Why in the world would you do that?
John:
I've always wanted them to be in the upper right.
John:
I wish I didn't have to use the dock at all.
John:
I wish my app could do everything the dock does, but Apple does not provide APIs for that, especially for an app that's going to be in the Mac App Store.
John:
So I have to run the dock and switch class.
John:
But switch class lets me pick the order things are in, just kind of like the dock does, but in a more regimented way.
John:
And switch class lets me change its position and appearance and do all sorts of...
John:
It's redundant.
John:
I get it's redundant, but it's old habits die hard.
John:
And I wouldn't want to use my Mac without those things.
John:
But when I go to someone else's computer, I know they're not going to be there.
John:
I understand how the computer works the other way.
John:
It's not as sort of like...
John:
Like Marco with the escape key or like both of us with the copy and paste.
John:
That's the type of thing where you don't think about it until you've fallen into the trap, until you've hit the wrong key, until you've lost data because you've copied and pasted.
John:
That doesn't happen with those two.
John:
But I guess that's my answer is Clipboard Manager, Quicksilver, and then the two apps that I wrote to make myself feel good on a Mac.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Tailscale and Delete Me.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Members get ATP overtime, a bonus topic every week, among other things.
Marco:
This week in ATP overtime, we're going to be talking about a listener.
Marco:
Patrick asked us.
Marco:
Why do we hope the Vision Pro succeeds?
Marco:
We had mentioned that we hope it succeeds.
Marco:
Why do we hope it succeeds?
Marco:
That's going to be this week's overtime topic.
Marco:
Thank you for listening, everybody.
Marco:
You can join us at atb.fm slash join if you want to hear that and many other benefits.
Marco:
And thank you.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
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:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
Marco:
I did finally set up my Mac Mini.
Marco:
So the news broke over the last few days.
Marco:
There's apparently this big Synology security problem.
Marco:
Like some zero day that everyone's like, oh, go update your Synologies really fast.
Marco:
Because there's some big zero day thing in one of their packages or something.
John:
Do you know anything about that, Casey?
John:
Because when I saw that message, I went and looked at my Synology and it said, oh, I'm all up to date because I have my thing set to run auto-updates.
John:
I'm assuming I'm fine?
Casey:
No, you're not.
Casey:
So I've only dug into this the teeniest, littlest bit.
Casey:
And if you are a owner of a Synology, please...
Casey:
double check all of my math on this because I might be steering you wrong by accident.
Casey:
But with that caveat aside and disclaimer aside, my understanding is there was some sort of conference.
Casey:
I couldn't tell you what specifically it was, but there was some sort of conference that happened in the last week or two where some of the attendees announced or perhaps discovered some zero day exploits.
Casey:
I think one of them was real bad with regard to Synology Photos, which is not something I use.
Casey:
But there have been a couple others.
Casey:
I think one was with Synology Drive, which I swear by.
Casey:
This is how I use Dropbox without having Dropbox natively installed on literally anything that I own.
Casey:
And then I think that the DSM, their basic operating system, if you will, also had a vulnerability.
Casey:
And I think as we were sitting down to record, the DSM update might have been released.
Casey:
But the email that we all got was, hey, FYI, there's some bad stuff out there
Casey:
We haven't fixed all of it yet.
Casey:
And in fact, I think when that email was sent, because I got it as well, none of them were fixed.
Casey:
And then I believe shortly, like within hours of that email, my Synology Drive software wanted to be updated.
Casey:
And allegedly, although I have not checked, there's, I think, a new DSM update waiting for me and presumably you if you wanted to grab it immediately.
Casey:
My understanding is it is pretty bad, the security vulnerabilities.
Casey:
But the good news is, as far as we know, they haven't really been in the wild but for a few days.
Casey:
And I think that they were patched as quickly as can be reasonably expected.
John:
So I guess my thing will update while I sleep.
John:
My synology is not exposed to the internet, so I'm not too worried about it.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
But anyways, Marco, you're starting to say you're setting up your beloved Mac Mini.
Marco:
Basically, over the last few years, like when I moved to the beach, I had the old Synology at the old house, the old 1813 plus that was running forever.
Marco:
I had that, you know, hosting a bunch of stuff for me.
Marco:
But I had mostly, if you listeners from a long time ago will recall, I had gotten into iSCSI for this purpose.
Marco:
Because the problem I was trying to solve back then was I had what was ending up being like, you know, 10 or 12 terabytes of archive storage.
Marco:
I wanted Backblaze to back it up.
Marco:
and the only way to do that without like you know you can you can do backblaze b2 that's like their block storage where you just pay per gig that you use and it's way cheaper than s3 um so that is an option you can and you can back up a lot of data to beat to backblaze b2 for not that much money and there's a built-in app on the synology to do exactly that but what i wanted was and i don't i don't even know if that option existed when i first started doing this but
Marco:
Basically, instead, if you had an iSCSI driver for the Mac, you could treat the Synology just as a giant iSCSI drive and have a Mac Mini or some other Mac hosting the iSCSI driver for that.
Marco:
And then Backblaze would see it just as a connected drive to the Mac and back it up with a regular Backblaze plan for unlimited space.
Marco:
So if you had a lot of terabytes of data to back up, that was way cheaper per month and honestly way better than trying to use B2 with some third-party backup solution.
Marco:
So, forever ago, I had this old Mac Mini, this 2014 base model Mac Mini.
Marco:
I had it since it was reasonably new, so around 2014, for various utility functions here and there.
Marco:
I ran Plex on it and stuff like that.
Marco:
And so I used that to basically host my archive storage.
Marco:
When I moved to the beach, I didn't want to bring that whole big setup, and I wasn't sure how long I was going to be there, and so I still needed some archive storage and some local time machine server functionality, and so I got a tiny Synology, the 4-bay DS420J, I think.
Marco:
It was something that ends in J and has four bays, and it was a pretty low-end model.
Marco:
That Synology has been incredibly unreliable.
Marco:
It would just fall off the network sometimes.
Marco:
It would have to be rebooted frequently for access.
Marco:
It would just disappear.
Marco:
It was just really unreliable.
Marco:
And I couldn't really figure out why.
Marco:
And honestly, it's not my job to figure out why.
Marco:
My job is to do other things that make me money and stuff.
Marco:
And the last thing I would want to deal with is this flaky few hundred dollar Synology.
Marco:
I don't have time for that.
Marco:
So I decided I'm going to read that.
Marco:
Now I'm not living at the beach anymore.
Marco:
I had in my office an ancient Synology full of like four terabyte hard drives sitting, taking up half my closet.
Marco:
And then this four bay ridiculous, like unreliable thing with some pretty good hardware.
Marco:
You know, it's like these four, like 16 terabyte hard drives.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
So pretty good stuff.
Marco:
So I decided, you know what?
Marco:
Screw this.
Marco:
I'm getting out of the Synology business.
Marco:
And this was well-timed with the security vulnerability.
Marco:
But I decided, you know, if I'm only using this thing as a big, dumb disk, I'm not taking advantage of the other features of an entire NAS with its own app platform and packages and everything.
Marco:
I'm not doing any of that stuff.
Marco:
I'm just using it as a giant disk that I want to be backed up.
Marco:
Like, I can do that with anything.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
That's why I ordered the most recent Mac Mini.
Marco:
I was going to order a Mac Mini months ago, but we'd heard they were being updated, so I figured, all right, I'll wait until the update.
Marco:
So now I have a brand-new Mac Mini that is almost the base model, just with a 10-gig Ethernet and the 512 update, because I can't buy 256.
Marco:
I can't let myself do it.
Marco:
LAUGHTER
Marco:
Because I've done that and regretted it every time I have done that.
Marco:
Pretty soon, maybe that won't fit the operating system.
Marco:
So good call.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So anyway, now I have that and I have decommissioned and actually recycled both Synologies because nobody wanted them.
Casey:
For the record, before anyone jumps on your back, you had very graciously offered to ship either or both to me.
Casey:
And the 1813, it is heavy.
Casey:
That would have been very expensive to ship to me, even if you had taken out all the drives, which I don't think you would have.
Marco:
It would have been over $100 to ship.
Marco:
Am I going to pay over $100 to ship you an 11-year-old Synology that you don't need?
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
That's not worth saying shipping.
Casey:
So you did offer, which was very kind of you, and as much as I wanted to take you up on it, I couldn't find a reason for either of them.
Casey:
I've already got a secondary Synology deployed to my parents for backup purposes.
Casey:
I don't need more than one in the house.
Casey:
So before anyone jumps on you, you passed the friend code, the friend test, and you did offer.
Casey:
I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
Casey:
Didn't offer them to me.
Marco:
You were in the same chat room.
Marco:
You didn't say anything.
Casey:
I know.
Marco:
I'm just saying that I wasn't offered them.
Marco:
I saved you from them.
Marco:
Yeah, that's probably true.
John:
I mean, I already have the exact one that you just got rid of, so I mean, it's not like I need another one, but just FYI.
John:
Well, actually, if I had known that you had 16 terabyte hard drives in one of them, that's what I want.
Marco:
Oh, that's true.
Marco:
I kept the hard drives.
John:
Well, I know.
John:
Those weren't offered to anybody.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Right, because what I ordered instead was just a four-drive Thunderbolt disk enclosure from OWC, like one of their kind of mid-range ones.
Marco:
And so now I have disks that are directly plugged into the Mac Mini through that enclosure.
Marco:
I'm using just software RAID 1 with two pairs.
Marco:
Because macOS has built-in support for software RAID 0 and RAID 1.
Marco:
If you want to do fancier things like RAID 5, you got to use third-party stuff.
Marco:
But built into the Mac, you have RAID 0 and RAID 1.
Marco:
So I did two RAID 1 pairs, four-disc bay thing, nice and easy.
Marco:
And it's running, and it's backing up to Backblaze.
Marco:
It's almost done already.
Marco:
It's doing great.
Marco:
It's serving files to my network.
Marco:
I haven't enabled Time Machine Server yet.
Marco:
I got to go do that.
Marco:
But otherwise...
Marco:
It's nice.
Marco:
And by the way, for the record, I'm no longer using one of those little dummy HDMI dongles that you have to plug into its butt to make it boot before.
Marco:
The new ones don't need that anymore.
Casey:
Yeah, I didn't know that.
Casey:
But I can't remember who it was.
Casey:
But somebody had said recently that I believe any of the Apple Silicon Macs do not need them.
Casey:
Here again, check my math on that.
Casey:
I'm not 100% sure.
Casey:
But that is what I believe to be the case.
Marco:
yeah because well and i was i that was a little unknown to me at first because the um i had the m1 mac mini briefly serving a role like this at the beach and that one did i had problems getting that one to boot headless but for some reason i guess those were resolved since the m1 era so the the m4 one boots just fine and doesn't need a keyboard or a mouse or anything plugged in it just boots up and it's nice and easy maybe it's a software improvement who knows
John:
Speaking of Mac minis and booting and external storage, I meant to mention this when we were talking about the person's question about how do I deal with a Mac mini that doesn't have a lot of internal storage and I have external storage.
John:
Should I boot from the external drive as a way to sort of solve the problem of the bifurcation?
John:
First, we should have emphasized that that is...
John:
If you want to do that and just forego the internal drive entirely and boot from it, that solves a lot of the problems we were talking about with like apps that don't want their stuff to be on the boot drive because you just make the external one the boot drive.
John:
But second, I want to emphasize that Apple Silicon Macs cannot boot from external drives in the way that you think they can.
John:
As in, if the internal hard drive dies, you can't boot from an external one, which may not make any sense to you because you're like, what do you mean?
John:
That's the whole point.
John:
I'm booting from the external drive.
John:
I don't care if the internal drive is torn out.
John:
It should be fine.
John:
But the way the security architecture works on all Apple Silicon Macs is they essentially always boot from the internal drive.
John:
They just stop during the boot process once they've booted a substantial amount.
John:
And they say, oh, you wanted to boot from that drive.
John:
OK, I'll chuck you over there.
John:
And it does a bunch of stuff behind the scenes in a secure way, blah, blah, blah.
John:
It's a security feature.
John:
It's not Apple being mean.
John:
From your perspective, it just basically looks like, oh, I can boot from an external drive.
John:
But be aware that you are always relying on the internal storage functioning and having an operating system on it that works.
John:
So if your internal SSD goes bad, you can no longer boot that Mac that you thought you were, quote unquote, booting from an external drive.
John:
So please keep that in mind.
Marco:
Anyway, that's my Mac mini story.
Marco:
So far, it's just working just fine.
Marco:
I installed it in my garage and the most exterior wall possible.
Marco:
Oh, there we go.
Marco:
Just mostly for John.
John:
Started in his garage.
John:
He punched a hole in the roof to let the rain fall through onto it.
Marco:
Well, it has to keep itself cool somehow.
John:
Do you use screen sharing to mess with it if you ever need to mess with it?
John:
yeah it's great i have it open right now when you do that what uh what does it do for the screen resolution considering there's nothing attached to it um i believe it's 1080 hold on give me a moment i'll report back i mean i suppose you could go into it and then just go to display settings and change that and it will just remember that it's non-existent monitor should be 4k or whatever uh yeah 19 so right now it's 1080 by default but can i change it
John:
no go to displays and by the way when you do screen sharing i'm assuming you just type command space scre and it just worked but keep in mind that the screen sharing app is not in the application folder or the utility folder on mac os these days it's in i think it's in like system library core services or whatever which is annoying but i think that's where it is
Marco:
No, usually I just – I go in a Finder sidebar.
Marco:
I go to the network location.
Marco:
It says – it's on my Mac Mini right there.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
And I just click the share screen button from that.
John:
Anyway, there is – I don't know.
John:
Actually, it is in utility.
John:
Sorry.
John:
I take that back.
John:
I think it used to be in core services, but now it is in application slash utility slash screen sharing app.
John:
It's the same app that launches when you do the thing that Margo just described or when you just do open URL, VNC, call and slide, or whatever.
John:
Like there's a million different ways to do it, but –
John:
Anyway, so you changed res, what does it do?
Marco:
No, so it turns out you can't.
Marco:
I remember Paul Haddad actually had posted about this the other day as well, that if you do plug in one of those dummy HDMI adapters, that enables more resolutions, I believe up to 4K.
Marco:
By default, it does 1080p, 1x, that's it.
Marco:
But it depends on what you're using this for.
Marco:
For my purposes of just administering a computer that's acting as a disk server mostly, that's totally fine.
John:
That's kind of weird, though.
John:
Like when they solve the problem of not needing the dongle, it's strange that they just didn't let you pick whatever the heck resolution you want.
John:
It's not like that thing will be breaking a sweat to just have a little bit larger, higher resolution display.
John:
But whatever.
John:
Hopefully you never even need to do that screen sharing.
John:
It just sits there in your garage with water dripping onto it doing its job.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Freezing cold in the winter, hot in the summer.
John:
Your heat pump water heater.
John:
Stealing all of its heat.
John:
Whatever it's doing.
John:
I don't know what's going on in your garage, but it's semi outdoors.
John:
That should be the name of your electronics channel.
John:
Marco Arment semi outdoors.
John:
It teaches you how to take things that aren't meant to be outdoors and kind of sort of almost put them outdoors.
Marco:
In all fairness,
Marco:
That 13-year-old or 12-year-old or whatever, 11-year-old Synology operated in a garage for its entire life.
Marco:
And it was, not only was the Synology perfectly fine and 100% reliable, I didn't even lose a single hard drive that entire time.
John:
Mine is still running right now.
John:
It's the last, well, it's not the last one to stay.
John:
i said it's the last one standing with the original hard drives my 2013 uh more than 10 year old synology all the original drives that were put in there in 2013 every single one of them is spinning as we record this uh mine has been endorsed his whole life so i guess marco you provided an excellent home for spiders and other bugs for over a decade that was nice of you
John:
Whatever mice are living inside there, whatever kingdom they've created for themselves, it hasn't bothered the Synology.
Casey:
Oh my.
Casey:
Remind me before we leave this topic behind, what Mac Mini did you get?
Casey:
I think we covered this, but one more time.
Marco:
Base model plus 10 gig Ethernet and 512.
Casey:
So not a pro or anything like that?
Casey:
Just the M4 plane?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I actually do intend to do some like Overcast processing tests on this.
Marco:
So I have some ideas on maybe how to do transcripts with Overcast.
John:
It's the fastest single core CPU in your house now.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
Honestly, it really is.
Marco:
And I'm not really near any upgrade cycles for my other Macs.
Marco:
My Macs right now are my M3 Max MacBook Pro and my M2 MacBook Air.
Marco:
And both of those are great and fine and
Marco:
I don't think I'll be updating either one of them anytime very soon.
Marco:
I'm probably going to do every two years on the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
So that would be I do the M5 generation on that and the MacBook Air kind of as needed.
John:
Let's just all savor Marco saying the phrase upgrade cycle and applying it to himself.
John:
Let's just say that's a thing as if there's some kind of cycle that he adheres to for upgrades.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, for my main beefed-up Mac.
Marco:
So I had the M1 Max MacBook Pro.
Marco:
I skipped the M2 generation.
Marco:
I got the M3.
John:
You had the M1 MacBook Air first, right?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
But when the Pros came out, I upgraded to the Pro, and it was great.
Marco:
Then I got the M3.
Marco:
I skipped the M2, got the M3.
Marco:
Now I'm skipping the M4, and I'll probably get the M5.
Marco:
All right, we'll see.
Marco:
Yeah, we'll see.
Marco:
And the MacBook Air, that's the portable one.
Marco:
That's the M2 right now.
Marco:
Maybe if the M4 MacBook Air has come out and they have nanotexture, that would be interesting because I frequently use it on the train and it is very bright in the winter on the train.
Marco:
So I am tempted by nanotexture, but not tempted enough to replace the M2 yet.
John:
I'm tempted by the 500-nit MacBook Air screen.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, that's not helping.
John:
Is it 600 now?
John:
I forget.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But honestly, the MacBook Air has been a pleasure to travel with.
Marco:
Because that M2 MacBook Air is so, first of all, it feels amazing.
Marco:
It's so nice for my light travel uses.
Marco:
And by light, I just mean weight.
Marco:
What I'm doing on the MacBook Air, sometimes, yeah, it's just email and FaceTime.
Marco:
But a lot of times, I'm doing overcast development on it.
Marco:
And it's fine.
Marco:
It's not nearly as fast as the MacBook Pro, but it's pretty good considering it's a two and a half pound, allegedly low end model of computer.
Marco:
It's a fantastic computer.